Duane Michals, Paradise Regained, 1968
I was flipping through one of the textbooks I use to prepare Art History lectures and came across this set of prints. Among many things, I was immediately struck by the almost immediate nakedness of the woman compared to the man. I wonder what a 2013 version of this print would be?
GERMANY on POLAND: I’d like to go see Twisted Entities at Museum Morsbroich in Germany. E-flux says, “bodies are dissected, squeezed, deformed, duplicated and over-wound.” Sign me up!
UNITED KINGDOM: Charming for the Revolution A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness a collaboration with the Tate Modern and Electra. E-flux says, “Charming for the Revolution is an experimental congress of artists, activists and thinkers who seek to unpick underpinning, pressing questions of contemporary sexual and gender politics; exploring strategies that divert and destabilise normative gender and its representations.”
NEPAL: There is now a third gender option for those procuring a citizenship certificate in Nepal. Huffington Post says, “activists hailed the decision, saying it was an achievement for gay and transgender rights.”
UNITED NATIONS: Did you know that there is a UN Gender Equality New Feed?
Kara Walker will be at the AIC in February!
Today I’m visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White. As the MCA’s website says, “With dozens of works in all media, Color Bind muses on the ways the English words “black” and “white” evoke both simple formal notions and metaphors for race, politics, and historical movements. Set to coincide with the recent US presidential election, this exhibition calls attention to the ways seemingly neutral formal terms assume moral dimensions that, in turn, complicate and politicize the very works assumed to be neutral.”
To prep for my trip to the museum I read part of Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities and this quick discussion on Art Info with Christopher K. Ho and Roger White about the idea surrounding Ho’s exhibition “Privileged White People” at Forever & Today, Inc. in NYC.
In light of the Oscar nomination list being released: NY Times, “Female Directors Gain Ground, Slowly.” Alison Klayman, the director of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, was featured in the piece. I can’t wait to hear what Coming off the Reels has to say about it.
From Miru Kim’s The Pig That Therefor I Am
Miru Kim’s pigs got sick at Art Basel on Huffington Post.
Updates on Ai Weiwei–Art21, a bit about his alleged tax evasion, the sunflower seeds are coming to New York!
Is the postal rendition of year of the dragon too “monstrous”?
Genderbread Person. I originally found it here.
Do you know about whats going on in Bosnia? This monument deserves its own post.
Take some time to learn a bit about North Korea.
This is a great new tumblr. Nepotism? No, it is simply lovely.
Another one of my morning reads is Art Daily. This morning I read an article about Jenny Saville’s new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. I think because of my recent post about Alex Meade I immediately wondered if Saville’s figures were painted bodies. Saville is known for painting and drawing bodies at dramatic angles on huge canvases.
I tried to find Saville’s website, instead I just found many gallery descriptions of her work. A short excerpt of something Saville said about her work jumped out to me. my work and research is about the body and moments of un-doing and mixing “conventional” gender. Of the painting above Saville says, “With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed.” Click here to read the rest.
I’ve been following Hazel Dooney for a long time. She recently stopped blogging regularly so now her website, email updates and Facebook are how I keep track of her work. I received an update this morning and wanted to share a paragraph she wrote,
“I never expected to discover within myself an enthusiasm for portraiture. Over the past decade, I’ve been asked many times to undertake portrait commissions and I have always refused. Then, about a year or so ago, I recognised a compelling connection between a long-standing theme of my work – the way advertising and entertainment media influence our identity – and the traditional role of the ‘public’ portrait. I became intrigued by the notion that I could create a reductive but still identifiable ‘idealisation’ of a subject which, like fashion advertising or celebrity portrait photography, might transform their real-world ‘self’ into an emotive ‘product’. As large-scale, gleaming, sexy, and super-real as a good fashion or lifestyle advertisement should be, these portraits might also be unsettling and revelatory, even to their sitters.”
*The photo above is a screen shot I took from the artist’s website www.hazeldooney.com.
