Political: Feminism

Our first word is “political”. From this, we all decided on global political issues and we chose feminism. What do you think when you hear the word feminism? Is it about women’s rights? 

First I started making a brainstorm. What is my identity as a woman? What is the symbol of woman?

and then remind me back the conversation I had in Denmark.  "Why do you shave your armpit? Why men don't have to shave armpit and women have to shave it? Armpit is part of yourself."

Yes. Why do we have to erase aspect of our "women’s" bodies? 

What is my identity? what is the symbol of women?

Yes it is "armpit"

Feminism - armpit is my identity-

Feminism - I am tied by "woman"s indentity -

Woman with armpit -Madonna-

Women with armpit -Sophie Loren

Women with armpit -Patti Smith-

Women with armpit - Lady Gaga - 

I realized lots of famous people such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, Sophie Loren, Julia Roberts don't shave their armpit. Has Armpit hair become a statement of women, feminist? For almost a century we have been brainwashed by the beauty industry, encouraging hair removal. By creating a contrast between common ‘fashionable’ female beauty and the raw unconventional look of female armpit hair thoughts are intrigued and a discussion is made. There is a sense of The film The Wolf of wall street I remind me back about  body hair. The main character Jordan Belfort said to Mark Hanna. "My wife don't shave her body hair, even though her armpit. She is becoming lazy. But look at that woman. She literally doesn't have any body hair. She is like a barbie. So sexy." Why did he say this sentence? It's because his way of thinking was woman should shave body hair?

Definition: Feminism

The term feminism can be used to describe a political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women. Feminism involves political and sociological theories and philosophies concerned with issues of gender difference, as well as a movement that advocates gender equality for women and campaigns for women's rights and interests.Although the terms "feminism" and "feminist" did not gain widespread use until the 1970s, they were already being used in the public parlance much earlier; for instance, Katherine Hepburn speaks of the "feminist movement" in the 1942 film Woman of the Year. 

According to Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walker, the history of feminism can be divided into three waves. The first feminist wave was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the second was in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements. It is manifest in a variety of disciplines such as feminist geography, feminist history and feminist literary criticism.

Feminism has altered predominant perspectives in a wide range of areas within Western society, ranging from culture to law. Feminist activists have campaigned for women's legal rights (rights of contract, property rights, voting rights); for women's right to bodily integrity and autonomy, for abortion rights, and for reproductive rights (including access to contraception and quality prenatal care); for protection of women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape;for workplace rights, including maternity leave and equal pay; against misogyny; and against other forms of gender-specific discrimination against women.

During much of its history, most feminist movements and theories had leaders who were predominantly middle-class white women from Western Europe and North America. However, at least since Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech to American feminists, women of other races have proposed alternative feminisms. This trend accelerated in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. Since that time, women in former European colonies and the Third World have proposed "Post-colonial" and "Third World" feminisms. Some Postcolonial Feminists, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, are critical of Western feminism for being ethnocentric. Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Alice Walker, share this view.

Chanel

The Chanel Spring/Summer 2015 collection seamlessly meshed the old and the new to highlight the classic Chanel woman. With the pro-female protest at the end of the show and the presence of “He for She” amongst the sea of signs, the media quickly connected the show to feminism. Upon scrutinous inspection, however, the nod toward Emma Watson’s UN speech seems to be more of a sly marketing afterthought rather than a political intention. Instead, the show seemed more concerned with touting the timelessness of the quintessential Chanel woman.
Since the 1920s, Chanel has promoted the idea of a self-sufficient, working woman. The start of the show immediately injected this sense of female strength into the audience with attention-demanding drumbeats that infiltrated the room with an authoritative atmosphere. Models strutted down the catwalk side by side, evoking the image of a sartorially savvy militia, whilst the background music played the words, “I don’t care, baby, I’m not scared", on repeat.

