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The idea of reality has come under increasing attack within current art history. ... How women have been and still are represented in art and the media, as the physical perfection of the human body, as flesh to be looked at by male viewers, as something to be lusted after, has been made possible through the male representation of what has been accepted to be a reality throughout the history of art. However, the persuasive powers of art have been embraced to communicate with a wide audience the differences between the reality and the representation of women and the female body in art.
Feminism in the arts grew out of the contemporary women’s movement and its first investigations relied heavily on sociological and political methodology (Pollock: 169) Early feminist analyses focused new attention on the work of remarkable women artists and on unequalled traditions of domestic and utilitarian production by women, as evidenced by the controversial art of Judy Chicago. ... These fragments of the female body are confusing notions of the nude, a classical representation of the sensual, lithe, rounded, pure and vulnerable female body, with the reality of being naked. ... It was art that represented a reality that real women could relate to, not that of an idealised male version of what a woman should look like or be. ...
Renaissance nudes seem to defy human decay, classically perfect in form, conforming to the stereotype that has become a mindlessly accepted reality, unlike the work of Cindy Sherman who has stripped away the decorative, the exalted, the idealised to render the female figure and represent reality (fig 3). ... Sherman addresses in her work the way much of western art has been constructed to present female beauty for the enjoyment of the ‘male gaze’, a primary focus of contemporary feminist theory. Sherman produced a series of sixty-nine black and white photos entitled Untitled Film Stills, which began in 1977, using photography as a critical means (Chadwick: 358). She considered how representation constructs reality, which led her to rethink how her own image was conveyed. ... Sherman designs, acts in, directs and photographs her works, taking control of her own image and constructing her own identity. ... Although she is still the object of the viewers’ gaze, the identity is one that Sherman has chosen to assume. Sherman’s work implicates the viewer in the construction of these identities while gazing at the images but, by offering so many characters, Sherman undermines this attempt to fix her image according to our desires (Cruz et al: 3). We cannot trust what we see to mean what we think it does; Sherman’s reconstructions can be said to open up a distance from the original meaning of images such as film stills, introducing speculation about the meaning of subject matter and its reality (Dawtrey et al: 156).
Sherman, a second-generation feminist artist exploring the nature of representation, shows how women have been used as subjects for masculine pleasure, as an object destined for the male gaze. In doing so, she heightens the reality that women have been forced to conform to these ‘ideals’, of beauty and behaviour, for example because of the representations women have been subjected to. She therefore portrays herself not as the media has deemed ‘beautiful’ but as women appear in reality. ... Sherman attempts to deconstruct these images and recreate them as her own, by mimicking them in a sarcastic manner. Images construct the notion of women and photography, ‘the medium that cannot lie’, is shown by Sherman to be malleable. She employs the ‘masquerade’ to render women as ‘unknowable’, ‘unidentifiable’ as that is how individual women are in reality; women are not like the predominantly male representations that we see in the media and in art. We see in Sherman’s work uncomfortably strong, independent women, even ‘unfeminine’ women in her attempt to challenge gender constructs that have been built by male representations of women in the past. Sherman questions the processes and politics of representation through the simulated look of film still self-portraits of B-grade movies (fig 6).
Approximate Word count = 3395
Approximate Pages = 13.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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