5 Impactful Female Artists

Silvy Matos

Due 4/23/20

Art and Women

Professor Cacoilo

The Controversiality of Vulva Art

              Throughout history art has become more than just a painting on a wall of the museum or of one’s home to look upon for its beautiful shading, lines, or colors. It has expanded to becoming a voice, a voice that spreads a global message to an audience. Art pieces have become performances, graphics, video, crafts, architecture, photography, and much more. Although, they can call be very different today they have been used as mediums to educate about politics, feelings, law, social injustice, rights, feminism, and much more. A very controversial topic in art would be the female body and what it represents, specifically the vulva/vagina. Women artists have gone through many hardships to give themselves a name and create meaningful pieces to support them against the patriarchal society, and to fight against male perspectives that have been spread in society and culture to degrade women. These ideas that women are not able to achieve what they want, to be successful, and be in control of their own bodies. I am very intrigued on expressing what I have learned of the views behind vulva art. Does it represent sexuality, feminism, self-love, desire? There are a variety of artists that have decided to do this type of art, but I will be mentioning 5 artists that I believe to use this art in the most beneficial ways in female lives.

Gustave Courbet,L’Origine du monde,1866

            
  The idea of nudity in art has been present since the beginning of time, we can date it back to prehistoric art. However, one can say that the imagery of female nudity actually began do to the wrong reasons by male artist. Artists like Gustave Courbet, Botticelli, Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Titian, and many more including Pablo Picasso himself have drawn the female body to be viewed upon as subject. Gustave Courbet is the most relevant to this piece because he specifically paints the vagina itself in his work “L’Origine du monde”. He is creating this female body part to be viewed upon by his audience as a way to achieve sexual pleasure, it is primarily viewed as a erotic painting rather than one that defends the female body. These different female artists break these barriers and use this body structure to represents the purities within them.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79

              Female artist Judy Chicago is well known to as a feminist artist. She has used her art to educate others of the female community. As mentioned in Chadwick, Judy Chicago began as a minimalist artist until she discovered a graduate student at the University of California who  created "abstract form, she associated them with female anatomy-breasts, belly, and vulva- and with sensations of sexual and emotional pleasure" which opened her eyes to feminist art.Chicago has created on of her most inspiring work in 1974, The Dinner Party, work that would come to articulate women’s history in a feminist perspective. This piece was created as a massive banquet in a triangular table structure, in which 39 plates were places with 999 women names inscribed in gold on the tile floor. Most importantly these plates consisted of vulvar mixed with butterfly structures. Unlike the way the vulva was portrayed in Courbet’s piece, Judy Chicago’s piece represents this female structure as empowerment for women, a way to deconstruct what the patriarchal society has done in society, implementing wrong beliefs. As Judy states, “ It’s a narrative through Western Civilization, presenting the lives of female heroes… the plates rise up as one goes around the dinner table as a form of liberation, it’s not just a straight rise, they go up they go down” this representing the different periods of time women have faces in society. Women have not always gotten equality rather they have had to fight consistently, there might be some good decades, but it was not always an upward slope. The rise of the feminist movement however as she mentions changes the vulvar plate structures, “ They begin to rise and rise and push of the table” in a sense women are not to be on the table they are to live their lives. This also speaks against domesticity of the female. Chicago expressed, "a central core, my vagina, that which made me a woman". Overall, throughout this piece Judy Chicago uses these vulvar plates to represent female power through accomplishments by fighting against their body stereotypes just because they are women.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930

Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923

              Furthermore, these ideas now lead to a very iconic female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe. Along with Judy Chicago she represents powerful women fighting for gender equality and feminist rights through her pieces of artwork without admitting to it. O’Keeffe was famously known for her close-up flower paintings, that have been viewed as vulvar imagery. Georgia O’Keeffe never associated her artwork with feminism, but in reality, everyone has viewed it as such. Flowers have always been associated with the vagina, the structure itself does the same as female sexual organs do in a human body. There is no denying that throughout history genitals are compared to a lotus flower an abundant amount of times. In a sense the message being spread is that we are vulnerable and beautiful just like a flower, with a great energy and light that many may not appreciate. She once stated “I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers." There is much more to this statement that one can just hear, they must analyze it, her flower paintings with vulvar imagery represent the female women. Although, feminists have related her work to vulvar imagery she has always denied it, Chadwick stated "she struggled against a cultural identification of the female with the biological nature of the body ... she responded with little sympathy to attempts by feminist artists during the 1970s to annex her formal language to the renewed search for a "female" imagery", in essence Georgia O'keeffe as an artist always denied her work to be connected to an erotical interpretation, no one truly understands why, but she probably did this in order for her work to actually prosper within a female and male society, but in reality it means so much more. 

