Ways Of Seeing By John Berger: The Oppression Of Women
Throughout history the female face and body have been been appropriated by artists, philosophers, and writers as a means to dominate the female form in our patriarchal society. She is often idealized, not ugly or deformed, nor does she appear to age. She is represented as an ideal form from a male perspective, which has lead to a highly objectified ideal represented numerous patriarchal societies throughout the western world. John Berger stated in the 1972 BBC documentary television series Ways of Seeing: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (Ways of Seeing). This quote clarifies the male gazer’s distortion of the female form through the creation of a ‘better and more beautiful’ image, while forcing the opposite gender
…show more content…
to participate within the patriarchal violence that is being forced upon them.
With the emergence of the feminist art movement in the late 1960s and flourishing throughout the 70s, contemporary art witnessed the dawning of a new art practice that reflected women’s lives and experiences as well as bringing more attention to the role that women had within historical canon (DiTolla).
This movement started the process of influencing cultural attitudes and transforming stereotypes, as well as acknowledging women as artists — just as their professional male counter parts have always been known as — while moving away from the term ‘women artists’. This new artistic revolution was shaped by the politics of inclusion at the time and also encompassed a sexual revolution of sorts, while creating alternative venues to promote women artists’ visibility within the art world (Linton). This movement was about creating a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer through a feminist lens. This forced the viewer to question the social and political norms of a male dominated culture in the hope that it would inspire change towards what is feminism and ending sexism and oppression by inciting change toward equality. Feminist art used a not only traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture, but also non-traditional methods including performance art, conceptual art, body art, video, film, and even fibre art. Through the use of non-traditional media, the viewer was allowed to question the social and political landscape through the expanded definition which feminist …show more content…
art brought to the forefront (DiTolla).
Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), was a pioneering feminist and conceptual artist based in New York who worked in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and installation. Born Arlene Hannah Butler to two Jewish parents in New York City on March 7, 1940. She attended and graduated from the Tyler School of Art from at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1956 to 1961, with a BFA and a teaching certificate. She taught art at two high schools over a period of 9 years before moving on to teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Art in New York between the years of 1972 and 1991 (Scharlatt, web).
Wilke’s art practice was devoted to the malleability and her interest in vulnerablity and was known for her gestural sculptures which used simple folds or movement of unusual fragile materials such as clay, bubble gum, Play-Doh, kneaded erasers, or even her own body. Her physical gestures turned them into sculpture. (Fitzpatrick, 9). She first created vaginal imagery in the late 1950’s, before most other artists who also produced what later came to be termed feminist essentialist art, or art that stemmed from the imagery of the female body (Fitzpatrick, 15). Wilke’s work, Early Box and Six Phallic and Excremental Sculptures (fig. 1), 1960-3, was created using Terracotta, plaster of Paris, and glazed terracotta, was completed while an undergrad at Tyler School of Art. Wilke referenced the delicate for that she called “blooms” or “boxes”—a pun on contemporary slang for the work “vagina” (Fitzpatrick, 13). She was concerned with creating specifically female imagery that fused the female body into exotic objects while always reflecting back to her own body and complex emotional feelings.
Though Early Box and Six Phallic and Excremental Sculptures were a departure from traditional female iconography, after a 1966 exhibition, the work was invisible and marginalized within the art world and to Wilkes, this was not surprising. Her comments after the exhibition were made clear: “The shapes were very sexy, like little tiny genital. But nobody noticed them. If you do little things and you’re a woman, you’re doomed to craft-world obscurity… Being an artist is difficult, an unbelievable risk, and making a female sexual statement is even riskier” (Stoops, 80). Over the next ten years, Wilke would continue to defy the art world standards while pushing her own boundaries between public and private, pleasure and pain, voyeurism and vulnerbility, individualism and relatedness. (Stoops, 80).
By the 1970’s Wilke had a difficult relationship with the feminist movement as a result of her uncompromising glamorous self-presentation and confrontational use of her nude body in her work. She had continued to produce both sculpture and drawings, but now she began to focus on photography, video and performance body art. Wilke’s active, yet defiant, solicitation of the “male gaze” as a method of feminist critique is best represented in her work S.O.S.—Stratification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication (1974-5) (fig. 2-3). Here Wilke’s presents a collection of what she calls “performalist self-portraits,” in which she parodies and dismantles stereotypical representations of “femininity,” (Wacks).
The TATE online website provides the best description of the work:
“These feature the artist topless, satirising the poses of glamour models in women’s magazines using a range of props including sunglasses, a cowboy hat and toy guns, rollers, a silk turban and a plastic toy. In all the pictures, Wilke is dotted with the gum wounds which ‘starify’ her, transforming her into a star at the same time as emphasising her scarred or wounded state. The regular and symmetrical placement of the wounds recall the African ritual of scarification in which bodies are ritually scarred, usually as a means of marking a developmental rite of passage. Wilke’s ‘starification’ thus hints at a ritual scarring process necessary to become a female star. In her public performances of this work, documented indirectly by the photographs, Wilke would hand sticks of gum to visitors as they entered the gallery space, before removing her shirt. She would then request the chewed gum from her audience, twisting each piece into a vagina form and sticking it to her bare skin, thus marking herself with a sign. She commented: ‘I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece’ (quoted in Avis Berman, ‘A Decade of Progress, But Could a Female Chardin Make a Living Today’, Art News, vol.79, no.8, October 1980, p.77)” (Manchester).
