Bolter and Grusin. Remediation. Understandig New Media

The Remediated Self

Jay David Bolter
Richard Grusin

In Chapter 15, the author analyses the impact of the media on our selves; he states that we have become part of the media we use. We are not defined by the media we use, he said, but we use this as a medium to express our self identity, as well as our cultural identity. In that way “we became the subject and the object of contemporary media” (p.231). The author points out that in different times different media became an “expression of our identity”(p.231), in that way with the access of new media we have new ways to define our selves. With the new technology of the internet, virtual reality, and digital solutions we can define our selves. We recognize and understand new media in relation to the old. The author gives an interesting example: when we use virtual reality, our digital point of view is an improvement or change in relation to and in comparison with the old point of view we had at the time when we were using television or film. We understand media in relation to old media.

When we are in front of media like virtual reality, or tridimensional computer programs, we can place ourselves in a virtual reality and be able to change or alter ourselves. In the case of multimedia and networked worlds, we become connected with others (e-mail, Internet). It remediates the idea of community, like we had identified before with the telegraph, telephone, radio and television. The author points out the work “Psychology” by William James - this analysis of the “empirical self” was produced at the same time the telegraph was expanded, creating a change in the perception of the self. The author points out that this analysis of the self, despite their age is contemporary, and has resonance with digital technology.

Mediation and the Presence of the Self

The author refers to the desire for self-expression. He refers to painting and points out that with painting, that more that a need for reality, we look to establish our place, and presence in the world. In the process, our subjectivity interferes with reality, and then our subjectivity becomes our “reality”. The way to recognize reality is through the presence of self. The author states that the idea of referring to our subjectivity as the way to understand reality is to speak of romanticism, in comparison, modernism focuses on the idea of the responsibility of the self in the search for reality switching the self for itself”.

In relation to self presence, the creators of digital media, according to the author, have embraced both systems. The author explains that the frame is a division between the subject and the object, establishing a distance between those two. In digital media it is possible to transpose that limit and in the case of virtual reality (adopting romanticism) it permits the user to pass through and manipulate the “reality” or the “object of representation” (p.235). The modernist system is used in hypermedia in which the user stays immobile, and the object of representation comes to her.

Referring to the subject of virtual reality, the author defines it as ‘not satisfied with one point of view” (p.235) looking for the place of other participants, other points of view. In hypermedia the subject is defined as a series of movements between applications.

The Remediation of the Body

The author points out that he considers that the desire for immediacy in the visual technologies might be a male desire, so the self with that “desire is gendered” (p.237). The author refers to the feminist Evelyn Fox Keller, who argued that “the Western, male gaze is abstracted and disembodied” (p.237). The author refers to some statements of feminist theory about the complicated relationship between technology and the body in contemporary culture. Donna Haraway, and other feminists, refer to the body as a medium and how contemporary culture tends to merge boundaries between the body, the world, and technology. Through technology the body is reshaped and take on a new identity.

In the case of bodybuilders, women change the image of the body, and society’s expectations about how a female body should look like change. Another remediation for the body is cosmetic surgery trying to accomplish the cultural idea of “natural beauty”, and according to the author in doing this the surgeon realizes the ultimate male gaze. The author refers to the work of artists like Orland, Stelac. Kate Bornstein uses cosmetic surgery and bodybuilder “in an astonishing determination to remediate their bodies” (p.239).

The New York Women's Video Festival, 1972-1980

The New York Women’s Video Festival, 1972-1980

The New Women’s Video Festival was created in 1972 by Steina Vasulka with the idea of presenting the videos of women artists, which were created at the Kitchen Center for Video in New York. Interestingly, the festival traveled to different cities in the United State, and some cities in Europe. This festival represents the intersection of the origin of video and feminist art. Melinda Barlow points out that little attention was paid to the issue that portable video and feminist were art born together.

Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)

Martha Rosler

Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a video, installation, and performance artist. Her work has focused on different social concerns like women’s experiences, war, the environment, and media. In 1975 she produced a 7 minute black and white video, “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, in which she transformed a perfect motherhood suburbia kitchen into a “war zone”, making a statement about the depression and frustration of domestic slavery. In a performance in which the artist performs a violent cooking session, different kitchen utensils become weapons. Confronting the idea as of the kitchen as the center of the family life, the artist explores women’s identities, as well as making a clear reference to Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

Marina Abramovic and Ulay Relation Work

Marina Abramovic/Ulay- Relation Work, 1976-1979: 14 Performances

In 1976 Abramovic and Ulay started to collaborate together as artists. Through performance, the two artists explored issues such as gender roles and the opposition inherent in the male and female body. The two artists created performances that put their physical and psychic selves to the extreme. Video was used as a medium to recollect all these performances. In the performance “Light and Dark” the two artists hit each other on the cheek, using a rhythmic action, in which the intensity of the hits increased. They used light as a way to hide the source of the aggravation so that they weren’t able to see the hit coming. With this performance the two artists were addressing issues like violence in relationships.

Joan Jonas Vertical Roll

Vertical Roll
Joan Jonas



Joan Jonas

Born in New York, 1936

Jonas is a sculpture, performance and video artist; she started using video and monitors in 1972 in the performance “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy’, in which she included different materials like mirrors, masks, and other materials, as well as video to analyze female roles and identity.

In 1972, she also created the piece “Vertical Roll”, in which she used the horizontal malfunction in a television set creating a piece in which a technical malfunction became the visual solution. Without any editing, the artist appears on the screen slamming a table at the same time the horizontal line of the television set is moving up and down rhythmically. It seems like her video piece is controlling the television set. In a different part of the piece the artist performs different actions creating a synchrony with the banging rhythm as well as with her movements. In the end of the video the only part of the artist’s body in the monitor is the head, which appears being hit by the vertical line, creating a series of perceptual illusions.

Disrupting the Content Feminism by Catherine Elwes

Disrupting the Content

Feminism

Television, the alternative view

By Catherine Elwes

The author analyses the two different ways television has been analyzed and deconstructed, one is -----, the other one was regarding content. The author refers to the different networks, which more than inform in an impartial way, they represent and stand for the groups in power and their commercial interests. Then Elwes refers to the process of television and its relation to reality, magnifying the use of television for political propaganda and thus avoiding the representation of reality. She points to the example of Vietnam, as the first U.S. war broadcast directly into our homes, and the effects of the exposure of the war’s reality to the people, who questioned the justification of the war, and contradicted the official war position. Since then, television broadcast has been politically practical. The author points out that in order to neutralize the networks points of view about “reality”, artists used video as a medium to show their perception of reality, “their version of history”(p.38). In the 70’s and 80’s, television didn’t present real people; society was represented through the exposition of fictional figures, or celebrities that represented the white, heterosexual, middle class males who controlled these networks. The rest of the population, according to the author, was represented through stereotypes, or not at all.

Feminism – The personal is political

Throughout history, the most societies have been based on a patriarchal system with patriarchal institutions. Men were in control of the public sphere; meanwhile women were limited to the domestic sphere. In spite of the influence and earlier work of the suffragettes in the 20’s, by 1960 and 1970 women were underrepresented everywhere - including the art world. During this time, feminism began challenging and questioning issues like gender inequality, roles determined by sexual differences, different roles in procreation, as well as biological essentialism. Elwes states that the private sphere (women’s world) was “created by politics in general and patriarchy in particular” (p.39). The author refers to the filmmaker Sally Potter, who said, “. . . ideology is not merely reflected but produced in the context of the family and in personal relationships . . . ”(p.39). In order to break this cycle of oppression and fight to gain equal opportunities in public life, feminists used an instrument of communication inside the domestic sphere to create consciousness, exchange personal stories, and recreate them as a collective story of patriarchy oppression. The author presents the “personal as political” (p.40), a slogan that became a rallying cry for activists and artists.

