Playing at Perfection

Yves Klein: What a Man

Anthropometries of the Blue Period and Fire Paintings

A slew of feminist banter comes to mind while watching this piece. It is an amazing example of the male gaze and the males artistic control and cultural control over women. I often wonder what sort of woman would allow herself to be smeared with paint and then directed as to where to put her body. But it is hard to deduce seeing the time period and socially accepted representations of women in art.

I'm thinking about this type of action painting in relation to the childhood action of finger painting, where the act is taken into the hands of someone naive and unknowing... sort of like the women in Klein's works. What would a grow woman with finger paints do now? how would she pint herself? How much would she recall of her childhood freedom to draw outside of the lines?

Anna Gaskell and the Theatrics of Girlhood

Anna Gaskell and the Theatrics of Girlhood: Where Fantasy and Fright Meet.

Anna Gaskell’s work is beautiful by any aesthetic standard. Moving light, lovely little ladies and fairy tale forest scenes comprise the majority of her carefully constructed scenes. Fashion informs her shooting style and her subjects are definitely models torn from the pages of Teen Vogue. The women wear fetishized garments to carefully construct a world we all recognize from our now distant childhood –– her images are the making of a fairytale.

But the work turns us around. The faces aren’t happy. The poses aren’t serene. Everything is set up for perfection, but the moment doesn’t strike and the mood is left in limbo, creating an alternative fairy tale where the girls show their teeth, their slightly deranged eyes and their softly violent intimacy.

While Gaskell’s images might not be the perfect version of what a little girl should be, these slightly off kilter representations might be just what every little girl needs to look up to. Nancy Friday in her book The Power of Beauty writes,

"Still close to purity of emotion, children recognize in their bones exactly what the wretched stepsisters feel toward the more beautiful Cinderella, having felt the same murderous cruelty that very day toward their own bother or sister, whose golden curls, once again, won the last cookie on the plate..... Fairy tales divert children from these overly harsh accusations by giving them events and characters who represent and play out everything the child is feeling; the child no longer has to internalize the bad feelings, turn them against himself." pg 95

So perhaps Gaskell is trying to relieve us of the pressure of a perfect childhood or consequently, a perfect adulthood. Perhaps by showing us the uglier side of these beautiful little girls she is say, ‘All is not right. Everyone is not happy. But perhaps we don’t need to be.’O

On a more personal note: I enjoy Gaskell's work in relation to my own themes. I too am exploring the ways that childhood identity forms our adulthood mindset. I enjoy Gaskell's use of the unsettling, awkward and at times, violent moments that come through in the child's play and images. But throughout this their remains an undercurrent of perfection. The models are perfect looking and the images are highly aesthetisized in the way of fashion, again alluding to this higher beauty and power that stands out in images of glamour and fairy tale.

Eleanor Antin and her alter ego.

A few things I'm looking at in relation to my ballerina piece....which is turning into a video at some point.

Art 21.

Here is the link to the Art:21 on Antin. I love her comments about walking on tiny stilts (point shoes) and how grabbing a woman's crotch and lifting her up can be called art.

Antin speaks up.

I found this to be an interesting interaction between the museum archive and Antin. I also enjoy the back story to her ballerina series.

I am currently reading "Being Antinovia," Antin's journal during the three weeks in the Seventies she spent in New York, performing full time as the black ballerina Eleanora Antinovia. The memoir is funny an engaging, filled with self absorbed details from a women who thought of little else but how other's perceived her. In her writings she discusses her paranioa over people being racist or discovering she was "playing black" through her makeup. She also takes about her need to be scene, and that as a black women, she was often not served in restaurant or waited on by doormen.

although Antin plays with the idea of being a black women, the entire personae would be about race if not for the part where she was also performing as a ballerina during this time, putting on nightly shows and wandering around the city in fabulously glamorous garb. In Antin's mind, the ballerina gave her free entrance into people's hearts. Performing as a culturally treasured female icon, she hoped to receive the same attention in everyday life. The vast difference between what she expected and what she got is something that I am exploring in my work as well. For while I put on the costume of the ballerina and the princess, I know full well that I can never be the characters I assume.

But I can be a character. The key to being a princess or a ballerina is to taking their invisible, innate qualities and applying them to yourself. Then, people don't know what they're looking at, but they know they like it. By manipulating the cultural standards of femininity, and using them to your benefit you turn the tables, even if somewhat naively. This is something I am interested in exploring in my work.

