arts analysis

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ARTS 1A

Topic 9: The Body

Previously we explored eight methods of interpretation:

Iconology Iconography Semiotics Formal Analysis Stylistic Analysis

Economic Determinism Marxism Postcolonial Theory

In this presentation we explore two additional methods of interpretation:

• Gender Analysis • Women’s Studies

First, click on the link below and watch the following short video, “Marina Abramović on Cindy Sherman, Untitled #90, 1981”:

https://youtu.be/tcWKXtEE3Wc

Pair 1: Cindy Sherman and Marina Abramović

Cindy Sherman

I. In the video you just watched, Marina Abramović said, “Art doesn’t have gender.” But in the next breath she admitted that Cindy Sherman’s photographs say more to women than men. Abramović described how personally she identified with some of the photographs.

Whether or not you agree that Cindy Sherman’s photographs say more to women than men, it is important to understand that many artists and writers analyze imagery from the standpoint of gender. Gender analysis is the practice of applying the study of the different social roles of women and men to a work of art. Analyzing gender often leads to this question: “How have the different social roles of women and men shaped the production and meaning of works of art?”

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #48

1979

Gelatin silver print

S II. Since the late 1970s American artist Cindy Sherman has

been using photography and her own body to create gendered imagery, calling into question stereotypes of the ways women are represented in media, especially cinema. The image by Cindy Sherman included in this chapter is from her series, ”Untitled Film Stills.” A film still is a photograph taken on a film set during the production of a movie. However, none of the photographs in Cindy Sherman’s series were actually made on film sets. For Untitled Film Still #48, the artist dressed herself to look like a young, vulnerable female character in a story. Even though the person in the photograph is the Cindy Sherman herself, it is less a self-portrait than an image meant to call attention to a stereotype associated with girlhood, as seen in films.

Marina Abramović

I. Marina Abramović, who studied art in Belgrade and Zagreb before becoming a professor of art, refers to her artistic medium as “performance.” Performance art emerged in the 1960s as a way for artists to engage in a range of actions, or presentations, sometimes manipulating their own bodies to become art.

For The Artist is Present Marina Abramović sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than 700 hours while museum visitors stood in line to take turns sitting in a chair opposite the artist. Abramović sat silently with each visitor, an experience which she says changed her “completely”; many of the visitors, too, found the act of sitting in the presence of the artist and engaging with her non-verbally to be deeply moving.

Marina Abramović

The Artist is Present The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2010

The artist, two chairs, and a table

II. In the video at the beginning of this chapter, Marina Abramović spoke of gender when describing Cindy Sherman’s work, but she does not characterize her own work as gendered. Rather, she says her work is informed by the personal experience of growing up in a violent home where her mother exercised “military-style control” over every aspect of Abramović’s life. Writers about art who have explored the work of Marina Abramović tend to focus on this artist’s life experiences—and specifically, her experiences as a woman. As such, they are applying women’s studies to the practice of art history: the study of women’s experiences in the analysis of works of art. Feminist art historians often ask, “How do the personal experiences of women shape the production and meaning of works of art?”

Pair 1

Analysis Exercises: Pair 1 Exercise 1: Consider Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 and Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present side by side. The artists include themselves but neither speaks. How might the act of speaking within these works of art change their impact upon viewers?

Exercise 2: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 was presented here in the context of gender analysis, but what questions might you ask it to transform the analysis of this photograph into one which utilizes women’s studies?

Exercise 3: Our introductory video revealed Marina Abramović’s thoughts about Cindy Sherman’s work. How do you think Cindy Sherman would respond to Marina Abramović’s work?

Pair 2: Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster

Artemisia Gentileschi

I. One of the reasons so few women became professional artists prior to the twentieth century was due to the difficulty of receiving training. But Artemisia Gentileschi grew up in the household of a professional artist in Rome; her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was a painter. Most Italian girls were raised to become wives or nuns, but Orazio Gentileschi trained his daughter to become a professional artist, teaching her to draw and to paint over the course of several years.

Artemisia Gentileschi eventually moved to the professionally competitive city of Florence and joined its painters guild. To earn money as an artist in the seventeenth century one had to join a guild: a professional organization for artisans, similar to a labor union.

Artemisia Gentileschi

The Birth of St. John the Baptist

c. 1635

Oil on canvas

II. To join the painter’s guild in Florence, Artemisia Gentileschi had to present a sample of her work to its members, to prove she would be able to complete commissions for patrons successfully. During a long and career, she not only worked in the Italian city- states but throughout Europe.

A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi which reveals why her work became sought-after by patrons is The Birth of St. John the Baptist. Here the artist communicates a history subject with a strong sense of variety: a principle of design in which notable units of difference are used to create a satisfying whole. Consider the layers of attention offered to the baby by many people within the picture plane. They are placed at varying distances from the child, but each attends in some way to the birth.

