Feminist Art Might Mean Something Different to Us
Feminist Art Might Mean Something Different to Us
August 17, 2023, 11:12 pm
Filed under: art, feminism, Visual Art | Tags: Ana Mendieta, art, feminism, feminist art, feminist future, Judy Chicago, Rachel Bloom, The Dinner Party
At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some of its feminist underpinnings.
How quickly I discovered that I had misread the room! Immediately, I got pushback about an underlying conceit in The Dragoning. (A show, by the way, that while it IS feminist in its mission, I’ve never explicitly labeled it as such.) The next thing I knew I was trying to explain that yes, men do kill women. And at absolutely terrifying rates. (How I wish I’d had numbers right then — but now I know that, globally, it’s six women every hour.) All night long, I’d been hearing feminist, feminist, feminist but as soon as an actual feminist issue came up, the room seemed very different. How did we all have such different perspectives on feminist art?
I wondered if it was generational, since I was significantly older than most of the others. I come from an era in which being a feminist carried some stigma. The others come from the GirlBoss era, the #feminist, the pink feminist swag years. It’s possible that feminist art just means something different in different moments. To me, it’s Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party or Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series. It’s work that challenges the status quo and makes the audience reconsider things. It’s not that I think images of beautiful womens’ naked bodies aren’t feminist because I suppose they could be but I might need some support materials to help me see them that way.
This is why I suspect it is a generational disconnect because those who’ve come up in a GirlBoss or Choice Feminism culture tend to have a kind of individualist POV on feminism, that is, it’s about the individual choices of a woman rather than the collective. I don’t blame them for the confusion. The corporate embrace of feminism served to really obscure what we were talking about. It convinced a generation of women that that their nakedness was a feminist act because they were choosing to do it. And if they just happened to please the male gaze while doing it, all the better! I feel like Rachel Bloom (who, herself, is a representative of this choice feminism generation) perfectly summed up the contradictions baked in to Choice Feminism in her song about all the modifications women do to their bodies “just for yourself.”
Put yourself first, girl
Worry about yourself
Make yourself sexy
Just for yourself
So when dudes see you put yourself first
They’ll be like, “Damn, you’re hot, wanna make out?”
Push them boobs up
Just for yourself
Wear six-inch heels
Just for yourself
If it’s just for myself, shouldn’t I be comfortable?
No!
Put yourself first in a sexy way
My feeling is that if your feminist art makes men want to make out with you, you’re probably not really making feminist art. This isn’t because there aren’t some great feminist men out there who might find feminists sexy, there are. I know some personally! But feminist art doesn’t exist to turn men on. (If it manages to do that, that’s a pretty neat kink. Tell me more.) For me, the best feminist art will make folks think or see something in a new way. It will reveal something hidden. It will right previous wrongs. It will give women seats at the table where they had none before. (See: The Dinner Party) Sometimes feminist art makes folks uncomfortable and there are sometimes consequences.
The Third Wave (or maybe this is the Fourth Wave now?) of feminism got a little diluted, I think. It got a little safer for everyone and it got a little buzzwordy. I think that’s okay, since it meant it became a lot less dangerous to talk about feminism. The thing that concerns me is that it seems like that didn’t come with any increased safety in talking about feminist ideals or ideas or art or propositions. It may be a safe word to use in your artist statement these days but I’m not sure it’s any safer to fight for the rights and benefits of women. That’s the part I’m interested in. And not just on Women’s March day when everyone’s doing it.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on August 18, 2023.
