Chosen photograph and why

From all the galleries I visited, I decided to choose this photograph of street art I found in Dublin. It’s simply an almost nude woman in blue, pink and black, with “Love Your Lady, Love Her Choice’ painted in white besides her. Ireland has only recently made abortion legal, which I think is what this piece is made for. This is both powerful and fascinating to look at. The message could also be ambiguous, simultaneously challenging all that women don’t have a choice in concerning their bodies or rights. I chose this over the more obvious art pieces I could have looked into, such as the pieces from Weimar Germany that were sexually violent towards women, because I wanted to focus more on empowerment.

I’ll be using this combined with Jenny Holzer’s advertising and campaigns to start off this year’s work on feminism, perhaps looking into unorthodox ways women empower themselves, such as cam girls.

Art in London

Tate Modern was a wonderful experience, having never visited before, and is currently showing exciting exhibitions from Andy Warhol to Weimar’s Germany. I found a huge amount of work that’ll be useful for my third year concerning women and empowerment as well as abuse towards them.

Jenny Holzer – Men Don’t Protect You Anymore

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, an art movement dubbed Appropriation was becoming more and more prevalent. Though diverse, Appropriation includes repurposing images that are already created for a different artistic purpose or playing with the way art is communicated, which is seen as Nirvana used Holzer’s work in the image below;

Artist Jenny Holzer was fascinated with the latter, including the ways that large institutions aggressively advertise. Her collection of work called Truisms appropriates the large-scale “language” and medium of most advertisements. Holzer would take a one-line aphorism and place it somewhere in the public eye where one would usually expect to see an advertisement, such as billboards and theater marquees. In 1982 she obtained permission to use what was then the Spectacolor Board in Times Square and broadcasted snappy remarks such as “Private property created crime”, “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore”, and, in wonderfully ironic fashion, “Protect me from what I want.”

Magic Realism: Art In Weimar Germany 1919-33

Rudolf Schlichter – The Artist with Two Hanged Women, 1924

This alarming scene is made more troubling by its lack of context. As the title suggests, the distraught male figure is intended to be a self-portrait. The work is likely to be directly related to Schlichter’s own sexual fantasies, which reportedly included play-acting around hanging and an obsession with women’s buttoned boots. As well as a disturbing private fantasy, the image reflects the unsettling presence of suicide in Weimar Germany. At a time of mass unemployment and cuts to welfare, suicides were extensively detailed in the tabloid press.

Otto Dix – Lust Murder, 1922

The theme of Lustmord or ‘sex murder’ recurred with obsessive frequency in weimar culture. Alfred Döblin’s novel ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ 1929 opens with the main character’s release from prison having served time for the murder of a sex worker, while the heroine of the film ‘Pandora’s Box’, played by Louise Brooks, is killed by Jack the Ripper. These disturbing themes have been linked to the lingering trauma of wartime violence, and seen as an extreme response to the emancipation of women.

Art in Dublin

While in Dublin, I got the chance to visit the exhibitions at Dublin Castle and Dublin’s National Art Gallery, which was also extremely beautiful to walk around.

However, I was slightly disappointed visiting the women artist’s exhibition at the Gallery, as the content wasn’t how it was advertised. There were only posters of the pieces the historical female artists had made and little information about them. I did, however, find the newspaper articles of the artists interesting to read.

These were the pieces I found most interesting and enjoyable to look at;

Emilio Greco – Woman’s Head, 1954

Greco is more known for his beautiful bronze sculptures of women, but this drawing captures something almost eerie to me because of how he’s drawn the eyes in comparison to the curvaceous ink lines, making them perfect circles, which in turn makes the woman look inhuman.

Colin Middleton – Sheephaven

Patrick Swift – Trees at St Columb’s

I really enjoyed looking at these pieces as they remind me of where I live back in Snowdonia. The energy from the wild landscapes were also very inspiring and reminded me of my work from the Gower, something I might return to in the print room.

 

Art in Paris

I immensely enjoyed the Paris exhibitions, including the ones at The Louvre and The Musée d’Orsay, as the art work and architecture’s beauty were definitely on par. I got to see the famous Mona Lisa, some of Van Gogh’s works, as well as other great artworks as seen below.

Pierre Bonnard – Études de nus, 1910

The theme of the nude in a domestic interior occurs throughout Bonnard’s work, as well as mine, and some of his most enthralling versions of this motif occurred during the 1920’s. Bonnard was interested in the way that the form of the figure links in to its surroundings, setting up a counterpoint between the softness of the limbs and the more angular shapes of the interior. One way in which Bonnard initiated this combination of integration and contrast was through an angled viewpoint and flattened perspective, so that the viewer is drawn into the image.  The forms in Bonnard’s drawings are composed in terms of light as well as shape, and the use of colour here creates a very effective soft tonality which greatly enhances the visual appeal of the imagery. This image has inspired me to go to more life drawing classes during this final year and look more into the human body, especially women’s bodies.

Hans Bellmer – La Poupée, 1935

In his nightmarish tableaux of mutilated and reassembled dolls posed in domestic interiors, Bellmer grappled with the base condition of the human body and with the bodily fragment as fetish object. Mannequins and dolls—simultaneously familiar and strange—supplied the material for his primal expressions of terror and awe, which often evoked the innocent violence and latent sexuality of childhood games. Whether they are read as Freudian emblems of the uncanny, who’s theories I’ve been heavily studying this past year, or as ominous harbingers of Nazi atrocities, Bellmer’s images exemplify the Surrealist view of the female body as the source of simultaneous fascination and revulsion. There was also information next to the piece about how this piece could be a product of his sexual fantasies of very young girls, which makes his work incredibly controversial for being displayed.

Hans Bellmer adopted his controversial practice—the creation of provocative, often grotesque sculptures of pubescent female dolls—in the 1930s to rebel against the artistic rules and standards of beauty imposed by the Nazi government. After moving to Berlin in 1923, Bellmer became close with the Dada artists, particularly George Grosz, a politically minded painter who furthered Bellmer’s distrust of government. Fearing that his art would be outlawed by the Nazis as “degenerate”, in 1934 Bellmer sought acceptance abroad with André Breton and the French Surrealists, who embraced his work for its revolutionary nature and libidinous engagement with female youth. In addition to his sculptures, Bellmer produced prints, photographs, and drawings, always dealing with themes of abject sexuality and forbidden desire. Also a writer, he referred to his doll projects as “experimental poetry”.