Wednesday, April 24, 2013


-Charlie


Something that is a constant battle is the fight for gender equality. Their is a double slandered on gender equality. The social standard is that a boy should have a since of masculinity. A boy never cries, he plays sports, he is imprisoned in social prison. If he decides to to vear from these norms he is outcasted and often called "gay" just because he is different. This is compleatly different for women, they are either very feminine or a tomboy they are not normally looked at differently. The social standards need to change everyone should be equal, it is the 21st century it is not that big of deal anymore.

-Charlie
The End of the Painted Road...

Charlie and I have had an eye opening time learning about all of the different things that we have discovered during out time researching for this project. Prejudices ideas and judgment definitely play a huge impact on the art community. Whether it is women, men, transgender, homosexual or etc., there are different options in each a object group, some that I found obvious and others I was taken back with. Women discrimination was a new thing or us and I for one did not like the idea of women being judges for the type of work they want to display right along with the men. I appreciate that people that are being discriminated against have taken a somewhat harsh approach to whatever they wanted I convey to the audience through paint. The same for photos. Because photography is such a modern outlook on a expressing art nowadays, people have become more comfortable with expressing then selves through that medium. It was interesting to see all the ways that art has evolves for both painting and photography and how people have taken advantage of that fact. New ideas are being openly discussed through art each day and we feel it is important to acknowledge such work. It forces people to visually either accept/deny what they are seein new but for the most part it really opens up people to topics such as these that they are not comfortable with yet. We took a little bit of a too open ended approach to our subtopic idea and we should have coordinated out posts a little bit better to make a easier pathway for people to go through when looking at out posts. Overall we had a good time learning new things.
-Justine Samaha And Charlie Staley

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

I Went to the Garden of Love...

During my research I came across a link to a photo that caught my eye. The title of the photo is "I Went to the Garden of Love" done by Evelyn Williams. A fellow blogger posted a topic dealing with her heart and said that it is the epitome of tenderness and gender biasness that is what really makes Williams work in this special. I have to agree because the gender bias idea is what originally caught my attention with this piece. We see the gender norm fashion of a woman kissing/embracing a man but then there is some homosexuality going on where men are trying to embrace other men but the women are keeping them form doing such. Does this have meaning behind it or what? I believe that this piece gives off the idea that communities are stuck in this "gender norm" idea and it keeps people from doing what feels right to them when it comes to them.

I think the women represent the gender norm that people tend to be stuck in and them pulling the faces of the men that are trying to embrace the other men away is the impact that expectations and tradition has on people. The same goes for the women in the case that they try to embrace the women but are being pulled away by the expectant man. What do you guys think of this? Are we too stuck in the gender norm way of thinking that people are reluctant to fight for what they feel is right? Do people try to keep others away from fulfilling their own desires if it's not what they want/believe is right?

-Justine Samaha

Here is where I found this
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/philbarcio/

The Guerilla Girls Step Up

I thought this was something interesting to read about. Lately during my research I have been finding a lot of things on discrimination against women and painters comparing them as lesser versions of male artists. Personally I have a hard time with this topic because one) I hate sexism and two) what does gender have to do with the quality of someone's technique? This article, called women Artists Still Face Discrimination by Eleanor Bader from Truthout, talks about how an anonymous group known as the Guerilla Girls went to a museum recently and found it insulting lacking woman artists. A good portion of the nudes were of women as well and this brought up a big dispute that the women confronted. They believe that because corporate businesses and art markets play a huge part in the investment in art exhibitions like this they have a greater portion in what type of art should be shown. they basically dictate what is to be shown and what is not and if this is the case, the women of the Guerilla Group want to know why a good lot of the art pieces are from men and use women as simple objects to view. These women take on the name of some past artists that stood for such a thing, like Frida Kahlo (an artist that I mentioned before hand). I think this might be a good to look into if you art interested in the art community because I think if enough people/groups like this publically point out flaws in systems like the art market, then maybe something can be changed.

Here is a link to check it out!

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8971-women-artists-still-face-discrimination

-Justine Samaha

Woman artist/painter struggling, from the article mentioned above.


