Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Doll, 2007-8, silicone RealDoll, chaise lounge, 35mm slide projector, fabric, curtain rodEdouard Manet’s 1865 painting.

“Olympia,” shocked the art world by depicting a prostitute whose unabashed gaze was part invitation, part dare. Lynn Hershman Leeson provocatively restages Manet’s notorious artwork in her installation Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Woman, by featuring a custom-designed sex doll. Incorporating Manet’s scandal, this work reveals cultural predilections toward displaced desire. Revealing a range of historical re-interpretations, the projected 35mm slides sample internet images and expose residual artifacts.http://www.iheartmyart.com/post/478035708/lynn-hershman-leeson-olympia-fictive-projections

RESEARCH: WOMEN ARTISTS AND MODERNISM

From this, modernists are not concerned with difference, they see art as homogenous. No value is placed on gender politics. So when imagery and feminized art is portrayed... it is 'foolish, feckless and thin. '



LYNN HERSHMANN, DEEP CONTACT, THE FIRST INTERACTIVE SEXUAL FANTASY VIDEODISC, 1984-1989
image from Media Art Net

Ed. Katy Deepwell, Manchester University Press, 1998
Susan Platt. Chapter 5, Pg 83. Elizabeth McCausland: art, politics and sexuality

McCausland (1899-1965) wrote emotionally charged articles on contemporary art during the 1930's that call for the modern artist to be immersed in society.

The 'American Action Painters' as characterised by Harold Rosenberg were celebrated for being active in terms of moving paint around a canvas.

Clement Greenberg: issues outside of artwork were seen as violating its 'purity' (addressing political issues compromises art).A recent example, 1993 Whitney Biennal. Critics dismissed the first Bennial as having a significant representation of women and people of colour and not, coincidentally, politically engaged art. Arthur Danto, for example, declared that it was 'mawkish, frivolous, whining, awful and thin'. There was no analysis of the political issues.

Canonical separation of art from politics basically forces artists to remain as part of a powerless 'Other'.

'Apolitical' art is a political position that diminishes the power of art and artists.

Houston Baker callls it 'an assumed supremecy of boorishly, racist, indisputably sexist and unbelievably wealthy Anglo-Saxon males'.

Post-structuralist females see its definition as 'construction neccesary to a highly political and successful cultural production of a highly privileged subject position. Modernist self-fashioning is accomplished... over and against a feminized and devalued other.

I can't spell but I can give you cosmetics advice

Reality killed the absent. Jules, Heidi.

Pink Symptoms

Jules, Pencil on paper with pink effects, whilst watching Masterchef, 2011

Sketchbook

Ella Guru. Stuckist Painter. Easter Consumption

RESEARCH (locked out of the house and a McDonald's down the road - might as well)

MALE ONN

Shanghai Artist MALEONN


Perhaps three of his best. A bit of a photoshop freak, he practiced as a short film maker first. Craig Scott Gallery represents Maleonn the 'reigning fabulist producing lyrical digital fantasies'.

Image 1, What Love Is, Image 2, Master and Slave, Image 3, Days of Cotton Candy
www.craigscottgallery.com/?sec=2&artist_id=6

RESEARCH NOTES - Unframed Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting

My conclusion is that this is basically an intellectualized Stuckism but instead refers effectively to gender issues and not the institution as such (the lines got very blurry there). Postmodern conditioning and all it's incoherence absent here. Can't be dealing with that.

UNFRAMED PRACTICES AND POLITICS OF WOMEN'S CONTEMPORARY PAINTING, edited by Rosemary Betterton, I.B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004 - explores the current state of making and thinking about painting by women. It aims to reclaim a space for different practices of women's painting and to assert that these are important if we are concerned with the current meanings of both art and gender.

