Dec 13, 2024
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The Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn
by Doniphan Blair
Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, recently appeared in the '#PussyPower Show' at David & Schweitzer, Brooklyn. photo: courtesy J. LinharesTHE FEMALE BODY IS A POWERFUL
weapon, it turns out, to the surprise of those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places.
In Ghana, in 2005, 200 women protestors threatened to take off their clothes to shame into action the male delegates attending a peace summit for the Liberian civil war. Many observers agreed, their body-image activism broke the deadlock.
More recently, at the Women’s March on January 21st, bold placard statements and sometimes-strange sculptures reclaimed the word and the image of “pussy.”
Yes, it is a fraught subject, with feral fascination notorious among men and exaggerated in the age of Trump and porn, but the mystical and moral qualities of the nude remain unbowed.
The "naked body provides a vivid reminder [of] harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos,” according to British art historian Kenneth Clark, in his acclaimed book, "The Nude" (1963). “[It] arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves, and first of all, the wish to perpetuate ourselves," he adds, emphasizing what scientists often fail to mention: the importance of biology to aesthetics.
Simply put: the curvy female body is the site of 99% of reproduction and, as such, is an apt icon for life and evolution. The male nude, meanwhile, is interrupted, visually and morally, by the linear, sometimes violent and often indiscriminate phallus.
Indeed, reproduction depends on communication, cultural as well as genetic. Starting at a distance with the surveying of potential mates, reproduction becomes physical in the defining moment of foreplay to sex but only reaches fruition with the raising of the next generation. Indispensable to this biology among humans are the "three Cs," communication, culture and cooperation, with some form of romanticism at its center.
This four-and-a-half inch limestone statue is about 27,000 years old and was found in 1908, near Willendorf, Austria. photo: courtesy Naturhistorisches Museum, ViennaNo wonder the female nude became our first real art, with the Venus figurines appearing around 45,000 BC and enjoying a popularity run of 40,000 years (incredibly summarized in Grace Paley's short "You Gotta Believe"). Although they finally faded in the face of patriarchal bullying and self-consciousness, the nude was soon reinvented by the Greeks.And it has been reinvented almost every generation since.
Indeed, over the entire last two-and-a-half millennia, the nude has largely held its own, dominating the provocative space between sacred and profane, until a recent publishing revolution upended that aesthetic and moral balance.
Starting in 1999, but going full bore in the new millennia, online computers graduated from dialup to DSL and gained high-resolution access to the World Wide Web. Along with a repository of humanity's knowledge and art, this included an avalanche of garish, over-lit portrayals of the naked form, mostly female.
Although pornography has been with us since ancient times and expanded greatly with the printing press and then, in the 1960s, with Playboy, Penthouse and, finally, Hustler Magazine—an acme of biology unaesthetically portrayed, it is now overwhelming our culture. By the time kids today turn 18, over 90% report viewing internet porn, significantly more than those who have Googled a Modigliani nude, let alone gazed on one in a museum. Moreover porn accounts for at least 20% and as much as one third of all internet traffic.
While this is a frightening development for those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places, we have to be realistic. Titillation, self-love and sexual exploration have been with us for a long time and, being personal activities, are difficult to repress or censor, leaving us where we started: our imaginations.
Given about a half-a-million women, and some men, went to Washington, DC, and tens of thousands more to the 400 marches nation- and world-wide, many with banners saying "Pussy Grabs Back," we may be witnessing a new movement in public and gendered image-making.
In fact, the New York art scene just had a notable season of self-image exploration by women, culminating with an all-star group show, "#PussyPower", at the David and Schweitzer Gallery, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the inspiration for which was primarily political.
A Roman copy of Praxelites's Aphrodite of Cnidus, surprised at her bath, considered the seventh wonder of the world. photo: unknown“One of the heartbreaking realizations of Election Night was the feeling, ‘Wow, we really weren’t ready to vote for a woman,’” I was told by one of the curators, Jennifer Samet, who is an old friend.
“In the week that followed, in that state of shock and disappointment, there were a couple of Facebook/Instagram friends, women artists posting body-based or explicit imagery with tags or comments related to the political situation.”
With a PhD in art education, Samet teaches, curates, including at the East Village gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, owned by another old friend, and blogs at “Beer with a Painter”.
“It felt REALLY good to be looking at body-based art by women,” Samet said, concluding with an opinion similar to the women protestors in Ghana. “We are not going to be silent as artists; we aren’t going to be silent about body issues; we aren’t going to be silent!”