The Power of Beauty by Nancy Friday

The following are quotes I'm considering in relation to my work.

"I cannot imagine a better battleground on which to examine our independance than the subject of this book –– looks, beauty, dress, the way we present our selves to others' eyes and see ourselves in all relfecting surfaces. Fashion appropriately spins like a top today, throwing away one look after another, bringing to mind the obsessed heroine of The Red Shoes, destined to dance her life away whenever she dons the slippers, which to me symbolize denial.

Women, men, none of us will ever understand or change our attitude about the way we look without going back to the source, she whose eye was our most critical mirror. She, along with father and siblings, created the primal stage on which we were cast in a role we continue to play or deny." pg 85


"Still close to purity of emotion, children recognize in their bones exactly what the wretched stepsisters feel toward the more beautiful Cinderella, having felt the same murderous cruelty that very day toward their own bother or sister, whose golden curls, once again, won the last cookie on the plate..... Fairy tales divert children from these overly harsh accusations by giving them events and characters who represent and play out everything the child is feeling; the child no longer has to internalize the bad feelings, turn them against himself." pg 95

" When children associate goodness with beauty, they simultaneously rank themselves, with their imperfect looks, as mean, bad, the worst, which becomes their secret selves, the blackness they will grow up to try to hide. Those of us who were the plainer ones often try to conceal this "bad character" with pretty finery, an exaggerated effort to please, behind which lurks the suspicion that when the who doesn't ring or the invitation doesn't arrive, the world has seen through our lovely exterior to the blackness within." pg 97

Performing Perfection

Hello all,

With this new piece I'm trying to examine the intersection between perfection and real life. The ballerina has long been seen as a symbol of feminine beauty, strength and grace. Often depicted at a whispy speck of a human, her body has been embraced by the modeling industry and standards for beauty at large. By embodying the ballerina, albeit the imperfect one, I am both producer and performer of my actions and girlish fantasies. I am taking up this costume/facade of perfection –– this goal that is attainable to so few and performing my way through it, in an effort to show the performance of everyday life, in the everyday person.

My work is becoming increainsgly about performing this perfection –– about taking signifiers of embraced since girlhood and reconciling them as a young adult. Also, showing what happens when I "real" person takes up these roles. What struggles do they have? How do they fit into the costume? How do they perform the actions they've witnessed so many time? How can I put humanity back into these ridged constraints of beauty and perfection?

The end product will be a stop animation film installed as some sort of projection...still to be worked out. That's all for now.

Marina Abamovic at the MOMA

I was transfixed by Marina Abramovic. Yugoslavian performance artists who emerged in the 70's as a powerful force for women's art, has been sitting at the MOMA n the same position for over a week now, staring at whomever sits across the table from her. She is scheduled to sit in the museum for the entirety of her show. I approached the performance from behind, seeing Marina from the back as a beautiful fleshy sculpture, and then came around to see her calm but attuned to her subject. The women sitting across from her at the present time was in her early forties, also a beautiful woman with lovely long grey hair. I circled the two performers several times moving to find the "best" angle on the action.

Marina's eyes opened and closed frequently, but they never wavered from her subject. She sat with her attention undivided, in spite of the camera flashes and a chaos around her. I couldn't help but admire the amazing mental strength it must have taken to remain so controlled... but then again, she has been practicing for this performance her whole career.

As I sat and watch the two women (the grey hair lady sat so long that the line behind her started to whisper and wonder if she'd ever leave) thinking about what was going on in each of their respective minds. As I built the narrative and dialogue up in my head I realized the genius of the silent exercise. These were my thoughts... not either of the subjects presented before me. There is no way for me to presume what they may or may not be thinking. I am left to consider my judgments as only my own. And who knows, Marina may only be thinking about how badly she has to pee.

In relationship to my work: I absorb Abramovic's use of struggle and violence towards oneself to discover oneself. I think there is an immense mental strength within her and a reflective capacity that I hope to someday achieve. I love the openness of her pieces, how she let's you fall in and out of them, taking what you will. But at the same time, she is very confrontational, forcing you to look at the horrors of self-inflicted tortures presented. I admire her gull, consistency and her commitment to performance as the most personal way of making art real for and with the audience.