Critical Annotation

My aim is to further study more modern feminist theory and objectification theory - especially relating to film, digital and “selfie” culture.  Amy Shields Dobsons exploration of the hypocrisy of the gendered selfie and the problematic nature of this culture. Barbara Fredrickson & Tomi-Ann Roberts ideas generated from Objectification theory, the experiential consequences of being a female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body.   I love the idea of monstrasizing, elongating and dissecting the female body in order to shift power dynamics of the traditional nude/female body in works such as  Annagret Soltau, Juno Calypso and Jean-Paul Gaude.  

The ideas from ’Virtual Normality: The female gaze in the age of the internet’ are incredible as a starting point, theorizing the post-feminine power dynamics of looking in post-internet, while also examining the works of great female writers/artists Juno Calypso, Leah Schrager. Devising the the Idea of the “Looped gaze” - the feeling of attraction and alienation when seeing yourself through your image in the social media age; the politics of the selfie - Identity, sexuality ands femininity via the body - bodiess over which the author has total control - the body as material; and the power of the self-directed camera “the female gaze has an urgent task to assert the nuances of the female experience through visibility, according to the aphorism of the social media age: i am seen, therefore I am.”

I would also like to explore current ideas about female materiality theory. I am influenced by Tacita Dean using film as both material and medium. Nicole Wermer ’s material simplicity in abstract representation, Mona Hatoum’s tactility - the tension between the warm, inviting domesticity and the danger and consequence of materiality, powerfully expressing feminine ideas through surprising material.

The ideas of self-representation in digital culture ties together my interest in the viewers role becoming an active agent in the viewing of film, and the changing dynamics of the female object/subject relation in film/digi-culture. The effect of a multi-partied female representation, both in form and content, will portray the intention of a monster-like, dissected body reflecting power dynamics in screen culture.

A viewers role now in digital space is now one of passive viewing and one of self-representation? The screen has become more-so the “two-way mirror” -  the same screen that we look at, looks at us.  I would like to further develop and explore the theories of traditional cinema, self-representation and feminist and post-feminist theory in the digital age. Somehow I’d like to portray the idea of the self-represented female within a frameworks of film and time/duration that I have been working on this year. 

Annagret Soltau

I am most interested in her self portraits and self-representation. 

A tension between desexualising the sexual, sexualising the non-sexual, and the

beauty and ugliness of the female body. I feel that she presents a real representation of the feminine and self, one that is multi-faceted. She doesn’t ‘curate a digital self-image’, she literally constructs a self-image made out of the many different parts of herself (and others).

Her sewing together of the torn photographs implies craft, and domesticity, but the images are raw and ugly. She questions female representation and female self-representation, segmented female body, the ageing female body, the ugly body, making the beauty of the female figure monstrous.

“For me it is important to gain more authenticity and directness through self-representation, but it is even more important, that I can go farthest with myself.”

Nicole Wermer

Nicole Wermer ’s material simplicity in abstract representation, powerfully expressing feminine ideas through surprising material. She explores current ideas about female materiality theory. Perhaps, the fur female coats imply femininity, masculine from the cantilevered tubular steel form. This comes from the softness and silkiness, the previous owners.  These materiality ideas of male and female representation are societal and historical but do they exist in the same form today? What is the meaning of hard surfaces to soft and curves to straight? Warmers representation of ritual social interactions is a perhaps a feminine mark on sociality and culture.

I am interested in ways that materials can imply meaning. The ‘clinical’ reading of my work in group crib was something that I wasn’t really interested in and  I am now looking at ways to use the same materials (mirror, acetate) in a way that doesn’t imply the medical/clinical of the objects themselves. This is difficult, as backlit acetate with human representation on it is hard to skew in any other way besides the medical. Werner uses a simple combination of materials, found objects, tied together in a subtle but probing way that directly implies absence of human, social interaction, architecture and society. 

Nicole Wermers' exhibition Infrastruktur ('Infrastructure') looks at the structures of ritualised social relations in general and at the material objects through which these relations are communicated in particular….The coats hang as if their owners had left the room, a coded fleeting ritual marking their absence and their 'ownership' of the chair and its 'place' as one would do in a public space.” David Bussel

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum’s tactility - the tension between the warm, inviting domesticity and the danger and consequence of materiality, powerfully expressing feminine ideas through surprising material. Installations and sculptures  using  primarily domestic and household objects, she plays with scale and tactility to create sinister connotations and messages about political/social turmoil.

“Often the work is about conflict and contradiction - and that conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object” Tate shots, 2011

Haltom’s conveyed meaning in the simple combination of objects and alteration is aspirational. She makes objects political and personal through such simple ways. I think that affect is really important in her object/sculpture work, the idea of pain and tactility that they all have is of fundamental importance.

I like this play on materiality and hope to create more tension and more of an immediate affect that visual tactility can produce. 

Leah Schrager

Schrager takes the representation of self in digital culture as an art form in order to critique the patriarchally skewed consumption of the female body in art/media. In doing so, she attempts to change the power dynamics inherent in female representation, female self-representation and male presentation of the female form.  She is challenging the a-sexualised or desexualised representation of celebrity in media and the repercussions and backlash against the sexualised body and its monetisation.