Amazingly, the first artist to fully render the female nude—Praxiteles, a fourth-century BC, male Greek sculptor—remains one of the greatest. According to reports, since the original did not survive, his life-size marble Aphrodite of Cnidus was so striking and sensuous but inner-regarding and elevated that Pliny the Elder (Roman, first century AD) proclaimed it one of the seven wonders of the world.
Her gesture of surprise and concealment and Praxiteles’s realistic yet impressionist carving skills, so soon after Egypt’s square and lined-up sculptures, combine into one of humanity's most astounding artistic leaps.
Culture cannot survive on patriarchal imagery alone, the male artists must have realized, undoubtedly inspired by their mothers, lovers, sisters. In fact, reinventing the fertility goddess as muse, love object and moral acme was obligatory simply to carry on with their cultural evolution.
Although Georgia O'Keeffe said there was nothing sexual about her painting, 'Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow' (1923), and her status as one of the first major woman painters belies that. photo: courtesy Georgia O'Keeffe MuseumPraxalites’s nudes, which also included males, were so mindblowing, they were immediately adopted across Hellenic art, offsetting the queer culture that helped Greek men rebel against the ancient matriarchies but also serving as a potent symbol of our shared humanity and equality—this is how we are born, this is who we are!
Alas, the Greek nudes were eventually broken by the barbarians, who invaded and ended classical culture by the fifth century AD, although even those armless/legless torsos remained more expressive than the clunky Roman knock-offs, which, in turn, were destroyed by the Christians.
After the Dark Ages, those torsos helped inspire the Renaissance and the nude reemerged, yet again, as an elevated icon in 15th century Florence. Masaccio (1401-28), the Praxiteles of his day and the first to paint the body realistically, was soon followed by Donatello (1386-1466), Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Rafael (1483-1520), as well as much of Western Civilization.
Around the same time, the female was being re-imagined in India (Konark, 13th century), Indonesia (Candi Sukuh, 15th century), China and Japan, where conquering patriarchies also needed more mystical or romantic imagery to balance their culture. Ultimately, the fornicating couple became a stand-in for evolution and the universe among the Tantrics of India, Taoists of China and Jewish Kabalists in Europe.
Finally, almost 5,000 years after the last fertility figures of Europe and the Middle East, western women were allowed, as well as inspired, to express the intricacies of their gendered worldviews, in novels in the 19th century and images in the 20th.
Lush, female genitalia was portrayed by the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1878-1986), even as she insisted they were just floral displays, while Frida Kahlo (1907-54), did highly personal self-portraits, often naked, even while married (twice) to the world-famous and rather macho painter Diego Rivera.
Feminism went full frontal and art world-savvy in the ‘70s with, among other important work, Linda Nochlin’s attack on male chauvinism in the galleries and museums, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), and Lynda Benglis's sex icon bomb, a self-portrait as a phallicized-female, which appeared as, and was thereby entitled, an "Advertisement in Artforum" (1974). Women artists often found the new art forms of photography, video and performance more suitable for body or gender art, both due to their immediacy and that painting and sculpture were so dominated by men, although others continued working in and expanding those media.
During the super-chauvinist '70s, Lynda Benglis dropped a visual A bomb with her self-portrait, 'Advertisement in Artforum', still able to shock today. photo: courtesy L. BenglisForty years later, these ideas have evolved and achieved notable influence. Marilyn Minter, a photorealist painter who became known for documenting her drug-addicted mother in the ‘80s, recently had a large retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, “Pretty Dirty” (closed May 7th). Working from photographs, Minter's recent paintings are full of bubbles and drips, emphasizing surfaces and suggesting skin.
“[Minter] is hot in New York right now, getting a lot of attention for her work and those shows,” Samet, the curator/educator, noted, although “there were a lot of exhibitions this fall where women were taking on the female body."
"Joan Semmel has been dealing with [body art] her whole career—she might be about 80—and the art world has finally caught up to her. She had a moment this fall.”
Kyle Stavers is another example of someone “dealing with the female body, the nude, reinventing myths,” as is Betty Tompkins, who also does sexually explicit photo-realist paintings.
“It is offering new ways of imaging the body, of looking at the body, of thinking about cultural norms," Samet summarized, "things handed down by generations of myths, fairy tales and popular culture by Disney."
Along the way, however, women body-oriented artists have been blocked, critiqued and attacked, sometimes mercilessly. For her visual hand grenade, Benglis was completely black-balled by the arts establishment, while Minter was condemned in the ‘80s, including by women, for using porn in her pieces.
