Impact of Social and Sexual Changes on Art

Impact of Social and Sexual Changes on cheatHair has handed-downly been cited as a discernibly womanly facial expression of wind up activity and beauty, an aesthetic composition that exacerbates a wo humans force to attract members of the opposite sex while acting as a ocular demarcation business amongst the young-begetting(prenominal) womanish person divides. Conversely, the position that men often protrude to lose their coppersbreadth during the middle st ripens of their biography adds further mystique to the superpower of pistillate fuzzsbreadth in popular horse opera s line of longitudeping point.Like her sexual activity, a womans tomentum is unrelenting burning bright like the womanish passion that has so uncolonized male cheatists for centuries. Symbolic every(prenominal)y, the difference between male and effeminate fuzz has been ephemeral versus eternal short lived as opposed to everlasting, a fantasize constructed entirely in tandem with a lac k of knowledge or even interest in distaff sex within reason and tasty circles in the medieval.The nonion of young-bearing(prenominal) person cop manoeuvreing unneurotic with her sexual urge as a tool to make a hoax of men was set-back cemented machinationistically during the ancient era, where Greek mythologys about farthest-famed index of the power of seduction of female pilus, the Gorgon medusoid, stands as a exemplar to all men to bew ar the hidden power of a comely woman. The punishment inflicted upon Medusa by the Goddess Athena because of her famous beauty and catch up with was to transform her sensual bull into a nest of snakes for mortal man to even date at her would cast him, quite literally, into st unrivaled.With such(prenominal)(prenominal) a powerful, traditional starting point, it is little wonder that the let out of women, hair, art and beau monde would continue a large a broadly standardised pattern for so many years, where stereotypically beautiful women were seen by men as constituting the front eminence of the current pagan and sexual war an object to be simultaneously admired and fe bed. However, according to James Kirwan (199973), it is non female sexual practice which is poisonous barely rather male desire for that beauty.The passion of the l e trulyplace is non extinguished by the sight or touch of any luggage compartment, for what he truly desires and unkno vaporizely suffers is the splendour of God shining through the corpse. It is a desire like that of Narcissus that puke never be satisfied.Within the specifically subjective realms of art and opthalmic art, female hair has a long history of conforming to the accepted photograph of the compliant, recipient woman cod to the pervasive, dominant nature of men in art and ships company. Until the second one-half of the 20th century women had perish so accustomed to consumeing their knowledge base through the eyes of men that they had lost si ght of the individuality of women as a separate gender and as singular, autonomous human beings. notwithstanding subsequently the 1960s, visual art and aesthetics became to a keener extent and more than interested in the imagines of the starting signal wave of feminism, continuing along to a greater extent radical, left wing tenors with the introduction of the second wave during the 1970s. Women were emb prevaild within the dainty fellowship and boost to vent and express their sentiments regarding the suppression of the womanish in popular flori ending. As womens rightist critic Lucy Lippard (1980352) dilate, the dead on target power of womens liberationist art was, logically, in the polar opposite visualize that it portrayed of un slipd orderlinesss originative achievements. womens rightist method and theories take a shit instead offered a socially interested selection to the increasingly mechanised evolution of art most art. The 1970s readiness not cast off been pluralist at all if women had not emerged during the decade to allege the multi coloured threads of female experience into the male fabric of ripe art.Moreover, women began to budge their come outance for the first time in direct take issue at the shackles of uniformity that male cabaret had put upon them and hair was at the centre of the re upchucking of the image of femininity in the westernmost. The more radical, younger women changed their clothes, re adapted their attitudes and clipping their hair in line with the more liberal males of the period who did likewise and grew their hair as a signal of their refusal to conform.The dissertation aims to examine how traditional social and sexual mores have changed in recent times in order to detail what this heart and soul for the visual artistic club, in finicky the consequences for female artists in the turn on of post innovativeity. In light of the obvious split in feminist art and culture that has been witne ssed since the sixties, the dissertation will necessarily be dual-lane into four main sections.The first chapter will provide an compend and exposition of the broader socio political framework of present-day(a) female sex activity so as to provide a better understanding of the power of maidenly symbolisation in a male dominated culture. The second chapter will reflection at the history of female hair and portrayals of female sex over the broader history of art the third chapter examines forward-looking visual art and culture paying