Pertinent Quotes

In various ways, I feel like these quotes relate or inform my process of thinking, making and acting out.

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object –– and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1972), 47.

“A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude towards herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste ––indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 46.

“…Broadly speaking there is a general tendency to endorse the idea that the individual subject as such is inseparable from the condition of being the subject to; for example, subject to ideology (of which gender ideologies are a significant instance), the state, commodity culture, and so forth.

Lisa Gabriella Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 337.

Nochlin writes, “Women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.”

Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays.

“Giving our bodies over to others to do as they want with them is a form of collusion in our own continuing infantilization.”

Dawn Ades and others, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self Representation, 13.