Even Playboy, which commissioned a series of nudes by Minter, cancelled publication after she began asking women to photograph themselves with natural pubic hair and turned the project into a "Bring Back the Bush" campaign. The series reappeared as an installation in her Brooklyn Museum "Pretty Dirty" show.
Part of Marilyn Minter's "Bring Back the Bush", an installation from her recent, large Brooklyn Museum retrospective. photo: M. MinterSamet herself experienced objections to the “#Pussy Power” show. Although no one took offense at actual paintings—“everyone is so polite in the art world these days,” there were Facebook, Twitter and Instagram critiques, including by the social media companies themselves.
Most of the artists contacted for the show appreciated its theme and the opening was well-attended but “there was some push back right away," Samet said.
“I am aware that the title of the show is provocative [but] it is a phrase people have been using for a long time. And it was reclaimed in response to Trump using that word and [women] saying, ‘Let’s take it back!’”
“I took a photo [of the Minter "Bring Back the Bush" installation] and posted in social media. It was taken down—removed!” Samet recalled. “That was the first time social media said [to me]: ‘Your post has been removed because of community guidelines.’ It was shock to me.”
Samet soon discovered that while the hashtag “pussypower” was being suppressed by Twitter, #pussy, popular for prostitution, was not. She didn’t get a response from her inquiry to Instagram.
”There were some strange Facebook posts,” she said, from mildly threatening to more so.
Meanwhile, male artists exploring the symbology of the nude female are also having problems.
"I think that male gaze on the female nude is a tough place to be for a contemporary artist,” Samet stated. "They have to approach it with at least an understanding of the problematics. For centuries, we were looking at it without an understanding of the gender politics."
A post-coital moment expressed by Dana James, 'A Cigarette and a Sandwich,' 2016. photo: courtesy D. James“Most contemporary artists—if they are around the conversation, around contemporary art, are aware of the political, or feminist, or transgender discourse,” she said, citing as examples Carroll Dunham and Ridley Howard.
In regards to naked men in art, "there was a small show over the summer in a gallery in Bushwick, ‘Women Gaze on the Male Nude,'" Samet said. "And another at Cheim Read Gallery, women painting men, specifically nudes—the female gaze on men," although it was hardly as provocative as the female self-reflective gaze.
One particularly powerful painting in "#PussyPower" was of a woman taking a piss by Angelia Dufresne. "She was one of the people who posted right after the election,' Samet elaborated. "Interestingly, she was [also] censored by Instagram."
"[Dufresne] does this really explicit video work. When [her post] was taken down, her response to the powers that be was, ‘I am not going to be silenced. You are going to take one down? I will put another up!’"
"When I asked her about [being in '#Pussy Power'], she immediately suggested that [woman pissing] painting. It is a great painting. I was really happy about that painting."
Dealing with other artists was not so simple.
“I have always had a curious relationship to Louise Fishman’s work—not quite emotionally connecting with it," Samet said about an artist who does aggressive, figure-less abstracts, sometimes including big block letter statements.
"Then over the summer, with the campaign filled with misogynist rhetoric, Fishman’s work started to make a lot more sense. She did a series of 'Angry' paintings," saying "Angry Louise", "Angry Hillary", etc. "I didn’t really know how to relate to them [until] I was more in that zone myself, dealing with what was going on politically and personally."
"It was complicated to figure out how to borrow from Louise Fishman. She is very well-known artist. I finally got in touch with her gallery. I said, ‘I have one fantasy and it is the ‘Angry Hillary’ painting.’ It happened to be available and she and the gallery were happy to lend it."
One of Betty Tompkins's photo-realist, sexually explicit paintings, "Pussy Painting #13," 2011. photo: courtesy B. Tompkins“There is a lot romance in the show,” Samet also noted. "It is not a show of just words, or text, or performance. It is very visual. It operates on a many aesthetic and emotional registers."
“Michael [David, her co-currator] and I kept saying, when we were hanging it, ‘This is a sweet show, a pretty show.’ That was part of the surprise: it is not like an ‘Angry Pussy’ show, although I think that emotion is present.”
Although the show had quite a few, almost-bucolic nudes, they were overshadowed by transgressive female symbols like Betty Tompkins's "Pussy Painting #13," a Gerhardt Richter-esque, black and white oil of a "bush-less" vagina.
"I think that is what [Tomkins] work does, it is kind of a flag," Samet ruminated. "It is really subtle and beautiful. It operates on both levels—not just graphic or a flag. It is subtle and kind of abstract.”