Judith Leyster

I. Like Artemisia Gentileschi, Dutch artist Judith Leyster was a dues-paying member of a painters guild. Unlike Artemisia Gentileschi, we do not know how Judith Leyster received her training, since her father was not a painter but a brewer. It is not likely that Judith Leyster was self-taught, since her work betrays the skill and confidence of someone who has been taught to use the materials and techniques of professional artists in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.

Judith Leyster worked as a successful genre painter in Haarlem until she married a fellow guild member. After relocating to Amsterdam, her husband provided an income for their growing family by producing and selling art. The only known works to have been produced by Judith Leyster during her marriage are drawings of tulips which were transformed by printmakers into mass-produced illustrations of tulip bulbs for sale in farming catalogues.

Judith Leyster

The Proposition

1631

Oil on canvas

II. Judith Leyster and Artemisia Gentileschi were professional artists during a period of European history when working as a female artist meant negotiating uncharted territory. The careers of both were profoundly shaped by their experiences as women. In Judith Leyster’s case, she appears to have stopped producing imagery almost entirely after she married. Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by one of the tutors her father hired to help her refine her painting skills. A transcript of the rape trial survives.

Consider the dynamic which exists between a man and a woman in Judith Leyster’s painting The Proposition. At first glance, their interaction appears somewhat uneventful, due to the quiet palette, that is, the range of colors chosen by the artist, as well as the composition’s unity, a principle of design that points to the way the visual units work together cohesively. But look closely: the man is offering the woman money, his hand on her shoulder. She does not look up. What might he be proposing that makes her not want to acknowledge him?

Pair 2

Analysis Exercises: Pair 2

Exercise 1: The training of history painters in the seventeenth century in Europe required artists to understand anatomy, so as to be able to create the illusion of people in action. This also applied to genre painters. When comparing works by Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster, how is it clear that these artists understood human anatomy?

Exercise 2: Are these works by Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster gendered? In other words, are they suitable for gender analysis? Why or why not?

Exercise 3: The Birth of St. John the Baptist and The Proposition prominently feature women. Would it have been possible for male artists to have produced these works? Why or why not?

Pair 3: Mary Cassatt and Judy Baca

Mary Cassatt

I. Mary Cassatt studied academic drawing for several years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before relocating to Paris, where she became involved with Impressionism: a modern art movement whose participants explored natural effects of light, color, and atmosphere, usually with loose brushwork (painterliness) on the surface of their works. After moving to France, it was impossible for Mary Cassatt to “unlearn” her drawing skills, but she tried to call attention to the surfaces of her paintings by incorporating some of the tendencies of Japanese ukiyo-e artists, whose heavily patterned designs achieved the effect of flattening the picture plane. Note how The Boating Party avoids chiaroscuro modeling; it also avoids drawing attention to the background.

Mary Cassatt

The Boating Party

1893-1894

Oil on canvas

II. Even though Mary Cassatt modernized her approach to painting, works of art such as The Boating Party betray her traditional education in drawing. For example, note how convincingly she modeled the child’s face, creating passages of light and shadow to provide the illusion that the woman holds a solid, believable baby. To call Mary Cassatt a modern artist is to suggest that she actively rejected the traditional norms of painting and instead embraced a practice of art making based on the present moment.

Our reading exercise introduces you to a work of scholarship which demonstrates that Mary Cassatt’s academic education in drawing did not make it easy for her to please the art critics of her day. Most writers about art in the nineteenth century believed that drawing was men’s work, and that women should not—and could not—learn to draw. Paintings such as The Boating Party which indicated that the artist had strong drawing skills resulted in Mary Cassatt being called a ”masculine” artist. Even though most Impressionist artists were men, male art critics in Paris wrote about Impressionist art in gendered terms.

Judith F. Baca

I. Like Mary Cassatt, Los Angeles artist Judith F. Baca acquired an academic art education. Like Cassatt, Baca has been profoundly successful working in an art practice traditionally practiced by men. In Baca’s case, the art practice is mural painting.

Judy Baca works in acrylic paint, a twentieth-century painting medium in which the binding agent is a petroleum product called acrylic polymer emulsion. Since 1970, Baca and her assistants have completed dozens of murals. One of our Spotlight on Technique videos features Judy Baca and others engaged in the research, design and completion of a major public commission, Danza de la Tierra.

