My first thoughts for the still life project surfaced after realizing by whose point of view the issues in society were had by in all of the cases before 20th/21st century; white men. The lack of women as viewers, as artists who had anything to say made me think about how women have been and still are in some cases viewed as objects by men. It also got me thinking about the history of art, how there has not been women thinking about women until late 17th century (Bronte sisters) and mid-18th century, when the revolutionary feminist book The Second Sex by Simone Beauvoir came along and in some way gave women a new beginning after the WWII. But the time before the revolution was empty of women.
Why there has not been any woman artists, and why women has been portrayed the way they have in the history of art since Venus the Willendorf? The tiny figure of woman with voluptuous breasts, belly and thighs symbolises the fertility of a woman but its hidden face with unrecognisable fingers symbolises the use of a woman as nothing but a carrying mother for new life. Her brain had been erased and her working hands didn't exist. This made me think, what is todays society's Venus? What shape and look would a 21st century's Venus figure take?
I did a little research by reading Linda Nochlin's book 'Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays' and ended up to think more about women's gaze after reading her essay 'Eroticism and Female Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Art'. The lack of woman gaze in anything erotic stirred my interest in gaze in general; with whose eyes are today's women to be looked at? And more importantly, when can women live without being under this invisible gaze that is still within our society (not to speak about the gaze of men in other cultures, and their "woman problems")?
Couple of months ago I read a piece on The New Inquiry about contemporary multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate who takes pictures of herself in her lingerie in different circumstances. Her most interesting work, in my opinion, is 'Lessons 1-10' where she is visiting strange men's houses' with her camera, recoding the visits by taking video and photos while having dance parties with the men, while she is wearing only panties. Her work challenges the gaze of a woman as viewer and as a object, as well as the gaze of a man, swifting the gaze's power back to the artist, to a woman. This got me thinking, by who is the portrait of today's women made by, and to whom is it made to be looked at?
All I could think about was blow up dolls and barbies, how they resemble the exact opposite of everything I believe women stand for, and yet how barbies rule young girls life as role models. But Barbie was too old-school, I needed a up to date version of it, which led me to Bratz doll. Ironically its figure is the exact opposite of Venus of Willendorf with its tiny body, that is closer to a man's body rather than woman's, and a massive head with a fountain of hair, glossy lips, wide spider eyes and different sets of clothing. Still the message stands the same as before; women are not equal to men.
What I want to photograph as a still life picture is this gap between women and men, yet I don't want it to be a doll, nor nothing that visually resembles human figure, but an object of a sort that connects my thoughts through everything said above.
To be continued...
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