This image is from CREGS but also known as Center for Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality and this exhibition was created to bring light on issues related to gender and sexuality. CREGS decided in march that they were going to create an exhibit of photographs that were submitted by their followers. With in weeks they had images from all over the world that shows peoples openness with sexuality. I strongly belive that people should be more open with sexuality.

-Charlie


Saturday, April 20, 2013

What makes a painting sexual?

An article that I read recently discussed the very topic on spatially wise what characteristics represent sexuality. I've always been curious about this idea because I've never really had a handle on what things in a painting actually make it a sexual painting compared to others that may have the same but are considered not sexual in any way. The article was written by Majella Clancy and Louise Wallace called Paintings, Gender and Space: Aspects of Contemporary Women's Painting Practice in Context. Based on the experiences that Clancy has with taking paint and applying it to photographic imagery and thus creating the idea of sexual differences, spatial usage, and identity within culture (factors that are similar to artist such as Ellen Gallagher and Shahzia Sikander), there are still some aspects that leave the artist in more of a uncategorized area even though a lot of these factors put it in the modern/post-modern area.

This is called Oil and Space II by Majella Clancy, with multiple pieces showing her experiences through sexuality, race, culture, personal emotion, family etc. by digital scans, photography, and an overlay of paint.
 
Throughout the article, Clancy makes some interesting connections to her statement. Some of the work that she has done through her stay at an art industry for the purpose of research for this article connects because it takes multiple pictures from different cultures within her life and corporates them into a spatial design that represents whatever she is trying sell in her piece. This includes a digital scan of her life dealing with the Sri Lankan Culture, old photos from her Irish side of the family, etc. Art pieces like these and other from similar artists as mentioned portray the artists cross-culture experiences as she said in her beginning statement. It is all in the way that Clancy displays each piece that shows the point she in trying to make in her piece. I never really thought that it would be that simple art wise but I am so used to painting and something more complicated being on the canvas (not that this isn't complicated) that I've become simple minded and closed off to the idea that the idea that you are trying to convey can be simply expressed through the physical feel of the idea, meaning positioning something on the canvas that in a way shows what the idea feels to you. I believe that this is what Clancy is trying to point out.
 
 
This point is made by Leo O'Donovan's article "Lifting the veil: symposium, controversial exhibit explore gay identity in art". O'Donovan explains the exploration that him and his colleagues went through with their own pieces that helped express their gay identity at the time that they were questioning it. He just used painting though as a way to portray this instead of it actually being physical things used like Clancy did. What both artists did was used the space setting of the frame for their work and combined it with the ideas that they want to communicate to make a piece that expressed whatever they were feeling.  Clancy and O'Donovan believe that it is the emotion behind the art work that is important. Without that, the piece is lifeless and can't really get a good show on what it is meant to be. The fact that they do different types of work though certainly might put an impact of their similar thoughts compared to if they were to both be working with the same type of art material.
 
I found this interesting because a lot of people seem to be finding a similar idea to expressing their own identity and sexuality through art. A blogger that I came across during my research names Elizabeth De Leon did a post on how she used painting as well as a medium for expressing her thoughts on her self. While this is not exactly as interesting as Clancy's art medium due to it's simplistic material, it is still an interesting idea because like Clancy and O'Donovan, she uses the color theory to portray emotion through her pieces.
 
This painting was done by Sonja Schenk from De Loan's collection expressing what Schenk believes to be on the inside of herself, capturing her soul.
 
Other artists such as Frida Khalo have used such expressionism as well to convey their belief in themselves. Her usage of it mostly discusses the affect that her experiences throughout life have changed her but the principle it still the same. She still seeks to show viewers how using something physical (even a thicker application of the paint) can really show how people can express enough emotion and thought behind a flat canvas with whatever idea they want to show.
 
-Justine Samaha
 
Sources:
 
Clancy, Majella. " Paintings, Gender and Space: Aspects of Contemporary Women's Painting Practice in Context" A Interdisciplinary Journal. 41:8 (2012) 959-975. TandFonline. Web. 20 April 2013.
 
