Sunday, April 26, 2009

Responses for May 1


Whitney Chadwick, “New Directions: A Partial Overview,” Chapter 13, “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart,” Chapter 14, and “A Place to Grow: Personal Visions, Global Concerns, 2000-06,” Chapter 15, Women, Art, and Society, 4th ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007), pp. 378-495.

Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 486-502.

Allison Arieff, “Cultural Collisions: Identity and History in the Work of Hung Liu,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 434-445.

John B. Ravenal, “Shirin Neshat: Double Vision,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 446-458.

11 comments:

  1. After talking about Julian Schnabel, I "YouTubed" him and wasted a whole night watching videos about him and art critics. It was fun.

    These are a few of my favorite Schnabel videos (they're a hoot). The last one is a spoof with Rain Wilson from "The Office." Only watch if you have nothing better to do. I had better things to do on Friday, but......watching the "Schnabster" is like watching a train wreck, I couldn't look away.:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sajnloTFvU

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rMCNC4Fdqc

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piKPeaWLpUM

    Hilarious. I've met some Julian Schnabels at MCA, Rhodes and on South Main. There are some good ones here (MCA)— I won't mention any names.

    This pompous cretin is a happy multi-millionaire and Van Gogh (among others) dies poor, unknown and depressed. AWESOME!

    (I plan to post a pertinent response)

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  2. Cultural Collisions was a great read. Liu's works is about literal cultural collisions in her own life and work. Its about a struggle to find identity but also a reaction of education in two distinct places. She reassigns well known western paintings like La Maisons that show the subjection of women and shows us another way women in another culture have been put through the same. It brings us to another reoccurring problem of women.

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  3. I'm not sure how long it's been up, or for what purpose it's up but in the elevator to the library and that wing (not sure which one) there's a digital image of what looks to be a grocery ad that you get on weds. in the mail. Know what I'm talking about? Well anyway...it's advertising what seems to be Walmart at first glance but after close speculation on getting to my designation of the elevator...it reads "Vagmart"...if you haven't seen it, and if it's still there...you must see it! It speaks on so many levels about our class. There's meat and cheese discounts and all the types of things that you'd normally see in a grocery sell or something but not! There's vaginal, penis connotations that you must see. It's very interesting and quite satirical. Didn't mean to babble on about that...but I just know someone in our class has seen this...I tell you what...if it's still there...I'll bring it to class so those who haven't seen it can. I was like WOW! But aside from that...this isn't my post of the reading response yet...

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  4. I am familiar with Hung Liu's painting, meaning that I've seen them before--honestly without knowing that the artist was female. I recall a painting of I believe three young Asian men or boys standing on their hands or something. Not only was I interested in the composition but with the treatment of the subject matter. Quite often I'd remember seeing some of the images like that of the boys, where the paint elegantly oozing off the canvas, or looked almost as fine as hair. Forgive me...but I know of the artist, obvious not as well as before reading this article. I became fascinated that throughout her work she addresses her Chinese heritage.

    Much of her work is based on historic photographs--mediated images--showing subjects fixed in time by the camera. Her pictures, often done in series, combine traditional Chinese imagery with engagement in personal identity. Resident Alien, 1988, is a large-scale blowup of the artist's green card, with her photograph and fingerprint to identify her, and her name given as "Cookie, Fortune"--a biting comment on Americans' unthinking perception of Chinese people. I just think that was brillant and then the ironically-titled "Goddess of Love, Goddess of Liberty", 1992 contains imagery of women with bound feet, a reoccurring motif in Liu's work. A woman with bound feet has become Liu's symbol for the suffering of old China. The work is also expressive of Postmodern feminist concerns as it refers to historically acceptable abuses and "resigned fate".

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  5. When reading "The Discourse of Others," it really is interesting thinking in terms of everyone as an "Other". Understanding more about everyone around us seems different and less focused on power. I enjoy how past art compared to Postmodernism is stated in these words: "it (Modernism) proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier, its liberation from the 'tyranny of the signified'; postmodernists instead expose the tyranny of the signifier." This thought process seems like it would function well if everyone thought like that, but it seems like there will always be someone who strives for power, and maybe it's not possible for there to be anything other than "Self" and "Other."

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  6. Tomorrow is our last class this makes me sad and I will blog soon but i will miss everyone! Blogging for class was actually fun! Thanks all!

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  7. I was thinking along the same lines as Lisa. I don't understand how it is possible not to "Other" people around us. It is possible to look for similarities in people instead of differences but only to an extent. I guess its just about trying our best to include and not exclude, and respect and not objectify.

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  8. In the Discourse of Other, I really thought that the concept of recognizing that you are Others to ... others, was very interesting. We talked all semester about how male was Self and female was Other, or white male was Self, and colored was Other, but we never discussed the Self realizing it was Other. I suppose this is the old saying of putting yourself in someone else shoes. How often in life do we think of ourselves as the outsiders? It's a wonderful concept that should be thought about more in life.

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  9. If you subscribe to the convention that good art must be some sort commentary on or reaction to societies turmoil (which I kind of do)—then what can a white American man, raised Catholic in an upper middle-class suburban setting with parents, siblings and wife who are all normal and all very loving have to "complain" about via his art? Hung Liu made work that expressed her personal conflict with her native China, but much of her work was about "giving a voice" to women who didn't have one. Her paintings speak volumes. I like the idea of an artist giving a retrospective voice because I struggle with pulling things from my own life to react to.

    I found it startlingly ironic when I read the following: "depictions of passive women are not part of Chinese tradition.....they are usually engaged in some activity." The active woman, how refreshing (that was sarcasm). This depiction is an act of "charlatanism" (yes it is a word). Women were extremely passive in Chinese culture, but in true communist propaganda fashion, they are depicted as "acitve" and engaged happy beauties or workers.

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  10. Neo-Confucian Inspired Sayings
    " A woman's duty is not to control or take charge."

    "Woman's greatest duty is to produce a son."

    "A woman ruler is like a hen crowing."

    "A husband can marry twice, but his wife must never remarry."

    "We should not be too familiar with the lower orders or with women."

    "The woman with no talent is the one who has merit."

    " It will be womens neither to do wrong nor to do good. Only about the spirits and the food will they have to think."

    "Disorder is not sent down by Heaven, it is produced by women."

    "Those who cannot be taught, cannot be instructed. These are women and eunuchs."

    " Man is honored for strength; a woman is beautiful on account of her gentleness."

    "There are three unfilial acts: the greatest of these is the failure to produce sons."

    "Women are to be led and to follow others."

    "A woman ruler is like a hen crowing."

    "A husband may marry twice, but his wife must never remarry."

    "We should not be too familiar with the lower orders or with women."

    "Women's nature is passive."

    "A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself, and never weary of thinking how she may yield to him."



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  11. If you are interested in learning more about the foot binding:

    http://www.dismalaesthetics.com/boundfeet.html

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