Art in context - gender

Gender refers to the roles, characteristics and activities that distinguish men and women. It used to be thought that gender was innate – e.g. if you were born female you would do “female things”, however opinions about this began to change in the middle of the 20^th century when some people began to believe and realise that gender was socially constructed i.e. if you were born female, society expected you to behave like a female, in our culture that was wife, housekeeper and mother.

Many artists have used their work to examine, question and criticise the gender stereotypes.

 
This began early on in the 20^th century with artists like Claude Cahun. Cahun (1894-1954) was born as Lucie Schwob and adopted the gender ambiguous name Claude Cahun in 1917. They were a French photographer, sculptor and writer. Their work was both personal and political and often undermined traditional concepts of static gender roles. Their self portraits emphasised the fluidity of gender by refusing to adhere to masculine or feminine characteristics. Many of Cahun’s portraits feature the artist looking directly at the camera, head shaved, with often only the head and shoulders on show. Cahun blurs the gender indicators and behaviours. This was revolutionary at this period in time. In their autobiography, Cahun says – “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” Cahun didn’t want to be famous, the work was made for personal reasons, to pursue their identity and fulfil the need to be creative, and Cahun was in a position to be able to work for no money. I imagine Cahun would have struggled to market these images at that time.

 
Another example of a revolutionary self portrait was by Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954). Her Self Portrait with chopped hair 1940 shows her looking like a stereotypical man with her chopped hair all over the ground – she had split up from her husband. She used a folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society.

 
As the feminist movement gained momentum in the 1960’s and 70’s artists continued to challenge the traditional roles of women especially women in public and domestic settings and conventional standards of beauty.

Laurie Simmons (American artist born 1949) used the camera as her medium to recreate the “perfection” of post WW2 households. She staged scenes with dolls to do this. In the Blond/Red Dress/Kitchen from the series Interiors 1978 we see a female doll in the kitchen. As well as showing the idealised vision of a housewife at that time, it showed the confining role that women are expected to fill.

 
Simmons’ series “Walking and Lying Objects” 1987-91 involved her attaching legs to “objects” and the transformed women  paraded across a stage as if they were in a fashion show – the point is that they were identified as the object, not as themselves. The objects were things like dollhouses, cakes, guns and musical instruments. Simmons’ fascination with dolls began in 1972 when she found a vintage dollhouse. This was during a wave of feminism when dolls were considered by some as a way of subtly indoctrinating girls into traditional female roles.

 
Cindy Sherman (born 1954) is an American photographer and her work was all self portraits in the sense that she was the model of her photos, however she would be depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. An art critic commented that being a woman is always a performance. Sherman helps the performance along by always reacting to something out side the frame hence she is acting.

Sherman made a series called "Complete Untitled Film Stills” in the late 70s. This is a series of c.70 black and white photographs of herself in many of the roles of women in performance media. These photos were characterised by not following the conventional ideas of marriage and family, and by this she is calling attention to the objectification of women in the media.

 
Again in her series Centrefold 1981 Sherman draws attention to the stereotypes of women in film, television and magazines. In Centrefolds she said she was trying to make the male viewer feel bad for looking at an image of a woman they expected to desire, but instead saw a victim.

 
This wasn’t all confined to how women were viewed, artists at that time were also exploring the stereotypical image of masculinity. American photographer Richard Prince (born 1949) created a furore by photographing photographs of Marlboro adverts and cropping them and essentially passing them off as his own, saying he had taken the photograph. The romantic image of the rugged masculine cowboys on their horses had been used to sell cigarettes and Prince stole that image. His image, Untitled (Cowboy) which was a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $! Million.

Gender politics has moved on in the 21^st century however is by no means resolved yet. I feel Cahun would have fitted in well into the 21^st century however in reality they might not have been given a second glance. The pioneers of social change tend to be the people we remember.