Guerrilla Girls, Benvenuti alla Biennala Feminista!, 2005

The Guerrilla Girls are completely and totally intertwined with Feminist Methodology. They project that they are women artists, and it is completely a part of their identity. Although they are masked, being a woman is an extremely relevant part of their work. Their gender has completely to do with the prints that they make, and their gender is extremely relevant to their message. In this piece, they are praising the Biennala for doing something right. There is finally diversity, and a lot of female representation, opening the door for female directors, which is something that was a problem before. They show themselves, wearing masks, and holding prints, which would have displayed statistics about the event, and congratulating the Biennala for opening its doors to woman directors. To examine this piece requires great amounts of feminist methodology. For example, this piece would not work if it were made by any other gender. The necessary of the woman artist, working for other woman artists, is important in their narrative. They call on their strengths of the other women, and they band together in an attempt to create change. What is interesting about the Guerrilla Girls is that they usually are calling people out. They go place to place, and try to ignite change for the benefit of woman artists. This creates a community, and a resource for women who had attempted to break into the art world. The fact that they released a poster in a positive light for a place that has done something right is a step in the right direction. The woman are working for other woman, it is important to know and analyze how gender plays a role in interpreting their prints, because not only does it play a role but it is perhaps the most important aspect of the piece.

Mona Hatoum, Over My Dead Body, 1988

In this piece, the feminist methodology must be utilized to fully understand the concepts of the piece and the role that the woman artist plays. This is especially relevant, because of the use of the word “my” in the piece. One must know the artist, one must know that the artist is speaking about herself, and one must know that it is in the context of a feminist woman. As a soldier marches over the woman’s face, the use of the word “my” becomes increasingly clearer. She is now talking not only about her body, but also about the bodies of other females, that men walk over. The phrase in of itself is an interesting and insightful phrase to use, as it is a strong and willful phrase. The part of the woman staring down the toy solider is interesting in this context, as it implies a lesser smaller man walking over her. She says over my dead body, and reject the militant corruption of her own body. Although this may have political meaning, and the Persian Gulf war was occurring at the time, this piece is more focused on the war between men and women concerning a woman’s body. Therefore, the woman is staring down the toy soldier saying over my dead body is much more contextualized to represent the fact that the battleground is now the woman’s bodies themselves. Therefore feminist methodology is important in understanding the artist and the meaning behind this piece. We as the viewer must understand that this piece comes from the perspective of the woman, and therefore must be viewed as such. The artist’s gender is completely intertwined with her work. She is talking about “me” in the text, but she is also talking about all the other woman, who would say over my dead body to the men who wish to occupy and possess it.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1979

It is necessary in this piece to utilize the feminist methodology, as the artist and her message of feminism are completely intertwined with her work. It is impossible to take out the agency of gender and the artists’ gender in this piece. This specific piece is a fraction of the larger groups of photographs. In these photographs, she poses like stills from a film. In each still, she tackles the supposed gender roles of women in film. They are stereotypical female roles of the housewife, the seductress, the other woman, the body. The emphasis on the body is important in her work, there is an emphasis her silhouette, and on her emotion. The feminist methodology is important in this case. Although she frames herself in what appears to be self-portraits, they are not portraits of herself as who she is, she is portraying herself in a specific role that is stereotypical in film. Therefore the fact that she, the artists, is a woman, and she is talking and presenting about the issues of feminism creates it absolutely intertwined with feminist methodology. These pieces could not have been done with a male artist. The male artist maintains his male gaze, and through that could not produce an un-bias work, and therefore the message of the pieces would be lost. It is necessary that this piece comes from a woman, as the most important aspects of this piece comes from the fact that she is a woman posing in these women roles. The fact that they are self-portraits is important in this context. She is placing herself in these roles and that is one of the most important aspects of this piece. It is intertwined with how the world views her both as a woman and as an artist. It is necessary in understanding who she is and what she is trying to say.

Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face, 1981

This piece is all about the power of the gaze, and the use of the text in the piece, especially the first person formatting of that text, is why it is necessary to analyze this piece under feminist methodology. The gender of the artist is incredibly important in understanding and contextualizing this piece. Without the knowledge of the artist, the piece almost loses its power and agency. Looking at it through a feminist methodology is necessary in understanding it. The phrase ‘your gaze hits the side of my face’ is feminist in of itself. It shows the woman who is not engaging, and who is looking away in another direction. The use of the word ‘hit’ is almost aggressive in power. And finally, the unspoken aspect of this piece is the presence and use of the ‘male gaze.’ The male gaze is present in art history, in every painting of a nude woman that was painted by a man. Therefore, this piece is empowering to women. They are rejecting the male gaze, and they are beyond it. As stated before, the use of the world ‘hit’ implies that the gaze is aggressive, and it is true that the male gaze is indeed aggressive, strong, and omnipresent throughout art history. The fact that the woman is turning away from the man, and from the male gaze, shows that she is better than the aggressive man. She does not fight back with the same aggressiveness, and she does not engage with the behavior. The woman fights back by turning away, and showing that she is better than the man who is directing his gaze at her. The use of feminist methodology is important in this context, as the message and the agency of the piece loses its context and its meaning if the artist is not known, or if one did not know the artist was a woman.

 

Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud, 1971

Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud is completely connected biographically to her life, and what she began to experience as a woman and as an American during the 1970s. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war continued to rage, woman’s rights became a tipping point once again, and the civil rights movement was in full swing and still in shock after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As an American woman artist living in New York City, Spero was heavily connected and invested in many of these issues that were present in America at the time. She had produced pieces of art previously that dealt with the issue of the Vietnam War, and which had expressed the extreme consequences and violence that came with it. Another important aspect to this piece was the fact that in 1960 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. After her works which condemned the Vietnam War, Spero looked to do something more personal, which she was able to complete through her Codex Artaud. Artaud was a French playwright who was masochistic, and known for his extreme language. Spero misdirected Artaud’s masochistic rages towards her own range and anger, which was previously at the American government and their involvement in the war, and made it much more personal and directed at her own inner demons and ventings. As a woman who experienced pain on a daily basis, who had to fight for feminism, and had to fight to be heard as a woman in a male dominated art world, she found solace in Artaud’s writings and made the Codex Artaud, which features his words whilst changing and manipulating them. Artuad was known for his alienating language, and saw himself as an outsider and expressed that in his writings. This was a great parallel for Spero, who also saw herself as an outsider as she was a woman artist, who was anti-Vietnam.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Backs, 1976-82

These repeated sculptural figures are heavily connected to the early life of the artist. The artist was born in Poland in 1930. During her time in Poland, she lived near Warsaw under Soviet Rule, and had in her youth experienced the Nazis and the horrors that came with that occupation. Under later Soviet Rule in her university years, Abakanowicz also experienced the extreme horrors the Soviet Union had committed against the citizens and students of the country. When one looks at these groups of statues titled Backs, they are all seemingly uniform, and all face the viewer with their back. As the artist says, faces can lie but backs cannot. She connects these backs to her time as a child in Poland, where there was an extremely visible and present group mentality that took over. Poland in the 1930s was a time where there was a collective group hate and a collective group atmosphere, and that is what is seen coming through when one begins to look at all these people, who have their backs facing the viewer, all doing the same thing, and doing it together. They are unable to hide what ever it is they want to hide as their backs are to us and we are unable to see their face, thus giving the viewer the bare minimum of what the statue itself has to offer. Another interesting biographical influence was that during Soviet Poland, only socialist realism was allowed in art. This lead the artist to be trained and surrounded by the soviet realism. And this biographical fact lead her to keep a sort of realism in these backs, where each seems at first to be uniform, but is actually in a small sense individual and separate from the other people in the group.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana, 1968

These monumental sculptures are heavily connected to the life of the artist. Niki de Saint Phalle had an interesting life, and much of it goes back to the way in which she was raised. She was born in France but spent much of her childhood in America. She married young and at 18, and began having children when she was in her early 20s. Also in her 20s, she was committed to a mental institution after a nervous breakdown, where they gave her electroshock therapy. Before her children she was a model, and was on the front cover of Vogue magazine when she was 19 years old, and therefore she has always maintained a slim figure, and revealed in some of her works and her memoirs how much she cared for and attempted to maintain her slim figure and body. She also revealed in one of her memoires how her father sexually abused her since she was 11 years old, and that her mother would force her and her siblings to eat when they didn’t want to, and was a very strict Catholic woman. All of these life influences can be seen in these monumental nana sculptures. They are light, joyful, and full of air, and in a sense seem to combat the darkness of the artist’s past. The only revealing thing on this string of works is on the drawings of the nana figures themselves, where the artists write lines expressing how she does not wish to become large like the nana figures she draws, writing “will you still love me when I look like this?” These figures, made after her stay in a mental institution, are different from her other more oppressive and dark works, and are light, expressing perhaps an optimism and freedom from her past. However, they cannot help but continue to be tainted by her physiological past.

Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Maison, 1946

This piece is heavily connected to the biographical life of the artist. Femme-Maison is French for woman-house, and explores the themes of woman’s domesticity and the fact that they are faceless behind a home. The print shows a woman who is completely nude, and is a house from the waist up. She lacks breasts, eyes, or a face, and is meant to be a commentary on how women were seen at the time. However, this could also be seen to link biographically to her life as a child. She has expressed anger and resentment through her work at her father, who was unfaithful to her mother. Her mother knew of these infidelities, yet thought it to be simpler to look past them. On top of this, there were many events that were occurring in her life that happened around this time. She had her own private show, yet she still had difficulties breaking into the art world. Also around this time, she adopted and gave birth to her three boys. Perhaps it was the self-reflective analytical assessment that had lead her to this subject. She could not break into the art world because she was a woman, and during this time a woman’s place was still seen as in the home. The presence of her new sons probably contributed a great deal to the feeling that women were so much connected to the perceived idea that they should be at home that they become physically like the home themselves. Another possible factor is the constant presence of Bourgeois’ parents and their problems. Perhaps the artist had painted how she saw her mother, as a piece of her home, and physically altered. The infidelity of her father and her mother’s patience with it in an effort to keep life normal and running smoothly can be greatly linked to the representation of the woman as a house.

 

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944

Much of Frida Kahlo’s work is linked biographically to her life, and it is very difficult to separate the events in Kahlo’s life from her painting. This piece, The Broken Column, is a self-portrait. However, it is different from most of the other self-portraits that one finds in art history. Usually a self-portrait is a portrayal of the artists themselves, a representation of what they look like physically in life. However, Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits capture the inside of herself, and appear to be more of a self-portrait of her feelings and of her soul. This piece shows viewers the great pain that she feels, both emotionally and physically. Frida Kahlo had many health problems throughout her life, the biggest being the traffic accident that occurred when she was a young woman. She was hit by a bus, and almost died. In the accident she had displaced three vertebrae, and had to wear a corset, the pain from the healing process was intense, and she would never fully recover from this accident that would affect her for the rest of her life. This particular pain is what is represented here in this piece. The viewer can see that she is wearing a plastic corset, which seems to be the only thing that is keeping her body together and is preventing her from falling entirely apart. The broken column is most likely a reference to her broken back, and how fractured and barely together it is, it seems to be doing a poor job at supporting Kahlo, and looks like it would crumble at any time. There are nails that are nailed into her body all over, and they represent the pain from the accident that she cannot escape from. It is like she is saying the the pain is not confined to her back, but can be found all over. Finally, there are tears that are streaming down her cheeks. This shows how much pain she is in, and although she keeps a straight face for the viewer, they reveal the emotional and physical distress she is in.

Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room, 1923

Suzanne Valadon can be connected to this piece, The Blue Room, in a biographical way. The piece features the artist herself lying down on a bed. She wears pants, she smokes a cigarette, and her top shirt appears to be what today would be called a tank top. There are some books on the side of the bed, and she poses herself in a way that is reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Manet’s Olympia. The biographical reference to this piece is found in who Suzanne Valadon was as a person. She was a little educated French woman, who became a model for the impressionists and the post-impressionists in Paris. She was known for posing for Renoir, but she was also very sociable in that circle of artists. She herself became an artist as well, she lead a lower class and Bohemian life style, and this combined with her friendships and affairs with Parisian artists at the time had a great impact on her work. In the piece The Blue Room, the biographical elements come out in the way in which Valadon chooses to represent herself in this piece. She smokes a cigarette, she wears pants and a tank top exposing her shoulders, she reveals her education by showing books on her bed, and she lays down in what is art historically considered an enticing pose. She is painting her life, how she sees herself, not as a woman of society but as a woman artist who came from the lower classes, but who became educated and connected. This piece is a self-portrait, and therefore seeks to represent her life biographically, as she sees it. It could be seen as a rebuttal to the male impressionist painters and how they chose to paint and represent the female nudes. Perhaps that is why she poses herself like Manet’s Olympia, she is reclaiming the way in which woman’s bodies are portrayed, and instead of the enticing prostitute Olympia, instead there is Valadon who paints woman as they are and how they should be seen.