Modern Mythmaking: Thérèse Bonney’s Masculinity and the Challenge of Biographical Writing (original) (raw)
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In Pursuit of Toyen: Feminist Biography in an Art-Historical Context
Journal of Women's History, 2013
The Czech surrealist artist Toyen's work and self-styling cut across gender boundaries. Toyen avoided revealing information about herself, and it became clear that she and her friends collaborated-consciously or not-in the creation of a mythically obscure biography. While the biographies of many other surrealists are well known, Toyen's personal reticence has rendered her unusually mysterious. In examining the construction of her biography and attempting to place her within an historical context that remains largely unfamiliar to western audiences, this article illuminates how one early twentieth-century female creative figure negotiated male-dominated avant-garde circles and how in some cases female cultural workers were marginalized less by their peers than by the cultural establishment or historical circumstances. This very private artist provides a unique and exciting opportunity to study one woman's role in three important avant-garde groups (Devětsil and the Prague and Paris surrealist groups) and negotiation of nonconformist gender roles and the erotic.
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.
How Images Got Their Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in the Visual Arts
A Companion to Gender History, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Teresa Meade (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 146-69, 2004
Art historians have long concerned themselves with images of women, at least of specific women. Among the subjects taken up in traditional iconographic studies, we find devotional icons of the Blessed Virgin Mary, portraits of queens, and mythological stories featuring Venus or Diana. Scholars have used an iconographic approach to interrogate a range of issues, including the correspondence between an image and the patron's religious affiliations, and the relation between an image and contemporaneous tenets of faith or philosophy. Such studies interpret pictures through their visual conventions and symbolic objects, drawing on historical, theological, or literary texts to account for aspects of the subject matter. Iconographers view female figures as saints, rulers, and deities, but not as positioned in the category "woman." Formalist art historians also looked at images of women, which they treated as either an evocation of an artist's manner or part of a broader stylistic trend. Older histories of modernism, for example, focused on the nude woman in Edouard Manet's Olympia (1865) to recount how painters rejected illusionism. In this story, Olympia might as easily be a male nude, since the flattening of form-not the cultural construction of the sexed, racial body-was at issue. Neither traditional iconographic studies nor formalist art histories considered how a woman's image related to conceptions of sexual difference or to notions of the proper woman's role in society. And neither did those analyses allied to the social history of art, a mode of interpretation that associated works with contemporary political or social ideologies. By using class as an analytic category, those social historians of art who drew on Marxist theory helped open the way for considerations of gender. Yet Marxism, per se, did not warm to gender. The intertwining of Marxist and gender analysis could only come later after feminist theory challenged what Griselda Pollock called "the paternal authority of Marxism under whose rubric sexual divisions are virtually natural and inevitable" (Pollock, 1989: 5). Before the early 1970s, interpreters-even those concerned with social issues-gave little thought to gender, to sexual difference, or to how images of women shaped and were shaped by prevailing constructions of femininity. Male figures, be they saints, heroes, or nudes, received the same treatment, and only later would scholarship acknowledge
Between the Archive and the Artworld: Writing Gendered Histories of Ibero-American Photography
Journal of Women's History, 2024
In recent years, a growing body of scholarship on women photographers in mid-twentieth-century Ibero-America has emerged in connection with exhibitions that have helped bring their work to the larger public. However, the importance given to notions of individual authorship, originality, and rarity in art market dynamics, institutional practices, and critical discourse on photographic images encourages scholarly work that often overlooks their print culture context. In this essay I argue that careful attention to the role of illustrated magazines as media for the circulation of photographic images helps us recognize photography’s value as an emancipatory practice that empowered women in rapidly expanding markets of print culture. To illustrate this proposition, I examine images by Kati Horna and Grete Stern, whose trajectories as exiled photographers working in proximity to the illustrated press exemplify the role played by women of Central European origin in shaping the medium’s gendered history in Ibero-America.
Art Blart, 2022
Using the media images from the exhibition 'The New Woman Behind the Camera' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (31st October, 2021 - 30th January, 2022) as a starting point, this text examines the (in)visibility of the "New Woman" behind the camera. The text briefly investigates the disenfranchisement of women in 19th century through the work of George Sand and Camille Claudel; the role of the female flâneuse and the rise of the suffragettes; the relationship between two women and two men; a story; the work of two women photographers (Germaine Krull and Claude Cahun) who through photography challenged the representation of gender identity; a Zen proposition, and the particular becomes universal – in order to understand how artists, both female and male, find integrity on their chosen path.
Photographs of artists reside in an ambiguous space between subject and object: they are at once a document, a printed record of an artistic act by the photographer (a work of art), and an image, a tonal rendering of a body that once was there (an artist). The artists represented within the unique sub-genre of “photos of artists by artists” are similarly marked by ambiguity, dually positioned as subject and object, maker and image. Yet unlike in other media, such as painting or sculpture, where the surface of the model is always reinterpreted through the hands of the artist, in the photograph the subject dictates their own representation, in that the camera captures a momentary look, flinch, or gesture produced solely through their actions. The photographer may direct, but ultimately the subject determines his or her own performance, which shifts the position of authorship and raises the question: is the photograph a work of art by the photographer (the labor of making) or by the artist in the photograph (the labor of posing)? I suggest that it is both, for the game of photography changes when the subject in front of the lens also identifies as an artist; the institutional binary of artist/model no longer holds. The question is further complicated when viewing photographs of female artists taken by male artists, a relationship already steeped in a long art historical tradition of men making images (out) of women. For example, Man Ray’s photographs of Méret Oppenheim have been read as pure visual objectification of the female artist, as have Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet this narrow interpretation denies agency to the women artists represented in the work. I aim to position the photographs of Oppenheim and O’Keeffe closer to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Louise Bourgeois, which exudes a sense of confidence and self-knowledge by a woman who has determined her own performance not solely as object, but also as subject.