Many of Wilke’s critics had defined her as narcissistic (Manchester). During the period of which Wilke was finding her stride as an artist, the social upheavals in the United States and Europe were significant as the fight for equality for woman with regards to sexuality, reproductive rights, the family, and the workspace. Artists and art historians had began to investigate how images in Western art and the media perpetuated idealizations of the female form. (Investigating Identity). It was at this time that feminist artists were seeking to reclaim the female body and began showing it through their own unique perspective while claiming control over their own bodies and questioned the issues of gender.
One of the main arguments that feminism has with nudity is that there is no possibility of using the image of a naked woman other than in an absolutely sexist and politically repressive patriarchal way. This argument parallels that of feminists for censorship of pornography. But where the argument fails is with the female subject’s exploration of her own sexuality (Thompson). Hannah Wilke was more progressive with her works and sexual openness, which distinguished her from her peers. Her art is often confrontational with the viewer and subject, not self-destructive or passive, but playful and ironic. Her particular style of art allowed her to physically gesture and act out her ideas. Wilke stated: “I didn’t separate the art from her body: it was just another part of it” (Scharlatt).
Wilke’s method of confronting the male gaze by using her own naked body in her art was met with great criticism and disappointment across the art world, especially by fellow female artists and critics at the time.
Art critic, Amelia Jones, who championed Wilke, writes: ”By adopting the rhetoric of the pose as the work itself, Wilke both insistently unveils the artist and unveils the artists as female (anatomically female, and so culturally feminine, and yet also clearly “masculine” in her artistic authority)” (Jones. Essay: “The Rhetoric of the Pose”). Wilkes critics used works such as “flaunting”, “exquisite”, and “gorgeous” and were critical of her being able to use her body with such ease and accused her of regressive feminist
narcissism.
In Claire Daigle’s article in issue #21 of Art Papers, Wilke was quoted: "A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult,” and goes on to say that the strength and the enigma of Wilke's early work is that it consistently and insistently straddles that precarious and "subtle abyss,” (Daigle).
Even though Hannah Wilke was not the only artist at the time to use narcissism and the male gaze as a feminist tactic for engaging the viewer, it was her command of these powerful tools of critique that separated her from her male-dominated artist counterparts. Wilkes use of active solicitation of the “male gaze” as a method of engaging the viewer, her command of the artistic mediums that she used, allowed her to take part in deliberate self-objectification. Although her work at the time may have been devalued by feminist critics at the time, it is important to note that Wilke was fully comfortable in her own skin as an artist, a feminist and a woman as she commanded her own image both in front and behind the camera.
to participate within the patriarchal violence that is being forced upon them.
With the emergence of the feminist art movement in the late 1960s and flourishing throughout the 70s, contemporary art witnessed the dawning of a new art practice that reflected women’s lives and experiences as well as bringing more attention to the role that women had within historical canon (DiTolla).
This movement started the process of influencing cultural attitudes and transforming stereotypes, as well as acknowledging women as artists — just as their professional male counter parts have always been known as — while moving away from the term ‘women artists’. This new artistic revolution was shaped by the politics of inclusion at the time and also encompassed a sexual revolution of sorts, while creating alternative venues to promote women artists’ visibility within the art world (Linton). This movement was about creating a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer through a feminist lens. This forced the viewer to question the social and political norms of a male dominated culture in the hope that it would inspire change towards what is feminism and ending sexism and oppression by inciting change toward equality. Feminist art used a not only traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture, but also non-traditional methods including performance art, conceptual art, body art, video, film, and even fibre art. Through the use of non-traditional media, the viewer was allowed to question the social and political landscape through the expanded definition which feminist …show more content…
art brought to the forefront (DiTolla).
Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), was a pioneering feminist and conceptual artist based in New York who worked in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and installation. Born Arlene Hannah Butler to two Jewish parents in New York City on March 7, 1940. She attended and graduated from the Tyler School of Art from at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1956 to 1961, with a BFA and a teaching certificate. She taught art at two high schools over a period of 9 years before moving on to teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Art in New York between the years of 1972 and 1991 (Scharlatt, web).
Wilke’s art practice was devoted to the malleability and her interest in vulnerablity and was known for her gestural sculptures which used simple folds or movement of unusual fragile materials such as clay, bubble gum, Play-Doh, kneaded erasers, or even her own body. Her physical gestures turned them into sculpture. (Fitzpatrick, 9). She first created vaginal imagery in the late 1950’s, before most other artists who also produced what later came to be termed feminist essentialist art, or art that stemmed from the imagery of the female body (Fitzpatrick, 15). Wilke’s work, Early Box and Six Phallic and Excremental Sculptures (fig. 1), 1960-3, was created using Terracotta, plaster of Paris, and glazed terracotta, was completed while an undergrad at Tyler School of Art. Wilke referenced the delicate for that she called “blooms” or “boxes”—a pun on contemporary slang for the work “vagina” (Fitzpatrick, 13). She was concerned with creating specifically female imagery that fused the female body into exotic objects while always reflecting back to her own body and complex emotional feelings.