The main focus of women artists was to raise consciousness about women’s private life: to render private life public. Feminist art had a political influence and help to make possible political initiatives such as abortion, measures against domestic violence and childcare. According to the author, feminist art was created to promote “political enlightenment” and to inspire women to participate in and make social changes. Feminist art based on oral history, stories shared by women, information passed from mothers to daughters, translated these exchange of information from an underground level to a public level through the visual arts, as well as video, where the analysis of personal identity become a main point. The author points out that feminism promoted activism, and at the same time analyzed femininity, focusing on representation. The different images or representations of women were narrowed to a dichotomy, in which the patriarchy created a classification of female stereotypes, as desirable or undesirable. It can be characterized as a virgin-whore dichotomy, in which an image of a woman as highly sexualized is contrasted with the image of a saint domestic mother which “society turned and reproduced”(p.40). Television was the medium through which the patriarchy spread stereotypical images of women, so logically video was the perfect medium to contrast these images and to begin to raise viewers’ consciousness. Video created the conditions for the exploration of “feminine experience,” as well as the exploration of the use of technology to search for identity.

Feminist Video – Instantaneity

Feminism as a political movement rose fast, after a long period of silence. Women had the urgent need to express themselves, as well as the need to be visible. Women artists chose performance for its confrontational nature, and video, for the ease with which the message is delivered. The author refers to the writer David Ross; he points out that video was formed by disciplines like film, theatre and television. However, according to the author, video and performance were “virgin territories for the exploration of the feminine” (p. 41). Video was attractive, because of its characteristics to mirror back the image of the artist to herself (p. 41). This medium was useful for artists dealing with issues like introspection; women were able to experiment with a certain autonomy. Another important feature of video was its possibility of “mass communication” (p. 42).

Domesticity and family relations

Domesticity and family life have been seen as a woman’s sphere and her near total identity. Family and family relationships were the main theme, in the beginning of feminism, of many women artist. The author refers to Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the kitchen (1975). In this video the artist performs a violent cooking session; she is behind a table in which she seems to be ready to cook, but instead, she creates a selective show of the kitchen tools like knife, fork, ice pick, etc and transforms these tools into weapons. She begins to use them to attack a non-existent entity in front of her. After this, the artist, uses a ladle to spill the contents of the pots making a disaster and with this the artist makes an statement about the destruction of the image of womanhood. The artist Vivienne Dick created a video It’s 3 a.m. in which the artist protests the role of women at home and her endless maternal and domestic activities. This period of early feminism was about the disappearance of women – in their roles as mothers and housewives - into endless activities of a domestic nature.

Fathers, Husbands, Lovers, Strangers

Women’s identity was attached to the identity of their male relatives. According to the author, along with the new idea to make the private life public, family relationship were a source of analysis. The abuse of women, inside in the house was exposed. Louise Forshaw’s video Hammer and Knife (1987) exposes her own sexual attack, and presents the artist sleeping with a hammer and a knife under the pillow. The exposition of violence against women was clear in the video Sari Red (1988) by artist Patibha Parmar. This video was made in the memory of Kalbinder Kaul Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in England for racist reasons. In the Ballad of Dan Peoples (1976) Lisa Steele sits with a photograph of a man. In the piece there is a transposition of adult and children voices as a way to recreate memories, and to find the identity, and relationship with the old man. The transposition of the voice from female to male is explored, as well by the Canadian artist Laurie Anderson, who presented a performance in which the artist switched her voice for a male voice and changing identity. Other women artists had been working in collaboration with male artist, and in some cases exchanging identities like in the case of Abramovic and Ulay.

Daughters and Sons

In this section the author refers to the work of diverse artists working about their children, showing different aspects of family dynamics ranging from parental influence to domestic violence. In some cases - like in the work of the artist Katharine Meynell –she collaborated with her daughter to create Hannah’s song (1986), a piece that explores the fusion of identities. The author refers to her own work There is a Myth (1984) in which she presents an image of her feeding her son and with this she tries to analyze the separation of male from the mother, and its social and political meaning.

The Body in Proximity

Feminist artists analyzed the way they were going to represent the female body to escape from the biological essentialism and from the male culture, as “reiterative patterns of sexual objectification” (p. 48). For English women artists, video was another tool objectifying women’s bodies. Peggy Phelan suggested using vanishing image as a way to “avoid patriarchal recuperation” (p.48). But, obviously this didn’t work for performance and video. In America, women artists were “resolving new forms of visibility” (p.48) and issues of proximity and “entitlement of the viewer” were explored. The author refers to Peggy Phelan, who suggested that is wa possible, with the use of extreme close-up, to “establish ownership by the woman who examines herself” (p.49). Nan Hoover explored close-up, and created videos in white and black about her own body, using the magnification of the image making indefinable the identity of it. Mona Hatoum in her piece Corps Etranger (1994) explores the inside of the body in order to escape all the political and social complexities that determine a woman’s outer appearance.

The Body Distant and Still

The different solutions feminist artists used to change or distort representation, according to the author, of “the most branded of all patriarchal products” (p.51) wasn’t as immediate in video as in film. The early quality of video gave a certain grade of distortion giving room for “subjective interpretations” (p.51). For some women artists, the limitation of the quality of video made this medium the perfect tool to become visible while avoiding confrontation with the audience. The author recalls the fact that the performance artist needs the audience to fulfill the act. She then refers to Lucy Lippard, who makes a really interesting observation that there is hardly any difference between a man’s use of the female body for sexual excitement and a “women’s use of women to expose that insult” (p.52).

The Modernist Inheritance by Catherine Elwes

The Modernist Inheritance



The Modernist Inheritance
Tampering with Technology and Other Interferences

The author explores the context by which video art emerged. By the 1960’s video, a new moving images format, became one of the most interesting media for diverse artists to explore. Since the beginning, video was defined by “the modernist aesthetic concerns” (p.21) that characterized post-war American and European painting.

What happened to painting and sculpture?

Artists were beginning to have less interest in the “qualities” of traditional materials, and less interest in the transformation of painting. By the 1950’s a modernist emphasis emerged on “surface, texture and the optical effect” (p.21) and the “truth to material". The materials weren’t required to represent something other than itself; they were simply to show its essence and its transcendence. Modernist art promoted an inclination of pure thought connected with “self-contemplation”. American post-war artists in particular received recognition for the production of art pieces in which the pure material was the subject. For example, Carl Andre showed an installation of bricks forming a platform, Donald Judd created metal boxes, and Richard Serra made steel slab installations in public spaces. Outside of the pure essence of the material, any visible intervention of the artist was censured, and with this traditional fine arts showed its possible annihilation.

The pure essence of material, as a signifier, defined modernism at that time and was the frame in which video emerged. In the beginning there was a preoccupation with process, lighting, filming, developing, printing, editing, and finally projecting. All the processes of creating a video were present and were revealed in the image. Video was considered as non-representational-however artists like Nam June Paik worked with video as something that represented the material by creating machines that interfered with their own technical process. Artists didn’t have access to the image directly without destroying the camera and turning the signal off.

The author refers to Marcel Duchamp, and his success in convincing a1917 public that his urinal was art, as an antecedent in the linguistic research of conceptual art. Conceptual artists could focus on a representational system that put order in objects and people and defined its value. In addition, conceptual artists demonstrated how these classifications were translated to the sphere of art and showed a cultural classification of what was considered art or not. Through their own practice conceptual artists focused on the displacement of the relationship between material and meaning. However the author points out that some artists used an absurd juxtaposition of materials and refers to the work of Meret Oppenheim who in 1930 created a furry teacup, or the enormous Mickey Mouse created by the American Claes Oldenburg. According to the author in conceptual art language became the axis, replacing the art object by “complicated and incomprehensible theoretical propositions” (p.23).

The production of video represented an interaction with a set of processes and machines defined by the artist’s or producer’s concerns. The image was produced through different machines, at a distance, however, according to the author, early video technology offered different ways of intervention. Video artists were interested in the exploration of malfunction, and problems of the technology to expand its knowledge about the “medium’s expressive potential” (p.24).

The Specificities of the Medium

As an introduction to this section the author refers to the French artist Cesar who created a piece in which he placed a set of televisions on the top of a pedestal and threatened them with a gun, as the first “assault” on television and portable video. Little by little the understanding of television and video gave more opportunity for artists to intervene and alter the image at the point of reception. Other artists with more technical expertise were able to dissemble the camera to alter it or improve it.

