Readings:
Re-reading Edward Weston: Feminism, Photography and Psychoanalysis by Roberta McGrath
Cindy Sherman: Burning down the House by Jan Avgikos
Bring three to five examples (not by Weston or Sherman) that illustrate extended positions presented in the text.
Re-reading Edward Weston: Feminism, Photography, and Psychoanalysis
ReplyDeleteBy Roberta McGrath
About the author:
Dr. Roberta McGrath is an Associate Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland.
Source: http://showstudio.com/contributor/roberta_mcgrath
Summary and Notes:
Even though the photographic work of Edward Weston is provided with context and perspective through his extensive writings - personal diaries published as “The Day Books” - it is often analyzed in terms of its formal qualities. Dr. Roberta McGrath discusses his work in conjunction with Feminism and Psychoanalysis. She explains that in Modernism issues of class, race, and gender remained hidden; and concerns for the wider social model to which the modernist movement belonged was suppressed. The idea of a “universal genderlessness” of art was exclusive of women. McGrath suggests the deconstruction of male paradigms and the construction of female perspectives in order to change those patriarchal traditions. She also mentions that some feminist theories borrowed from Marxism and Psychoanalysis. The problem is Marxism does not account for sexual division. She further summarizes the difference between those three philosophies by stating that Marxism deals with the struggle between social classes and Psychoanalysis the struggle within ourselves while Feminism tackles the struggle between sexes. Psychoanalysis, however, proved that masculinity and femininity are socially determined; not biologically. This fact adds a valuable piece to the arsenal of arguments of feminist theories. Dr McGrath quotes feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir who said: “One is not born a woman. But rather one becomes a woman.” We could also add that one becomes a woman through the system established by men and by complying to their rules. According to McGrath, Weston’s work embodies traces of marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist debates. However, she highlights the fact that Weston was pro-individualism.
The work of Weston placed an emphasis on the appreciation of “naked beauty;” and for this reason he did not include the faces of his models. He was not looking to make portraits. The appreciation of naked beauty does not apply only to the human nudes but to his inanimate subjects as well. McGrath speaks of the voyeuristic aspect of Weston’s work supported by the unreturned gaze. Men’s fear of castration, of which women are the symbols, is dealt with through fetishism and voyeurism. This is what Weston was doing with the illusion of control awarded by the very act of photographing. McGrath adds: “For Weston, photography in the form of the camera, was that ‘pleasurable extension to the eye’: both it and the faithful photographic print become fetishes; necessary props.” The eye is substitute for the penis. Beauty, for Weston is rooted in sexual stimuli. His sexuality is not only expressed through the photographs but also through his printing process, his choice of glossy paper, his decision to equate the nudes with the negatives. Contact printing was Weston’s favorite method. It is a sort of sexualized union between the negative and the paper from which the photographic print is conceived.
Cindy Sherman: Burning Down The House
ReplyDeleteBy Jan Avgikos
Notes on the author:
Jan Avgikos teaches at Columbia University. She is an Art Historian, a critic, and a contributing editor for Artforum.
Summary:
The work of Cindy Sherman reunites many genres: from film stills to art-historical portraiture, fairies tales, and so on. According to Jan Avgikos, it is a “convergence of discourses” from which the feminist part emerges. In the photographs of the plastic mannequins, Sherman deals with female identity, representation, contamination, and taboo. These photographs are sexually explicit, but because of the artificial nature the subjects depicted Avgikos raises the question on wether or not they would qualify as pornographic images. A report by the Meese Commission in 1986 associated pornography to the unreal, arguing that the problem is not the sex per se but its representation. Avgikos further notes after Avita Ronell that “an imitation of reality produces the desire to imitate.” This kind of representation is contagious. She points out the fact that censorship protects “the so-called majority” ’s idea of what is normal. However what is considered normal sexual behavior is so limited that the majority of us could be considered freaks.
The interpretation of Sherman’s work varies from being an argument against the Hollywood clichés in female representation to a pedagogy against violent masculinity.