Aaron Post 6

Aaron Childree

The struggle for women to gain an equal footing in all aspects of society is one that has been going on for much of history. While some of these issues (women’s suffrage for example) were resolved long ago, some areas of society have taken a much longer time to allow women in to their historically male-dominated culture. Art is one of these fields of study. This is because, unlike voting rights, you cannot just pass a law that gives women an equal opportunity to create and make known their art. While the playing field, in respect to gender, is slowly being leveled in the visual arts, doing so requires the rejection of thousands of years of patriarchal tradition. Mary Devereaux argues that in order to give women the respect they deserve in the visual arts, we cannot just add their names to a list of well known artists, we must undergo what she refers to as a “conceptual revolution” (p.125).

One of the major influences gender has on art is that it traditionally looks through the male lens. This idea of the “male gaze” is one of the most important concepts to understand when talking about the role gender plays in art. Feminists would argue that not only is art literally from the male point of view because men are making it, but also that when women do make art it still assumes a male gaze because of the patriarchal ideas that have been engrained in their heads from birth. Because of this, women are seen as objects in most art. Men can be identified by intellect or athleticism or any number of things, but women can only be evaluated according to their beauty and, essentially, their worth to men. Mary Devereaux references Laura Mulvey on this subject, saying that “man is the bearer of the gaze, women its object” (Devereaux, p.121). A perfect example of the objectification of women in art is shown in the first image above, entitled Birth of Venus. This work of art was painted by Sandro Botticelli in the year 1444. The sensuality in this painting is very obvious and shows that women have been seem as objects in art for hundreds of years. Another example that is more recent is Amedeo Modigliani’s painting Reclining Nude (image #2) which was painted in 1917. The woman is lying down fully exposed (as the title suggests) and has a very seductive look on her face. This painting supports Devereaux’s idea that the male is assumed to be the spectator of art. The women is again shown as an object of beauty for the male eye.

Another major influence is the long and sometimes seemingly unbreakable patriarchal tradition that has run and still runs (although maybe to a lesser extent) the world in which we live. If you just take a quick survey of well-known artists throughout history, you will find a remarkably small number of women mentioned anywhere. This has raised the question of why women are not making large contributions to the visual arts. Is it that women haven’t been given the education and resources to create “great” art, or is that they have created “great” art, but were not able to promote it as well because of their lack of standing in society? Most people today would argue that there were plenty of women creating art on par with the men of their time, but their art was still considered inferior because as women they were “out of their element” as artists. Women were supposed to do practical things like cooking, house-keeping, and raising the children. Devereaux gives lots of examples of how the idea of the stereotypical house-wife is promoted through Hollywood and the film industry. On p.128 Devereaux gives examples of different ways girls are portrayed in the movies and then shows how all these portrayals are there to promote the notion of the “good girl” as a “dutiful daughter who preserved herself” and the bad girl as someone who “flaunts her sexuality indiscriminately”. This shows that women are still being identified by there involvement (or lack thereof) with men. An example of art that portrays this struggle is The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo (the third image above). Kahlo was in a horrible car accident at age 18, and lots of her art focuses on the pain she went through recovering from that accident. This painting shows her tied up in bandages and presumably wanting out. This could be seen as the artist’s way of saying that women artists are being held back and that they want to escape and be free to express their ideas on the canvas. The bandages holding her back and causing her pain are the patriarchal tradition.

Gender has played a large role in the history of art and the overall study of aesthetics. I think making it easier for women artists to express themselves is an important step that needs to be taken, but it is also important to remember that feminism isn’t gender neutral either. While most feminists only claim to want equality between men and women and nothing further, the idea of feminism comes with an inherent bias towards women. We should see feminism as a movement created to bring the “gender spectrum” back to neutral, not as an extreme movement trying to turn the tables and create a female-dominated society. On p.139, Devereaux states the feminist movement’s role as “a means of resistance” and also talks about the bias associated with feminism when she claims, “so too a feminist perspective is not, nor should it be regarded as, politically neutral”. It is the idea of tradition and resistance that keeps us from going too far in either direction on the political spectrum, and feminism is an important part of that equation.