As previously stated, models flooded the runway with “He for She” picket signs-a blatant reference to Emma Watson’s UN speech on feminism. But the “Ladies First” sign and the we-want-to-be-chic shouts disclosed that the show was, in fact, not about Watson’s feminism. Since her speech advocated equality between males and females, signs such as, “Ladies First” and “History is Her Story", which place women above men, directly contrast “He for She”. Although one could argue that the female-over-male mantra mirrors New Age feminism, the contradicting signs, cries for “chic", and the nonsensical “Free Freedom” make the protest more theatrical and less political. The closing protest was not a fight for feminism. it was a display of the fight in the Chanel woman. The aforementioned independent, working woman full of sophistication and verve who still commands relevance in today’s world. 

Ace Studios 

Their previous mens wear collection for SS 2015, which told a story with its androgynous, retro uniqueness. Erasing the line between male and female may not be the solemn purpose, but it is an inevitable reaction to trendsetter’s and powerful influencer’s actions. Their AW 2015 collection is no exception. This time though, it gets crystal clear with bold, statement prints, pieces emblazoned with pro-women, feminist patches and slogans such as “Woman Power” and “Radical Feminist”. They strongly show their view on gender equality and their non-acceptance of current injustices. Also on their website, you can see they’ve worked with unisex. The man model wears women wear on women's section.

Fall 2015 menswear collection

From Acne studios website woman's wear/ Using man's model

Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake was an expert manipulator of exaggerated shapes. While the West was obsessed with the rise of hypersexuality brought about by feminism, Miyake focused on creating works of wearable art. He saw clothes as more than a form of coverage that accentuates the female body championed by the Western standard of beauty (aka tits and ass), they were art pieces that changed according to the shapes and sizes of individual wearers. In many ways they were more of a liberation – that the feminist hypersexual norm of beauty the Western fashion advocated – than the typical Parisian designers. This happens to be a common theme among the other Japanese designers. Their garments mould their shapes according to the wearers, whereas the Western designs require the wearer to mould their bodies according to the garments. How many of us strive to lose pounds on the treadmill just to fit into a skin tight dress?

Issey Miyake × Fusae Ichikawa

Miyake was a pioneer in gender roles, asking feminist Fusae Ichikawa in the 1970s, when she was in her 80s, to be his model, sending the message that garments must be comfortable and express the natural beauty of real people.

"Designing is like a living organism in that it pursues what matters for its well-being and continuity," Miyake writes in the book published for the exhibit. "My work's touchstone phrases are: Making Think, Making Things and Making Reality."

Picture of Fusae Ichikawa design by Issey Miyake

Fashion x Feminism

Also When I started thinking about What is women? How do we recognize gender as a visual aspect? First thing I came up was How to dress. Fashion is visual communication tool of of woman's identities through dress and fashion is ubiquitous and a fundamental tool that proclaims who we are, both to ourselves and to people around us.Getting dressed every day is a compulsory, non-negotiable activity for most people, we can hardly ever exercise our preferences on the matter. What we choose to wear can determine rejection or acceptance into different social groups, whether or not we get a job, a promotion, respect, admiration and attention. Our dressing and fashion choices have psychological, social, political and economic meanings and consequences. For example Chanel collection of 2015. The first batch of looks from the collection continued to evoke this dominance with an homage to Chanel’s iconic tweed suits. oversize “comme des garcons” look broken the typical women's looking. and also express "Chanel" who was self-sufficient, working woman, independent woman. Fashion have a possibility to tell What is your personality, and identity. 

Kirsten Justesen

Danish artist Kirsten Justesen was born in 1943. She currently lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. She studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen 1975.

Justsen's oeuvre highlights her experience navigating her role as a woman and artist. She explores the links between female identity and gender roles, examining the limits women faced as they fulfilled Western society’s expectations to become housewives and mothers during the 1970s. Themes of freedom and struggle are pronounced in Justesen’s oeuvre. Her works examine how childcare and domestic duties impact the scope for expression. Even Justesen’s studio was positioned between the kitchen and the nursery—an "inspiring threshold" and physical illustration of her blended identity as an artist and a mother. As a student at the Royal Danish Art Academy, She helped pioneer the birth of the feminist art movement in Denmark. In 1970, She joined a collective of women artists whose experimental art project, Damebilleder (“Women’s Images”), portrayed women’s role in society “from the beauty parlor to dish-washing.” The group’s efforts challenged gender perceptions by focusing on female perspective and capturing women’s experiences through art. 