Judith F. Baca

Danza de la Tierra Latino Cultural Center, Dallas, Texas

2009

Acrylic on canvas

II. In an interview in Santa Monica, California in 2006, Judy Baca recalled the tensions of becoming a muralist as a Chicana woman: “I was in in struggle with the men within our Chicano movement, and I was in struggle with feminist white artists, and I was in struggle with the art world.“ Unlike many American women of European descent who have produced imagery as feminists, Judy Baca says, “I wouldn’t have defined myself as a feminist first,” though she eventually became a feminist, that is, someone who advocates for women’s rights and equality. For this artist, and for many other artists of color—both women and men—struggles of race and ethnicity have been at the forefront of their concerns, strongly influencing the subject matter of their work. Judy Baca recalled that, towards the beginning of her career, ”simply placing a brown face in public sight in a mural was problematic.”

Pair 3

Analysis Exercises: Pair 3 Exercise 1: The Boating Party and Danza de la Tierra depict women in close proximity to men. What do the relationships between women and men in these paintings exhibit? Comfort? Joy? Discomfort? Joylessness?

Exercise 2: As a Latina/Chicana, Judy Baca investigates histories of art-making that extend beyond her education at a California university. Similarly, Mary Cassatt looked to stylistic authorities beyond what she was taught. Find one detail in each work of art which indicates that these artists looked to authorities outside of European or American art to influence their ideas or forms.

Exercise 3: How is it clear that Mary Cassatt and Judith Baca sought to focus viewer’s attention on the bodies of women in these works?

Pair 4: Annie Mae Young and Hung Liu

Annie Mae Young

I. Alabama quiltmaker Annie Mae Young produces textiles from old clothes. She says, “I work it out, study the way to make it, get it to be right, kind of like working a puzzle. You find the colors and the shapes and certain fabrics that work out right.” Art historians refer to the types of shapes we see in Annie Mae Young’s quilt as organic shapes: shapes that bear the irregularities of nature. After Annie Mae Young finishes making the quilt top she backs it with additional layers and sews the layers together. Sewing the layers together is referred to as “quilting.”

Annie Mae Young

Work Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion of Strips

1976

Denim, corduroy, and various synthetic fabric

II. Some quiltmakers design quilt tops that have recognizable imagery, producing portraits, landscapes, history subjects, still life, or genre scenes. Annie Mae Young does not convey recognizable imagery with her quilts. Her Work Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion of Strips is not a portrait or a still life; it is not a genre scene or a landscape; nor is it a history subject. It is an example of non-representational art.

Unfortunately, art historians often dismiss the work of quiltmakers as craft rather than art. However, Annie Mae Young’s quilts have been shown in numerous major art museums, due their visual power. As such, Annie Mae Young is regarded as a contemporary artist, which signifies art made during our present time. Most museums and art historians categorize contemporary art as art made from around 1945 to the present day.

Hung Liu

I. Hung Liu was one of the first artists in communist China to be allowed to study in the United States. She did not return to China to live and work after completing her studies, and chose to remain in the U.S. Today her work is collected and exhibited widely, including the Smithsonian Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

A painter, Hung Liu produced Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter) in the form of a diptych: a two-paneled work of art. When producing a diptych, an artist may hinge the two parts together, or may simply hang the two parts together. Note the faint trace of a line down the center of this large work. This indicates the place where the parts of this work are joined.

Hung Liu

Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter)

1997

Oil on canvas • H

II. Hung Liu’s Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter) is one of a series of works based on historical photographs from China’s history. The series calls attention to those with the least power in society. Here two women pull a boat through shallow water by means of a rope tied around their waists.

To produce this painting, the artist drew upon her training in China in an approach to art making called socialist realism, that is, an approach to figures and the environment which glorifies the ideas of a communist state. Within the tradition of socialist realism, figures are depicted naturally or ideally and are often engaged in actions helpful to the state or to other workers. Here Hung Liu painted in a style acceptable to socialist realism. But the experiences of the suffering women rather than the goals of the state appear to be the subject of this work. As such, this work would not be an acceptable example of socialist realism in China because its subject matter points to the state oppression.

Pair 4

Analysis Exercises: Pair 4

Exercise 1: Which method of interpretation—women’s studies or gender analysis—would you find most useful in understanding the production and meaning of Work Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion of Strips? Which method of interpretation may be most useful in understanding the production and meaning of Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter)?

Exercise 2: How would you describe each artist’s approach to color?

Exercise 3: In what ways do both works of art help us to understand the relationship between women and labor?

Pair 5: Unidentified artist(s) and Anoli Perera

Unidentified artist(s)

I. Located on the side of an enormous rock in the Matale District of Sri Lanka is a series of frescoes at high elevation. The site, Sigiriya, was occupied by Buddhist monks as early as the third century B.C. It was fortified by King Kashiyapa I in the fifth century, who built a hilltop palace at the site. The frescoes, which date to the period of this king, may be viewed today by standing on viewing platforms built for scholars and tourists.

Art historians do not know the purpose of the frescoes, which represent women wearing elaborate headdresses and jewelry. Many of the women hold flowers or fruit. Some gesture with empty palms.