Television

In the first television sets, the image was scanned in a “vidicom” tube, which was a glass tube containing phosphor. In this tube an image was scanned - in 525 lines in the United State, and 625 lines in Europe. The scanner was activated by an electron gun, which bombarded the phosphor with electrons in a controlled rhythm. To create an image in the monitor, first of all the electron beam scanned the image and then the rhythm of the lines in the monitor moving 24 frames per second.

The first television set was in black and white and had a mono system sound. In comparatively with its weakness, the television offered visual content capable of holding the collective attention of viewers. The social response to the television was important, and soon become the substitution for many family activities, establishing its new social role. This substitution of family interaction for “bland narratives and establishment views of broadcasters” was the first element of exploration for artist. The author refers to the German artist Wolf Vostell, who in 1962 proposed several actions like changing the channel so fast that was impossible to see it, or burying it or eating it for dinner. With these actions the artist tried to smash the negative narrative of television. In one Nam June Paik, the artist used magnets to distort the television image. He also pursued the John Cage’s same idea silence and chance, and in one piece exposed the audience to their own breathing sounds. June Paik reduced the image of the television as a simple line of light. In its installation “In Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965), the artist modified the scanner so that the light on the monitor was reduced as a simple circle imitating the shape of the moon. In further versions of this installation the artist used magnets to distort the shape of the circle. In each of the twelve monitors the moon was re-shaped to represent the different stages of the moon.

Since the beginning, artists have been interested in intervening technology in ways of improving it or in a ways of improvising it to obtain specific results. Since the 1950 artists like Ben Laposky produced visual abstractions, using the distortion of sound waves with a “deflector plates attached to an oscilloscope” (p.26). The oscilloscope used the same principles as the television, and was susceptible to magnetic interference. By 1963 Nam June Paik used the same technology to create a hybrid machine. He created this set by adapting the output of a radio into a television. The amount of light was controlled by the level of volume.

Camera

The camera was the subject to all kinds of interventions by artists. The curiosity and the immense interest to discover the inside of the medium, took an artist like Douglas Davis to bury, smash, and finally throw it out of the window filming its own process of destruction. According to the author this basic form of “torture” were signs of the understanding of the internal workings of a camera. In 1975 the artist Mary Lucier created the piece “Dawn Burn” in which the artist exposed the camera to the direct sun creating a nice work about sunrise, but as a consequence, destroying the camera. In 1975 the German artist Jochen Gerz created the piece “Prometheus”, in which he reflected direct sun light into the lens using a mirror. The image was consumed by burn marks made by the sun. The author points out that with the concentrated use of light, these pieces revel weak spots in the technology.

Camera to Monitor, Video Feedback

The author refers to artists like Bill and Louise Etra and Ben Tatti, as artists interested in video feedback. They pointed the camera directly to the monitor, creating a “closed-circuit manifestation of the video process” (p.28). The author defined this as an endless process of re-feeds itself with itself, a “self-contemplation” (p.28). The video feedback was defined as a deconstructive device, or a result of the hallucinations of the consumption of LSD. The feedback attracted interest for its “ability to dramatize the imaging function of the camera as well as the perceptual processes of the artist.” (p. 28)

Sound Feedback

To exemplify sound feedback the author refers to the artist Richard Serra, who created the piece “Boomerang” in 1974. In this piece he used a delay in the relation between speaking and the image of the woman speaking, at the same time, through headphones. For the participant, Nancy Holt, video was the source and destination of the speech. The speaker became conscious of the processes by which thoughts were formed. Holt described the experience, “I am surrounded by Me, my mind surrounds me, goes out into the world, then comes back inside me . . . no escape.”(p. 29)

Sync Sound

Richard Serra used the anti-synchronization of sound to represent the destruction of what should be an understandable communication system. The American artist Bruce Newman created a piece in which the face of the artist in the image is upside-down. He said the same term over and over until he finally caught the movement of the mouth, creating synchronization. By the end of the 1960’s it was technically possible to create these effects, thanks to small technical advances in Portapacks.

Years later, the American Artist Gary Hill, in his piece “Why do things get in a muddle? (1984) made the image run in the opposite direction to the sound, creating confusion, even when the movie was played backwards.

Further Malfunctions

One of the most famous modernist videos used a television technical problem, and used it as an important resource in this work. The television sets, in the beginning, presented a problem of losing the synchronization and moving from frame to frame. The vertical and horizontal buttons were really helpful in synchronizing the image again. The artist Joan Jonas adjusted the vertical button to create an effect. In 1972 she created, "Vertical Roll" a video about herself slamming, rhythmically, a table with her hand, and synchronizing it with the vertical line scrolling over the image. The action seemed that her hand was pushing the vertical line of the frame. It looked like the impossible was happening, reversing the immateriality of the video image by climbing inside the technology and touching a physical component.

Feminist Art Theory. Politics in Practice. Video Technology and the Feminine (1992)

Feminism-Art-Theory

Hilary Robinson

In the chapter Politics and Practice, section on Video Technology and the Feminine, Nell Tenhaaf describes how women artists, since the 60’s, have been using technology which was originally considered masculine, and how they have appropriated it for themselves to create their own space out of the sexism of art history and practices in which they were marginalized. The author states that the use of technology offers a great opportunity for women artists to develop a visual discourse.

Willing Machines/Bachelor Machines

The author refers to Friedrich Nietzsche’s postulation of the masculine will, which is the central force of technology in the modernist era. The will of power is wound together with concepts of duality, the machine as masculine, and submission as feminine. The author explores Nietzsche’s definition of will: as a guide for the body to a determined desire, the will to power. She then compares the will with the machine. “Will has replaced reason as the highest mental faculty…Modern thinking ego is characterized by the I-will and, I-can.” (p.378) This idea has created a metaphor of modernity in which the body as a source of desire is separate from the mind as defined as will. The philosophy of the will determines the male body as subject to technological power, and a focus in the future. The base of the will is the duality of masculine dominance and feminine submission, and this duality determines the technology arena. The strong gender differences, as well as the will to power, frames the male controlled progress through technology development.

The author compares the “bachelor machine” with “Nietzsche’s willing machine which determine by will and desire” (p.379). She defines the bachelor machine as the result of desire turning into it self, and refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, and explains that both represent masculine bachelors and feminine brides as opposites. The bachelor machine represents masculine desire through the machine or technology. Le Grand Verre represents, according to Robinson, the absence of the body and the feminine. The author refers to several cases through history in which the bachelor machine became a signifier for different interpretative systems like the Einsteinian clock. Michael Serres determines the bachelor machine as a representation of the history of machines, however now the bachelor machine has moved into the informational state. The authors refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard who declares that “the growth of power, and its self-legitimization, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operability of information.” (p. 380) The bachelor machine is delineating a ”mythical technological framework”(p.380) in which the male defines his self as the creator of it. The author refers to the difference between the bachelor machine and the willing machine, and she points out that the feminine is more present in the former.

Robinson states that both represent “male self-representation”(p.380), and they play the role of the god-creator. The product of these machines (literary machine, social machine, etc.) is going to be a part of the machine itself. As different from men, which has a presence as subject, a woman is not able to speak for herself; the feminine in the era of biotechnology is absent.

The author wonders “. . .how women can turn herself in the technological order,” (p.380) and refers to the proposition of Luce Irigaray of the creation of the autoeroticism engine in her interpretation of the female body parts. She states that autoeroticism is a site of empowerment for woman, and she explains that when a woman touches herself, she establishes a position in which she clams her soul, and the essence of herself. However, Irigaray brings up the fear of many for biological determinism, as well as sexuality as a definer of being female. Irigaray states that the theory about the body is important because “every part of the body confronts a set of social meanings” (p.381). Autoeroticism is presented as out of the context of the bachelor machine’s sexual frame.