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975

              In continuation, the third female artist is Carolee Schneemann. She uses her vagina as a feminist structure. She is well known for her piece titles the “Interior Scroll” 1975. Rather than using the vulva in traditional painting or structures, she uses it in contemporary art through performances. She stood naked on a table with her body painted with mud and pulled a feminist scroll out of her vulva and began to read it to her audience. The scroll spoke of her beliefs of the vulvic area, “I thought of the vagina in many ways – physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers.” Rather than caring about her nude body looks she wants viewers to observe a women’s body in all forms, not just how society makes it look. Schneemann her work with feminist and political issues.

Deborah De Robertis, 2014

              Vaginal art although at first glance seems to be erotic art it is far from that; it is a way to express political and cultural statements of a woman. New contemporary artist Deborah de Robertis famously known as a performance artist and photographer, reenacted Courbet’s piece, L’Origine du monde in May of 2014, in Musée d’Orsay located in Paris. She used her body to make a statement of female body parts. Rather than having a male paint a female’s parts let the female as a person decide for herself. Her vision was to give contemporary viewers a realistic version of his piece showing that not all vulvas are perfect just like women. Men portray women to be perfect objects to please them and she is expressing the opposite. Robertis also explained that everyone looks at the painting as if it were normal to look upon, but once you she it physically people are disgusted by what they see. Sexism has been used to portray women as objects, but they act blind at the idea that they are human.

            

Frida Kahlo, My Birth, 1932

  Lastly, Frida Khalo is a very important artist in feminine culture. She would empower women around the world through her paintings of herself, especially her body. Khalo tells a story of female empowerment through the hardships she has had to endure in her past from accidents to maltreatment of her male lover to growing up in a restricted society for girls where men are head of the household. Like the previous artist, Frida has also used her vagina as a symbol of female life. In her piece, My Birth created in 1932, she paints her mother giving birth to her, but her mother’s head is covers, the vagina is represented as a female feature to bringing life to earth. This also represents the difficulties she went through and being told she wouldn’t be able to have children although she desired it very much. This piece can also be taken further in representation of many women that are not able to have children. In a most patriarchal societies, the women is views as the one to have kids and take care of them at home, it is their only job in their view. Well Frida changes that by telling women to accept who they are, it doesn’t make them less of a women, she lived it firsthand.

              Overall, these five outstanding female artists in their own artistic forms have tried to change the way that one looks at a female body. Rather than looking at them as a sexual object, treat women equally as humans, delicate as they should, as givers of life, as powerful beings that have been able to accomplish many things in this world. Through vulva art these female artist want women to stop feeling as if they are not enough for society, rather just accept themselves as beautiful strong beings that can do the exact same as men. Vaginal paintings of objects is a way to analyze a females subjectivity , through a image of the vulva these artists are allowing other females to celebrate female experiences accomplished and their knowledge/ power. 
 New contemporary Artists that I discovered on social media (AMAZING WORK) P.S. These artists are still not famous :) just if your interested to see developing artists
- Natalie Krim artist- https://www.instagram.com/nataliejhane/?hl=en
- Daniela M. artist- https://www.instagram.com/coloringdan/?hl=en
- Millie Brown Performance artist- https://www.instagram.com/milliebrownworld/?hl=en

Sources: 

“Frida Kahlo Paintings, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist/kahlo-frida/. 
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Thames Hudson Ltd, 2020. 
“Georgia O'Keeffe.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 2 Mar. 2020, www.biography.com/artist/georgia-okeeffe.
“Judy Chicago Prepares for a Dinner Party with Female Hero...” Judy Chicago Prepares for a Dinner Party with Female Hero..., www.sfmoma.org/watch/judy-chicago-prepares-for-a-dinner-party-with-female-heroes/.
“Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (Article).” Khan Academy, Khan Academy, www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/post-minimalism/post-minimalism-sculpture/a/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party.
Tate. “'Interior Scroll', Carolee Schneemann, 1975.” Tate, 1 Jan. 1975, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemann-interior-scroll-p13282.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/performance-artist-arrested-manet-olympia-409004