The Dana James painting, on the other hand, was "an interesting combination of romantic and poetic, also vulnerability and strength. It is post-coital, with the cigarette, a dissociated kind of not caring,” she said.
If nothing else, the Age of Trump may stimulate a renaissance of edge-cutting female, feminist or matriarchal image-making. The time has obviously come, given the Women's March attendees surpassed a half-a-million, almost triple the previous day’s Trump inauguration.
Some of the imaginative biology-based art gracing Oakland's Women's March, January 21st. photo: D. BlairIn Oakland, where I attended with my 36 year-old daughter, the Trumpocalypse had yet to sink in and approximately 4,000 participants brought a festive air, full of funny signs and inventive imagery, including vaginas in every media, from magic marker to sewn cloth sculpture.
While the pornographers' garish nudes flash around the world in milliseconds, if history is any guide, iconography involving how we honestly imagine ourselves, our fellow humans and the romantic communication needed to reproduce will eventually prove to have stronger staying—and even political—power.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 05, 2017 - 11:50 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, recently appeared in the '#PussyPower Show' at David & Schweitzer, Brooklyn. photo: courtesy J. Linharesweapon, it turns out, to the surprise of those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places.
In Ghana, in 2005, 200 women protestors threatened to take off their clothes to shame into action the male delegates attending a peace summit for the Liberian civil war. Many observers agreed, their body-image activism broke the deadlock.
More recently, at the Women’s March on January 21st, bold placard statements and sometimes-strange sculptures reclaimed the word and the image of “pussy.”
Yes, it is a fraught subject, with feral fascination notorious among men and exaggerated in the age of Trump and porn, but the mystical and moral qualities of the nude remain unbowed.
The "naked body provides a vivid reminder [of] harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos,” according to British art historian Kenneth Clark, in his acclaimed book, "The Nude" (1963). “[It] arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves, and first of all, the wish to perpetuate ourselves," he adds, emphasizing what scientists often fail to mention: the importance of biology to aesthetics.
Simply put: the curvy female body is the site of 99% of reproduction and, as such, is an apt icon for life and evolution. The male nude, meanwhile, is interrupted, visually and morally, by the linear, sometimes violent and often indiscriminate phallus.
Indeed, reproduction depends on communication, cultural as well as genetic. Starting at a distance with the surveying of potential mates, reproduction becomes physical in the defining moment of foreplay to sex but only reaches fruition with the raising of the next generation. Indispensable to this biology among humans are the "three Cs," communication, culture and cooperation, with some form of romanticism at its center.
This four-and-a-half inch limestone statue is about 27,000 years old and was found in 1908, near Willendorf, Austria. photo: courtesy Naturhistorisches Museum, ViennaIndeed, over the entire last two-and-a-half millennia, the nude has largely held its own, dominating the provocative space between sacred and profane, until a recent publishing revolution upended that aesthetic and moral balance.
Starting in 1999, but going full bore in the new millennia, online computers graduated from dialup to DSL and gained high-resolution access to the World Wide Web. Along with a repository of humanity's knowledge and art, this included an avalanche of garish, over-lit portrayals of the naked form, mostly female.
Although pornography has been with us since ancient times and expanded greatly with the printing press and then, in the 1960s, with Playboy, Penthouse and, finally, Hustler Magazine—an acme of biology unaesthetically portrayed, it is now overwhelming our culture. By the time kids today turn 18, over 90% report viewing internet porn, significantly more than those who have Googled a Modigliani nude, let alone gazed on one in a museum. Moreover porn accounts for at least 20% and as much as one third of all internet traffic.
While this is a frightening development for those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places, we have to be realistic. Titillation, self-love and sexual exploration have been with us for a long time and, being personal activities, are difficult to repress or censor, leaving us where we started: our imaginations.
Given about a half-a-million women, and some men, went to Washington, DC, and tens of thousands more to the 400 marches nation- and world-wide, many with banners saying "Pussy Grabs Back," we may be witnessing a new movement in public and gendered image-making.
In fact, the New York art scene just had a notable season of self-image exploration by women, culminating with an all-star group show, "#PussyPower", at the David and Schweitzer Gallery, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the inspiration for which was primarily political.
A Roman copy of Praxelites's Aphrodite of Cnidus, surprised at her bath, considered the seventh wonder of the world. photo: unknown“In the week that followed, in that state of shock and disappointment, there were a couple of Facebook/Instagram friends, women artists posting body-based or explicit imagery with tags or comments related to the political situation.”
