Richardson claimed her protest was partly at the way men gaped at the painting, which hangs in London’s National Gallery. The painting portrays Venus looking in the mirror, turned away from the viewer with her bottom at the centre of the canvas. In 1914, the suffragist Mary Richardson attacked Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with an axe. We have to learn to look the past and its faults in the eye.”įor more than 100 years, feminists have drawn attention to sexist attitudes that exist within the art world. “My line is that the boundary between art and pornography is always a treacherous one and the point about the past is that we have to see it both in its own terms and ours. “That is a complicated question and anyone who thinks they know the answer should reflect a bit harder!” Professor Beard tells BBC Culture. So is what we are looking at art or pornography? The programme explored the many ways male artists have tried to justify the existence of naked women in their paintings: reclining nudes are depicted as innocently ‘caught’, half-bathing or somehow sleepily compromised in a state of undress. The classics professor Mary Beard asked a similar question in her TV series Shock of the Nude, which aired earlier this year in the UK. “It’s a form of feminist ventriloquism – my voice, being spoken through a third party with AAB is the equivalent of a ventriloquist's dummy.” “This way, I can lead people gently into those conversations,” Williamson tells BBC Culture. Williamson began the project as way to engage students with feminist ideas, and in particular the way women are portrayed in art. The placard bearer is ArtActivistBarbie, a Barbie doll posed in front of artworks and monuments, and the playful alter ego of Sarah Williamson, a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield. Is the Renaissance nude religious or erotic?
How black women were whitewashed by art
Gauguin’s beautiful and ‘exploitative’ portraits Another sign beside a statue in Iowa, US – of a bronze topless woman arching her back and holding her breasts as if to deliberately enhance her cleavage – reads: “Iowa as a mother figure offering nourishment to her children? Yeah.” It shows a seated man bathing his feet surrounded by a clutch of fawning semi-naked women.
At the time the Black Lives Matter campaign in the UK was drawing the national spotlight to the statues of slave traders, another activist was highlighting the way women are represented in civic statuary. “Just look at what you are being socialised to accept as normal…” says the activist’s placard, focusing on a monument outside the Trafford Centre in Manchester.
0 kommentar(er)