I find the “self” to “product” aspect of her work and her statement very interesting. Those ideas of course bring me straight to gender representation and roles. What looks “male” or whats “looks” female? Of course that question can be seen as purely an inquiry about the actual naked human form but the influence of cultural products, advertising, and so forth can have an even greater impact.
Zane Davis recently sent me an email with a link to www.mybodygallery.com. The website is a place to see images of “what real women look like.” You can search by combinations of height, weight, clothing size, etc. A user can also click on the body type. I entered my body and there was no match–I am my own little snowflake.
Above is a screen shot of pear shaped women who share my height and weight (but not my clothing size).
This is what My Body Gallery says about itself, “In a world full of images of how we “should” look it can get difficult to tell how we DO look. Our hope is to build a site where women can see what real women look like. What we really look like. Most women have spent so many years looking at themselves in mirrors that we can no longer see what’s really there. The My Body Gallery project’s goal is to help women objectively see what we look like and come to some acceptance that we are all beautiful.”
Some of my “off the cuff” thoughts:
*Is this website empowering, objectifying, something else? Both?
*I searched for my own body type. Is that a “female” thing to do? Would men use this site differently?
*Is there a similar site for men?
*I am very curious about the demographic of the participants.
Zane, thanks for sharing! Bodies and how we approach them is so fascinating.
Hello, all! I have been back in the States for about a week. The jet lag is gone and I’m ready to catch you up on the adventures and art. My time in China and South Korea was incredible to say the least–I learned a lot and met amazing people.
This post is long over due. Chad and I visited Chaochangdi almost a month ago. You might remember our visit from this picture. This post is a small collection of artwork we saw at Three Shadows Gallery which was designed by Ai Weiwei. The space was great and we really enjoyed the artwork in it. The whole time we were there I couldn’t stop thinking about our close friend and talented photographer, Zane Davis.
The work above captured my attention immediately. It is Chen Zhe’s series Body / Wound Series created from 2008-2010. The abstraction of the body is wonderful. Upon immediate approach I was not clear on the subject matter. As I stood infront of the works I began picking out different parts. I love bodies as puzzles that can be taken apart, mixed and put back together. Below is a different view, I apologize for the glare.
The next grouping is by the same artist. For this work she won the 2011 Three Shadows Photography Award.
When I visit an art space I have to decide how I will approach the artwork. Sometimes I read about the artist and the work before I look at the pieces. This method gives an immediate context and in many ways makes the art more accessible. My preferred method, which is a bit more challenging at times, is to enter a work of art through my own raw, uninfluenced interpretation. With the piece above I did so. I thought of the way my brain feels after being online bumming around the internet for a long time. My brain bounced around, I couldn’t settle on an image. I barely noticed the sliced arm in the center.
Yang Nannan created the photographs above. I think the series is called The Other Side Series but my notes are unclear. Yang photographs cross-dressers and transexuals. On the title card the artist says, “The Other Side is my exploration into the things behind mainstream society…I hope that these works will allow people to reexamine respect and violation, normal and abnormal, and moral and immoral. I want to give the audience a new understanding of human nature, emotions, desires, instincts, and social roles.”
The last photo I took of Chad at Platform China in honor of his employer, Groupon, who is very generous with many, many things including Vitamin Water.
Pin Gallery in 798 is currently hosting Bad Exhibition. It is a fantastic exhibition and if you are in the area I suggest visiting. To learn more about it look at this article from CAFA Art Info. The work above is of particular interest to me. Lee Yong Baek, a South Korean artist, created Pieta in 2008. It is an installation made of FRP and iron plates. It is incredibly striking measuring 400 x 240 x 320 centimeters (157 x 94 x 126 inches). Last semester I revisited Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. In the manifesto she states that, ““[a] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature or social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 7).
I have appropriated the idea of a cyborg into a way to look at gender–pulling apart a body and reconstructing it. All bodies are just a collection of parts. Lee Yong Baek conceptually merges an archetypal symbol of Western art with this idea of the body as non-human. A Pieta is usually Mary holding Jesus–a female holding a male. I like to look at these figures as ambiguously gendered but they are most likely two males.