Justesen explains, “My generation is brought up with the male gaze, a gaze that still seems synonymous with defining the history of art . . . we want our gaze back in history, to secure diversity.”

In Justesen’s own words, “through our upbringing we were defined as reproduction tools and were supposed to behave in order to find suitable husbands.” The core of the feminist artist movement challenged the marginalization of women and the confines of strict gender roles. Justesen’s Lunch for a Landscape seems to imply that the adoption domestic duties does not mean giving up the desire for freedom. Works like the photograph on view at NMWA provided a voice for Justesen and enabled her to establish herself in the art world.

Lunch for a Landscape

Justesen sitting in a shopping cart with her arms raised. Justesen said, “I made this when I was raising two small boys, breastfeeding the baby, and also living as a spouse in a foreign country [Canada]. I describe my life then as a daily ‘housewife ballet.’ Here, a housewife is on her way in the vehicle of her life.” Justesen juxtaposes a celebration of freedom with a traditional symbol of wifely duty—a grocery cart.

Sculpture

ICE PORTRAIT

ICE PEDESTAL

Her work express freedom of expectations to become housewives. Expectations of "Women Imagine" From her work, "Lunch for a Landscape"and "Sculpture", She made her imagination of "women imagine" and she come knocking on the door of viewer's heart. She made definition by herself. Don't share her question to the viewer. Her body is using as a tool, material, surface It is not main thing in her work. Her body is part of her art.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s intensely personal work encompasses a range of materials and techniques including painting, mono-prints, sculpture, film, photography, embroidery and neon. Characterized by a highly autobiographical and confessional style, Emin’s work blurs the boundaries between art and life and has often led critics to struggle to define the line between true autobiography and artistic presentation of life-inspired events in Emin’s work.

Emin’s candid work often combines both sadness and humour in its representation of personal experiences, desires and memories, which explore desire, love, relationships, family, emotional and psychological states. Often annotating her work with - or creating works solely from - text, the misspelling that frequently characterizes Emin’s work adds to the conception that her work is born from spontaneous, and at times cathartic, outpours.

Emin’s ’bad girl’* attitude, which resonates throughout her highly personal and sexually explicit work, locates Emin’s oeuvre firmly within feminist discourse. Re-appropriating traditional domestic craft or ’women’s work’ for radical intentions, Emin’s work embodies the feminist dictum that the personal is political, and reconfigures craft based practice as high art.

Emin-evolution is a sign of the power of female creativity. It is not limited to, restricted to, or subject to. Tracey Emin is a full-scale artist. The bizarre idea of the "woman artist" like the "woman artist" like "woman writer", where "woman" is used to indicate small-scale replica model, must surely for a stake through the heart. The dynamism of her Hayward Gallery retrospective in 2011-Love is What you want-made it obvious that energy and output, quality and scale, are not about gender. That is not to say that it is as easy for a woman to be an artist as it is for a man-stereotypes prevail in the artword as they do in the boardroom. Certainly it is not as easy for a woman to be taken seriously as an artist-and Emin has had her fair share of criticism. What is wonderful about Tracy Emin is that she has just carried on, good times or bad times, poverty or frame. 

Emin Frequently uses imagines, objects and materials from her own life to address difficult subjects such as rape and abortion, but her work consciously reworks her life story as a set of narratives and memories. She produces her life as  a series of texts in a deliberately unrefined autobiographical form, aiming at immediacy and intimacy in relation to herself and her early sexual experiences.  As she describe using the graphic Margate vernacular, "Being broken into" - sex without consent- was something that had to be sadly accepted as part of life. Emin gives to that earlier self the opportunity to speak back through her art, a means of resistance against her former silencing, and thus gives form and narrative to an experience that was, at the time, unspeakable. In the video Why I never became a dancer 1995 the traumatic experience of being jeered off the dancefloor with shouts of "slag" during a competition is re-presented through Emin's jubilantly gyrating adult body, which performs as a powerful antidote to the memory of humiliation. Leaving Margate meant survival, leaving the site of trauma, of family disruption, sexual abuse and attempted suicide, but it remained the focus of Emin's practice throughout the 1990s, returned to again as a catharsis. These experiences are represented in other video works including Tracey Emin's CV. Cunt Vernacular 1997 in which her mother also appears, as well as in etchings, quilts, sculpture and diaries, in ways which suggest a constant return to and refiguring of the past.