O'Donovan, Leo. " Lifting the veil: symposium, controversial exhibit explore gay identity in art " National Catholic Reporter. 47.9 (2011) 19, Academic One File. Web. 20 April 2013.
 
Admin. "The Exploration of Identity through Self-Portraiture by Raymond Roca." Niram Art Magazine Articles in English. Defeses Fine Arts, n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2013.
 
De Leon, Elizabeth. "Rhizome | Identity - Expression Through Multiple Mediums." Rhizome | Identity - Expression Through Multiple Mediums. Rhizome, 2011. Web. 22 Apr. 2013.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 




 

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Battle Between the Sexes.

"...Gender stereotypes in art are just another form of identity theft..."

- Bob Duggan

Hey Guys! So last time I left of with the hope that I would be able to find some more modern painters that approach the topic of sexuality and/or gender and unfortunately I have not really found a piece that really captures my attentiton. So I decided to look at the more older paintings that might capture me. I stumbled across something interesting in my research and while the piece itself may not represent gender or sexuality in any case, the idea and situation behind the painting is definitely soemthing to think about.

The picture above is an art piece done by Jacques-Louis David during 1801 called Young Women Drawing.  A lot of people find this drawing to be one of his most interesting pieces until a recent discovery has everyone questioning whether or no this is actually one of his pieces of work at all. Experts believed that this piece is really the work of a woman named Marie-Denise Villers. A funny thing about this situation though is the duality of credibility that went along with the question of who was responsible for this piece of work. Apparently, when the artist that was repsonsible for this painting was titled David, many people showed interest and value in the artwork. But once Villers was named the actual artist, the art piece was not given a lot of thought. This brought into question for many people, including fellow journalist Bob Duggan, whether male painters (or artists in general) get more credit for the "stolen" artowrk that they create than the real female artists themselves.

An interesting result in this questions was the experiemnt that the Deleware Art Museum came up with, where people did a poll of whether art pieces belonged to female or male artists. A good question that came up was whether or not discrimination was amonst ourselves when looking at art that specicifically had a masculine feel to it. The whole point of this experiment was to prove that we cannot truly "see" gender within art and instead we immediately jump to conclusions and stereotypes based on opinions and experiences regarding who does what kind of art. On May 19th, the results were posted on the voting done by the male and female visitors. The ending results came back as about 50% of the art pieces guessed correctly on the gender of the creator. It was thought that the guesses above 70% indicated that the artists style was heavily representing their own gender traditions, guesses that were somewhere between 60% and 40% were the art pieces that artists tried to go out there with and take a chance, while the pieces that were guessed correctly that were under 40% correct showed completely opposite traditions for the gender style in art (Dobrzynski, 2011).

I looked further into this to see if there might be another cause for such results. Was there a specific reason that people were mistakenly guessing men's work for females and females for men? I found a journal article written by Wanda Corn that discussed such a controversy between female and male painters and I have to agree with her conclusions. An artist that Corn focuses on in her journal article is a well known mural painter Pieree Puvis de Chavannes. Corn states that Puvis is a well respected artist that is appreciated by men for his protrayel of the every day life of men vs. women: men being represented as the strong, skillful, thinkers and women being the fragile, small, do-nothing but care for children type of people.

Women (and myslef in this case) disagreed with this depiction. The painters that used Puvis as a reference for thie inspiration ( two women named Mary MacMonnies and Mary Cassart) showed this difference in idea through their own paintings, showing women the strong and working type while reducing men to the sit-at-homes. Corn used these two women as examples because their works of art showed that women as a sex could do their own (Corn, 2009). But it is not just the idea alone that makes the art work different between Puvis and MacMonnies and Cassart. It is the handling of the brush, they wayt he figures are shown on the canvas, and the overall feel to it. Puvis has a peaceful yet masculine feel to his paintings, something you can undoubtlyfully recognize as male. Cassart and MacMonnies are sure in their brush strokes as well but you can tell by their pieces that a female hand created it. I am curious if the same sort of principle is being applied while testing the visitors at the Deleware Art Museum. Did some art pieces have a certain stroke to them, a certain idea, a specific feel to it that made it seem more female than male? Or vice versa? Is this the reason why the random test subjects mistook some female artistry for male artistry instead: female artists are approching a new way of art with a more masculine/dominant feel that people are so used to men having?