With a PhD in art education, Samet teaches, curates, including at the East Village gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, owned by another old friend, and blogs at “Beer with a Painter”.
“It felt REALLY good to be looking at body-based art by women,” Samet said, concluding with an opinion similar to the women protestors in Ghana. “We are not going to be silent as artists; we aren’t going to be silent about body issues; we aren’t going to be silent!”
Amazingly, the first artist to fully render the female nude—Praxiteles, a fourth-century BC, male Greek sculptor—remains one of the greatest. According to reports, since the original did not survive, his life-size marble Aphrodite of Cnidus was so striking and sensuous but inner-regarding and elevated that Pliny the Elder (Roman, first century AD) proclaimed it one of the seven wonders of the world.
Her gesture of surprise and concealment and Praxiteles’s realistic yet impressionist carving skills, so soon after Egypt’s square and lined-up sculptures, combine into one of humanity's most astounding artistic leaps.
Culture cannot survive on patriarchal imagery alone, the male artists must have realized, undoubtedly inspired by their mothers, lovers, sisters. In fact, reinventing the fertility goddess as muse, love object and moral acme was obligatory simply to carry on with their cultural evolution.
Although Georgia O'Keeffe said there was nothing sexual about her painting, 'Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow' (1923), and her status as one of the first major woman painters belies that. photo: courtesy Georgia O'Keeffe MuseumAlas, the Greek nudes were eventually broken by the barbarians, who invaded and ended classical culture by the fifth century AD, although even those armless/legless torsos remained more expressive than the clunky Roman knock-offs, which, in turn, were destroyed by the Christians.
After the Dark Ages, those torsos helped inspire the Renaissance and the nude reemerged, yet again, as an elevated icon in 15th century Florence. Masaccio (1401-28), the Praxiteles of his day and the first to paint the body realistically, was soon followed by Donatello (1386-1466), Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Rafael (1483-1520), as well as much of Western Civilization.
Around the same time, the female was being re-imagined in India (Konark, 13th century), Indonesia (Candi Sukuh, 15th century), China and Japan, where conquering patriarchies also needed more mystical or romantic imagery to balance their culture. Ultimately, the fornicating couple became a stand-in for evolution and the universe among the Tantrics of India, Taoists of China and Jewish Kabalists in Europe.
Finally, almost 5,000 years after the last fertility figures of Europe and the Middle East, western women were allowed, as well as inspired, to express the intricacies of their gendered worldviews, in novels in the 19th century and images in the 20th.
Lush, female genitalia was portrayed by the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1878-1986), even as she insisted they were just floral displays, while Frida Kahlo (1907-54), did highly personal self-portraits, often naked, even while married (twice) to the world-famous and rather macho painter Diego Rivera.
Feminism went full frontal and art world-savvy in the ‘70s with, among other important work, Linda Nochlin’s attack on male chauvinism in the galleries and museums, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), and Lynda Benglis's sex icon bomb, a self-portrait as a phallicized-female, which appeared as, and was thereby entitled, an "Advertisement in Artforum" (1974). Women artists often found the new art forms of photography, video and performance more suitable for body or gender art, both due to their immediacy and that painting and sculpture were so dominated by men, although others continued working in and expanding those media.
During the super-chauvinist '70s, Lynda Benglis dropped a visual A bomb with her self-portrait, 'Advertisement in Artforum', still able to shock today. photo: courtesy L. Benglis“[Minter] is hot in New York right now, getting a lot of attention for her work and those shows,” Samet, the curator/educator, noted, although “there were a lot of exhibitions this fall where women were taking on the female body."
"Joan Semmel has been dealing with [body art] her whole career—she might be about 80—and the art world has finally caught up to her. She had a moment this fall.”
Kyle Stavers is another example of someone “dealing with the female body, the nude, reinventing myths,” as is Betty Tompkins, who also does sexually explicit photo-realist paintings.
“It is offering new ways of imaging the body, of looking at the body, of thinking about cultural norms," Samet summarized, "things handed down by generations of myths, fairy tales and popular culture by Disney."
Along the way, however, women body-oriented artists have been blocked, critiqued and attacked, sometimes mercilessly. For her visual hand grenade, Benglis was completely black-balled by the arts establishment, while Minter was condemned in the ‘80s, including by women, for using porn in her pieces.
Even Playboy, which commissioned a series of nudes by Minter, cancelled publication after she began asking women to photograph themselves with natural pubic hair and turned the project into a "Bring Back the Bush" campaign. The series reappeared as an installation in her Brooklyn Museum "Pretty Dirty" show.
