I mentioned my dissertation in an earlier post and should explain what it involved, because my current work has been affected by it.
It bothers me that everyone sees life from an individual perspective, and considers they own their personal story, and yet history only records some of these. The cine films I am using in my project are typical of this effect. Different edits and re-tellings have distorted and destroyed the original collection of individual films and stories. Some people who filmed them or were filmed have died, and their stories have lost place to the stories of filmers or film-ees who still survive.
This was an important idea behind my dissertation research. Generally, if you can get your story accepted by the power system of an establishment, it will become The Story. This makes life unfair for many groups of people, but the situation of women in art is really interesting. They have been excluded as artists from art’s power system while being defined as essential but passive objects for male ‘genius’. Some female artists have claimed status by making work that explores the experience of being female, but others have tried to redefine the rules of the system that has excluded them. I wrote about four female artists who did this by appropriating male artists’ work, why they did so, and what they achieved.
I love the way appropriation is ‘not-art’, because it is copying and therefore ‘un-original’, and that these women, copying men’s art, made themselves ‘not-artists’ and ‘not-women’. This should have removed all their power. What interested me was how they reused the men’s work they appropriated and, by being women, overturned art’s conventions about women to give this work a new and powerful narrative, and claim this creative genius for themselves.
I looked at the Guerilla Girls’ witty but accusing iconic poster (no title),(1985-90) and their source, Ingrés’ Une odalisque, dite La Grande Odalisque (1814):
I also considered Sturtevant. She denied that she was interested in ‘gender discourse’, but some of her work demonstrates her need to ‘trump’ her male source. I looked at Sturtevant’s Duchamp Wanted, (1969) and her source, Duchamp’s Wanted, $2000 Reward, A Retrospective Exhibition by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy:
Next I looked at Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #224,(1990) and her source, Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, (c. 1593), Young Sick Bacchus. Sherman is particularly inspiring because she makes no claims to knowing much about art theory, yet she uses this single photograph to unpick and reorder established assumptions about the relative positions of male and female artists. She makes it look effortless and teasing, but her appropriation has radical outcomes.
Finally I analysed Sherrie Levine’s Bachelors, (1989), and her source, Marcel Duchamp’s (1915-23) The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).
Levine makes no pretence to ignorance of art theory and the politics surrounding the status of women artists, and she uses her Bachelors to overturn the status of Duchamp, the ‘master’ of appropriation, and the patriarchal art system that established his power.
Levine is one of my favourites. I feel like I ought to dismiss her because her work is exclusive – you can’t understand what she does if you don’t know what makes the source she’s appropriated ‘important’, and the context that surrounds it (I saw her Crystal Skull, (2010) on a recent trip to Venice, and had very little idea what it was about!) Reading about Duchamp’s Large Glass alone was exhausting… But I can’t resist the madness of her viewers needing to do homework only to find out how she has demolished the subject they’ve revised so earnestly. There is something gleeful about the obsessive dryness of her methods. And something zany about the way she finds endless ways to undermine her source.
Anyway, this was the stuff I had been absorbed with before I began my cine project. I really found it fascinating and very badly wanted to see if I could use what I’d learned in my work. Although I feel compelled to try and work through some sort of appropriation, and that the issue of the films’ lost narratives is at the heart of my work, I really feel uncomfortable about moving away from being original. Intellectually I can see that the ‘underhand’ act of appropriation has given female artists a power to say things with their work that male artists can never do. But I’m not sure how to achieve this myself, and so far the feeling of being weak by ‘copying’ is stronger than any feeling of achievement.
I think my problem is that there is no strong ‘them and us’ behind my ideas. My dissertation was about the opposite positions of women and men in the art world, but my work has become about the remembered and forgotten – which is not at all precise! This means that my work feels empty of meaning, and reduced to a series of repetitions.
Do I need to narrow my focus – maybe just deal with the lost female narratives? Or am I already up a blind alley?
