Ghada Amer's New Sculpture (original) (raw)
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Ghada Amer's recent bronzes are conceived as rectangular, mostly horizontal partitions, that are folded just enough to allow these to stand upright on the floor. The vertical folds, which are complemented by horizontal folds at the top and bottom, reveal that these thin freestanding polyptychs with ever so slightly warped skins have their origin in large sheets of cardboard out of which boxes are traditionally constructed. Over-life-sized cropped portraits of anonymous young women appear on the front and back of these screens, with the crown of the head sliced away by the top edge of the support, and the face, hair, neck, and-occasionally-shoulder(s), arm(s), and hand(s), rendered with meaty lines that were modeled with the fingertips. These idealized beauties with their languorous glances and tactile outlines draw us in, and then arrest us through the reductive stylizations of the source material culled from pornographic photographs generated to stir up sexual desire. The dripping lines raised in relief off the flat ground create the illusion of three-dimensional bodies which are in fact not there, as there is no modeling of volumes in the round within the outlines.
Studio of Her Own – a Space for Young Female Artists in Jerusalem was founded by Ziporah Mizrachi in 2011 as her final project in the Gender Studies Program’s field activity track at Bar-Ilan University. It is the only association of young female artists in Israel today, artists who create and present their works at group exhibitions in public art spaces. The Studio brings together young religiously observant female artists by giving them a working space for a period of two years as well as offering them professional support. In the group’s early exhibitions, the direct engagement with body and sexuality stood out. The direct and explicit engagement of these young women artists with body and sexuality can be associated with the 1970s American feminist radical art. However, the singularity of their works derives from the meaningful revision they have introduced into the modern Orthodox world: apparently, they produce a radical feminist artistic discourse similar to that of the past (even the forming of creative groups of women brings to mind a prevalent feminist practice of the 1970s’ American feminist artists); but, actually, they pick up former feminist discourse, transplant it into the present and link it to their Jewish-Orthodox world thus shifting it to a particular, cultural, new place. In this essay, I shall argue that even though their creation, as they perceive it, is not meant to produce a critical discourse of resistance, it does, in fact, constitute a subversive feminist act. All in all, my aim here is to highlight, explain and culturally contextualize a significant phenomenon transpiring in Israeli modern Orthodox society’s field of art.
Writing//painting; l’écriture féminine and difference in the making
2013
This thesis critically interrogates the concept and practice of l’ecriture feminine as proposed by Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to challenge phallocentric structures embedded in language and culture. It examines why abstraction has been so problematic for women and feminist artists and why, despite l’ecriture feminine being utilised in art practice it came to a standstill in the mid-1990s, ceasing to provide possibilities for women’s abstract painting. By using l’ecriture feminine as a ‘lens’ with which to see abstract painting, I have distilled particular aspects of it and put forward my own concept and practice of peinture feminine to move on from these problematics. I demonstrate that whilst the historicity of Modernist abstraction is embedded in abstract painting, it is not bound by rigid and fixed structures and conventions and these are not phallocentric per se. Peinture feminine as defined here reconceptualises abstract painting as a spatiality comprising m...
Journal of Literature and Art Studies Vol.9 Issue 12 December
David Publishing Company, 2019
is a Trinidadian-British writer, who is a remarkable immigrant writer in the world literature. He wrote many works throughout his life, including A House for Mr. Biswas, Miguel Street, In a Free State, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival and so on. With Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie, they are dubbed as the three great immigrants in the English literature. From the perspective of feminism, this paper focuses on the study of female images in his first novel, The Mystic Masseur. These female images in the third-world are dominated by the double oppression: patriarchy and colonial culture. And in this process, they lose their voice and have an inferior social status because of economic and other elements, making them become the subordinate of the subordinate. The paper analyzes the reasons for the oppression upon these women and is intended to reveal the deeper connotation that embedded in this novel. That is to say, it provides valuable enlightenment to modern women.
s anthologies. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany of 1982 and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History of ten years later. These collections offered important alternatives to traditional art history textbooks. The articles served as models for our own research both in terms of content as well as methodology. We went on to use them in our classrooms, where they inspire a new generation of students for whom feminism is a historicaland often disturbing -phenomenon. It is important here to contextualize these anthologies within the classroom, now perhaps the primary ground for our rereading of the essays. The articles -written before most of our students were born -can be used today as evidence of how our discipline grew in the last decades of the twentieth century. The two anthologies act as "proof" that women artists and patrons are recent and contested additions to our studies, that images of women and representations of the female form are not mere depictions of beauty, and that the language of art and art history as it has developed in the West is neither neutral nor universal. Our discipline has, indeed, benefited from our frequent return to the contributions made by the many and varied authors in these anthologies.