Lecture IV
Chaudhuri, S. (2009). Feminist film theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis,Barbara Creed. London: Routledge 31-44
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16(3): 6-18 reprinted in Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures. London: MacMillan.
Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The politics of performance. London: Routledge. 1-33
• What is the relationship between the audience and the performers and how is this
mediated through structures of looking?
• How does desire and identification run through the process of showing and viewing in
performance?
• What are the implications of this in understanding gender and sexuality in
performance?
ARTISTS
Yasumasa Morimura
is a Japanese appropriation artist*. Since 1985, Morimura has primarily shown his work in international solo exhibitions, although he has been involved in various group exhibitions.
Morimura borrows images from historical artists and inserts his own face and body into them. Most of the artworks he appropriates have Western subjects, particularly female subjects. These include Mona Lisa, Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, and the characters in Velázquez's Las Meninas (1956). Through the use of disguises, he overturns the effects of the male gaze, gender, race, ethnicity, and cultural standards, challenging the traditional methods of portraiture that he alters the original Western artworks by incorporating details related to Japanese culture.
* Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. In the visual arts, to appropriate means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
Inherent in our understanding of appropriation is the concept that the new work re contextualizes whatever it borrows to create the new work. In most cases the original 'thing' remains accessible as the original, without change.
Orlan
is a French artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris.
Although ORLAN is best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid-1990s, her work is not limited to a particular medium.
About her importance in art history as a body artist, in "The Narrative" monograph (2007): "Revisiting ORLAN's history, from the early sixties to the present day, means, above all, rediscovering the history of the poetics of the body, in which body art and carnal art are the fundamental stages. Real body and imaginary body, lived body and emotional body, mystic body and social body, diffuse body and hybrid body, all merge together in the ceaseless flow of references in ORLAN's work."
Pieree Molinier
(April 13, 1900 – March 3, 1976)
was a French Surrealist painter and photographer best known for his erotic sadomasochistic imagery. Molinier began his artistic practice as a landscape painter, working in the Fauve and Impressionist styles. In 1965, the artist began to make autoerotic self-portraits and photomontages in his Bordeaux apartment, which he referred to as his boudoir. These photographs feature Molinier and occasionally other models dressed in women’s lingerie and engaged in erotic and sadomasochistic acts. The figures in his works are often collaged into vertical or radially symmetrical configurations. In the 1970s, Molinier’s health began to decline, and he committed suicide on March 3, 1976 at his home in Bordeaux, France.
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese-American multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art, which she performs in both English and Japanese and filmmaking. She became involved in New York City's downtown artists scene, which included the Fluxus group.
Faith Wilding
is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights.
Vito Acconci
(January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017)
was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world.
Ana Mendieta
(November 18,1948 – September 8,1985)
was a Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist. Her work was somewhat autobiographical, drawing from her history of being displaced from her natal Cuba, and focused on themes including feminism, violence, life, death, identity, place and belonging. Her works are generally associated with the four basic elements of nature. Mendieta often focused on a spiritual and physical connection with the Earth. Mendieta felt that by uniting her body with the earth she could became whole again.
THEORISTS
Jacques Lacan (13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981)
was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with post-structuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.
Laura Mulvey
is a British feminist film theorist. Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. This essay brought the term "male gaze" into the academic lexicon and eventually into common parlance.
Guy Debord (28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994)
a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI).
Peggy Phelan
is an American feminist scholar. She is one of the founders of Performance Studies International. Phelan's work is primarily concerned with the investigation of performance as a live event. She argued that the ephemerality of performance is crucial to its force. While most of her initial work was rooted in feminist post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, her more recent work is concerned with media, photography, and visual arts.
John Berger
(5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017)
was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is often used as a university text.
CONCEPTS
Spectatorship
The act of watching without participating. A film can be viewed from 3 perspectives ": (i) the first look is that of the camera, which records the events of the film; (ii) the second look describes the nearly voyeuristic act of the audience as they view the film proper; and (iii) the third look is that of the characters who interact with one another throughout the filmed story. (Mulvey)
Mirror Phase
Is a concept by Lacan which proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". For Lacan, the mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. (Critical Link)
Scopophilia
Pleasure in looking. Mulvey refers to scopophilia as the pleasure involved in looking at other people's bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects without being seen either by those on screen or by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that cinema viewing conditions facilitate both the voyeuristic process of the objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ideal ego seen on the screen. (Oxford Reference)
Narcissism
Narcissism, a concept in psychoanalytics, first elaobrated by Freud, is the pursuit of satisfaction from self admiration.
Fetishism
is the desire of a particular object or activity which brings sexual pleasure and excitement.
Voyerism
the activity of getting pleasure from secretly watching other people in sexual situations or, more generally, from watching other people's private lives. (Cambridge Dictionary)
Male gaze
The term was introduced by Laura Mulvey in 1975 in her essay 'Visual Pleasure' and it is about the potrayal of women (objects) in media, to be seen by the men (subjects).
Objectification
Objectification is the unrespectful treatment of a person as an object that has no personality or dignity. Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire.
Castration anxiety
In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the castration complex refers to the child’s fear of punishment for their incestuous desires. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the concept of castration refers first to an imaginary anxiety and, more fundamentally, to the child’s acceptance of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and their consequent entry into the symbolic order. (Cahiers Kingston)
Marked/ Unmarked