The last question though brings up some more interesting topics of discussion. How does an art piece have a male or female "feel" to it? Like I mentioned before, the idea behind the art piece plays a big part in the overall image of the art work. Gudrun Helgadottir points out a good example when she talks about pronogrpahy art. While the art topics don't have anything in common (with Puvis' piece being about the peaceful country side and Helgadotirr discussing pronogrpahy through art) I think the same principle certainly applies here. Puvis' created a piece that men could mostly connect to. Hegadotirr taks about how pornogrpahy through art is certainly created for men as well (at least it is assumed so). What modernist people cannot get over now is that other artists (women specifically) are starting to develope the idea of taking men's ideas and fascinations and transforming it through a woman's touch when a canvas is applied. Maybe this is another reason why people mistake women work for men's and men's for women's: they are too stuck in the idea that women paint about certain things and men about others (Helgadotirr, 1991).

Personally, I thought that the mueseums attempt at proving whether or not people nowadays display discrimination towards was certainly worth looking more into. I think I've thought of the same question occasioanlly when looking at different pieces but have not really extensively approached the idea any further. I'm not too sure if this really represents the opinion of people when it comes to gender in art. Maybe some more tests could be done witht he same idea behind it. It bothers me that not a lot of people voted in the first place. I'm not really sure what I was expecting though for the results. I think maybe about the same thing that the results showed: a mixture of thoughts on who's work is who's. But whether or not these results really prove anything, I think it's something interesting to look into. Does society allow gender stereotypes and traditional ideas cloud their ideas on change when it comes down to something not being part of the norm? Do we give too much credit to a certain gender when it comes down to art work?  Who knows.


Sources:
Duggan, Bob. "Identity Theft: Seeing or Not Seeing Gender in Art." Big Think. N.p., 09 Mar. 2011. Web. 06 Mar. 2013.

Dobrzynski, Judith H. "In The Battle Of The Sexes, Results Show We're Often Wrong." Real Clear Arts: Search Results. N.p., 09 Mar. 2011. Web. 06 Mar. 2013.

Corn, Wanda M. "Gender." The Smithsonian Institution. 23:1., Spring 2009. (Pg. 25-26). Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

Helgadotirr, Gundrun. "Gender Issues in the Art Education." National Art Education Association. 32:4., Summer 1991. (pg. 248-249). Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

-Justine Samaha

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Gender and Sexuality: Painting

Hello Bloggers. I am writing a personal post for the Gender and Sexuality: Arts section to talk a little more specifically with my topic, painting. Now as I mentioned before, artists have played around with the idea of introducing sexuality and gender into paintings for generations. The type of art that I will be specifically looking at is the art that depicts the human body's sex: male, female, transgender, etc. I hope that I can find some interesting art pieces to share with you all that artists have shared with us. I really want to give you guys a chance to observe paintings that point out sexuality and gender in an obvious way. My hopes is that people start to think about what the artists saw when creating their pieces, how did they view sexuality and gender themselves through art, and how did they portray these terms. In my opinion, paintings like this show us a lot of interesting things on how people viewed sex from back then to times like these. The idea of sexuality has certainly grown along with the definition and some artists boldly took the opportunity to record these changes, something I have had an appreciation for ever since I got into art. Through my experience so far, I have seen paintings depict woman as delicate, feminine, fragile, and soft while the men hard, dominant, and bold. While these labels can be accurate in some cases, one of my hopes is to find pieces that really explore homosexuality, cross-gender, and non-stereotype captured pictures of people throughout the world. I feel like we don't really focus on paintings like these and more on the paintings that depict heterosexual men and women. The paintings that I have seen really try to approach this type of branch in sexuality and gender has been painted by the oldest of artists like this Euaion painter from ancient Greece (example of their work is the picture posted). I would like to find some more modern painters that have taken on these terms into their pieces. Hopefully you all can developed some appreciation if you haven't already for art like this and come to accept more pieces similar to these. I certainly have overtime. After all, as Pietro Aretino stated, "why should I be ashamed to describe what nature was not ashamed to create"?
-Justine Samaha