Part of Marilyn Minter's "Bring Back the Bush", an installation from her recent, large Brooklyn Museum retrospective. photo: M. MinterMost of the artists contacted for the show appreciated its theme and the opening was well-attended but “there was some push back right away," Samet said.
“I am aware that the title of the show is provocative [but] it is a phrase people have been using for a long time. And it was reclaimed in response to Trump using that word and [women] saying, ‘Let’s take it back!’”
“I took a photo [of the Minter "Bring Back the Bush" installation] and posted in social media. It was taken down—removed!” Samet recalled. “That was the first time social media said [to me]: ‘Your post has been removed because of community guidelines.’ It was shock to me.”
Samet soon discovered that while the hashtag “pussypower” was being suppressed by Twitter, #pussy, popular for prostitution, was not. She didn’t get a response from her inquiry to Instagram.
”There were some strange Facebook posts,” she said, from mildly threatening to more so.
Meanwhile, male artists exploring the symbology of the nude female are also having problems.
"I think that male gaze on the female nude is a tough place to be for a contemporary artist,” Samet stated. "They have to approach it with at least an understanding of the problematics. For centuries, we were looking at it without an understanding of the gender politics."
A post-coital moment expressed by Dana James, 'A Cigarette and a Sandwich,' 2016. photo: courtesy D. JamesIn regards to naked men in art, "there was a small show over the summer in a gallery in Bushwick, ‘Women Gaze on the Male Nude,'" Samet said. "And another at Cheim Read Gallery, women painting men, specifically nudes—the female gaze on men," although it was hardly as provocative as the female self-reflective gaze.
One particularly powerful painting in "#PussyPower" was of a woman taking a piss by Angelia Dufresne. "She was one of the people who posted right after the election,' Samet elaborated. "Interestingly, she was [also] censored by Instagram."
"[Dufresne] does this really explicit video work. When [her post] was taken down, her response to the powers that be was, ‘I am not going to be silenced. You are going to take one down? I will put another up!’"
"When I asked her about [being in '#Pussy Power'], she immediately suggested that [woman pissing] painting. It is a great painting. I was really happy about that painting."
Dealing with other artists was not so simple.
“I have always had a curious relationship to Louise Fishman’s work—not quite emotionally connecting with it," Samet said about an artist who does aggressive, figure-less abstracts, sometimes including big block letter statements.
"Then over the summer, with the campaign filled with misogynist rhetoric, Fishman’s work started to make a lot more sense. She did a series of 'Angry' paintings," saying "Angry Louise", "Angry Hillary", etc. "I didn’t really know how to relate to them [until] I was more in that zone myself, dealing with what was going on politically and personally."
"It was complicated to figure out how to borrow from Louise Fishman. She is very well-known artist. I finally got in touch with her gallery. I said, ‘I have one fantasy and it is the ‘Angry Hillary’ painting.’ It happened to be available and she and the gallery were happy to lend it."
One of Betty Tompkins's photo-realist, sexually explicit paintings, "Pussy Painting #13," 2011. photo: courtesy B. Tompkins“Michael [David, her co-currator] and I kept saying, when we were hanging it, ‘This is a sweet show, a pretty show.’ That was part of the surprise: it is not like an ‘Angry Pussy’ show, although I think that emotion is present.”
Although the show had quite a few, almost-bucolic nudes, they were overshadowed by transgressive female symbols like Betty Tompkins's "Pussy Painting #13," a Gerhardt Richter-esque, black and white oil of a "bush-less" vagina.
"I think that is what [Tomkins] work does, it is kind of a flag," Samet ruminated. "It is really subtle and beautiful. It operates on both levels—not just graphic or a flag. It is subtle and kind of abstract.”
The Dana James painting, on the other hand, was "an interesting combination of romantic and poetic, also vulnerability and strength. It is post-coital, with the cigarette, a dissociated kind of not caring,” she said.
If nothing else, the Age of Trump may stimulate a renaissance of edge-cutting female, feminist or matriarchal image-making. The time has obviously come, given the Women's March attendees surpassed a half-a-million, almost triple the previous day’s Trump inauguration.
Some of the imaginative biology-based art gracing Oakland's Women's March, January 21st. photo: D. BlairWhile the pornographers' garish nudes flash around the world in milliseconds, if history is any guide, iconography involving how we honestly imagine ourselves, our fellow humans and the romantic communication needed to reproduce will eventually prove to have stronger staying—and even political—power.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 05, 2017 - 11:50 PM