Schrager is forward thinking in the evolution of female representation in media. This evolution of self-representation becomes a chaotic one when the internet and social media become the number one way of representing oneself. Also, the moment where the iPhone came out with reversible lens, changing the camera/subject dynamics and the ability to actively participate in our own representation. I guess the history of self-portraiture is long, but this is an interesting time where ‘self-portraiture’ will always be tied to the ‘selfie’, the ‘high-art’ to the low brow representation of self. and the only difference is possibly its placement: facebook, insta, gallery, biennale. This embracing of ‘low-brow’ self-representation by women like Schrager, Soda and Calypso is a moment where women are embracing femininity in all of its forms and using it as a powerful weapon against conforming to feminine ideals, but simultaneously not being apologetic for every aspect of femininity.

Separating her online personas into two categories - face girl and ass girl. A micro “male gaze” focused on one category.  Ignoring the patriarchal lense through which the female artist is viewed, “she’s not looking to disrupt the highly visual, deeply entrenched, highly-calibrated male gaze in terms of how it engages with the unabashed, male-seducing, sex-kitten “Ass-Girl,” ONA.” https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/leah-schrager-manifestations/4158

Rethinking female sexuality in the media and online. Face girls a “desexualised facade that is sold to the masses” because it is the female performers only option.

New media allows the females to create and profit from their own constructed self-image, can be sexualised and sexuality can be normalised.  https://www.facebook.com/leah.schrager/posts/10107255088581228

An institutional critique of the female body and its depiction online, image appropriation and self-exposure. Ownership and control - model, photographer, artist. 

…She's called this effect, in which women's images of themselves are ascribed artistic and market value by their function in the work of male artists, like Richard Prince and Ryder Ripps, "man hands." https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/vb9aka/leah-schrager-body-art

“questioning the gap in value and representation between male and female artists”

Essay by Schrager - http://bodyanxiety.com/leah/

Bruce Nauman

Contrapposto Studies, i through vii”

Nauman revisits and updates his past work into the present with this installation. and brings something totally new to Contrappdosto studies. Using the body as subject

Manipulating time, the performance seen in a segmented multiplicity, seen both forwards and backwards, in positive and negative. 

The segmenting and multiplication of these performative durational events in a single moving image explores duration, the body and time. Also, my favourite, film’s ability to compress and manipulate time.

“Exploring the history and possibility of representation across media as well as time.” 

He also investigates the history of self-representation, of male self-representation. I find this hypocrisy across male and female representation annoying, that female representation is so loaded with other meaning that it can’t be seen without sexual/historical (etc) connotations. But male (self) representation alludes only to the meaning behind it. There is no question of sexuality, of vanity etc, it simply is what it is. 

Francesca Woodman

Woodman’s oeuvre of self-representation, dismemberment/segmentation of the female body, and images of the body in time appeal to me.  The usage of mirrors in Woodman’s work and illusion of dismemberment -using simple hiding/reveal techniques…

The evolution of self-representation in photography is fascinating to explore through history and i wish to further study. How many of these artists used character or extremism for it to be considered ’high art’? Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahuns, Mona Hatoum’s semiotics. The history of photography self-portraiture seems riddled with character building and constructed identities. Also, the tie between photographic self-portraiture and mirrors is inherent. Is it an intrinsically female link to be photographed with/through a mirror, as they are looking at themselves anyway? 

More importantly today, what is the difference between the self-portrait and the selfie? I feel that the selfie is considered low brow, ubiquitous digital feed fodder, whereas the carefully composed self-portraiture is “an occasion for the artist to construct her representation through her own medium, be it a camera or a paintbrush or what have you. It’s an opportunity to declare who you are visually and who you aspire to be.”

I think that ‘high art’ always looks down on something that it doesn’t understand, until someone radicalises it and brings it to the forefront of culture in an exciting way, that overrides the existing norms.  It just seems to me that all throughout history, the high art world doesn’t like the actual interesting art made at grass roots level until the person dies or popularity/interest overrides the system.

Muybridge

Muybridge work is influential. Time in motion is represented in photographic sequence. He paved the way for the sense perceptory illusion of movement using photography.

The “grid composition” presentation of his images in photo form are intriguing . This moves the eye along horizontally, but then breaks the flow of movement when the images finish and continue on the line below. Why didn’t he print them all in a horizontal line? The eye movement mimics the movements of reading, maybe he was using the natural/learned physiology of reading to familiarise the viewer. While the zoopraxiscope presents a continuous flow of movement, i enjoy this break, i think it breaks the engagement and breaks the continuum of time when the eye moves to the new line causing a time-lag.

Not only is he the precursor to modern cinema, with the zoopraxiscope projecting his images in succession with the illusion of movement. I am drawn to the process of distorting the image and projecting it in order for it to look real. 

I am fascinated by the eye’s movement perceiving motion and the brains ability to delude itself and create movement out of still images. My work relied on the eye, by agency of the viewer, to move in order to see the illusion of movement that is created by film. To think that his images were initially seen as falsities shows the ability to change perception of the masses through media and technology.

Also, incredible side-notes that pre-photography he suffered a major head injury, his behavior became “eccentric” and that he pleaded insanity in the murder of his wife’s lover and acquitted on the grounds of ‘justifiable homicide’.  

Sol Le Witt’s Muybridge I and II is a titillating development of the Muybridge presentation and technique, though highly patriarchal and voyeuristic and of the times/ creating a keyhole type glimpse of the naked female in motion, presumably ‘unawares’ of this looked-at-ness (though it’s hard to ascertain from images online). It showed perhaps how the scientific-like presentation and idea of documenting through photography can evolve through the simple change in shape, from grid to circular.