• Painting has ceased to be central to current critical debates about contemporary art in the western world
• Gender issues that have been foregrounded by women's movement over the previous 30 years are deemed irrelevant to the making of new art
• The twin peaks of postmodernism and post-feminism, however ill defined, appear to have overshadowed any serious consideration of the contemporary practices and politics of women who paint
• Sterile set of oppositions such as traditional or new media, abstraction and realism, feminist or non-feminist Marsha Meskimmon suggests are simply inadequate to contain the complexities of contemporary practice by women
• Groundplans exhibition in 1989, with nine women painters
• There have been sporadic attempts to address the relations between women, painting and feminism over the last decade, there has been no sustained critical analysis of women';s painting and i remains, as Fran Lloyd commented, 'one of the most undervalued sites of feminst practice in Britain'. (Llyod 2000: 37) Part of the reason must go back to the sustained critique of painting as a reactionary masculinist discourse by feminist artists such as JUDY CHICAGO and critical theorist like Griselda Pollock since early 1970's
• Many women artists at the time rejected painting in favour of less 'tainted' media such as performance, video or installation
• issues of racial and cultural identities are histories are crucial, for writers like PARTOU and ROSA LEE, their respective Iranian and Chinese identities are an implicit factor in their work, alongside gender and generation. The attention given to the specificities of race and place, to culture and identity, marks this kind of painting out from the modernist assumption of a universalized aesthetic or a postmodernist play of signifiers detached from histories and politics - the 'play'
• Why do I, as a feminist, still invest desires and pleasures in painting? I think the answer lies less in question of political content and more in issues of gendered spectatorship and embodiment. By evoking my sense of being a carnal subject, a female subject in a fleshy body, painting can begin to articulate complex pleasures and displeasures attached to looking and being as a woman. It is the material qualities of paint, its ambiguity and resistance, over and above the signified meaning of a specific painting
• Pitfall of feminist criticism that asserted in the past - destruction of visual pleasure was in itself, a feminist act.
• Practices... BARB BOLT explains, paintings can be understood, in C.S. Peirce's term as 'dynamic objects', that is they exceed pure signification and can be understood as bringing something new into being
• Bolt argues, paintings are not merely images, but materializations that can have an insistent presence as objects, which is why a slide or photograph is never enough
• For Lee as for Bolt, painting is a means of an engagement with and a bringing into something that has previously not existed, rather than a re-presentation of a pre-existent event
• Lee identifies characteristics that exceed the purely visual and relate to somatic senses of touch, rhythm and gesture, as well ad different kinds of rhythm. Roger Fry, ' not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent. They aim not an illusion but at reality'. For Lily Bruscoe, as for Eva Hesse, the act of making art is 'absurd' or 'impossible'.
• Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the act of painting is figured as 'bound up with some sort of love. As its close painting finally emerges as a response to "emptiness" ... It is a practice, in which some sort of retrieval is attempted'. (Rowley 2003)
• Partou, this may be a desire to retrieve the self or to move beyond the bounaries of self towards forgotten others in the works of SUSAN HILLER, LUBAINA HIMID and PAM SKELTON
• Painting; it is an ongoing and relational (two key shifts) painting as a system of signs within semiotic analysis to a concept of painting as having an indexical relation to the world
• Bolt 2003 (second shift) towards an understanding of painting as an inter-subjective process: 'a practice of co-emergence involving the play of objects, bodies, materials, technologies and discourse' (shifting away from being solely an 'object')
• 'Personal is political'. For REBECCA FORTNUM, this involves using her art 'as a way of reflecting and understanding [her] place in the world'. The question of what it means to produce work as an embodied, sxed, raced, classed and historically situated subject is implicit. Marsha Meskimmon points out, both the embodiment of subjects and the situatedness of knowledges have been crucial concepts in recent feminist theory.
• the studio: For Partou, it is by 'a naked female body stating herself in paint' that she can challenge the male rtist's right to monopolise the symbolic space of the studio.
• Partou 2003. In exploring what it means to paint from - and with - a female body, she renders explicit issues of gender, nudity and the assumed identity of the artist.
• By reasserting her own socially gendered I/eye, Partou does not simply occupy the body and space of the male artist, but displaces him in a 'political and intimate' project of self-representation as both the subject and the object of her work. Her series of self-portraits resists fixed ontology; anti-definition. Looking at paintings unfold over time and, is materially situated. (Fortnum 2003).
• hyper-masculine

Stuckism

THE STUCKIST (est. 1999)
An anti avant garde movement. I don't always won't to pronounce the profoundness of paintings and the prejudices of postmodernism - I am a Stuckist of sorts I will say in place. I'm reading about this Stuckist movement and I agree and but I don't preach.

19-04-2011 Last night I was watching Marina Ambromovich on youtube. Even though she epitomises postmodern bullshit I love how she dictates a divine figure of herself, she has a real artist spirit but it's ringfenced in nauseous performance art . There is something very sickly about performance, unless its funny. Imagine if Abramovich painted again...

Post It

Studio Journal

Studio from February to early March. I swapped walls and it suits my project better to have the window behind my piece . I didn't capture April unfortunately, I did intend to.

MAUREEN O'CONNOR

ARTIST: MAUREEN O'CONNER,Thinner Than You, Steel 1990

'' It is about a woman as depository, as container. Men ejaculate inside the women. This is clothing, so it could represent her interior as a pocket."

Contemporary art without it's obstuseness.

Dolce Villasimius

Cagliari, Poetto, Villasimius. April 2011

Thought it would be rude not to share...

Impersonal

If in the disbelief that abstraction is a form of expression then do you believe in stuckism? If confessional art is too sentimental then where do you draw from... Geometry?? Jules, Sketchbook pages

Artist: Rosenquist

Like a forewarming of a shallowing pandemic.

Discovered Rosenquist on the fifth floor of Tate Modern. Good Find.

Ai Weiwei

STILL MISSING