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.
saratrouble 