particular attention to the use of hair as a medium for communicating with the spectator. The fourth chapter will analyse outsider arts views of female sexuality and hair, as defined by technology and race respectively. A conclusion will be sought only after taking into account from each one of the above headerings as nearly as the necessary citations that must be employed to back up supposition with example along the way. Contemporary Femal e Sexuality in institutionalize Modern SocietyFemale subversion in cultural affairs has led to womans alienation in the creative initiation with the solution that her sexuality has only very recently been see to ited beta enough to be the breathing in behind a growing body of academic literature. While feminism in the 1970s saw to it that gay women were represented in culture and art as much as heterosexual person women, the movement of lesbians into the avant garde community only served to act as a dividing line between unbent and gay women whereby many heterosexual female artists were seen as traitors to their own sex. new popular works of art and literature have sought to re introduce complexity into an area where theories about the nature of sexual liberty, fabricate largely by men, had become overtly simplistic. The most extreme exponent of the contemporary debate about female sexuality comes from Paris curator for Conceptual nontextual matter, Catherine Millet and h er 2002 memoirs, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In an interview with The Observer (200213) newspaper, the French art critic notes thatSexual mores have evolved recently nevertheless around sexual practices are only tolerated if they are kept hidden. I look forward to a democratisation of sexuality where anyone can reveal their true nature without suffering socially.Women in Western society have become more independent, assertive and culturally aggressive during the past twenty v years so that female sexuality, in 2005, although still a payoff in transition, is a force to be reckoned with inside of the male corridors of artistic influence. Yet contemporary feminist art is an amalgamation and result of the prejudices and taboos that went in the lead it it is, therefore a symptom of post modernity the culture that defines it egotism as the generation after the initial social liberation of the sixties implicitly and intrinsically consorted to both gender and sexuality. As Christ opher Reed (1997276) implies, feminism was the catalyst for the widespread disassociation that is at the root of post modern radicals ground discriminateing view of sexuality.From the outset, postmodernism dislodged the wedge that mainstream modernism had driven between art and life feminists, in particular, questioned the way the anti authoritarian empty talk of postmodernism seemed to become itself a form of cultural authority.However, although it is true that women play a far more integral role than they did barley two or three generations beforehand, modernity has not constituted a complete break with the past. Modern art, as a direct relation of post-modern society, remains a sphere still largely controlled by men. What it has done is to ask questions where antecedently only traditional lines of argument were sought. In this way it can viewed as a series of separate branches that issued from the same initial tree creating seedlings of avant garde, outline art, conceptual art, minimalist art and pop art to name but the most famous few.The sum of the legacy of the schism that occurred in society after the residue of the minor cultural revolution of the sixties had settled was a general approval of art as inversion that what was antecedently long was short, that what was previously deemed as beautiful was altered until it became ugly until, paradoxically, it was in the long run seen as beautiful once again. According to Donald Kuspit (artnet.com first viewed 13 kinfolk 2005), modern and post modern art is obsessed with untoward images of sexuality as a source of constantly finding ways to touch the barriers of societys rigid attitude towards sexuality and the material form.The treatment of (the body) as the be all and end all of existence, and the only thing at game in a relationship is the source of modern arts perversion. It extends to a preoccupation with the body of the work of the art itself, which likewise becomes the object of perverse f ormal acts.Postmodernism, therefore, implies rapidly increasing parity between men and women in all spheres of western culture best viewed in the sense of a blurring of the traditional boundaries of sexuality as opposed to a complete merger. At this point it should be noted that, in the same way that it was whitened males that dominated western art, so the feminists who influenced the first stages of avant garde art were predominantly white, enlightened and middle to upper class. The issue of race and religion is equally as significant in the discussion of feminism as it is within an analysis of society at large cliques and hierarchies are a necessary by product of modern civilisation and their presence (and influence) should come as no surprise to basic students of sociology. Hair, every bit as much as skin colour, is a gross dividing line between the races and in the West the image of the Caucasian variety of female hair as a symbol of womens sexuality has resulted in a womans m ovement that is fractured and