'The modernist myth of genius constructs the artist as a man lauded for making a mess: the avant-gardist 'messes' up canons of beauty, and his habits and sex-life 'mess with' bourgeois conventions. Modernists 'mess' conflates the aesthetic, the erotic, and this visual. Within modernist discourse and moden life, the woman artist who 'makes a mess' has not experienced success rqual to en's. This is because tidiness has been and remains a norm imposed by culture on women.
The erotic is pleasure in its many forms. The erotic exists in genital sexual gratification, but operates much more expansively in recognition of plenitude and in development of wisdom regarding satisfactions unadulterated by pain, hostility, shame, or frustration.
Pleasure in these terms is neither utopian not Pollyanna-ish.
It is an urgent instinct beneath the cultural burden of belief in pleasure and pain as necessary correlates and feminist theories.
So problematising women's desire and pleasure as to suppress their ability to represent, let alone trust, their own pleasure, thus squelching an erotics of experience.
That images substantiate reality and reality substantiates images means that both women's lives and art reify the pleasure/pain model. Yet some women's art has substantiated pleasure, for pleasure is necessary to human well-being and social transformation.
I rip the discursive fabric and repiece it differently for pleasure and healing.
...culture-t-large believes make women women: masochism, victimage, and hysteria. In modernist discourse, women's feminity is a necessary and aberrational condition: feminity is a mess and a monstrosity.'
Ref
Women artists and modernism. Edited by Katy Deepwell.
Page142 Joanna Frueh, Chapter 9
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