She Lay down deep beneath the Sea

The double lines she uses is so suggestive of the complexity of the female form. This is not the female body as art object drawn by men for millennia; it is a woman drawing on herself as a woman. 

The double line is vulnerable-here are the sometimes wavering, sometimes uncertain boundaries of a woman's body as she negotiates how the world regards her, usually at the expense of how she can regard herself.

The double line undulates-it is entirely sensuous. The curves of a woman's body, debased by the fashion industry's obsession with thinness, return here as something strokeable, desirable. These are pictures you want to touch. Like love the eye reaches out to the hand.

The double line underlines. It acts as answer as well as question. It is a repetition, like an incantation or a prayer. More than once is how we remember - this is how woman remembers herself.

The double line is just like that - doubleness. Woman as more than, not less than. Woman as subject as well as object. Inevitable if the painter is a woman. Inevitable if the gaze is turned inwards as well as outwards. 

Body as an art : Tracey Emin

What viewer think about her work when they see it. A form of discourse constructed form, but not identical with, the experiences it recalls. It is perhaps significant in this context that, until recently, much of her childhood, adolescence and early adult sexuality.  

"This is the body as truth. This is not the body as artiface, artifact, artificial. But it is the self as art."

Body, self, blue, sea... Self as an art, her identity? She drew herself as a woman. "She" Woman as subject as well as object. This body line and color are is a secret code visible in certain lights. and We, Tracey Emin see this. This is Tracey Emin. But This is not only Tracey Emin. It is ourselves. It is a mirror of ourselves. She brings to her world as a woman is in itself an educative experience for the viewer.

"Woman as more than, not less than"

"Wherever I am aware of where I am and the me that is in the where I am. So I am always a little bit outside of anywhere, and wondering about it. I am me wherever I am. It makes no difference. Wherever I am, I am Tracey."

Female gaze. A gaze that models from the inside to the out side, from the outside to inside. We are tied by female gaze. We tied ourselves. and then make our own world where is critically in between identities that seek escape and disengagement from the female form. and then ask question to our selves. It is a repetition like an incantation. We wish we could recognize our existence from other people? Ask many times, think about it many times. What is my identity? Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I?

"Emin’s candid work often combines both sadness and humour in its representation of personal experiences, desires and memories, which explore desire, love, relationships, family, emotional and psychological states."

I started research about myself. Because I often ask to myself, What is my identity?

From my daily in March

I was there in that moment.
I met people
I talked
I felt something
I saw the view
Everything in this moment makes myself, makes my identity.

We are living in the present facing a future we can't predict.

Right now, this moment is not only unchanged and irregular but also in flux and predictable.
Right now this moment is becoming a meaningful moment as we notice that this predictable moment is not predictable but unchanged and something that is precious and irreplaceable.

The past moment is linked to the present moment happening now, and
the present moment is linked to the unexpected future without our noticing.

We are not living in the past. We are not living in the future.
We are living in this moment. this moment right now, is what makes us and our identity.

But we don't know when our identity might change.
In the next moment, there may be an event that changes us
or there might not be. Because we are living in this moment.

This moment defines your identity. 
Identity is the portrait of yourself.

 I noticed my old work is deciding my definition and impose my values on other people, viewer. This is omg opinion. So viewer also have to be same way of thinking. This is terrible to just say to opinion even I was not tried to ask to the viewer and shared my feeling.

Francesca Woodman

Woodman’s photographs many influences, from symbolism and surrealism to fashion photography and Baroque painting. They have a timeless quality that is ethereal and unique. 
Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings. She puts herself in the frame most often, although these are not conventional self-portraits as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence. This underlying vulnerability is further emphasised by the small and intimate format of the photographs. 