Threshold

The author describes metaphorically the television monitor as something alive, as the frame of change from dark to light. She compares the cinema with the screen as the connector between the subject and the camera. This can be the bachelor machine - but an electronic one. The monitor is like a double-sided mirror: one side emits light and the other reflects an image. On one side we have the subject, which in the cinema is the spectator, and “the male gaze situating the subject within the dominance of the phallic”(p.383).

The author describes the insides of the television, as well as the video monitor. The electron bean hits a curve covered with phosphor. This action produces light, then with the shot of a negative electron from the back of the monitor, its passes through the neck to the tube faced by a positive voltage. Outside the images is discharged. Here the author brings a reference to Irrigaray.

Body Parts

The author points out the fact that many women artists developed her visual discourses using video, opening a space for the expression of female desire. The author then describes the video work of different artists, like Kate Craig’s Delicate Issues (1979), and she describes it as a powerful piece about body, technology and power. This is a piece about the female body, in which the use of in-focus, and out-of-focus, as well as the closeness of the camera, creates an effect of unidentifiable parts of the body. At certain moments, the work uses dramatic contrasts, and abrupt close focus on details like hair, skin, and eyes. The use of a breathing sound gives an effect of intimacy/closeness, and at the same time frames the different parts of the body expressing autoerotic pleasure.

Marshalore’s trop(e)isme (1980) shows the artist, again, as the subject. The artist puts her fingers into her vagina taking some menstrual blood out and then covers parts of her face with it. She then takes a cigarette and smokes it with satisfaction. In this piece the artist tries to state a taboo, and at the same time tries to break it. The use of video allows women artists to express an important part of the “absent subjectivity that characterizes postmodernism” (p.385). The author points out that this position has been an important point of attention for women artists working in the new media. “Women artist have been developing important work in the theorization and practice”(p.385)

The author writes that the use of technological media as a language of the female body is complicated because the body is absorbed by the ideology of the “idealized body”. The body’s fragmentation is questioned in the development of technology, when it can be replaced by the bionic body, and this shows how society has been controlled by the technological media.
By the end the author refers to the limitation imposed by the debate about essentialism, and according to her this debate doesn’t assert any difference. Here, she refers to women of color.

Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body

Feminist Theory and the Body

Lynda Birke

In Linda Birke’s article “Bodies and Biology” she analyses the central point in theorizing about the body: the difference between sex (biology difference) and gender (social difference). However, some feminist disagree with the analysis of this differences. Birke states that the biological body is a problem in feminist theorizing.

Biology is a synonym for living organisms and its processes, in this way human biology resembles dualism, and this is s problem for feminist theory. Biological discourse tends to provoke gender division, as well as the definition of the social roles of women and men, and as a logical response, feminism has been against biological determinism. They stand for some kind of “social constructivism of gender”(p.43).

The body has become a main point of interest for feminists and non-feminists alike. Some theorists tend to emphasize sex-gender dualism, emphasizing the living body, and “transcend the mine/body dichotomy”(p.43). The body is the “signifying and signified”----- In this way the body is defined as something through which you can have social discourse.

The body is important for feminist theory, however the focus on the interior and its processes have been limited, as well as ‘the body development” (p.43). Feminist theorists have been deconstructing texts and images, although the analysis of inside the female body’s images had been ignored. The author exposes that the analysis of images in biology texts are important. The representation of the female body’s interior is evident in the work of two authors, Donna Haraway (1991), and Emily Martin (1994), who presented a work about images of the immune system, and how this is culturally defined. The author points out two aspects of these two texts, one is about the analysis of the “cultural understanding” (p.44), how through the images and the discourses the immune system is going to be understood. The second one is “the permeability of the body,” (P.44) according to Haraway, “the postmodern immune system” is part of a network of bodies, and these bodies, through its permeability, is harassed by the “discourses of science”(p.44).

The author describes how, even with great interest about the body, there is a lack of interest about the inside of the body, and these areas are out of the reach of philosophers of biology. The author considers that the body’s interiors need to be exposed to cultural criticism and be considered as something which is moving, changing, and not only as a medium to analyze cultural meaning. However, the experience or the perception of the inside of the body is affected by culture.
The author points out that although we can highlight “human development in terms of transformability” (p.46), fixity concepts of “the gene” is gaining attention. These kind of concepts reinforce the conservative ideas of “family, gender and race”(p.46). Contrary to feminist intention, these concepts are expanding into the culture through the discourse of “genes”.

The author refers to the permeability of the body, and she points out the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who talks about gender and the organism as something fluid and transformative; the author refers, as well to Haraway’s work “visions of the cyborg,” in which she also talks about fluidity. She talks about polymorphous information systems, and highlighting fluidity across boundaries. While these two authors argued for female fluidity, Birke agrees with the two authors, however argues that organisms have an entity itself. Haraway uses this metaphor of fluidity to argue about this western idea that organisms are determined by genetics.

Referring to this idea of transformation is the social idea that female bodies are devaluated, and this conversation about self determining or transformation is a way to get out of this simple self vs. the body. This section examines several scholars’ views about the self, using biology theory in different degrees to talk about the self.

Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni

Antoni uses her own body as a primary tool- sometimes the whole body, and sometimes parts of it, such as her mouth, hair, and head. Through her body the artist explores issues like process, materiality and cultural perceptions of the body. She uses diverse materials to produce her work like chocolate, soap, etc. Performance is an important medium for the artist, however she didn’t intend to do it, she was focused on the process of making, and the process of production. In the performance Loving Care (1992) Antoni uses her own hair as a paintbrush, and in the performance the artist mops the gallery floor with her heir pushing the public out of the gallery. And with this she is trying to explore concepts of the body and power.


http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/antoni/index.html

Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota
Fluxus is an international group of artists, created in 1960. In this group were a mix of different artists using different media, as well as diverse disciplines. One artist who was an important part of this group since the beginning is Shigeko Kubota; born in Japan 1n 1937. Kubota stated her participation in Fluxus in 1964. During this time Kubota discoverd and started working with video.f Kubota is known as an important artist for elevating video as an art form. In 1965 she presented, during the Fluxus movement public festival in New York, Vagina Painting a really controversial performance. She painted over a horizontal paper using a brush that extended from her vaginal position. This work was referred to as a “subversion” of the Jackson Pollock technique of painting, or dripping paint over a canvas. The artist was creating a parody of the work of Yves Klein, who in his Happening of the 1950, used naked women as paint brushes. According to Peggy Phelan in Art and Feminism, “using her vagina as a source of inscription. Kubota questioned the western cultural designation of female genitalia.”(p.65)

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/feministbloggers/2007/10/page/2/

Phelan, Peggy. Art and Feminism, Paidos

Whitney Chadwick. Women, Art, and Society

Women, Art, and Society
Whitney Chadwick

In Chapter 10, “Modernist Representation: Female Body”, the author points out that the gradual development of different forms of expression about the “self-consciousness” which defines modern art, conceded with the materialization of the first group of women artists. The artist refers to the “avant-garde” as the “dominant ideology of artistic production”(p.279) which was used to relegate women artists as has happened before in different times in art history. The author states that there never existed a female Bohemia or artistic myth of the woman artist. She argues that women don’t have a history of art, therefore, it is difficult to place, or name, or mythologize women’s art. The author argues that if expressionism and feminism are in conflict, then the relationship of some artists like Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz to Expressionism is difficult to state clearly. “Stylistic innovation and monumental size”(p.279) leave the production of many artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo in an position in which art and femininity are opposites. The author points out that artists like Monet, Gauguin, Renoir and Picasso merge “the artistic creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless” (p.279) and as sexual objects.

The author refers to Carol Duncan’s article, “Domination and Virility in Vanguard Paintings” in which Duncan makes clear the equalization of creativity and the male’s sex desire in the work of several artists who formed part of the Fauves, the Cubists, and the German Expressionists. She claims that “the vanguard myth of individual artistic freedom is built on sexual and social inequalities” (p.280). The subject of the female is diminished to “flesh”, defenseless to the artist and viewer. The female form is transformed based on the “sexual” desire of the artist. Whitney points out the importance of Duncan’s essay to argue about the representation of the female body. Duncan brings up the concept of the female nude as a form for male pleasure. Contemporary feminist art historians should further investigate the issues around sexualized looking, other forms of looking and female subjectivity.

