How the artists Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas, challenge spectatorship through exploring the female body within their works: ‘Cut Piece’ 1964 and ‘Mirror Check’ 1970?
Within this essay performance and feminist art movements will be examined, referring to the opportunities which feminist art created and the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. Through this essay the focus will be on the body as the primary medium through the works of: Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas. By analysing the role of the female body within their pieces, specifically Ono’s performance ‘Cut Piece’ 1964 and Jonas’ work ‘Mirror Check’ 1970. In addition to addressing how the artists Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas, challenge spectatorship through exploring the female body within their works:
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... performance pieces from becoming materialized via their documentation, one still finds many discreetly taken photographs and videos of his pieces circulating the web. Likewise, the reception of Yoko Ono’s 2003 reprisal of Cut Piece (1964) as captured by CBSnews.com’s article, “Crowd Cuts Yoko Ono’s Clothing Off” is typical of the sensationalized reception which characterizes the market consumption of avant-garde practices . So Burger was right in saying the culture industry consumes the most radical of gestures, for no one is completely outside the market, the circuit of exchange. On the other hand, no one is completely inside of it—there remain parts of humanity to which the market can stake no claim, Following this, we can perhaps write this addendum to the avant-garde demand: to integrate art within life-praxis, and make visible what is absent from both .
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In fewer words, Jon Berger’s Ways of Seeing discusses how humans see the world and he does so through the lens of art, seeing as he is an art historian. Specifically, in chapter three, he brings to attention how the portrayal of women in art and in the world is contingent on the male eye and its ideals. Women have been oppressed in their sense of selves because men dictate what they prefer in a women. Even in this day in age, a woman’s self-worth banks on the acceptance of men. Her only way of making a way in the world is by impressing men with hyper-sexual and or submissive tactics because that tradition has been drilled into all of our brains since Adam and Eve.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
During the Art Deco era the calla lily became one of the most popular flowers around. Whether in florist shops or on artist canvases the calla lily became a recurring theme. Like many flowers before it the calla lily came to be more than a flower on its own but it represented the idea of femininity. The calla lily was used by artists such as Tamara de Lempicka, Diego Rivera and Georgia O’Keeffe as a symbol of femininity and feminism. Through examining their works, in relation to their own lives and the events of the day, I will explore how the calla lily came to represent a new type on femininity and feminism.
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... are flipped upside down, skies being taken down like wallpaper, these contradictions depicted. In performance art, Lady Gaga, a contemporary pop singer, also embodies the strange of Surrealism. With her outlandish costumes and ideas, she transforms her stage in a wonderland. Her stage stands for everything society rejects. Her videos and performances are engaging; viewers critically see the underlying comment behind cultural phenomena. For instance, her piece Paparazzi, she comments on society. She is the celebrity she is in real life and at the same time is questioning the conditioning of masses to worship celebrity culture. While only using a few examples, Surrealism has not strayed too far from the fine arts but has spread into all forms of art. In the digital age, the canvas on which we paint or write has widened and evolved from the time Surrealism emerged.
Women have spent a large amount of time throughout the 20th century fighting for liberation from a patriarchal form that told them that they must be quiet and loyal to their husbands and fathers. For the duration of this essay, I will be discussing how the “Modern Woman” image that appeared through the Art Deco style — that emulated ideas such as the femme fatale and masqueraded woman, and presented new styles to enhance women’s comfortability and freedom — is still prevalent and has grown in contemporary art and design since. Overall I will describing to you how fashion, sexuality, and the newly emerged ‘female gaze’, and how these tie in together — in both periods of time — to produce what can be described as powerful femininity.
Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2007. Print.
Women in pictorial history have often been used as objects; figures that passively exist for visual consumption or as catalyst for male protagonists. Anne Hollander in her book Fabric of Vision takes the idea of women as objects to a new level in her chapter “Women as Dress”. Hollander presents the reader with an argument that beginning in the mid 19th century artists created women that ceased to exist outside of their elegantly dressed state. These women, Hollander argues, have no body, only dress. This concept, while persuasive, is lacking footing which I will attempt to provide in the following essay. In order to do this, the work of James Tissot (b. 1836 d. 1902) will further cement the idea of “women as dress” while the work of Berthe
In her essay, “Embodying Subaltern Memory: Kinesthesia and the Problematics of Gender and Race,” Cindy Patton argues that Madonna’s cultural appropriation of Afro-Caribbean drag queen kinesthetics (and said community’s restylization of extensively choreographed posing for the fashion elite, of which Vogue belongs) perpetuated and reinterpreted the “memories of resistance” (Patton …) from the civil rights revolution exploding from the Stonewall riots, although in a necessarily muted form. Patton describes Madonna’s video as an example of “cultural imperialism” (86) in which Madonna co-opted voguing from black and Latino drag queens who used the dance-form which confronts the “realities of intragroup violence among men… Vogue is a ‘challenge’
Throughout this essay I hope to illustrate how the development of Feminism was shown through art into Post Feminism and how feminism not only gave rights to women but to other 'Minorities ', I also plan on showing how strong Political influence is involved in art and feminism.
“The Mending Project” by Chinese-born artist, Beili Liu, is a performance art and installation project. This project was held on February 26, 2011 at the Women and Their Work gallery in Austin Museum Of Art, Texas, USA. The installation consists of hundreds of Chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling in a shimmering cloud, pointing downwards. The project involves the artist sits in front of a small black table beneath the countless sharp blades of the scissors performs an on-going simple task of hand-mending patches of fabric together, which visitors are encouraged to cut themselves near the entrance. This essay will analyse the meaning and artistic intention behind the project and it is also a reflective writing, which expresses my feelings