We often see her in otherwise deserted interior spaces, where her body seems to merge with its surroundings, covered by sections of peeling wallpaper, half hidden behind the flat plane of a door, or crouching over a mirror. Found objects and suggestive props are carefully placed to create unsettling, surreal or claustrophobic scenarios. Her photographs are produced in thematic series’, relating to specific props, places or situations.

Woodman uses her own body as subject/object to create a sense of fleeting (or serendipitous) femininity that passes between the polarities of presence/absence, woman/ environment, pain/hope and human/corpse, forming a feminist identity that is strategically ‘in-between’ and transient.

This action that I foresee has nothing to do with melodrama. It is that life as lived by me now is a series of exceptions … I was not unique but special. This is why I was an artist … I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see … and show them something different. Simply the other side.… Nothing to do with not being able “to take it” in the big city or with self doubt or because my heart is gone. And not to teach people a lesson. Simply the other side. " by Francesca Woodman

Her photography is always she who is naked is there. She revealed so little. 

For her, her portrait imagine is both subject and object; both present and not present. The self and the self-portrait are under scrutiny. Her body is read as an autonomous entity but at the same time as part of her surroundings.

About Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono has worked as an artist, film-maker, poet, musician, writer, performance artist and peace activist for over five decades. Born in Tokyo in 1933, One rose to prominence during the early 1960s when, living in New York, She hosted a series of performances and exhibitions in her loft apartment in Chambers Street. One also has a long-standing connection to London, which began with her participation in the Destruction in Art Symposium and subsequent show at Indica Gallery, both in 1966. These projects cemented her reputation as an avant-garde artist in the UK and internationally. Throughout her career, Ono has embraced a wide range of media, defying traditional boundaries and pioneering new forms of artistic expression, most notably her instruction pieces, which she began making in the 1950s and continues to make today. The works presented at Serpentine span fifty years of production and viewers and invited to engage with the idea rather than the object, the conceptual over the historical.

Yoko Ono as a feminist

Yoko Ono matters as much today as ever. Read passages from her 1971 manifesto "The Feminization of Society" and you could think she was talking about 2007:

 Yoko Ono "Cut Piece"

In Cut Piece, which was first performed in Japan in 1964, in New York in 1965 and later in London, Yoko Ono invites audiences to cut away pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors. She is virtually motionless throughout the performance, surrendering herself to the different reactions of audience participants. The intimate encounter between the artist and the audience becomes a symbol of (female) passivity and vulnerability, while the latent potential for sexist and racist violence and for a destructive desire becomes increasingly apparent. Cut Piece is one of Yoko Ono’s many ‘Instruction Pieces’ which are based on a score and intended to be re-enacted by others. Many artists have since followed her invitation and continue to perform Cut Piece today. In 2003, the year the US troops invaded Iraq and almost forty years after Yoko Ono first performed Cut Piece, she re-enacted the performance in Paris as a call for peace and a demonstration against the political climate after September 11th, 2001. She asked the audience to send the cut pieces of her clothing to a loved one as a sign of reconciliation.

During the performance, some audience dared to cut her bra. Lots of Audience seems got really shocked and started whispering. But then I thought, Why was anyone so surprised to see this? Why did they get shocked? Why was anyone so incredulous, appalled, stunned or offended? When this kind of violation of women's personal space and the objectification of her body happens everyday? When we are told what to do with our bodies and what they should look like, here was a woman well ahead of her time, making a statement about female objectification by actually allowing the audience to "process" her body and performance. and She shared her "wish" with audience.

Yoko Ono's film

She wrote in 1971 Cannes Film Festival)

Fluxus films are based on simple concepts, entirely in keeping with the spirit of Zen and similar to those that underlie the actions of Ono. Ono concentrates on minimal plot lines characterized by a frugal use of cinematic resources, which enable her to achieve poetic effects much like those of Haiku while promoting insights into broader contexts. Aside from the status of woman in society, which Ono examines in her films, she also addresses issues of concern to the place movement in several of these works. Moreover, all of her works reflect her strong belief in the power of imagination as well as her goal of questioning the passiveness of consumer society through poetic and absurd actions.