In the modern art movement, while women were pushed out of the political and aesthetic discussion, many women focused on the female body as a principal subject. The author points out that many critics are split between essentialism and constructivism of femininity, as well as a “psychoanalytic construction of sexual differences”(p.282). The author states that in order for us to understand and get access to conceptualization about the female body, we need to access it through medical, art, and legal discourses. The work of female artists about gender, representation of female body, and esthetic conventions, represent important “precedents”(p.282).

Valadon and Modersohn-Becker were two important female painters whose work about the female nude form challenged the way the female form was represented - figures connected to nature, and controlled by emotions and biology. Critics couldn’t find Valadon’s nudes a “signifier for male creativity” (p.282), and for this the artist was relegated for her “femininity”. The author describes Valadon’s nudes as figures in control of their surroundings and of their own movements.

The author describes a change from the seductive femininity created by Symbolist painters and the idea of ‘natural-womanhood’ (p.286). The idea of the natural female body was developed extensively by Gauguin. Between the artist related to the German Expressionism there are Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz, which exposed a clear conflict between the modernist beliefs and the “social reality” (p.286). Modersohn-Becker had trouble trying to create images merging both experiences. Kathe Kollwitz focused on the production of social images. Modersohn-Becker focused on the term of “earth mother”, and through her models she developed an interest in embodying the “elemental nature” (p.286).

The author points out that critic Karl Scheffler states the incapacity of women to be part of the production of culture due to her connection to nature, and of course “her lack of spiritual insight” (p.289). Modersohn-Becker made this ambivalence clear through a poem and defined her ambitions as masculine. The author continues to analyze the work of Gauguin and points out the contrasting relationship between native women and the white artist in a “colonized society” (p.290).

The author refers again to Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz. About the first the author points out the death of the artist after giving birth, and questions the disparity between the idea of motherhood and “the biological reality of fecundity”(p.290). In the case of Kathe Kollwitz she addressed the concept of motherhood in a “perspective of class and history”. Kollwitz through her work stood for the social purpose of art and in this way she broke with “the modernist cultivation of individual artistic freedom”(p.292).

Finally, the author refers to the surrealism in which the segmented and re-created female body became the “Surrealist signifier” (p.310). Many female artists felt attracted to surrealism for its anti-academic character, as well as its emphasis on personal expression. However, female artists were confronted with the idea that the creative role was only played by a male role, as well as the metaphorical destruction of the “object and subject with the violent assault on the female image” (p.310). Even though women made important contributions to surrealism, in many cases their interest in the movement was develop not for their political or theoretical similarities, rather for their personal relationships with male artist. However, women artists changed “the erotic violence of male artist for a magical fantasy” (p.311) and their images of the body were claimed as “Self”. Different images of the female body, in surrealism, were identified with a “creative nature” (p.311), and artists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning developed fantastic themes in their work. Eliminated from Surrealism theory, women artists focused on their own reality. Surrealism recreated women as a “magic object and sites on which to project male erotic desire” (p.313). The work of artists like Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo and Leonora Carrington shows how the work of females artist is important and “the use of mirror to assert the duality of being, the self as observer and observed.”

Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke was an American feminist artist working with the body as major theme, more specifically her own body. As many feminist artists during the 70’s, Wilke used the performance as a central medium to develop her concepts, however she used different techniques like sculpture, photography, drawings, mixed media, and assemblage. The artist used her body or only an abstraction of it to develop her work. In many works, she used her own beauty to play with the concept of the “ model” and being able of the deconstruction stereotypes of femininity. In many pieces the artist used ceramic, latex or chewing gum to resemble vaginal forms. She used photography, drawings or other materials with these organic shapes. Wilke worked with different concepts like female identity, sexuality, stereotypes of femininity, pain, feelings and pleasure. In the last part of her life she documented and worked on a series of photographs “Intra-Venus” in which she recollected all the process of her disease, and her deterioration after treatment.

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann was a controversial, and multidisciplinary feminist artist, who used her own body, through performance, to play with concepts like eroticism, desire, sex-“heterosexual”, and the female body’s representation. She works in different medium like painting, photography, installations, as well as performance. However, before she started her involvement in performance, she was a painter. The continued use of painting references in her performance gives a sense of the importance of this technique for Schneemann. Through her work Schneemann has been trying to re-shape the definition of eroticism, as well as female sexuality. I am not sure if she was challenging, or using the traditional and repressive way of seeing female’s body and sexuality. However, the intension of the artist was to establish different ways of seeing female desire. There was a controversy in the way this artist was using the representation of her body.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Donna Haraway

In Chapter 4, “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory”, Haraway opens the chapter by bringing up several questions about the existence and objective of feminist inquiry about natural science. She wonders if feminists should focus only on critiquing science and its production, or if they should create a new theory of scientific knowledge. She wonders if the feminist theory of knowledge should be similar to existing theories of representation. She asks if feminist epistemology would do away with the separation between object and subject, or between “non-invasive knowing and prediction and control?” (p.71). She also brings up the question about whether or not feminism is going to be able to master science and offer a new understanding between science and humanism. She declares that she would like to bring up these questions through the analysis of four books, which direct the attention to contemporary natural science.

Haraway points out the debate about the interpretation of men from a strictly biological perspective and human nature. She declares that feminism has developed a “story in a patriarchal voice” and that feminists have received knowledge from a paternal line.

The author refers to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s study of nineteenth-century women writers, in which the authors describe the painful process women went through to create and establish creative presence as writers. They describe the role of the author as somebody who has the power to create. In addition to authors producing natural knowledge, they should decode biological theory that was created by men. Haraway references Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwomen in the Attic as they describe the techniques used by women writers in the nineteenth century to impose authority; they made a reinterpretation of the original text and made it right, or they created a new history. In correspondence, Haraway declares that feminists working in biology should recreate poor science about evolution, brains and hormones to show a biology “without conflict between reason and authority” (p.72). Feminists should impose the terms of speech.

The author refers to the David Baresh’s book, The Whisperings Within (1979) that tries to reveal the central knowledge of biology in a cultural framework in order to teach people about themselves and achieve their potential. Barash makes use of parts of Genesis, and his first quote is from Pius XII on natural law and reproductive sex in marriage. According to Haraway, his central concern and strategy is about lineage. He supports his statements in the authority of the father - patrolineage is his technique to produce facts. In conclusion, Barash establishes necessary biological determination, which is used for male dominance.

Haraway analyzes an essay included in Gregory et al.’s collection, Sociobiology and Human Nature (1978). This book was published based on a symposium created to explore humanistic involvement in socio-biological research. Haraway points out that Marjorie Greene, the only woman invited, was assigned to discuss socio biological implications for a philosophy of the mind. The author describes this book as a well reasoned one, however, she points out the limitations of analysis imposed to maintain it out of feminist scientific discourse. Haraway argues the authority of some people invited to symposium like David Barash, or Pierre L. van den Berghe, who declares that only a return “to the pastures of biology will we root the human science in the soil of truth”(p.75). For all, and each of the participants, Haraway points out their tendency to support patriarchal points of view and to not support the truth of scientific theories.

The author wonders about the room feminists have to recreate and reshape the production of science, and she addresses this question through the analysis of Hubbard and Lowe’s book Gene and Gender (1979). Haraway analyzes the tendency of Hubbard and Lowe to reinterpret stories and she is, as well, concerned about lineages like David Barash. Haraway points out that the authors mention the ubiquity of “bad science” with relation to sex differences, for a historical need of feminists to begin with “the heritage of names in a patriarchal voice”(p.77). Hubbard and Lowe declare that bad science is not an accident, that it is constant, and in the case of sex and gender is almost impossible to analyze because is not possible to disconnect, or step away from daily life, and this creates a contradiction when feminists want to tell new stories about sex and gender with authority. According to Haraway, the critique of bad science, which leads to the principle that all scientific statements are historical fictions, creates a problem when feminist “want to talk about producing feminist science which is more true” (p.78).