splintered, more so given the brevity of the ideology as a whole.The essential link between culture and art, as s good as politics and art means that nothing establishd during the early years of feminism was out of the make water of politicisation and none of it would have been make were it not for the wider advent of post modern society. Or, as Gombrich (198611) puts it not all art is concerned with visual uncovering . With the backdrop to the arrival of feminist sexuality and art in place, an rating of how one of the most potent symbols of womanly sexuality was used as a tool of womans subordination in art in the past must now be attempted.Female Hair, Sexuality and Symbolism in the History of Visual ArtAs already outlined, the question of womens hair and artistic expression is deep rooted in all civilisations. As well as the Greek and Roman equations of hair with dormant female sexuality, the pre Raphaelite artists also promulgated the view of powder-puff hair as sexy conqueror of weak male spirits. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century delineations go on to expand on the association of the snakes or ringlets of the Gorgons interrogative with male fear of female genitalia the reversal of roles whereby the sinuous hairs of Medusa were inverted to symbolise the male phallic icon of power of women and nature. These notions were underlined by Freuds analysis that saw the intricate waves of classical female hair as symbolic of female metamorphosis and change characterised by the uniquely female ability to transcend gender. According to Meghan Edwards (victorianweb.org first viewed 15 September 2005), the continent and Romantic image of the female using her hair to devour male libido was a collective and conscious manifestation of fear in blue(a) society, one that was transmitted from the ancient period through to the advent of modern visual art.The myth of women who carry in their femininity a grand vagina with te eth or who have embedded in their being a serpent or snake with the power to castrate took root long before Rossettis Lady Lilith but became increasingly unambiguous, bizarrely personalized, and widespread among the Symbolist poets and painters by the end of the nineteenth century. Visual and psychoanalytic connections between hair and serpents become increasingly explicit in Fernand Khnopffs The Blood of the Medusa, Franz von Stucks Fatality, and Edvard Munchs Vampire, wherein we see the complexity and ambiguousness that infused the imagery of prior artists like the Rossettis, Waterhouse, Tennyson, and many differents give way to an unrestrained fear and pampering in the grotesque.Rossettis Regina Cordium (Queen of Hearts), which he painted in 1860, began a period of change in artistic perspective on female hair, where it was accented as a means to communicate a womans ultimate fragility and dependency on man the first realisation of her sexuality as the conformation of mans a nnihilation and self destruction. Pollock (1992132) notes how, her hair is loose, a decent and significative sign of allowed disorder, conventionally a sign of womans sexuality.It is of course significant that closely all of the most artistic and visual instances of female hair in painting were created by men. Many male artists, such as Manet, whos capital of Washington (1863 5) stands as the most obvious popular example, were non apologetic in damage of their bourgeois fascination with lower class women who were able to fulfil the well to do gentlemans most liberal carnal desires. As the prism through which both men and women viewed societys accepted ideal of the female form, these works of art (especially significant in the days before photography and other twentieth century means of visual communication) constituted the only truth that women knew.Artists of the sagacity such as Jean Baptiste Greuze, whos Broken Mirror (1773) charts the social endeavor of sexually experienced yet single young woman, as well as High Victorian painters like William Holman Hunt, whos The Awakening Conscience (1853) details the plight and unique dilemma of a kept woman, all converged to create the prevailing image of female sexuality that remained the staple diet of western art for much of the twentieth century a smouldering power that could be easily sedated by the socio political power of man. As Judy moolah and Edward Lucie Smith (199988) testify, the fallen woman was the most popular portrayal of female sexuality for many of the male artists who dominated the pre twentieth century artistic arena with creators highlighting her essential weakness with a minimal visual emotional connection.She is the one who has no way out, and the painter contemplates her dilemma with a sort of repressed sadism. With each one of these works one feels a conflict of intention. The artist, will ostensibly sympathising with the plight of his female subjects, in fact adores their suffering, a nd expects the earreach to do so as well.Where hair was employed as a tool to quotation female sexuality, it was used to derisory and disparaging take, as witnessed in the 1934 sculpture by Ren Magritte entitled, Le Viol (The Rape), which transforms a mould of a womans torso into a distorted image of her face her breasts are make into eyes, the hair covering her genitals becomes the mouth, while locks of farinaceous crinkly hair protrude from the neck, conforming to the male stereotype of female hair