(detail)

Unidentified artist(s)

Sigiri frescoes Sigiriya, Matale District, Sri Lanka

c. 480

Fresco

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II. Some scholars have identified these frescoes as representations of apsaras, female cloud or water spirits. In South Asia, apsaras are mythological figures skilled in dance and entertainment. Some anthropologists liken apsaras to the ancient Greek muses, goddesses of inspiration in the arts and sciences.

Youthful, sometimes partially nude, and with large breasts, apsaras have been described as the wives of celestial court musicians. They also play a role in fertility rites.

Because Sri Lankan scholars undertook research and interpretation of the Sigiri frescoes during a period of increasing independence from colonial Britain, the frescoes have become important to the island’s national identity and heritage. The appearance of Sri Lankan women has often been judged by the standards of the Sigiri frescoes. Physical characteristics such as large breasts, a small waist, elegant hands, and neatly groomed hair have long been considered to be attributes of female beauty on the island.

Moreover, since they are the wives of male musicians, apsaras are associated with heterosexual marriage. Because they are associated with fertility rites, apsaras are also associated with motherhood.

Professor Natassja B. Gunasena, who was raised in Sri Lanka and teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, found it impossible to live up to the expectations her family placed upon her to be like the elegant women in the Sigiri frescoes: “my hair was too coarse and curly, and my body too thick,” she wrote in an essay published in Women’s Studies Quarterly in 2019.

After finishing college, Gunasena agreed to get married. “. . . I chose to wear the traditional ossariya, with white flowers in my hair and jewelry in the shape of golden lotuses. I was, on that day, as beautiful as I could ever hope to become in the shadow of nationalist, ethnic expectations. When less than a year later I was forced to confront the realities of my marriage and my own sexuality, I was first and most strongly apprehended by a fear of betraying familial expectations, and, in doing so, betraying a part of my Sri Lankenness itself.”

Women and men often feel confined by gender stereotypes in the cultures in which they live or in which they have been raised. The physical and social expectations imposed upon Professor Gunasena as a girl growing up in Sri Lanka (which she writes about in her essay, “Something Like Kali and Durga Must’ve Rocked: Sri Lankan Femininity and the Poetics of Diaspora”) are born out of the pressure many families on the island feel to raise their daughters and granddaughters in accordance with religious, national, and anti-colonial ideals inspired in part by the Sigiri frescoes.

Anoli Perera

I. Nearly a decade before Professor Natassja B. Gunasena published her essay, contemporary Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perera produced I Let My Hair Loose, part of a series of photographs she calls a “Protest Series.” Anoli Perera describes the images in this series as photo-performances, that is, photographs which double as performance art. This term did not exist when Cindy Sherman began producing “Untitled Film Stills” in the 1970s.

While Cindy Sherman continues to make art to communicate both stereotype and storyline, Anoli Perera seeks to confront viewers about a specific indicator of female beauty in Sri Lanka: hair.

Anoli Perera

I Let My Hair Loose From “Protest Series IV”

2010

Inkjet on Hahnemuhle paper

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II. “Hair in its proper place,” explains the artist, “is seen as a mark of beauty. Hair out of place is seen as significations of hysterical, uncontrollable, uncertain and unpredictable behavior. . . .” Inspired by childhood memories of looking closely at antique photographs of women, Anoli Perera became determined to “interrupt” the act of the male gaze upon women’s bodies by concealing women’s faces with their hair. “By covering the face, it obstructs the completion of the viewers’ voyeuristic enjoyment of looking at their female sitter.”

Anoli Perera’s project calls attention to the long tradition of heterosexual men viewing women in works of art for the purpose of experiencing desire. She challenges the male gaze: the act of viewing women in art which objectifies and diminishes women while empowering men.

Anoli Perera does not name the influential Sigiri frescoes as a motivating factor in the production of this series, but look back at a featured detail of one of the Sigiri women. Her face holds a pleasant, calm expression, her features clearly available to viewers because her hair is pulled back tightly and neatly. Nothing about her expression shames any of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visit Sigiriya every year, climbing staircase after staircase to gaze upon these partially nude women.

Pair 5

Analysis Exercises: Pair 5

Exercise 1: The Sigiri frescoes represent women who may be apsaras. What is an apsara, and in what ways is the woman featured in Anoli Perera’s photo-performance similar to or different from an apsara?

Exercise 2: Both artists used leading technology in their day: fresco in the 5th century and photography in the 21st century. Which technology is likely to last longest: fresco painting or photography?

Exercise 3: Anoli Perera writes, “Hair out of place is seen as significations of hysterical, uncontrollable, uncertain and unpredictable behavior. . . .” Why does “hair out of place” signify these things?

Question: Why does this presentation on “the body” explore mostly art about women made by women?

Answer: Because for most of history, art has been made about men by men.

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