A correlation between Sackler Center for Feminist Art and America’s Next Top Model?
Yes, but correlation does not equal causation. Hear me out.
Annika von Hausswolff, a Swiss artist included in Global Feminisms, contributed three photos from her series, “Back to Nature.” They are meticulously planned photos of women in crime-scene looking scenarios. They are all face down, dead looking, and disturbing.
Exhibit A, from von Hausswolff:
Given the ideological context of the Sackler Center and knowing that this was a “feminist piece of art,” I thought it added a level of transparency to gendered violence and ultimately was an empowering display.
A couple of days later, the feminist blogosphere exposes some pretty offensive photos from the most recent America’s Next Top Model challenge. And I agree with Bean, Jill, Jessica, Jennifer Pozner that these photos are absolutely vile.
exhibit b:
Speaking on pure aesthetics, the ANTM shots could be viewed as being more feminist than the von Hausswolff photos since they actually show the women’s faces. On the other hand, the ANTM pics are clearly glamourized and romanticized.
I know the world of art critics gets pretty scary and I would get ripped to pieces if Roberta Smith heard these words, but for me this is a good example of why feminism is an important ideological context for women and art and how having a center for Feminist art can be useful.
In her review, Smith said that the work in the show was “essentialist” and that “Again and again and again women fall back on making art from the thing nearest at hand that separates them from men: their bodies.” She also says that, “feminism is not a style, or a formal approach. It is a philosophy, an attitude and a political instrument. ”
Feminism may not be a “style,” but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have aesthetic value. As for my example, we have two similar series of photographs and without feminism they would both just be dead women. Their bodies create the scene. With feminism, a photo has become illuminating and transformative. Without it, the photography becomes victimizing and humiliating. Feminist theory, then, makes the difference between art and profanity/pornography.
3 Comments
March 27, 2007 at 6:25 am
There’s another feminist artist whose name escapes me right now who did a series of photographic self-portraits with herself as a rape victim. One photo was from behind, with her back and legs naked and beaten up. I agree that these images can lay bare (no pun intended) the dynamics of gender violence…but I also wonder about the risks they pose when the challenge is both so bald and so capable of glorifying the subjugation of women by calling it “art”.
March 27, 2007 at 10:03 am
Yes! I’ve seen the “Rape Performance” photos, too, but couldn’t find the artist online – And I agree, it’s risky. But I think the alternative – not having a language and a visual understanding of the reality (even if challenging) also treads on leaving violence unnamed, misunderstood, and marginalized.
April 9, 2007 at 1:22 am
I think the important dynamics to look at are exploitation, glorification, and examination. The ANTM photos were exploitative of others’ misery, and unironically took objectification of woman to its logical conclusion. The Hausswolff photo on the other hand didn’t smash the dead woman into an objectified, fictionalized picture of glamorized femininity – it just showed the nasty way that sex and violence and the reality that bodies die all sit alongside each other. I think that an interesting example of the middle of the spectrum on which these two dynamics sit might be Law and Order SVU: it’s exploitative and unintentionally glamorizing, only by making sexual violence out to be so boringly common, but it all hinges on the audience’s horror at what’s going on. I think it’s the simple repetition that makes it so crass – when did rape get to be so formulaic?