Feminist statement

While most of the many depictions of nude bodies and sexual activity an underground films may be regarded as critical commentaries on the hypocritical conventions of Hollywood movies as they were perceived by underground filmmakers, they could not prevent the portrayal of woman as sex objects even in underground cinema. Few artists succeeded in articulating genuine alternatives. The New York performance artist and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann shot an erotic film entitled Fuses(1964-67) from a decidedly feminine point of view. In her film, she presents a couple engaged in sex and shows both the male and female bodies in states of erotic ecstasy. Using an unusual stylistic device meant to ensure a non prejudiced, non-sexist cinematographic approach, the artist assigns the view's vantage point to a cat that appears early in the film.Two movies by Yoko Ono also address the subject of the prevailing conventional, predominantly male vantage-point strategy in mainstream cinema and subvert it in innovative ways.

Produced in 1970, her short film Fly to which she added a sound track herself, explores the female body from the perspective of an animal. As the film focuses on the single fly rather than the woman, the insect spective is shown in close-up, while the landscape of the woman's body is presented merely as a fragmentary background. In an introduction, the artist also emphasized the "autobiographical" references to the fly and the woman

In contract, her film Rape, also shot in London in 1969, presents a dramatic intensification of male visual lust. The film was produced in collaboration with John Lennon and Shifts from fized camera position to a form of moving documentary cinematography and narrative structure. Based on a concept developed in 1967/68, one cameramen and one sound man follow a young woman selected at random from the street and stalk her, nor do they retreat; instead they pursue her stubbornly even into her flat, provoking reactions of desperation. Several reviewers expressed doubts about the authenticity of the situation presented in the film and focused on parallels to the presence of the media in the life of the artist, who had the consequences of unbridled, sexually motivated visual artist. 

Film FLY

Film RAPE

From Film FLY. which presents an imagine of the female body that is as complete and undisturbed as possible, and thus prevents its constant exhibition as an object of lust with subtle humor. also she notes, the insect shown flying around freely in the film reveals her yearning for personal freedom. This express freedom of women. We are tied by big society and this is she show her wish, women's wish through her art work.

Whole world is starting to realize that it was the most unwise thing for our society to have ignored women power, to run the society with male priorities. Everything men have priority in the whole society. Whole society have ignored women power.But also we “women” always compete with men who their blunders, have shown us that they have not been doing such a great job. Why do we try to equate ourselves with such flawed power?

she said

“I always felt that I was just being me and by being me in my work I was automatically being that one who is promoting the body of women.”

This is the solution. She suggest to the viewer, It not about woman, or man. It is about one person human. yourself. This problem is not only for women but for everyone. It is gender problem and we all thinking about this problem together. Any type of equality gap between humans is unacceptable really and if you think about it, isn’t it more logical for everyone to have the same conditions and rights, no matter where you’re from, the gender you identify with or who you are?  

However I am wondering, even we are being ourselves, surviving in Japanese society as a woman is such a tough thing because we still have this way go thinking of men’s priority.  How can we suggest this question through the art work? I want to find solution during the foundation.

lyrics The song "Its Alright" Yoko OnoSometimes it's such a drag

I don't feel like getting upin the morning

Then something happens

It clicks in my head

I feel like crying

But i know it's gonna be alright

It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

I know it's gonna be alright

Sometimes, i'm so afraid

I don't feel like facing the world

Then something happens

It clicks in my head

I feel like crying

But i know it's gonna be alright

It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

I know it's gonna be alright

I guess i'm not the only one (not the only one in misery)

There many of us around

So when you're feeling down 

Hold your heart and say, it's gonna be alright

Hold your heart and it'll be alright. Yes.

I guess i'm not the only one (not the only one in history)

There many of us in history

So when you're feeling dow

Hold your heart and say, it's gonna be alrightj

It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

I know it's gonna be alright