Please post your feedback on lesson 4 here. Lesson 4 looks at problems in defining a feminist art topic and researching an artwork.
Please post your feedback on lesson 4 here. Lesson 4 looks at problems in defining a feminist art topic and researching an artwork.
I have the same problem as the previous participant, I can’t get into the forum from lesson 4 to answer the question asked there.
Here is my homework.
I chose 1982 Sanja Iveković, Personal Cuts.
-I read it as a feminist, as a feminist artist myself, concerned with the fact that women and girls experience restrictions in their lives, imposed by traditions, religion, policies, stereotyping, simply because they are girls and women.
-to me this artwork is feminist, as the subject matter addresses how societal ‘norms’ and politics have a direct impact on women’s lives, the expectations, the stereotypes, the roles they are supposed to/allowed to assume. Each snippet of a documentary of the history of the Yugoslavian socialist republic is sliced by a fragment in which she cuts a hole in the stocking that ‘masks’ her face. In a way, I see it as revealing her own personal narrative as a ‘real’ woman hidden away under a false narrative projected onto her by policy and social constructs limiting what women are to be in her country.
-The contingency of her work, the specificity of it being linked to a geographical area, the concreteness of it plays a role in how/why I view this as feminist art.
-She presented Personal Cuts on prime-time Yugoslavian national television, on TV Zagreb’s 3, 2, 1 – Action! This way of presentation, where the work was shown, to me also plays part in why I consider it (feminist) activist art, it’s a ‘public’ work, addressing the personal lives of women in her society.
-She talks about her art as in the intersection of artistic and activistic activity, addressing women’s rights and gender identity in her country. She is also the founding member of different women’s organisations.
I wanted to add I spent several weeks digging through this goldmine of feminist artists, discovering new names, rediscovering old names, visiting their sites and social media even connecting with some and getting better at framing my own work as a feminist artist within this wide rich heterogenous panorama of what feminist art clearly offers. Thank you~
Hi, I am trying to participate in the Forum for Lesson 4. But I have not been able. When I click on the link it sends me to the registration form.
Here is my homework. By the way, everything has been fantastic until now.
Teresa Margolles, Lote Bravo (2005). The topic was violence against women, these artworks are a response to rape and other forms of violence. It highlights the victim’s point of view, and it is also a form of resistance.
Margolles installed brick-like objects on the floor; they are fragments of the places where victims of feminicides were found. Accompanying the installation, she played on a loop a video and a sound recording of Lote Braco, Lomas de Poleo, Anapra and Cerro de Cristo Negro (Ratliff, 56); all these places are, at the same time, where corpses were found, and part of the trajectories women travel to get to work. The spectator is invited to follow the trip women working at the maquiladoras of Ciudad Juárez take: through empty and desertic roads. The video transport us to their life and lead us to feel the fear and vulnerability all these women feel just by going to work.
I would like to say that, as a Mexican woman, it is impossible for me to see an artwork about feminicides in Ciudad Juárez and not reading it as a feminist.
On the other hand, every Mexican should know about her, as last year she was the only Mexican artist named by The Guardian as one of the 100 more influential contemporary artists. After art academies in Mexico are fixed teaching about the three muralists (Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco), Tamayo and, sometimes Frida Kahlo, to have a woman in that list it is a huge triumph for women artists in Mexico.
The artwork recognises a problem we have in Mexico. Since 2001, when Mexico’s Government faced the trial Campo Algodonero, in which the Interamerican Court for Human Rights determined Mexican authorities were negligent and re-victimise the women, Ciudad Juárez has been under the scrutiny for the cases of feminicide. Ratliff says about the artwork: ‘by focusing her lens downward, she instead pictures the physical earth of the nation, a perspective that could be interpreted as implicating Mexico itself because of the failure of the State to bring any form of justice to the victims in criminal investigations’ (58). Which means, Margolles has the same opinion about the role of the Mexican Government when facing feminicides as the Interamerican Court.
Ratliff article explains how the feminicides are related to the NAFTA agreement and globalisation. This is true, Fregoso’s hypothesis about how the fact that maquiladoras hired only women and empowered them economically broke the social fabric. However, the Mexican context is a little more complicated and this artwork reflects it. Marcela Lagarde invented the term feminicide, inspired by Russell’s femicide; the difference is that it is not only the murdering of women but the reason for which she was murdered is related to her gender. The feminicides started in Ciudad Juárez, by now, they are a national phenomenon even if there are no maquiladoras all around Mexico. Lagarde herself explains that there is no way for women to avoid feminicide as any woman can be murdered due to gender issues (Lagarde, 2014). ; the machista culture keeps women in danger, every brick we step in might be the last one we step in.
The work is feminist because of the message. It is not the first time Margolles shows interest on the topic; she has worked with images from the red top, trans-feminicides and the children of women victims of feminicide. After all, as Suzanne Lacy explained, feminist art against violence does not appear as a result in answer to inspiration, but to the need to involve the audience with the problem experienced by women. In the catalogue about her participation in the Venice Biennale, her curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, explained that she stopped using the morgue as an atelier and now works with the peripheries of the body (2012). This is because of what she explains, in Mexico, we are surrounded by death; we can not scape the corpses, so her art is a reminder about that. She has been related a lot to Sayak Valencia’s theory about gore capitalism (2012); for her, Mexico’s Government is not trying to stop organised crime as they produce tons of money, there is actually a promotion and masculinity is expressed through violence. Her installations are a recreation of gore capitalism: the violent and really wealthy culture organised crime has in Mexico.
Though she has identified herself as a feminist, she does not work in a community. She is recognised by other feminists, such as Mónica Mayer, but she does not work with them; while it is common that Mexican feminist artists work together, in a community. Also, many of the feminist artists from Mexico are doing artivism or artistic-social interventions; meanwhile, Margolles is addressing an international audience, so I think that is why she works differently. After all, someone from Mexico has to make the first world countries understand the impact of the globalised economy and their consume on drugs on the Mexican landscape.
Ratliff. ‘A War on Women Teresa Margolles’ Ciudad Juárez’, N.paradoxa, vol. 35.
Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela, ‘Pacto entre mujeres: sororidad’, Revista Aportes, 25 (2006), pp. 123-135
Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela, ‘Preface’, in Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas, ed. by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (USA: Duke University Press, 2010) pp. xi-xxv
Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela, ‘Del femicidio al feminicidio’, Desde el jardín de Freud, 6 (2006), 216-22
Lacy, Suzanne, ‘In Mourning and in Rage’, in Femicides. The Politics of Killing Women, pp. 317-324
SAYAK VALENCIA TRIANA, CAPITALISMO GORE: NARCOMÁQUINA Y PERFORMANCE DE GÉNERO, UCM. E8.2 DOSSIER HEMISPHERIC INSTITUTE https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/emisferica-82/triana.html. 12 DE AGOSTO 2020
Dear Natalia,
Very sorry that I did not respond until now.
There are links to the forums in the Menu bar under “my profile”.
I’ve added your two great contributions to the forums. Well done and thank you for your participation!