Nude Debate

I received my invitation to the 2012 Re-Nude show benefiting Planned Parenthood, which will be Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm -10:30pm at REDUX. I wrote about it last year here, here and here, and I can't wait!

[Image: flier for Re/Nude event. Reads, "Re/Nude: Celebrate the Body / Support Charleston Planned Parenthood." To the right and underneath the text are the silhouettes of a thin woman with longer hair showing outlines of her head, upper arms, hips and calves, in purple/pink. Resting in front of her shins is a reclining thin male silhouette showing outlines of his feet and legs, torso, arms and head, in coral pink/orange.]

Around the time I received my invite I read this post by Twisty Faster. To sum up, a young Egyptian woman named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude photos of herself on her blog as a big old Fuck You to the Salafis, who are a strict fundamentalist Islamic party that seems to have come out on top following the Arab Spring. Her actions, and the considerable risk she's taking, have sparked attention and controversy a few months ago in Egypt, the Western media and feminist blogs internationally. To support Elmahdy a group of Canadian feminists assembled a nude calendar featuring a "nude revolutionary" each month with the proceeds benefiting something-or-other related to Elmahdy's cause.

Twisty compares and contrasts the contexts of Egyptian and Canadian female nudity and questions the efficacy of a feminist nude calendar within the Patriarchy. To those unfamiliar with Twisty's blog she advocates a hard-line radical feminist rejection of Patriarchy-- that is, the system of dominance, objectification and hierarchy embedded in every element of our global society: misogyny, racism, classism, and so on. (Spoiler: she finds the Canadian nude revolutionaries ineffective at challenging Patriarchy).

Drawing of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy by The Corpse Debutante.

So when I go see the artistic representations of nudity at Re-Nude this March they will be on display in the context of the Patriarchy.  I will be viewing them as a feminist and an individual person but I will also be taking into account the context of the Patriarchy. And here is where I'm torn.

Being realistic about the limitations of empowerment through nudity in a Patriarchy, refusing to gloss over capitulation to the Patriarchy, refusing to pretend a nude portrayal of a woman exists outside our tradition of oppression, pornification and objectification, is a feminist act. However valuing my own experience and POV as a woman, learning to think outside the confines of Patriarchy, and really listening to other women is also profoundly feminist. In the context of nude art created with at least some input from women and shown in a gallery for the general public, I am stuck. Ambivalent. 

Re-Nude: Part 3 (collages n stuff)

These may look like drippy paintings but they are collages by Conrad Guevara. The top one is called, "Rear Action," and the one on bottom is "Make It Rain." The fact that I don't get excited about exploring the History and Meaning of Painting through art that fetishizes painting makes me a really bad postmodernist (or a great post-post-modernist?) But where I fail Guevara steps up, and he seems to pose an intriguing question:

Lichtenstein famously made a gigantic steel sculpture that represented an Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, presented in Lichtenstein's famous cartoon-dot-and-outline style. It was a sculpture of a cartoon of the ideal painterly expression, oh-so-ironic. What if he had conceived of that piece today, informed by punk graphic art, Tokyo pop art, the Etsy marketplace, and feminist art?

While Lichtenstein was making art for galleries, public squares and modern mansions, many artists today are designing artwork for ease of shipping, for digital sharing, and for a young, middle-class, apartment-dwelling crowd. The contrast is similar to the difference between Northern (German/Dutch) and Southern (Italian) Renaissance painting. While Michelangelo and da Vinci were making theatrical, larger-than-life murals and sculpture for the tombs of royalty and to decorate the Church and the villas of great families, in the North painters like Durer, Vermeer and van Eyck were supplying the newly-created middle class with art. Their paintings were much smaller, often of domestic themes that ordinary people could relate to, and more affordable. They were more contemplative as well. Durer even had great success as a print-maker because because he could make simple artwork that was even more affordable to the middle-class.

To answer the question, Lichtenstein's commentary on the state of painting today may have looked more like these collages. The materials are (I think) colored paper and magazine pages on an acrylic background, affixed to a canvas (as in "Make It Rain") or framed ("Rear Action"). The size is appropriate for a small house or apartment, and the materials (photographic magazine pages) are familiar to an audience of ordinary people, as are the pretty candy colors and references (banal pornography and now-familiar drippy Abstract Expressionist art like that of Jackson Pollock).

The use of materials is very witty, too: printed magazines and photography have largely replaced painting and hand-made or -printed illustrations as a mode of mass artistic expression. Using a magazine to mimic paint is balls-to-the-wall ironic. But my favorite critique of "The Brushstroke" is the comparison to a spray of semen. My mind immediately went there with the "drips" covering the face of the model in "Rear Action." It is SUCH an accurate way to describe the macho post-war culture of Abstract Expressionism. I always wondered why critics like Lichtenstein stopped so short of the obvious: the Big Ideal Painterly Expression championed by Clement Greenburg and New York AbEx collectors was a sublimation of male orgasm, full stop.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go down the "Is Painting Dead?" rabbit hole.

Here's another collage. It's called, " I Love You, I Know," by Angela Chvarak. The title immediately reminded me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back with Han Solo and Leia right before he gets frozen. Then the hands in the collage reminded me of Luke's hand that gets severed, since my mind had already gone down that road. But I re-grouped and took another look.

It bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece I did in art school:

We were supposed to work along the theme, "God or Goddess," if I recall. That may be Mila Kunis' head, but I didn't know that at the time so ignore that and don't think of Meg Griffin or Black Swan.

Anyhow, Chvarak's piece looks like a flower in full bloom with arms for stamens, with a background of collage and graffiti-like paint radiating outward from the flower. In this context, "I Love You, I Know," makes sense because flowers can pollinate themselves. The piece could be a metaphor, then, for loving one's self (or, more literally, masturbation, since we cannot impregnate ourselves). It seems like more of a female construction of masturbation or sexytimes not only because flowers are symbolic of women but because women's "alone time" is often portrayed as special, sensual, an indulgent retreat from the world complete with lit candles and a bubble-bath; whereas men's "alone time" is usually portrayed as a gross, thoughtless indulgence, the way you might eat your way through an entire bag of chips out of boredom.

I don't have much to say about Chvarak's piece but it is one of my favorites. It's very fun to look at.

*If you enjoyed this work you might also like Wangechi Mutu, Robert Rauschenberg

Re-Nude: Part 2

*My apologies for the shitty photography.

Continuing what I loved about Re-Nude, here is part of Jenna Lyles' series, "Fempire / Night Vision."



I didn't immediately love this. Actually, when I first saw this hasty-looking display, I exclaimed, "What the crap?" But then I was drawn in by this glittery weirdness:


You're looking at strips of holographic stretch fabric that you might have seen on an ice-dancing or stripper costume from 1994, sewn down only on the top edge and hanging in loose strips. Above that is black fabric with a chain-mail-type texture exposing a grid of sheer black mesh beneath vinyl-type overlay. Mounted over that is a developed Polaroid with a blank image. To the left, between the fabric sections, are three repeated copies of a photo of a woman in a red wig and cosplay-esque purple lingerie, in a cartoonish "sneaking" pose. The photos are sewn on with orderly zig-zag machine stitching. The whole piece is sewn down to a raw-edged irregular scrap of canvas about the size of a notebook page and stapled to the wall on the top edge only.

The piece is obviously very playful and flashy, like a toy. But it isn't candy-colored and well-packaged like a lot of neo-Pop art and Tokyo Pop. It looks like a kid made it (sort of), but it doesn't fall into the category of cutesy childhood fetish hipster art, like the endearingly awkward, big-eyed, wolf-hide-wearing, lost-little-girl illustrations on Etsy. It incorporates crafty elements, like exaggerated stitching and use of cloth but seems divorced from homemaking, stuffed sculpture or clothing design.

What we have, then, feels very uneasy. My first instinct was to suggest that the artist either make the pieces smaller and more precious/sculptural, or large and numerous enough that they feel like a visual assault. But I keep coming back to the size and presentation because they don't resolve themselves and that experience feels challenging and fresh. And although the fabrics are wonky and unfinished, and the photos look homemade, the regular stripes and grids anchor the piece while the repetition of the colorful photos create an exciting rhythm. The small size also makes the piece seem half-hidden and private, like a radical fantasy told in a quiet voice. Functionally, the canvas is a tiny playground for the tiny redheaded heroine.

She shows up in all the pieces in the series, usually duplicated:


"Fempire:" I take it to mean, "female empire." So the canvases, as her playground, could be that empire. She could be suggesting that a woman's empire is an imaginary realm that she crafts for herself and rules like a superhero. Totally empowerful, right? But why the stripper clothes and fabrics, and why the implied male gaze? Why does she repeat the images of the woman, which usually serves to cheapen the image and efface the original, a la Andy Warhol's Marilyn? Could she be taking the opposite approach, that repetition glorifies the individual through syndicating and branding oneself? From a marketing perspective, the model has put her best foot forward by decorating herself, then has reproduced that image and displayed it in a dazzling peacock-like array.

What's more, the woman doesn't seem to rule the space, exactly. She seems to be involved in some sort of covert guerrilla tactics, which would imply oppression and fighting back. Is she trying to take back her own psychic space? Is she experiencing conflict about her own sexual fantasy? The fabrics-- purple lame, sparkly black fishnet and black lace-- suggest sexuality that caters to a male gaze. Is this the "fempire," the power of pleasing others? And is this the conflict she is engaged in? The other fabric, canvas, at first suggests a traditional artist's canvas. But in the context of covert guerrilla tactics it suggests military warfare as well. The juxtaposition of the sparkly fabric and the canvas, then, brings to mind the quote, "love is a battlefield," but also suggests common realities in which female sexuality and sex work incur violence, and where warfare breeds prostitution and sexual violence toward women.


"Night Vision." She actually wears what could be night vision goggles here. I also think the title, "night vision," refers to the nighttime fabrics that would be seen in a club or bedroom. The split title seems to reinforce the notion of conflict between female sexual domain and violence. It could simply be a reference to the conflicting urges to be vulnerable and open, versus guarded and strong when it comes to sex.

I just looked up Jenna Lyles after writing this post and it turns out she co-organized Tick Tock Blume, a small Kulture Klash type festival with the theme, "time," and her co-organizer was... Liz Vaughan, the subject of my last post and my other favorite artist from Re-Nude. Wow.

More on what I loved from Re-Nude coming up in another post!

*If you like the artwork above you might also enjoy work by Hannah Hoch, Wangechi Mutu

Edited to add: My husband has this to say about these pieces: "...I like it. It looks like a Trapper-Keeper."