Art History Blog 411

 This week, we read "Meaning, Identity, Embodiment" by Amelia Jones. The book covers gender identity and art through Gustave Courbet's painting "The Origin of the World". The origin of the world painting is a vagina, pubes and all. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) The Origin of the World 1866 Oil on canvas Why paint a vagina? Amelia Jones book theorizes that Courbet painted this to showcase humans focus on what they see in the flesh as opposed to what makes the person who they really are, outside of their sex. To me, the focus is completely upon their genitals as that is what people from the early 19th century would have seen in women. The painting confronts the audience with this image to make them confront what they really see. The art reminds me of the classical roman sculptures and how asking the modern person what they remember about those statues isn't the artistry or the pose, it's the nudity. While there are still very many negative gender norms with...

TW; Suicide  Tokenism is created to apply a straw man to minority groups so those in the majority can mock or use them to further their own agendas of what they think is best for the group based on stereotypes. Reading Trinh T. Minh-ha's Difference: "A Special Third World Women Issue its clear that she understands how these issues affect everyone, not just African Americans."I shall, therefore, play a double game: on the one hand, loudly assert my right, as a(n exemplary) woman, to have access to equal opportunity; on the other hand, quietly maintain my privileges by helping the master perpetuate his cycle of oppression" Essentially, shes describing how she has to prove herself to be an extremely competitive woman in order to be seen as a person by others. As our society views women as "cute and docile". This cycle of what we expect from women also places an unfair expectation on men. Sexism does apply both ways, though it is much more unfair to expect wom...

 Through out history, its been in the best interest of majority groups to place minorities into groups that look outlandish and weird, so that those within the majority can treat them poorly as to not upset the status quo. This has almost always failed as people see the humanity in others that was forced out of them by their own government, through eugenics.( U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective , n.d.) This resulted in tokenism, or the act of helping a person within one of these groups as to appear avoid critique from ones own group. For example, if I had a band and we were critiqued for not having any minority members then out of nowhere, I just found some random person to "represent" that particular community? That would be tokenism and its harmful as it only encourages one aspect of a group, typically a stereotypical aspect, to be portrayed in a group. This is done to appeal to what they think will appeal to th...

 This week we discussed authorship and its role in how people interpret authors work. One of my favorite "authors" is Fumito Ueda. While he is a video game developer, his roles in development range from director to lead animator. What makes him so interesting in the world of authorship, is how little is known about his life and how he hides his influences. As stated in a interview with The Guardian in 2016, "From my perspective, I just say, here, go ahead, play it – then at the end, the player can come to their own conclusion about what the game is trying to tell them. I don’t like to force feed themes.”(Stuart, 2016) This is perfectly clear in his games as there is almost never a user interface or the user interface that is available, is kept to an absolute minimum. Two examples are within ICO, where the player is placed into an open area and expected to press buttons to figure out how to play. On the more direct side of things, Shadow of the Colossus has instructions a...

 Auteur theory, or the idea that the person who creates the more iconic part of a piece is the "author" of the piece. This can lead to people searching for what inspired the artist to create their work and placing much of that value in their biographies. Some passing even that happened when they were a child, suddenly becomes a huge iconic part of their lives that defines their success. Depending on how dangerous the "defining" event was, people may even try to replicate it, in hopes to be just like their heroes. People value the work they consume because, for some of them, it changed their ideas on issues or helped to support them through a rough time. Unfortunately, authors are people too and they can say and do things that the fans may question so they attempt to remove the author from their work.When this happens, the reader can see the more surface level themes of the book that they may have been blind to when they were, well, blindly supporting the author. An ...

In many medieval art pieces, the prominent actors in the piece, were white. However it quickly became a tradition to portray Balthazar, one of the Magi who brought gifts to Christ, as a black man. The reason Balthazar is black, is because Christianity sought to portray itself as a world wide belief ( Taking A Magnifying Glass To The Brown Faces In Medieval Art.) Though this just one example of a black person in Medieval art, it is one of many that has had the black person, cropped from the painting when it is reproduced in textbooks. Since history is easier to explain for white people when black people are excluded. Unless its something where many white people died, the African community is largely ignored through history. Bell Hooks book discusses how history has been altered for the white male perspective. While media and television have an impact upon African Americans, the inability to even see themselves in school. The whole ordeal seems excessive and unnecessary, its not as thou...

 Cinema has changed significantly from 1992, when the book In Black Looks:Race and Representation by Bell Hooks, was written. In chapter 7 of the book, Bell hooks describes how people of color have been seen through media. A great recent example of a movie where a black female character is empowered and is an example of a non stereotypical black character, is the 2019 horror movie, Us. In the film, Adelaide defends her family from doppelgangers that have appeared and begun killing people. The idea of the gaze plays a major role in the film as the doppelgangers often stare at the family or vice versa. To pull a quote from In Black Looks, "The politics of slavery, of radicalized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze" In the film, the right to gaze is literally denied to the doppelgangers as they dwell under the earth. When one of them finds the surface, it is through a fun house mirror revealing their "other" on the opposite side ...

 The male gaze is something often discussed for visual arts such as movies or paintings. However, music has also used the male gaze to describe women as sexual objects for heterosexual males. While there's a slew of songs describing how men would "go down on women" I think the best example of how men view women as sexual objects comes from the song The Girls of Porn by Mr Bungle, released in 1991. The song is about a man masturbating to a porn magazine, the women are a literal objects, pages for the narrator. Here is a link to the song itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7x_uBcg3DE The song describes the women featured on the pages of the magazine, but ends with the narrator saying how he was trained to have sex with the women in the magazine. It's a great song in terms of its melody, beats, and instrumentals, though the way the song ends, has the implication that hes "training" himself for having sex with a future partner. Is it one of the girls in the ...