Art and Feminism

I was so fascinated by those articles.  Honestly I was surprised that those issues are real.  I can't believe that forcing a woman to undress on the beach is allowed.  It is interesting too that all of this talk surrounds women's dress.  It reminds me of this political cartoon:

It also makes me question and look into feminism and art and the ways that we "should" respond.  With an issue like this... I honestly don't know how to respond.  I don't think I particularly like the bikini culture, but do I think that women's swimwear should be limited and controlled by someone?  Probably not.  But what if women don't want to wear any clothing at all?  Does it ever come to close to that?  What kinds of gender issues are we dealing with here?  I honestly don't feel like I understand the complexity of those issues.  

When I consider feminism in art I find the different waves of feminism most fascinating.  The first wave said "there is a problem here" and their method of solving it was to flaunt femininity.  It tried to solve the problem of male dominance in the art world.  The first wave of feminism flaunted the woman's body, its curves, its reproductive cycles and everything.  Second wave feminism realized that that was most likely perpetuating the issues and tried to correct it.  In some ways when I look at the problem illustrated in these articles I feel some sympathy towards those early feminists.  I feel like I don't know how to respond.  Woman and men are different.  The way we deal with them in society is different.  So what now?  Do we regulate what women can and can't do?  Do we treat them like we treat men?  Do we cover them up?  Do we flaunt them?  I don't know the answer, and I find myself proceeding with caution because I know how easily the pendulum can swing when we see a problem.  I don't think it is right to tell a Muslim woman that she can't where a burkini on the beach.  I don't know why political, social, and religious difficulties manifest themselves in women's clothing but, I do know that there is a problem and that we should carefully consider each side.  What are we perpetuating?  Why are we doing this?  What does it imply for everyone?  

UMOCA

I went to the UMOCA for the first time for this assignment!  I was so thrilled and I went ready to appreciate some contemporary art.  I walked into the first little room and I was kind of pleased by it.  There were these odd figures and these screen prints on newsprint that you could take with you.  Me and my brother took these ones.

  The walls were painted, which I liked and her subject matter felt somewhat lighthearted.  She was talking about every day life and she had what felt like a light-hearted video piece.  I enjoyed it, it seemed playful and thought provoking even though I wished I could hear her talk about her own work.  

There was an interesting feeling video piece of someone in gold dancing through a landfill with a gold gas mask on, to the tune of "I'm singing in the rain."  The message to that felt pretty clear.  I went to another room where they had a collaborative mural of women who were maybe missing from history, who should have been noticed more.  The photographs of the artists were spread throughout the room.

Unfortunately... I felt like my visit was kind of downhill from there.  I don't know if that was a result of me feeling sometimes disenchanted with art, but I just started to feel like... what is the point?

I work at the MOA and we have copyright issues with a lot of contemporary artists, so I kind of assumed I couldn't take pictures.  I did begin to take pictures of what I really found interesting though, and that was honestly the writing on the plaques on the walls.  I found myself curating a curious collection of words and what felt like kind of weird evidence of contemporary art and our ideals and our emphasis.  My curation felt kind of like my own art piece.

 The piece above is one that I found particularly interesting and that made me feel a lot of frustration.  Scared around the room were green and yellow troughs.  I was looking at troughs that really didn't remind me of humans at all.  They weren't the same size and they didn't help me think about what the plaque said they should.  My younger brother came with me, and he was particularly startled by the wording of this plaque.  He was amused that they put "processes of ingestion" instead of eating.  The interpretation that I made of this piece was that we were meant to think about our bodies and everything goes into them.  It might compare our eating to that eating that animals do in preparation to become our food.  It might compare their job, down in the dirt and eating from a lowly trough, to ours.  I think that they were trying to make the point that no matter who we are we are a part of that and it shapes our identity.  I felt frustrated because without the plaque I never would have understood that, and with the plaque it was still difficult for me to work my way past the jargon, if not because some of the sentences made no sense, just out of pure annoyance for that kind of block that they put up for some reason.

I don't know if this was the experience that I was supposed to have but I felt kind of like... why do we make art?  What was the purpose of this?  And that was kind of an uncomfortable feeling for me.  I wanted to be floored by the art, but I instead left feeling disenchanted with contemporary art.  I felt like there wasn't a purpose to the things that I had seen and if there was the artists were selfishly keeping that from me through their jargon and their attempts to be everything at once.  Industrial and domestic.  Rigid and soft.  I thought about a reading that I had to do in one of my classes about a dancer who learned when she got too old to dance that she could gain a lot from giving to her dancer that could still dance.  Sometimes I feel like these artists are hoarding instead of giving.  I know they don't need to spell it out... but I just felt frustrated by the experience of going there.