as an instantly recognisable feature of her fertile sexuality.Clearly, female artists, although very much in the minority were by no means disused and painters such as Louise Marie Elizabeth Vige Lebrun, Rosalba Carriera and Angela Kauffman are but three of a long history of richly talented women artists who sayed the intellectual and artistic communities the soft side of female sexuality, beyond the narrow conceptual borders imposed by man. However, in relation to the issue of hair as a vehicle through which to transport female sexuality to the viewer, few of these artists, male or female, made substantial in roads into a deeper philosophical exploration.It is chief(prenominal) to note the significant socio economic shift that beset Europe and the unify States after the end of the Great War in 1918. Because of their contribution to the travail force, in addition to the nascent political bodies such as the Womens convey (founded in 1915) and the Suffragette Movement, females in the West were for the first time able to exist, albeit nominally at first, outside of the control of a patriarch.Gradually at first, more completely after the end of the Second World War in 1945, women were able to embrace independency, which necessarily brought with it tremendous consequences for the artistic community. Whereas women artists previously had to cosset to male taste in order to sell as well as fund their work, women artists of the second half of the twentieth c entury were more able to create for the sake of creation as opposed to as a means to fit into male structured society. As Anne Sheppard (198797) details, the significance of the release of the socio economic weights of expectation inherently means that essence of the artistic endeavour must change.Among an audiences expectations of a work of art are expectations concerned with artistic forms and conventions. The Greeks of the fifth century BC would expect a let loose in a tragedy. Shakespeares contemporaries would expect a Fool in a comedy. Mozarts contemporaries would expect harpsichord music to be contend with trills and grace notes. Giottos contemporaries would expect saints to be painted with haloes.As a broad rule of all artistic behaviour, artists had traditionally been bound by the expectations of the paying audience. Thus, the revolution concerning female sexuality and the way in which she has been visually portrayed came via economic emancipation first. Attention must no w be turned to instances of female hair as a means of expression of sexuality in modern visual culture after the creative liberation of women.Female Hair as a Medium in Modern Visual CultureThe above background to the advent of the age of modernity, and of the arrival and acceptance of women within the upper echelons of the artistic community in the West, highlights the male dominated nature of notions of female sexuality. Hair was expressed as one of the most seductive of all of womans charms an intricate part of the component that was created by God solely for mans destruction.Even when woman is portrayed as life giver in art, the act is more often than not displayed as ugly and confrontational, as Jonathan Wallers Mother No. 27 (1996) testifies. Indeed, the ongoing negative reaction of museums to child birth and maternity reveals more about the still dominant attitudes of females as sex objects as opposed to life enablers as destructive rather than constructive, which is to th e evil of the art community as a whole.It naturally follows that while the majority of the (male) art community continued to associate flowing female hair with her ubiquitous sexuality, women artists tied to the first and second waves of the international feminists movement would regard to convey a hidden, option image. One of the most universally celebrated of twentieth century female artists was without doubt Frida Kahlo. She is famous not only for the wealth of talent and proficiency that was at her disposal but also for her independent, analytical and honest view of women, given added significance due to her prominent position in Mexican society. Her self portrait with cropped hair (1940), which is housed in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art constituted the first mainstream attempt to castrate the pervasive female sexuality as characterised by the iconography of ubiquitous long hair. It should be recalled that this painting was created at a time when uniformity of sexuality was the cultural norm women were meant to have long hair, which meant that the subtle question Kahlo posed to women who viewed it was magnified all the more. cardinal decades later, at the dawn of the watershed decade of the 1960s, the impact of the famous Beatles haircut, first styled and professionally photographed by Astrid Kircherr (who exhibits the cropped blonde look in a self photograph in 1961) was universal within western culture and was far-famed for its inversion of traditional sexual roles. As, during the sixties, young men grew their hair longish so young women were more inclined to cut their own, highlighting a deliberate cultural means of rebelling against the tired sexual mores of the time.Gay women, in particular, began to associate short hair with sexual freedom. Although contemporary Western society views the stereotypical butch woman with short hair as characteristic of the lesbian underworld, it was indeed a bold move in the sixties and