The missing wit(h)ness: Monroe, fascinance and theunguarded intimacyof being dead (original) (raw)
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This mini-dissertation serves as a framework for my own creative practice. In this research paper my intention is to explore, within a feminist reading, representations of the female corpse in fashion photography and art. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s theories on the concept of representation are utilised to critically analyse and interogate selected images from fashion magazines, which depicts the female corpse in an idealised way. Such idealisation manifests in Western culture, in fashion magazines, as expressed in depictions of the attractive/ seductive/fine-looking female corpse. Fashion photographs that fit this description are critically contrasted and challenged to selected artworks by Penny Siopis and Marlene Dumas, alongside my own work, to explore how the female corpse can be represented, as strategy to undermine the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. Here the study also explores the selected artists’ utilisation of the abject and the grotesque in relation to their use of artistic mediums and modes of production as an attempt to create ambiguous and conflicting combinations of attraction and repulsion (the sublime aesthetic of delightful horror), thereby confronting the viewer with the notion of the objectification of the decease[d] feminine body as object to-be-looked-at. This necessitated the inclusion of seminal theories developed by the French theorist, Julia Kristeva (1982) on the abject and the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) on the grotesque.
Death and the image (November 2018)
Art Blart, 2018
This text investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma. Through an analysis of the context of images of death by artists such as Alphonse Bertillon, Robert Capa, Alexander Gardner, Walker Evans the paper ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem. It seeks to understand that line between presence and absence where life was there… and now death is in its place. Death was one step removed, now it is present. How does the act and performance of photography depict the trauma of death, this double death (for the photograph is a memento mori and/or the person in the photograph may already know that they are going to die). "The text of eternity that the photograph proposes, imparts and imposes a paradoxical state of loss. The secret of telling truth in a photograph is that the more truthful, "the more orgasmic, the more pleasurable, the more suicidal" the pronouncement of the perfect paradox (you are dead but also alive) … then the more we are strangled while uttering it. The language of deferral in the writing of trauma in death and the image becomes the dissolve that seizes the subject in the midst of an eternal bliss. In death and the image we may actually die (be)coming." Word count: 8,137
My paper seeks to explore interlinks between gender, photography and pleasure and how gender is mediated through photography in the works of Barbara Kruger, Orlan and Cindy Sherman, who use the female, gendered and erotic body in order to rewrite the parameters of happiness and 'jouissance' by producing ad-scapes and photographs which bespeak the suture between the 'femaleness' of identity and the stereotypical notions of aesthetic female beauty as they are valorised and canonised in the West. In the first instance, the photographs themselves serve as an instance of the commodification of desire and pleasure in consumerist culture. Yet beyond their fetishistic value, they also exemplify an attempt to undermine phallogocentric discourse and the objectifying, 'penetrating' and all-seeing male gaze. By drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Cadava, Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag I hope to show that although such photographic representations can be extremely empowering and engaging in light of the various provocative issues they raise in relation to gender and the female body, they also freeze and stultify the female body in a kind of temporal death by placing it into and within the photographic frame and locking it into a framework of reciprocal (mostly male) gazes and exchanges.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown
Visual Studies, 2024
This article reviews the latest monograph by Kimberly Juanita Brown whose research intersects at African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. Through her study, Brown provides a poignant and sharp critique of the news media's treatment of Black subjects. She also interrogates the role of photography in the viral nature of images of Black death and the defining of Black subjects as the living dead.
Ghostly threads: Painting Marilyn Monroe's white dresses
In 2012 I started a series of paintings of Marilyn Monroe's white dresses. While painting, it became apparent that they were more about the body inside them than about the dresses themselves. Since her tragic and much speculated-over death, Monroe has been infantilized and cast as a victim by many biographers, while at the same time being used as a figurehead for a multiplicity of ideas around sexuality, whiteness, 'otherness' and feminism by theorists and artists. In the article I look at how Monroe's image, despite, or maybe because of, her efforts to control it during her lifetime, has continued to be influential. I refer to specific examples of her film roles and her costumes to unpick why she is still such a fascinating figure and why my paintings, while not actually featuring Monroe, manage to convey a powerful essence of her through the trace of her body.
Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2018
In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first , I give an overview of Ioannidou's artwork, making connections with significant events in her life; then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography; and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artist's portrayal of women's bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centerpiece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation.
This article aims to address the social meaning of representing female body in photography 1 . In contemporary art, particularly in conceptual photography, body is politicized and becomes a discursive text that is encoded with social criticism. Focusing on the relationship between artist and city space, this article examines how a photographer explores the hidden corners in public space and examines how the artist explores the identity of female sex workers through representing their bodies. The artist that discussed in this article is a Montreal based emerging photographer, Mia Donovan, whose exploration focuses on the women who work in the sex industry and focuses on the issue of female body and identity. Approaching Donovan's art, in this article, I employ some post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan to form a theoretical framework. My intention is to shed some light on the issue of city space, body, and identity in the context of contemporary art and critical theory.
A Philosophy of Disturbatory Feminist Art
Aesthetic Investigations, 2017
In this paper, I show how contemporary feminist artists whose works concern femicides address three senses of the term ‘to disappear’. These works can be particularly disturbing, along the lines of Danto’s notion of disturbatory art, since these kinds of works use artistic means to unveil the social and subjective implications of gender crimes.
The corpse is the reason why crime fiction exists, and more often than not that corpse is female. Obvious consequences arise from portraying a female body in one of the most popular literary genres, but feminism has changed the archetypes and traditions related to women's roles in the narrative, allowing for a more complex and diverse representation. With the considerable introduction of female forensic doctors in artistic crime fiction representations since the 1990s, the female corpse has found an ally during the investigation. No longer an object subjected to the male gaze, the female corpse has undergone a change in both re/presentation and identity, from object to subject, in the last twenty-six years. This paper aims to examine how female forensic doctors prompted that change, and the different tools and strategies at work from a literary, philosophical and medical humanities point of view.