Notebook - All Things Are Always Changing

8.11.2010

Vessels - Looking at Yourself

That which makes change inevitable. In Vessels from All Things Are Always Changing

We had not posed before the camera since the mid-eighties, so we were surprise by changes wrought over 20 years. Children, surgery and free radicals took their toll. Our thoughts about age and beauty bloomed when we photographed other models who had lost breasts or other womanly organs and had gained scars and creases along the way. This is how we began our investigation regarding the representation of women, beauty and change over time.

Truly, looking at yourself separates you from yourself...a passage of the soul....

In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso discusses Kore. The young woman, sees herself reflected in the eyes of her observer...

"the meaning is twofold: she discovers reflection, duplication, the moment in which consciousness observes itself and paradoxically, that duplicated gaze is also the ultimate of fisions, it can't be divided anymore....it was in the drama of reflection that detaches itself from the body, from every object, from the earth even--to then be reunited with it's origin."

Some resources, others involved in this investigation:

Linda Nochlin Representing Women

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Feminista

Anne Ream Article ...Barb....you're paying attention

Self Magazine

Susan Suleiman The Female Body in Western Culture

Linda Nead The Female Nude

Vessels - a Natural History

the series, Vessels from All Things Are Always Changing

Natural History is the study of natural phenomena, the natural development of something over a period of time.

Our images never abandoned their identity as individual torsos, but viewed together, the amorphous and abstract became more prominent: a typology of flesh. They project a sense of "a systematic classification and analysis." This is our own natural history.

"In the midst of chaos there was shape, this eternal passing and flowing was struck into stability..."

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Vessels - Photographic Representation of the Body

from Vessels, All Things Are Always Changing

Love and Desire by Willliam A. Ewing is an interesting source of information about the ideal of "beauty" as it is manifest in the photographic medium. It is ironic that the emergence of photo as a medium came at the height of victorian modesty (prudery?)....so that female nudes were disparaged when they wore the "costume of Mother Eve." Is the realism of photographs of the female body impossibly explicit, or is it the gestures that "heat up" the image?

In order to "cool down" our original negatives, yet still invoke beauty, we used photoshop to recreate the fragmented art of rational Greeks and to eliminate gestures and expressions.

for more see post Vessels - What's with the stumps?

Vessels -The Mature Body

our most mature Vessel from All Things Are Always Changing

Dove and Evista advertisements

Thoughts suggested by Love and Desire, 1999 by Willliam A. Ewing:

o If advertising makes "beautiful women" ubiquitous, how do we determine "inner beauty" or "mature beauty" considering humanity's relentless scopophilia [sheer pleasure of looking at beautiful pictures]?

o "Beauty is our escape from the murky flesh-envelope that imprisons us" -- Camille Paglia (p 39)

So according body-loathing Paglia, the aged body becomes shameful and alludes to decay. So what exactly is beauty and how murky is this prison we wear?

o Ewing (p. 46) suggests photographs of nudes can excite, inform, attack or subvert conventions. We can see examples of this, from surrealist (misogynist) photographers onward to Mapplethorpe, Jen Davis, Sally Mann or Jeanne Dunning....

It seems the authority and self-consciousness with which photography speaks in our culture broadens the conventions. Does this happen in any way other than compare and contrast?

7.28.2010

McGuane Park Master Swimmers in West Bend

Museum of Wisconsin Art - Main Gallery

To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Contemporary Wisconsin PortraitsJune 2 - August 29, 2010

Sneak Peek Friday: Friday, June 4th, 10:30 AM

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 6th, 1:30 – 4:00 PM

The Moment: Thursday, July 22, 5:00 – 8:00 PM

We see ourselves in the mirror daily. We also see or look at images of others on a daily basis. How often dowe really pause to examine or think about what we look like and how we present ourselves to the world? This exhibition features artists who do just that: Fred Bell, Melissa Cooke, Sarah Detweiler, Tom Jones, Gary S. Kampe, David Lenz, Demitra Copoulos, Lindsay Lochman & Barbara Ciurej, Mark Mulhern, Katie Musolff and Marc Sijan will challenge viewers to look at themselves and others to see how they look to the wider world.