Art and Women
Post #2
02/11/2020
Power is claimed to privilege a system and its individuals, however, men have more power than women, men are entitled to some privilege to which women aren't entitled to. The conception of patriarchal structure has been a central topic to several feminist theories. It's an attempt to clarify the social stratification of power and privilege by gender which will be observed by several objective measures. The term patriarchy derives from pater or father. Father or father-figures are the ones that hold the authority in the patriarchal society. From Mary Daly: “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'." ‘the male gaze’. It refers to the presentation of women in visual arts and literature from a male, heterosexual perspective where women are depicted as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer.”
 |
| Mary Daly on Social Construct and Feminism |
The “male gaze” solicits the sexual aspect of the gaze and suggests a sexualized political means of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. Within the male gaze, a female is visually positioned as an object or vision of the heterosexual persepection of male desire. Her feelings, thoughts, and her own sexual drives are frowned upon to satisfy the gaze of the male desire. Historically speaking, the standard viewer of artwork was and had always been a white male. Most depictions of the female in paintings throughout history are commissioned and painted by men for men resulting in the terms “male gaze”. Since women throughout most of history are weakened, kept illiterate, and treated as property of their fathers and husbands, they learned to be well aware of the gaze. This show of the female physique for the pleasure of the male viewer particularly among the visual hungry culture of the nineteenth century has therefore turned the female nude into an object of desire. One of the most influential artists of the seventeenth century was an Italian painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. She started her own life as a prodigy of painting. Her extraordinary biography has become a group text of feminist humanistic discipline . In 1611, Artemisia was raped by Agostino Tassi at the age of 17. Tassi was subsequently charged and guilty, but only after his victim had been forced to endure testimony under torture and accusations of immorality. The condemned rapist never served a day in his life.
 |
| Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610 |
John Berger's famous formulation in his Ways of Seeing was “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Naturally, female bodies were presented in culture and society as objects to be looked upon. It had an impact on women and on the way they came to terms with themselves as only a mere sight or a vision. Furthermore, John Berger touches upon a topic which is familiar to several many women. It comes with growing up and living as your own onlooker. Berger is trying to convey a message that you're contempt with yourself and you're only as your appearance is to others. A female has been viewed as an object all her life, and only she feels the worthless feeling of being regarded as a desire. To men, and to the women with who we are alleged to compete with for his attention.
 |
| Judgement of Paris, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530 |
John Berger in the Ways of Seeing comments on a frontal nude of a young girl holding a mirror in her hand. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” John Berger would call the male gaze: the buyer market. The prosperous society not only objectifies the female persona, but also objectifies her own self-worth and the image of herself not as a person but as an object of sexual desire. She is compelled to become this object in her own eyes, in a way making her a slave to herself.
Berger went through each painting from European high art, before and after the renaissance, where the female nudity was eternally helpless, being displayed as a public exhibition, often as a portrait for sale and painting by the display owner. She is usually an object of collective male gaze, fully aware of her nudity as a display turned submissive, her naked body sort of a statue suspended in belief and disbelief, her eyes watching the viewer, who is additionally the painter, and, perhaps, the photographer, editor, copywriter, and the cameraman. His gaze owns her. In the end, he enters the substantial society’s publicity and advertising industry, and breaks open the various layers of fetish and illusion, which marks the buyer's society. It's the insatiability desire, which sustains the market, the infinite manufacturing of this desire. One desire can only get replaced by another, though everything remains an equivalent.
For women growing up in a Western patriarchal society, it is normal to be constantly analyzing and critiquing your own appearance, constantly battling the truth of your body and the ideals with which you are presented, measuring yourself up, not for your own pleasure, but for the eyes of men. The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, Ways of Seeing, offered not just a thought but also a call for participation to determine and know the planet differently. “The relation between what we see and what we all know isn't settled,” he wrote. He knew that writing has its limitations. By itself, writing cannot rebalance the inequities of this or establish new ways of seeing. Yet he wrote with hope. He showed us in his work and through examples that there are other possibilities for living a life that was committed to criticizing inequality, while celebrating the sweetness within the world, giving attention to its color, and joyous surprises.
Citations:
Hooks, Bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, 2010.
https://www.manrepeller.com/2016/09/male-gaze-definition.html
No comments:
Post a Comment