Though Early Box and Six Phallic and Excremental Sculptures were a departure from traditional female iconography, after a 1966 exhibition, the work was invisible and marginalized within the art world and to Wilkes, this was not surprising. Her comments after the exhibition were made clear: “The shapes were very sexy, like little tiny genital. But nobody noticed them. If you do little things and you’re a woman, you’re doomed to craft-world obscurity… Being an artist is difficult, an unbelievable risk, and making a female sexual statement is even riskier” (Stoops, 80). Over the next ten years, Wilke would continue to defy the art world standards while pushing her own boundaries between public and private, pleasure and pain, voyeurism and vulnerbility, individualism and relatedness. (Stoops, 80).
By the 1970’s Wilke had a difficult relationship with the feminist movement as a result of her uncompromising glamorous self-presentation and confrontational use of her nude body in her work. She had continued to produce both sculpture and drawings, but now she began to focus on photography, video and performance body art. Wilke’s active, yet defiant, solicitation of the “male gaze” as a method of feminist critique is best represented in her work S.O.S.—Stratification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication (1974-5) (fig. 2-3). Here Wilke’s presents a collection of what she calls “performalist self-portraits,” in which she parodies and dismantles stereotypical representations of “femininity,” (Wacks).
The TATE online website provides the best description of the work:
“These feature the artist topless, satirising the poses of glamour models in women’s magazines using a range of props including sunglasses, a cowboy hat and toy guns, rollers, a silk turban and a plastic toy. In all the pictures, Wilke is dotted with the gum wounds which ‘starify’ her, transforming her into a star at the same time as emphasising her scarred or wounded state. The regular and symmetrical placement of the wounds recall the African ritual of scarification in which bodies are ritually scarred, usually as a means of marking a developmental rite of passage. Wilke’s ‘starification’ thus hints at a ritual scarring process necessary to become a female star. In her public performances of this work, documented indirectly by the photographs, Wilke would hand sticks of gum to visitors as they entered the gallery space, before removing her shirt. She would then request the chewed gum from her audience, twisting each piece into a vagina form and sticking it to her bare skin, thus marking herself with a sign. She commented: ‘I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece’ (quoted in Avis Berman, ‘A Decade of Progress, But Could a Female Chardin Make a Living Today’, Art News, vol.79, no.8, October 1980, p.77)” (Manchester).
Many of Wilke’s critics had defined her as narcissistic (Manchester). During the period of which Wilke was finding her stride as an artist, the social upheavals in the United States and Europe were significant as the fight for equality for woman with regards to sexuality, reproductive rights, the family, and the workspace. Artists and art historians had began to investigate how images in Western art and the media perpetuated idealizations of the female form. (Investigating Identity). It was at this time that feminist artists were seeking to reclaim the female body and began showing it through their own unique perspective while claiming control over their own bodies and questioned the issues of gender.
One of the main arguments that feminism has with nudity is that there is no possibility of using the image of a naked woman other than in an absolutely sexist and politically repressive patriarchal way. This argument parallels that of feminists for censorship of pornography. But where the argument fails is with the female subject’s exploration of her own sexuality (Thompson). Hannah Wilke was more progressive with her works and sexual openness, which distinguished her from her peers. Her art is often confrontational with the viewer and subject, not self-destructive or passive, but playful and ironic. Her particular style of art allowed her to physically gesture and act out her ideas. Wilke stated: “I didn’t separate the art from her body: it was just another part of it” (Scharlatt).
Wilke’s method of confronting the male gaze by using her own naked body in her art was met with great criticism and disappointment across the art world, especially by fellow female artists and critics at the time.
Art critic, Amelia Jones, who championed Wilke, writes: ”By adopting the rhetoric of the pose as the work itself, Wilke both insistently unveils the artist and unveils the artists as female (anatomically female, and so culturally feminine, and yet also clearly “masculine” in her artistic authority)” (Jones. Essay: “The Rhetoric of the Pose”). Wilkes critics used works such as “flaunting”, “exquisite”, and “gorgeous” and were critical of her being able to use her body with such ease and accused her of regressive feminist
narcissism.
In Claire Daigle’s article in issue #21 of Art Papers, Wilke was quoted: "A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult,” and goes on to say that the strength and the enigma of Wilke's early work is that it consistently and insistently straddles that precarious and "subtle abyss,” (Daigle).
Even though Hannah Wilke was not the only artist at the time to use narcissism and the male gaze as a feminist tactic for engaging the viewer, it was her command of these powerful tools of critique that separated her from her male-dominated artist counterparts. Wilkes use of active solicitation of the “male gaze” as a method of engaging the viewer, her command of the artistic mediums that she used, allowed her to take part in deliberate self-objectification. Although her work at the time may have been devalued by feminist critics at the time, it is important to note that Wilke was fully comfortable in her own skin as an artist, a feminist and a woman as she commanded her own image both in front and behind the camera.