The Ballerina and Her TuTu

The search for herself. from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

Ballerina Stop Motion: Bad Quality

Untitled from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

i made this video at the beginning of the quarter. The quality is really low and the ideas are quite rudimentary, but it's the basis for what I've continued to work on this quarter.

Ballerina Production Stills

Is it possible that the things that give us power also keep us restrained? Does the use of feminine beauty to get ahead also create a world where beauty is commodified and turned against those who don't have high amounts of the desired good?

I'm employing the societal models of the ballerina and the princess to talk about the slightly outmoded, but still very present "feminine ideal."

As a society, we can say that we are post-postmodern, that beauty is no longer currency and that playing by the rules only gets you so far, but that is only half the story and a naive one at that. What if playing by the rules gets you exactly the attention you were looking for. What if playing by the rules of femininity is rewarding?

Characters like the ballerina and the princess play by the rules to get their stories to turn out perfectly. But while they are getting what they want, are they not also captives of their "good girl" disguise? This duality of captivity and reward based on beauty and good girl actions is what I'm am working to visually represent.

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.