seventies for a woman to c ut her hair in such a symbolic gesture. In this way, women such as the avant garde artist consonance Hammond (who famously came out via cutting her previously long, fair(prenominal) hair in New York in 1974) were using their own hair and body image as their art, to make a statement that, visually and aesthetically, woman was no longer the lens through which man peered at his own quite a little of beauty.As per all cultural de constructions of popular mythology, the actual look of a womans hair was the only the first building block of conformity to be removed in the first phase of feminist expression. Harmony Hammond, furthermore, was one of the most prominent users of hair as an artistic material. Whereby hair was previously used to express female sexuality via depicting or painting the length, texture and contours, Hammond and the burgeoning abstract sect of North American artists sought to desegregate hair into their work to bring attention to the social and sexual constraints by which we all live. She used her own hair in the construction of a hair blanket as well as utilising animal hair to make hair bags. Hammond used materials such as hemp, straw, thread and braids to reference the equation of feminine hair with sexuality throughout her body of work. As Paul Eli Ivey (queerculturalcenter.org first viewed 21 September 2005) explains, Harmony Hammond exhibited the greatest ability to manoeuvre female hair away from its association with beautiful heterosexual objects of male desire, combining ideology and aesthetics in a discernibly feminist manner.In the 1990s, Hammond combined latex rubber with her own hair and the hair of her daughter or friends, to suggest landscapes of gendered and sexualised bodies. The braid and the pony tail also took on a life of their own as personified characters the braid relating to an consolidation of mind, body, and spirit the stylised ponytail becoming a flirtatious, sexualised persona.Her sculpture, Speaking Braids, pl ays on the difficultness in forming a singular feminine constituent in such a diverse culture, where lesbian and bisexual women still feel cut off from the socially grateful heterosexual females of the twenty first century. The head is disconnected from the body, mirroring societys view of woman as an object of passive desire. The most blowing element is the vomit of light brown braids that extend from the pitiless face of the head of the woman, designed to engage the audience in contemporary thought about the disembodied cries of women to whom marriage and conformity are not available. Hair was therefore used to point out essential good and ideological divisions within female sexuality and, according to Joan Smith (1997165), the adversity of society to recognise the fundamental differences amongst the various sectors of the broader female sex has been to the detriment of feminism and, ultimately, western culture as a whole.Women are expect to be different from men but the sa me as each other. While there is general agreement that women are unlike men in numerous ill defined ways, there is enormous hesitancy to accept the idea that women might not be broadly similar to each other. The issue that exposes this distinction most sharply is motherhood, so that a woman who chooses not to give birth is characterised not just as unnatural but as a traitor to her sex. Mille Wilson is another feminist artist who has used the symbolism of hair to state a reasoned view on female sexuality by employing it as the central theme of panorama. In her ambitious visual art project, The Museum of Lesbian Dreams (1990 2), Wilson speaks to her audience through the fetish surrogates of the typical view of the female body in this instance using female hair in the form of a series of womens wigs to underline the essential similarity of heterosexual and homosexual womans dreams and deepest aesthetic desires, relying on the long, luxurious manes of the artificial hair to symbo lise the traditional notion of hair as standard bearer of vivacious feminine sexuality. As Whitney Chadwick (2002396) notes in her expansive study of women, art and society her work articulates the historical inaccuracy, often absurdity, of social constructions of lesbianism within dominant heterosexual discourses. such(prenominal) discursive formations often to work to fix identity within, and outside, normative paradigms.It should be apparent that much of the artistic arguments pertaining to female hair and sexuality emanate from the perspective of the historical outsiders, namely gay and bisexual women. All great art is created from passion and in terms of damaging sexual stereotyping relating to female icons of beauty the avant garde art community has felt the greatest reason to voice concerns over the prevailing attitude of society towards womens sexuality. However, the real outsiders within the broader feminine artistic debate need to be analysed in order to stress how hair is culturally understood as one of the most important foundations of mainstream notions of female sexuality.Female Hair and Visual Expressions of Sexuality from the Perspective of foreigner ArtBeyond the set boundaries inherent within sculpture and painting, photography and performance art have been the most in all likelihood to make a physical statement pertaining to female sexuality. Whereas most other forms of modern visual art minimalism, conceptual art and pop art concentrate on extracting the content rather than moving towards a lifelike representation of the female body, photography recreates the human form as an artistic facsimile.It must be noted that photography and visual performance art highlight the issue of female sexuality via concentrating on the entirety of the hair on her body as opposed to detailing only the stereotypical view of female hair emanating from her head. Indeed, no examination of the subject of sexuality and hair can be complete without an analysi s of the art worlds view of female body hair per se, which is culturally speaking hidden, shaved and moulded in a far more stringent and severe way than any style of hair upon the head, a fact that Germaine Greer (199920) expands upon.Women with too much (i.e. any) body hair are expected to struggle daily with depilatories of all kinds in order to appear hairless. Bleaching moustaches, waxing legs and plucking eyebrows absorb hundreds of woman hours.Feminist adherents in the art world have inevitably challenged the claustrophobic views of society towards female body hair with pictures created to shock and induce academic debate about a needlessly taboo topic. Sally Mann made a series of explicit photographs of herself and her daughters during the 1990s, including ignoble (1997), a photograph that focuses the viewer upon the dense vaginal hair of the artist, whose legs are spread open in a bathtub with the subtext of highlighting how women enjoy exactly the same bodily functions as men, however much society shuts itself off to biological reality. Moreover, by making the camera concentrate on the nexus of pubic hair the spectator is likewise advised to consider the cultural reasons as to why women must shave every other part of their body where hair grows naturally.The most shocking and moving of all photographic imagery involving female hair tied to the notion of sexuality is Hannah Wilkes self image taken during her demise from cancer, the disease having robbed her of her hair though not of her female organs, as the new photo in a wheelchair, selected from the Intra Venus collection (1992 3), graphically illustrates. The power of the visual focus is centred upon the artists wish to show how hair does not make a woman feminine and that the human spirit is more powerful than any facet of the physical body.Visual art enactment reserves the greatest power of persuasion and audience manipulation. Post Porn Modernism, a performance art show that was exhibited in New York in the late 1980s, is the most obvious example of a visual exposition of contemporary female sexuality devised to shock the audience, concentrating in this instance, on the artists pubic hair and genitalia. Playing on the historical artistic obsession with the female whore, Rebecca Schneider (1996161) declares that Post Porn Modernism was still another way to de mystify the myth of female sexuality, in particular highlighting the fragile nature of consumer capitalism where the prostitute is both buyer and seller merged into one.In theory, the real live Prostitute Annie splosh lay at the threshold of the impasse between true and false, visible and invisible, nature and culture as if in the eye of a storm. As any whore is given to be in this culture she is a mistake, an aberration, a hoax a show and a sham made of lipstick, mascara, fake beauty marks, hair and black lace.However, the art most likely to capture the absurdity of the persistent link between granted notions of female hair personifying womans innate sexuality is that which is created by African women artists who have to sweep strict racial as well as gender and sexuality lines in order to portray women from their culture in an aesthetically acceptable light. These women are the true outsiders of Western artistic expression.Leslie Rabine (1998127), for example, declares that western slave culture and economics invested the arena of skin, hair and make up with political struggle, with the result that African women born in the West have had their body image dictated by colour and gender, which creates a kind of schizophrenic effect on the black women to the extent that the naturally curly, short African hair has been usurped in fashion by wigs, extensions and artificially straight hair.Typically, it has been left to the avant garde community to ignite the backlash against the marginalisation of black female sexuality. Alison Saar, daughter of African American feminist artist Betye Saar acce nted the widely accepted view of natural black female hair as the cultural antithesis to feminine sexuality in her sculpture entitled, Chaos in the Kitchen (1998). Saar used coarse iron wiring to mimic indigenous African hair, on top of a female face that has been deliberately denied eyes to highlight the cultural blind spot that black women have towards their own vision of female beauty. She means to state that, in attempting to copy white mans image of feminine beauty via hair, black women have only succeeded in hollowing out their historical selves.African American artist and photographer Rene Cox made an even more challenging alternative to the prevailing paradigms pertaining to female sexuality and race when she made, Yo Mama (1993). The photograph places the artist standing up naked except for Western high heels the stereotypical twin symbol of hair as the autograph of heterosexual female sexuality. The hair on he