The artist of the painting is unkonw since the timing was such a while back (circa 460-450 BC). It is done by using a technique called red-figure style where the background is filed in with black pigment and helps outline the figure and details. The painting itself is a tondo (circular painting) and it depicts a young male playing an aulos at a banquet. An Aulos is a muscial "flute" that was sexual in it's origins in that it gave the player the ability to do anythign it wanted to the person listening. In this photo, homosexuality is expressed through the young male that  is playing the aulo to another male in the hopes of making the male succumb to his whim. Homosexuality was openly expresed in such an innocent and sometimes discrete way (for the male listening appears to be in pain whereas he is actually woed by his male player) and I hope to discover more art pieces that showed such preferences dating all the way back then like this.
 

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Hey fellow bloggers! We are Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley and we will be focusing gender/sexuality and art. We both have had a lot of experience coming into this field so it should be fun to expand on it a little bit and become more open minded with what we find. Charlie will be posting about gender and sexuality in photography. It fascinating because not one person may have the exact same views as another. For example when Charlie was in Spain visiting The Rein of Sofia in Madrid he saw this photograph by an unknown artist. He can't find a copy of this photo. This was an abstract photo, at first glance it looked like a view of Paris in the winter, one could see a ruff view of Le madam of Paris also known as the Eiffel Tower, Then he saw a strait couple, a lesbian couple and gay couple kissing. Then he realized that this was a collage of photographs to make 1 giant photo. This collage was huge, probably about 10 by 15. When he stood back at this photo it was a giant LGBT logo and Love was in the foreground. he found this image to be very motivational and empowering, even me being a strait male he was glad that this artist did this. Charlie plan to post images and a brief synopsis for each photo, stay updated and you will see my views on the images and I would appreciate feedback.


My posts will be talking about gender and sexuality and incorporating these two terms into the art of painting. From my learning, art has been a huge playing card in the visualization of gender and sexuality for centuries. From the depiction of what sex and gender is to the striking paintings of how people view these two terms, art has taken sexuality and gender into its own form of expression. Sexuality and gender was introduced into the art society around the 1920’s shortly after film production began. Of course, sexuality and gender was displayed in art pieces by many artists before this time from the Victorian era. Sexuality and gender took a bigger step into the obvious world when photography and film was introduced though.  It was put into a more realistically visual outlook for people that didn’t really pay attention to it before while in paints and sculptures and this drew some concerns. Sexuality and Gender in such an obvious way became heavily protested against. It went to the point where art dealing with gender and sex of any kind became prohibited against some viewers. However, as the years went on, people began to feel more comfortable with the idea of dealing with such an abrasive point of view on sexuality and gender. Many even looked the idea of expressing these two terms through such a way as a learning experience through the eyes of others.




As art developed, it became more and more part of our lives, encouraging people to acknowledge it more daily as well. Once art in this matter began to first cshow itself to the world, ertain art forms were confined in ways that they limited visual ideas. Paintings of such things were usually of men only, films of sexual acts or gender were restricted to men’s eyes and photographs of sexuality were scarce. But these restrictions lessened and lessened as well. People began to bolding paint women in such promiscuous forms, women could see the films that expressed sexuality and gender roles so explicitly and photographs became the stand stills of breath taking moments that poured of sexuality in our lives. Then the question of gender really began to take play in art. What was gender? What did people see when they thought of the term? How does it feel? Art boldly took a turn to begin showing what gender meant to people. Taking on ideas of people being straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, bi, etc was another big step in the art society. This is what draws me to the topic of art; the boldness of people's ideas being blatantly placed onto a canvas. I've always thought that art was interesting, being an artist myself. But I have never really taken the time to look at art through the perspective of sexuality and gender. In my posts, I will be discussing art pieces that I find respresent these terms well that I think people will think interesting over the time of my research.

It will be fun working with each other because again, Charlie and I have some personal experience with art and it will be interesting to see how by the end of the term our opinions of the matter might change. Any feedback is welcome of course and we look forward to exploring. Happy blogging!

-Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley