User:Benzubu/Feminist art

Sylvia Sleigh ,Philip Golub Reclining (1971)

Sylvia Sleigh deals with this trope of challenging, gendered spaces, specifically dealing with gendered art in art history. She was a traditional painter, who painted with oil paint on canvas, she idealized the male nude. Her painting, Philip Golub Reclining takes on the same form that Velasquez did in his famous nude painting, The Rokeby Venus. The male in Sleigh’s painting has the same reclining pose with the model’s arm up as he is regarding himself and his own beauty in a mirror. Another similarity is just like Venus is regarding herself in The Rokeby Venus, Velasquez would often paint himself as if he was in the background of his paintings, and Sleigh painted herself in the mirror of Philip Golub Reclining. In this regard, it becomes an image of beauty but it also becomes an image of vanity because the goddess sees her beauty in the mirror. This becomes inverted and an example of male vanity. This isn't an accidental choice at all. She is reflecting this same objectification back onto men, to highlight the biased way we objectify women. It shows the arbitrary way we view women's bodies, yet these bodies are in the same pose. Her paintings are beautiful and sincerely respectful of the male figure.

Sylvia Sleigh,The Turkish Bath (1973)

The painting The Turkish Bath (1973),  is a gender-reversed version of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of the same name. The Turkish bath was the subject explored by the French painter Ingres, and you can see this circular work where women are in a variety of poses and it's this composite imagined image of women bathing. Their bodies are intertwined while listening to music, lack agency within the composition, objectifies the female form, and therefore the male viewer enjoys it. Sylvia Sleigh, about 100 years later, is playing on that idea. We can see her husband who was an art curator and critic in the foreground, gazing at her in this very traditional female supine nude pose, where he is reclining and he's gazing out towards her. She also included other male figures who were her close friends and intellectually inspired her. There is also a strong naturalism in this painting. She's not shying away from tan lines and body hair the same way that we often see in Old Master paintings, where there's no signs of tan lines and no signs of body hair. So there's a certain realism here that Sylvia Sleigh is really engaging with. It's a very clear subversion of the traditional way women are objectified, but she's not necessarily objectifying these men. These were men who inspired her, she's celebrating these men and their culture of the Turkish bath, while referencing images of the past.

Ana Mendietat ,The Tree of Life

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Ana Mendieta brought an intimate, distinctly feminist approach to land art. Mendieta was originally from Cuba, her body was often involved in her work and she died relatively young. Mendieta  thought a lot about Mother Earth, and women's forces. Mendieta would often recreate crime, rape and assault scenes. In her piece, The Tree of Life, you see she is exploring this particular pose with her arms raised making her connect with the earth and the heavens and associates that with the female role. This piece, like most of Mendieta's work, is phenomenal land art where she is part of the earth by bringing a mother goddess to the form.

Judy Chicago, the dinner party(1974–1979)

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party made in the 1970s.This mixed media work uses a variety of material including gold chalices and utensils, embroidered runners and china-painted porcelain plates that is all made up like a dinner party. There are 13 elaborate place settings on each side, making up 39 place settings. Also included are the names of 999 women inscribed on the heritage tile floor at the center. Each of these women are influential and important figures in the world. The idea of the dinner party relates to the history of women and domesticity, with traditionally women serving the home, Chicago is playing with gender roles. The way this piece is being presented evokes ideas of an altar, and brings on themes of sacrifice. In addition, there's no one seat that's at the center, and many people have said the idea of 13 on each side is very similar to the last supper, because you have Christ at the center with his 12 apostles. But in this case, there's no central figure. She is playing on the idea of the Last Supper, which is a male dominated image and space. Judy Chicago was very interested in the idea of flower symbolism and also a kind of female genitalia as a symbo

l representing the woman. So if you look at these individual plates, not always but very frequently, they seem to allude to the idea of a flower and also symbolically to female genitalia. Some women responded negatively to the idea that women aren't just female genitalia, that they're more than that. But Judy Chicago and other artists that saw this as the symbol of women's life giving abilities, the idea that this is a symbol of femininity, this is kind of the ultimate symbol of femininity. And so that's why she chose it for this particular series. It was made by many people, she was very good at getting lots of individuals together to work on large projects. And this includes painted porcelain needlework. It was a big project that involved many women who assisted her and men. This artwork is very large–measuring 48 feet on each side–and for a long time, it had no place to go, so it was put on as a temporary exhibit in a number of museums, and then it was going to be put into a university, but there were government officials that objected to it because they saw it as pornography. Eventually, however, it was put on display in a Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and that's where it lives today. This piece is a great way to learn about these different female figures.