Research Point: Photography and Feminism 2

Hannah Hoch

Dada was an avant-garde, artistic movement, that was anti-art, anti-bourgeois, and aligned itself politically with the radical left. The movement began around 1915 and quickly spread to European cities such as Berlin, as well as New York. As with Marcel Duchamp a few years earlier, the movement attempted to swipe away the conventional thinking on art and it's origins were based in Cubism, and German Expressionism.

Collage was a form of art that became highly developed under the Dadaists. Hannah Hoch's work is well known for her critiques of the German Weimar republic, gender roles - including marriage, and the representation of women in advertising and larger society.

Hoch struggled to have her work recognised by the Dadaist themselves. In later critiques and reviews she began to slip from view as biographers downplayed her importance. It was not until later decades when Feminist historians re-discovered her work that Hoch's place was rightly restored to the movement.

It is difficult to fully analyse Hoch's work online. Her collages are packed with complicated imagery that really needs to be seen full size to be appreciated. Also, some of her political messages are now hard to interpret without an understanding of the political motivation and players of the time.

Her views on female representation are much easier to read as many of these themes are universal and still relevant today. Hoch's collage incorporate images from fashion and advertising. Women's bodies are often re-imagined. Limbs are stretched or out of scale and eyes are enlarged or misaligned. This work reminds me of Cindy Sherman's 'Sex Pictures' series to an extent. Hoch was bisexual and it is clear that she thought a lot about defined gender roles for women and how those roles suppressed her as an individual.


Tamara de Lempicka

Synonymous with the Art Deco style this Polish artist's paintings were loosely based around the technique of Synthetic Cubism. This is a variation on Cubism using a colour palette that was much more acceptable to a majority audience. Lempicka also painted mainly society portraits, and her work was much in demand right through the decades of the 1920s & 30s. In her paintings, Lempicka portrayed women as strong figures (much like herself) that were part of the new machine age and able to take what they wanted from life. The images featured modern technology and used strong, bold colours, to depict automobiles and cityscapes as angular backdrops to her subjects.

After moving to America in 1939 her style fell out of favour and she became much more widely known for her private life and demand for portrait commissions dwindled. It wasn't until the 1970s when the Art Deco style began to make a resurgence in popular consciousness that her work became widely known again. This is typical of many women artist's as they struggle not only to make their artistic voices heard but also sustain them over time. Many art historians seemed to quite happily let these women's histories slide into oblivion. Luckily Feminist re-discovery in the latter decades of the twentieth century has restored them to their rightful places.


Frida Kahlo

Born in Mexico, Frida Kahlo's work embodies self portraits, her enthusiasm for her native culture, and critiques against the cultural imperialism of America. The self portraits embody the pain, both physical and psychological, that she endured throughout her lifetime. A serious traffic accident as a teenager affected her for the rest of her life and Kahlo was frequently bedridden or in hospital. Her paintings reflect not only the physical damage done to her body but the issues around her sexuality also. Mexico is depicted as a natural world of plants and earth and sky; this is often juxtaposed against the hard and mechanical machine age of Modernist America.

Kahlo's paintings have a Surrealist element - although the artist herself is known to have been disdainful of this label for her own work. Kahlo preferred to state that her work portrayed reality - her inner pain was real. I can appreciate where she is coming from here. The Surrealist paintings of Dali seem far removed from what Kahlo was attempting to communicate in her work.

Research Point - Photography and Feminism 1

Many women photographers have used the medium to critique Patriarchal societies and Feminist issues around class, race, representation, and sexuality. In chapter 6 of Liz Wells' 'Photography - A Critical Introduction' we are asked to read the sections on 'Women's photography, Questions of identity', and 'Identity and the multi-cultural.'  This section breaks down the approaches that Feminist campaigners took in photography and the arts into three broad based areas:

• Examination of ways women have been represented in Western Art.

• Feminist art historians rediscovery of women artists previously ignored.

• How women in art schools, galleries and publishing, asserted a right to have space devoted to contemporary women artists.

In the course notes we are asked:

What part have female artists played in the history of Feminist thought? 


Cindy Sherman
The photographer Cindy Sherman's 'Film Stills' work is well known for its critique of the representation of women in the media. Sherman's work neatly highlights the objectification of women by using her own body to transform herself into a number of female characters that are easily recognisable  - roles we have seen represented many, many, times in films from the past and present. The fact that Sherman's work looks to the viewer like it could almost be stills from those type of movies, shows just how stereotypical and gender defined women's place in a Patriarchal society can be.

Sherman has also made work critiquing the female nude; a genre of Western Art painting that is very problematic from a Feminist standpoint. The term 'nude' being objected to as a polite word to intellectualise and mask the voyeuristic male gaze. Sherman uses mannequins, swapping the plastic body parts around between male and female. She uses provocative poses, exposing orifices and genitalia, putting breasts onto old men's bodies, that create disturbing images that seek to disconnect the male gaze.

Barbara Kruger
Incorporating text or slogans into an artwork is a very powerful way of juxtaposing an image with a thought. Barbara Kruger makes collage, incorporating her text with found photographs, usually advertising shots from print-media. Slogans such as 'I shop, therefore, I am' 'Your comfort is my silence' ' and 'You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men' are very thought provoking pieces of work that incisively critique the Patriarchy from a Feminist perspective.

Raeda Saadeh
In 'Who will make me real?' the artist shows her own body encased from neck to ankle in a cast made from newspaper articles concerning the Palestinian conflict. The artist is reclined in the pose of the 'odalisque' a recognisable genre of 'exotic' foreign women in Western Art. In doing so, Saadeh not only looks at the representation of women, but imperialist views on race and gender.
 

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics - Bell Hooks

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

I'd definitely recommend this book as a good way to get a grasp on the basic concepts of Feminism. A lot of people think they know what Feminism is - especially its detractors. Hooks argues that their view comes via the patriarchal mass media and is biased. The book explains how the movement has been influenced and changed over time and charts that history. The issues discussed around sexism, class, race, sexuality are done so without resorting to an overly complicated academic language.

Before reading this book I was unaware how much the different factions have split and changed the Feminist movement. How the white-supremacist and patriarchal mass media have made sure that Feminism has been thoroughly vilified and held in disdain by the majority public - with a little help from an elite set of educated women that have used Feminism to bolster their own power and class status, whilst leaving behind many of the women that needed a voice the most.

What I took from reading this book is that if you believe in equality for all then you are a Feminist. Feminism is not just about women's issues but a critique of the whole patriarchal system and how it suppresses both men and women. How some women (because they are brought up in the system) can be thoroughly patriarchal and just as damaging to the Feminist cause too.