The Ferocious Feminist: Watch out!!!

Is a male capable of portraying an unmasked nude woman in art? Do we always view things as being over-sexualized, such as the references to Modigliani or Kirchner as representing women with immutable masks of femininity? Will men forever more place women on this sexual pedestal? Always in the thoughts as object, victim of the sexually deprived. Is it possible for them to see women through the eyes of a woman’s, as person and not as the other? Suzanne Valadan’s paintings-as said by Mathews-: looks at how to produce cultural meaning, giving into or resisting given values and her demands as an artist from the various subcultures of class and gender to which she belonged, the bourgeois. She set up her nudes in an unconventional way, this contrary to the usual objectified bodies on display with other artists, the majority being males. And my favorite reference to how female sexuality is a masquerade, capable of being either worn or discarded and is the dutifully performed gender act of women.

Coming from the Feminist artists viewpoint, which not only battle with assumptions about women artist, but also colored artist, issues with class and alternative sexes. Mathews first introduces the fact the feminism is something that you “do” as if it were a “method.” She states feminism is a worldview, the vision of dismantling the social and cultural hierarchies of difference of past and present. Since 1987 she states three feminist art-historical politics as being: 1. Feminist politics focusing on recuperating the experience of women and women artists. 2. Practices that critique and deconstruct authority, ideologies, institutions, resistance to them. 3. Strategies to rethink the cultural and psychological spaces traditionally assigned to women.

Mathew’s example of Valadan seems to be just this. Her paintings are from woman to woman, rather than man to man. The subjects are self-content and self-absorbed, not with sexual pleasure or an overly desired look to the onlooker. It seems to me that Valadan sees a woman as if she would see her own reflection in a mirror and all women know what I mean. As if it is a photograph taken when the woman was not paying any attention to her surroundings. But if this were a male artist, then he would most certainly represent a woman who gives the look of sexual desire because this is what they see when looking at a woman, a subject posing as the object of another’s desires. And by re-examining these past artists from a feminine perspective we then see a whole another viewpoint. Honestly, I think I would have thought some of these points without thinking from a feminist perspective, but it’s always good to look at art with various methods.