Haraway refers to Hubbard’s essay, Have Only Men Evolved, by critiquing theories of representation, and different ideologies of objectivity in science. Hubbard declares that language plays an important role in creating reality, however she continues, “all acts of naming happen against a stage of what is socially accepted as real”(p.78). To this Haraway declares as well that language generates reality in the context of power, but that this does not stand for or point to a knowable world hiding somewhere outside the ever-receding boundaries of particular social-historical enquiries. Haraway states, “that feminists want a theory of representation to avoid epistemological anarchism. An epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying to build a shared politics”(p.79). However the author recognizes that feminists know the importance of naming a thing, the power of objectifying.

Haraway refers to Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding as they point out that these two authors have argued that for women’s historical position it is possible to have a theory of objectivity, and a possible end of dominating by naming - that “subject and object can cohabit without the master-slave domination” (p.80).

Finally, and referring to Hartsock and Harding, Haraway declares that feminists have finally entered in the debate about the nature and power of scientific knowledge with authority.

The Second Sex. "The Data of Biology", Simone De Beauvoir

The Second Sex: Part One, Chapter One
Simone de Beauvoir
In Part One, Chapter One, “The Data of Biology”, Simone De Beauvoir inquires about the definition of women and responds with a classic male definition: “. . . she is a womb, an ovary: she is a female” (p.3). The author points out that from a male point of view, the word “female” is an insult, and she shows that this reaction limits a woman to a purely sexual definition. A man tends to look at biology for a justification for this definition. The author exemplifies these sentiments showing us that the world “female” refers to images of a monstrous ovum castrating a spermatozoon, a queen bee in which the male are killed or, like in the case of praying mantis, swallow by the female.

The author analyzes two questions: “What does the female denote in the animal kingdom?” And “what particular kind of female is manifest in woman?”(p.4). She states that the division of a species in two sexes, with the objective of reproduction, is not really clear, and points out that in nature many other animals use different systems of reproduction, such as multiplication (cellular division, and subdivision) as a way to reproduce. Other animals reproduce themselves by schizogenesis, which is the union or segmentation of an individual that creates a new one or by blastogenesis, which is the creation of a new organism base on a section of the parental body. In the case of the parthogenesis the female doesn’t need the male fertilization. The author points out that some scientists proposed that even in these species male fertilization was necessary to fortify the species, but the author shows that this hypothesis was disclosed as incorrect by recent research which shows that this asexual reproductive system can perform for ever without any degeneration of the spices showing the non necessity of the male.

The author points out that the existence of two gametes- like the sperm and the egg – don’t necessarily indicate the existence of two sexes. These two gametes can be produced by the same being like in a hermaphroditic species. However, some biologists defined the existence of the two sexes as a response of evolution, others debate about the superiority of the other system. The author states the importance of both systems to fulfill the survival concerns of the different species.
De Beavoir uses Hegel’s definition of woman as “an incidental being, suggesting with this the incidental nature of sexuality” (p.6), and continues referring to Hegel to define sexuality as a way for an individual to find a signification of herself in other individuals. According to Hegel, for this to happen, there must be sexual differentiation. Then the author analyzes Hegel’s discourse, implying that the problem with Hegel is comparing significance with necessity. She then points out that men give importance to sexual activity just as he gives importance to other functions.

The author refers to Merleau-Ponty, and points out that “human existence requires us to revise our ideas of necessity and contingence.” Existence, he says, “has no casual, fortuitous qualities, no content that does not contribute to the formation of its aspect; it does not admit the notion of sheer fact, for it is only through existence that the facts are manifested”(p.7). Then de Beauvoir states that we can consider the reproduction as something implicit to the nature of being, However, she says that the perpetuation of the species doesn’t need sexual differentiation.

The author refers to different myths about reproduction, and she describes Hippocrates and Aristotle’s theories in which reproduction is materialized as a male accomplishment, between a weak and a strong “seed”. The author presents theories from after the seventeenth century, in which the role of women was limited only as a receptor and sustenance of the new embryo. Not until the use of the microscope was the ovule defined, and cellular division and the union of gametes was observed.

De Beauvoir refers again to Hegel and his idea about the necessity of two different sexes, one passive and one active, and his emphasis on the tendency of man to allude to the “lively movements of the sperm”. Here the author refers to different experiments about parthogenesis, which shows the sperm as a simple reactant to initiate the development of the embryo, and she inquires, that in this case the sperm is not necessary for reproduction. However, she states that parthenogenesis is not more essential than sexual reproduction. Finally, she states that the only way we can grasp the meaning of sexuality is by “studying it in its concrete manifestation; and then perhaps the meaning of the word female will stand revealed” (p.9).

The definition of male and females depends on the gametes each of the individuals produce, and these two gametes develop from equivalent cells. It develops into sperm or ovule, and each of these contains a similar number of chromosomes. The sperm contains x and y chromosomes, meanwhile the ovule contains x and x chromosomes. During fertilization the egg contains two sets of chromosomes, which will determine the sex of the new individual - the 48 chromosomes in humans form later. The author shows that the female and male play identical roles in the hereditary context, so neither sperm nor ovule are superior to the other. The author describes the difference in size between the sperm and the egg, and describes the union of these two showing how the sperm lose its tail and is being absorbed and unified into the nucleus of the ovule. In response of the relevance of one gamete to the other, the author describes the active role of the sperm in fertilization, provoking new life in contrast the passivity of the egg as representing all the factors to maintain and develop life. The author states that both, in different ways, have the same rolls in procreation, and that this differences has been a source of theories about women and men rolls in society, and declares that these analogies are more the result of the philosophy of nature from the Middle Ages.

De Beavoir states that the determination of sex during fertilization can be affected by the environment, and gives as an example of the bees and ants. These species are affected by nutrition, which determine if a larva is going to be an asexual worker or a fertile queen. In contrast, in vertebrates the hormones produced by the testicle and the ovaries (gonad) are important regulators - any alteration in the endocrine system can cause serious disorder.

The author analyses the central importance of reproduction in different species and gives as an example in the parasitic crab, which in the case of the female is physically a sac full of eggs, In the case “Edriolydnus” the male is attached to the female’s shell and lacks a digestive intestine; he depends on her to survive and his only function is reproduction. In the case of insects, the egg is the most important thing. In many insect species, both male and female die after sexual intercourse. Female insects have a special role since they care and protect the eggs’ development. The author cites several insect species in which the male’s role is purely reproductive and, as a consequence, is killed after fulfilling his mission. De Beauvoir points out that in reality both female and male are, in different ways, destroyed by the process of reproduction. In the case of the female, life is longer but without independence, her life is focused completely on the protection and development of the egg. For this reason, males are physically evolved and the female presents physical deficiencies as a product of her role.

Two more important phases, or roles, in reproduction are: “maintenance of the specie and creation of new individuals” (p.19). These are distributed between the two sexes. However in some species, there is some independence between the parents and the egg. In the majority of fish, as well as in some frogs, copulation doesn’t exist. Fertilization is through stimulation, and in these cases, the eggs are left to develop by themselves.

Reproduction in mammals is more complicated. De Beauvoir explains that the division of these two roles, “maintenance and creation”, determines the role of the different sexes, female being the victim “under regulation of a sexual cycle”. The male’s roll is minor and consists in fertilization, and he recuperates his individuality almost instantly. The female is subordinated, first of all to menstruation, then to the “penetration and internal fertilization.” Here, the author writes that the female is “alienated - she becomes, in part, another than herself” (p.22). Then she carries the embryo for its development (the time depends of the species). After birth, the female needs to feed it; and then finally menopause arrives. For the female, in contrast to the male, her individuality is restricted in the name of the species.

