Constellation – Week 4

Monsterous Femininity 

• Masculine anxiety – lack of control leaves them feeling dis-empowered (“[My greatest sexual fear?]… The vagina dentata. A story where you were making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off” – Stephen King cited in Creed, 1993:105)
•  Snakes is a symbol of the castrated female genitals
• Medusa is regarded by historians of myth as a version of vagina dentata – poised and ready to strike
• She was raped by Poseidon because she was attractive and Athena cursed her out if jealousy – a very wronged woman – punished by another woman for being a victim of a man in a patriarchal order
• She was so threatening to man, she had to be destroyed, as she threatened the established order
• She becomes ‘hideous’ because of her hair, but her face is always open to interpretation
• She was initially frightening because she could seduce a man, thus castrate him

Fetishism and the Phallic Woman

• The male might desire to create a fetish, to want to continue to believe that woman is like himself, that she has a phallus rather than a vagina
• Repeated in all patriarchal cultures – James Bond has a threatening woman character who causes him to lose his masculine power, so he seduces her and removes the threat, and she becomes a castrated woman rather than a castrator

Patriarchal anxieties underlying Misogyny 

• The menstruation taboo – sight of woman’s blood confirmed man’s fear of being eaten and castrated by the female genitals
• The duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims
• “man-eater, man-trap”
• Man has erected a series of taboos against woman, all of which relate to her sexual functions: menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and most importantly, sexual intercourse

How can I relate this to my practice?

I could look into vagina dentata again, as I did last year, but by also incorporating fetishism. I recently waled around with last year’s final piece to see what reaction I got from it, and it was mostly shock rather than interest, proving the anxiety our society still holds. 

 

Constellation – Week 3

Monstrosity, Embodiment

• Boundaries of the body (is there a clear binary between the outside and inside?)
• The Abject – “that which does not respect borders, positions, rules.. that which disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva, 1982 cited in Creed, 1993, p8)
• Liminality and socio-cultural rituals designed to diminish the vulnerability of the body (the abject form)
• Embalming and disavowal of ‘organic matter’
• Wrecking the skin

Monsters

• Denying that we are flesh and blood – textures
• Emphasis on the materiality of the body
• Concepts relating to the liminality – inner and outer
• Fluid bodies – shapeshifter, not a fixed form
• Are unrelatable yet relatable
• Femininity is defined by the exterior – male monsters are feminised in horror
• Difference = threat
• Our bodies are vulnerable – our obsession with glamour is a defense mechanism because we’re never going to be ‘ideal bodies’

Tools

• The combination of beauty and grotesque
• Phobias and fears
• Juxtaposition
• Transformation – vampires, werewolves, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde
• Femininity – Buffalo Bill, as he’d be a woman in his suit
• In-between categories – Dracula isn’t interested in gender/sex – what is he?
• Glamour

Glamour

• Unblemished skin signifies health and perfection – everything is contained as skin is an effective barrier
• Eroticism and sexual desire – fetishism/conceal and reveal
• Beyond human

When you have a cold and your nose runs, you wipe it away as if it was never there. Makeup is to hold the horror of decay at bay.

McQueen, Jack the Ripper Coat, 1992. The inside of the coat is filled with pubic hair and is red with barbed wire, signifying removal and torture/mutilation. The silk lining and it’s feeling on the skin contrasts with the theme.

How can I relate this to my practice?

I’m currently experimenting with vaginas and how women are now under pressure to have a ‘tidy’ vagina – that is with a small labia, no vaginal discharge, etc. I’ve been using clay to create a similar textured look that vaginas generally have, and then “dress them up” using nice and soft fabrics, such as lace and silk to create the fetishism, and obsession with having to distract others from our natural bodies.

 

Personal Statement

My chosen artwork is by Huguette Caland, named ‘Self Portait’, 1971, which is a piece from a series of drawings I saw in the Venice Biennale, which were extraordinarily delicate, intimate ink drawings of female genitalia. I decided to go down the route of using theories discussed in Cath’s Goddesses and Monsters about phallic women and castration fear, which has created an element of humour and irony in my work.

I started by drawing her piece and created collage-type drawings of it, which lead to different drawings of vaginas in Caland’s simplistic style.

I wanted to focus on the materials I used to create these sculptural/paintings of vaginas in order to create a meaning, leaving them open to interpretation. My idea was to use contrasting materials of soft fabrics, making the spectator want to touch them, as well as use clay which mimics what a vagina actually looks like. The act of dressing up a vagina then opens up a social issue that women face, as well as a slightly humorous side of fetishism and strip tease – but by using a ‘scary’ vagina, rather than an entire body.

I believe I was successful in doing this and will continue to develop this idea, as well as incorporate other theories into the next pieces.

Documentation and Contextualisation for the first assessment

Personal Statement

Documentation

First Project – ideas lab

Ideas – Huguette Caland’s ‘Self Portrait’

Material response to Huguette Caland’s ‘Sef Portrait’

The thinking and process 

The significance of the materials used in my pieces

Contextualisation

Key concept lectures and how they’ve influenced my practice

Huguette Caland

V&A: Opera: Passion, Power and Politics

Function of Studios – Davida’s home

Venice trip – 5 artists that caught my eye.

 

The thinking and process that is directing the development of Huguette Caland’s ‘Self Portrait’

Firstly, I was having difficulty on how to actually develop such an open piece; I could have stuck with it’s simplicity and have my work open to interpretation by using delicate drawings, or I could incorporate all that I’ve learnt through lectures this term and create interesting, but rather abstract, set of pieces that could still be open to interpretation.

I wanted to create these pieces without taking the meaning behind them too literal, and have them mean something different to every spectator, which would in turn make my pieces even more interesting to look at and discuss.

I used the original artwork of the vagina and used a theory from Constellation about phallic women and castration fear to develop it, which helped me create this idea. I also used materials to make it symbolic, so that it wasn’t too literal.

I’m very happy with how they’ve all turned out, and I’m pleased that I went down the more abstract route. Creating a sense of wanting to touch the pieces and analysing why I made them in this specific way is exactly what I wanted. I’ll be cutting out more boards to develop this idea further and, hopefully, create more of these.

The significance of the materials used in my pieces

The materials I’ve used, I believe, are very important to the pieces I’ve made. I chose to use a combination of fabrics, such as velvet, silk and lace, alongside clay, paint and wood. These contrasting materials heavily link to Goddesses and Monsters, as well as Caland’s Self Portrait. They link by using Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion and constructions of the feminine ideal. Themes of gender construction and embodiment identified in the poem and investigates themes of sculptural transformation, corporeality and the desire for idealised somatic forms. The myth offers insights therefore into key tropes relating to gender configuration and discourses of materiality when creating/fashioning representations in visual culture. By dressing up my vaginas with fabrics that conceal and reveal at the same time, especially soft fabrics that are very inviting to the viewer, I create a contrasting piece. The contrast is in how vaginas are seen so much in porn but not in everyday life, thus is hidden and is distracted by other comforting parts of the body, such as legs and breasts. I chose to make vaginas in all shapes and forms and used fabrics to create a sense of irony and humour to how we dress our bodies up to distract the male gaze from how ‘horrifying’ vaginas are. I’m also looking into how I might incorporate vagina plastic surgery, such as cutting off the labia in order to create a ‘tidy’ vagina.

The wood and the clay offers insight to how vaginas really are; the clay creates folds and an almost realistic texture to the vagina, while the wood supports it all, signifying it’s strength.