The author describes the physical characteristics of the male and female. The males develop greater strength in relation to the female’s body. On the contrary, the female body, possesses all the processes and changes that the body goes through in different stages, for example the development of the breast, the processes of ovarian secretion and its endocrine manifestation involving different glands like pituitary, the thyroid, and the adrenals. “Woman, like men, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.” Menopause represents the end of the servitude established by her own biology. The female develops physical characteristics, which are determined by hormonal activity, such as less muscular strength, respiratory capacity, and the instability of metabolism. These characteristics have been a source of subordination. She writes, “Woman is of all mammalian females at once the one who is most profoundly alienated. . . the one who most violently resists this alienation; in no other is enslavement of the organism to reproduction more imperious or more unwillingly accepted”(p.32).

Biological characteristics are important in analyzing women’s condition, but these characteristics are not sufficient to define her destiny, she writes. She mentions several attempts, using “psycho physiological parallelism” to make a comparative analysis between male and female body to demonstrate male superiority, but she rejects these theories, and declares them absurd to analyze man and woman based on an “evolutionary hierarchy”(p.33).

De Beauvoir writes about Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the status of women as something in process - “. . . man is not a natural species: he is an historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality” (p.34). She agrees that women are half of the human species, and they haven’t developed all their capabilities; they are in the process of developing. Analyzing the body purely in term of biology is inherently limiting – if man wants to measure everything from a biological point of view, then the issues of actual human existence are ignored.

In conclusion, while nature is always “present”, social practice between humans can’t be based on biology. The practice of society reflects its other nature, thus the body is not only a biological organism, rather a body subject to taboos, laws and social values that define it.

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith, born in German in 1954, uses various media and materials to create her artwork. Since the beginning of her career in 1979, she has been using diverse material as sculptural medium like papier-mâché, wax, wood, fabric, glass, etc., material considered “feminine”. For Smith the use of material is connected to the dualism of the concept of the body as feminine and head as masculine in the Western culture, as well as the definition of nature and women as inferior.
Smith’s focus has been the body and how the body is a physical receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. According to Eleanor Heartney in her essay “Kiki Smith: A View from the Inside Out”, Smith rejects the Western tendency of privileging the vision over other senses. Over the course of her career, Smith has been moving from working about the inside of the body to the outside. In the 80’s her work concentrated on the organs, cells and other systems and now she sees the body as a landscape in which political and social issues take place. Her work states the condition of women. She has created work inspired in biblical and mythological figures changing their historic or mythology meaning.

Rosemary Betterton-An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body

An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body
Rosemary Betterton

In Chapter One of “An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body”, Betterton examines Suzanne Valadon’s “Self Portrait”, in which the artist, 66 years old, presents herself naked and without commiseration. Betterton points out that Valadon’s painting is” intimate”, and at the same time she upholds her body as “an object of representation”(p.7). According to Betterton, when an artist such as Valadon, looks at her representation, she completes that space between “self and others” (p.7). Betterton examines two extremes in the representation of the body - looking at the body, and the embodiment itself. She explains her interest in the analysis of the symbolism of distance and touch in women’s art and how the center of interest in Western art and science is looking. By looking, we establish a distance between the subject and the object. In contrast to Western art theory, feminist theory presents an alternative view of the way we think, see and talk about the body.

These alternatives include examining the “borderline between the biological and the social, the natural and the cultural”(p. 9). The author states that the way the body has been represented in culture and in language is at the core of feminist theory. She mentions the importance that feminist theory has made of the poststructuralist and psychoanalytic work of Foucault and Lacan to question the “notion of a coherent female subject.” (p. 9) Betterton points out that women artists have started to recreate the cultural meaning of the female body as a specifically female experience. Women artists were, in effect, reclaiming the cultural meaning of the female body. In the 1970’s, pornography was a catalyst for the discussion about the representation of the female body that contested the male view of the female body as only genitalia.

The author points out that the analysis of aesthetics was a point of debate in feminist theory in the 70’s. The deconstruction of the traditional representation of women’s body became a central point for women artists. Rejecting traditional art forms like painting, feminist artists turned to methods and genres that allowed them to deconstruct the image of the female such as text, performance, and photo. The author explains that deconstruction represents an important tool to analyze “cultural forms and women’s oppression”(p11), and points out that if women artists want to represent their bodies, that it should be out of the “male gaze frame”.

To define the relationship between looking and embodiment, Betterton uses a comparison between Roland Barthes who stated that the only possibility to see our body is through existing cultural codes, and Luce Irigaray who rejected the idea of the image of women as re-duplicating male gaze, and states that the relationship to the body and its representation has been the center of debate in feminist visual theory.
Back to Roland Barthes - the author shows other interpretations about the body in representation, in his essay, “The Grain of the Voice”. He suggests another way to see the body, as a relationship “based on looking and one based on other senses” (p.13). For Luce Irigaray, the look has been privileged over other senses.

In the section ”Social Bodies”, the author points out the tendency of Western culture to establish dichotomies. Women have been categorized as inferior and aligned with nature, different from the category of the white, male, middle class. Males have been defined as rational (the mind) and women as just the body. The body has been defined as a “binary term of difference”. The author states the difference between identity as a result of social discourse, and embodiment. According to her, modern feminism has responded to this position about the body in two ways: taking the liberal theory of equal rights, but leaving out specific status of women, and adopting sexual differences, and affirming the idea of nature as something positive, but not questioning “male rationality”(p.14).

In the last part of Chapter One, Betterton describes how feminist theory has defined the body as the point of “social and political inscription rather than giving a biological veracity”(p.15). In contrast, the author presents the feminist literature of science in a progressive level in the deconstructive analysis of the sexual difference, by presenting the interaction of cultural, and biological parts in the female body.

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic
Abramovic is a Yugoslavian performance artist from who since1965 has used her body as the medium to explore personal experiences of pain, power, abuse, relationship and punishment. In her performance she places her body as the object and the subject. According to Sue Scott in her essay “Marina Abramovic: Between Life and Death”, the violence and self abuse the artist imposed on her own body had been always in her life. The artist defines her performances not as feminist body art. She said, “When feminism became an issue, I was in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia women were partisans, absolutely in power…I never felt that I didn’t have things because I was a woman.” Her work, full of symbolism, is focused on the area between the body and the mind.
The artist uses the performance as a medium, using knives, fire, animals, objects, and the most important element: her body.
References
Marina Abromovic’s Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psych in Installation Art. By: Turim, Maureen. Camera Obscura, Dec2003, Vol. 18 Issue 54, p98-117, 20p.
Scott, Sue. “Marina Abramovic : Between Life and Death: After the Revolution Women Who Transforms Contemporary Art, Prestel Press, 2007.

Valie Export

In 1967, Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to Valie Export, adopting a new identity that was different from one associated with a father or husband, and at the same time, she created a brand name of her identity as an artist. Export is one of the first artists to use her own body as the central artistic tool. She deconstructs her own body as a way to explore identity and society, as well as to explore image and representation. A second important expression in Export’s work is the concept of “body configurations” - the artist uses her body as a symbol or sign in nature or architecture as a way to show how we the body is an extension of the architecture as well as a contrast, and as a way to separate itself from “ideological environment”.

Export has used images of herself through performance to create her photographic and film work that explore the image and its representation. In the process of creation, her body is transformed from object to active subject. Many times the artist re-uses the images with the intention of change the meaning.

Export is one of the most prolific media artists; she uses different media such as her own body, video, film, performance, photo, and drawing. Her conceptual work in photography and film has become important to the history of this art period.


References:
Alberro Alexander. Artforum International, Valie Export, April 01.
Markus Hallensleben. Importing Valie Export: Corporeal Topographies in Contemporary Austrian Body Art, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 42, No. 3, University of British Columbia. 2009.
Sally O’Reilly. Valie Export, Art Monthly, Vol. 28.
David Stromberg. A Self-Created Personality. July 24, 2009.

Orlan-Feminist Artist

Orlan
Orland is a French artist whose work is about the body, and she uses her own body as a medium to analyze both female stereotypes and the concept of female beauty as something imposed. As many feminist artists, Orlan has not used traditional media like painting or sculpture; instead, she has been using alternative visual media to represent her body. Orlan uses plastic surgery as a medium to explore the idea of beauty in different personages from the Renaissance. The artist has created several performances in which a medical team carries out plastic surgery on the body, and most of the time on the face of the artist. Orland has performed nine plastic surgeries - each one has been video transmitted live to different galleries and museums like the Pompidou in Paris. In each of these performances, the audience was able to ask her questions through a video conference about the performance and interact with her at the same time that the surgery was taking place. The post-surgical (painful) period was an important part of the performance. Orlan incorporates pain as an important part of this performance to emphasize the lengths that women will go through to fit themselves into the male definition of beauty.
In the scope of her work, Orlan has used various media like video, video conference, digital photo, the Internet, and plastic surgery.
References
Review/Art; Surgical Sculpture: The Body as Costume
Smith, Roberta. New York Times, New York, N.Y., Dec 17, 1993. p. C.31.

Flesh & Feminism: Abstract (Summary)
Carey Lovelace. Ms. Arlington: Spring 2004. Vol.14, pp. 1 – 65.
Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology: MIT Press, 2002.

Wilson,Stephen. Information Arts, Intersections of Art, Science and Technology

Information Arts, Intersections of Art, Science and Technology
Stephen Wilson
In Chapter 2, “Biology, Microbiology, Animals and Plants, Ecology, and Medicine and the Body”, the author describes how biology has been a source of attention from artists since the Renaissance. In this chapter, the author describes the areas of biological research in the U.S. through the National Science Foundation. The NSF’s biology department, according to the author, is divided in four areas such as: biological infrastructure, environmental biology, integrative biology and neuroscience, and molecular and cellular bioscience. In addition, the NSF develops different projects such as: human genomic project, biodiversity studies, and microbial research. The author gives special importance to a workshop developed by NSF called “Impact of Emerging Technologies on the Biological Science”, in which the NSF “identified technologies that would shape the future of biological research and ultimately intervention”(p.56). The author summarizes these technologies as: bioinformatics (using a computer for analysis and data), computational biology (use of computers for research purposes), functional imagining of the chemical and molecular dynamics of life (spectroscopy and fluorescence), transformation and transient expression technologies (technology for the research of DNA), nanotechnology (to merge mechanical and biosensors). The author explains that some of these areas represent a good terrain for artistic exploration in biology and the body, although there are limitations imposed by researchers and moral standards in the development of these complex projects (bioethics). However, artists exploring these areas “can serve a useful function by being aware of the full range of research that may be culturally significant in the future”(p.59).

In this section, the author describes research focusing on the senses, and he emphasizes the importance of this scope of research for information technology, with the intention to design computers (sensors) and the possibility of developing software capable of performing these sense processes. This area, according to Wilson, represents a great opportunity for artists to explore; however, the artistic intervention in this area has been limited.

In the section “Theoretical Perspectives on Biology and the Body”, the author states the importance of questioning the established concepts and methodologies in biological research. The cultural theory demands a deep analysis of the ideology of science. He writes, “Deconstruct all aspects of life to understand how text, image, and narrative work to produce and reinforce behavior and ideology”(p.72).

In “Rethinking the Body and Medicine”, the author describes the interest of artists in the body as a subject matter. Later he refers to the text “Making of the Modern Body” in which the authors Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Walter Laqueur analyses the different ways the body has been explored and “represented”(p.79), in different cultural circumstances. One of the authors notes that there are several interpretations of the body depending of the point of view of analysis. The author refers to Michel Foucault as somebody who had great importance in the analysis of the body. The author notes that for Foucault “the body is the ultimate site of political and ideological control, surveillance and regulation”(p.80). And explains that Foucault claims that the body has been the center of the imposition of power.

The author describes how cultural theory analyses different concepts and technologies about the merging between the body and mechanical technology. He presents as an example the human genome as some kind of mechanization and the consequent reactions of the idea of seeing the body as a system able to be scanned or decoded in the computer and with this creating a space of power and control. To illustrate this point, the author refers to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and he writes, “Haraway analyzes science’s fascination with domination and control. With the new technology it is possible to have access to images inside the body” and this, according to Wildon, represents a great opportunity for the artist, and that in the majority of cases, the artists use the same technology that the researchers use. But it is not just important to use the same technology - artists should use the deconstructive process to analyze science and technology’s concepts. Science and technology are defined by culture, and here the author claims that “the more information artists have about the research and its contexts, the more adequately they can respond”(p.88).

In the section “Impact on Cultural Frameworks”, the author explains how scientific research impacts “general cultural discourse”(p.89), and gives an example of the social response to the birth control pill, and how it changed important sexual and social behavior. These social reactions represent a great “advantage of artists”, since “artists are cultural producers”(p.89). In this section the author presents several artists who actually are working with different materials like chromosomes and genes. One of them is Suzanne Anker, who creates installations using chromosomes. In her work “Chromosome Chart of Suzanne Anker”, she works with her DNA to create a representation of herself using the print materials of the chromosomes. Other artists mentioned by the author in this section are Susan Alexjander and Dave Dareamer, who create music using their own DNA. Gail Wight creates work about scientific experiments. Using the same scientific resources, she creates installations, which analyze the social and moral involvements of scientific experiments.

In the section “Bodies, Technology, and Theory”, the author explains that the body has been used by artists in different areas, and, in some cases, the body itself is the principal form of expression, and in other cases it is the principal theme of the expression. Here the author gives us an example of video and film that regularly explore different expressions giving the opportunity to change our perception over “gender and identity”(p149). The author explains how scientific, medical and technological research has converted the body as the center of attention for “cultural discourse and artistic experimentation”(p149). The author refers to the body as something we all know and something we experiment with every day. However, the author explains, many of the characteristics that define us or feelings we perceive are “socially constructed”(p.149).

In the section “Extropian and Post-Human Approaches”, Wilson points out that some groups (Extropian and Post-Human) believe that we should be experimenting more and using the results of scientific and technological research, for example plastic surgery, artificial implantations, etc. However, the author warns us that there are other sectors of this movement that we need to be careful of in the use of new technology. The author points out that “for artists, the impact of the technologies on identity and concepts of self are of prime concern”(p.156).

In the section “Artist’s Experiments with Technological Stimulation”, the authors describe a great number of artists investigating through technology the body and its cultural discourse. In the first place the author points out an Australian artist, Stella, who merges the body and technology to play with the idea of the “post-human”, the super-powerful human, and the decadence of the human body.

Marcel Attunes Roca uses the computer as a tool to manipulate his face and other parts of the body - with the help of an audience - to control his pain or pleasure. He has several projects, among them one named Phantom Body, which examines the idea of missing organs.

Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford, are exploring different functions of the body in “contemporary culture”(p.164). In the cyberSM project they use a special suit with sensors that the audience can manipulate to simulate touch. Another artist working with the same technology, and with interest in exploring the body are: Knut Mork, Kate Pendry, Stahl Stenslie, and Marius Watz. One of their projects consisted of wearing a bodysuit with sixteen sensors in different parts, and the user of the suit has, then, the feeling of being touched, and with the use of goggles the user can see virtual images representing the people they are touching.

Orlan is a French artist using plastic surgery as a medium to explore identity, as well as to show the relationship between the inside and outside.
In the section of “Body Modification”, the author mentions other artists like: Fakir Musafar, who bases his work on the idea that our body is ours, and rejects the imposition and control of the” Judeo-Christian body programming and emotional conditioning”(p.176). He believes that technology has been a determining factor for the body modification movement.

Between other artists included in this section are: Peras Kaul, working with “ 3-d words that are navigated by brainwaves”(p.182). David Rosenboom, working with nerves and music. Catherine Richards works with different technology, and the artist explores parts of the body, and at the same time challenges the possibilities of the technology.
In the section “The Psychological Processes of Perception, Cognition, Appreciation, and Creativity”, the author refers to artists working on different functions like Masayuki Towata and Yasuaki Matsumoto, who are interested in exploring senses. Paul Vanouse, through his project “A Corpus of Knowledge on the Rationalized Subject”, uses a bar-code reader, and invites people to scan parts of the body of a live model, localizing internal organs.

In the last part of this chapter, the author makes a brief review of other artists working with 3-D technologies, the concept of death, and the use of MRI and PET.