The relation between visual representations and the identity of the human subject. The ideas and research that have informed this lecture are grounded in the areas of queer theory, gender studies, critical race theory, and feminist studies.

1. The Power of the Image:
Contemporary art, gender,
and the politics of
perception
Dr. Deborah Jackson
Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory & Practice
Amalia Ulman

2. How is gender domination reproduced?
The reproduction of gender domination happens in ways that are subtle,
complex, and indirect but also violent, ideological, and direct.

3. “The Personal is the
Political.” Carol Hanisch (1969)

4. Fighting sexism in a profoundly racist society

5. Myth of Post-Feminism
That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore:
Primarily people with social privileges such
as being heterosexual, white, male, and/or
cisgender, believe that all women are now,
for the most part, equal to men.

6. Perhaps feminism has
been watered down by its
recent transformation into
a commodity.
Beyonce's blackness is
intrinsic to the power of
her feminism.
Marketplace Feminism
Beyoncé at the MTV VMAs 2014

7. Popular culture is
produced, represented
and consumed to
reproduce the conditions
in which feminism is
valued or dismissed.
Feminism is a lucrative business

8. #blacklivesmatter
A growing number of Black Lives Matter activists have been refocusing
attention on how police brutality impacts black women and others on the
margins of today’s national conversation about race, such as poor, elderly,
gay, and trans people.

9. Dasha Zhukova, a Russian socialite, art collector, and Garage editor,
perched atop a chair by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard comprised
of a comfy leather seat attached to a statue of a naked, bonded black
woman (2016)
Intersectionality
refers to to the ways
in which oppressive
institutions are
interconnected and
cannot be examined
separately from one
another

10. Lynda Benglis
Artforum (1974)
American art in
the seventies
was still a
"heroic, macho,
sexist game.”
Denunciation of the male-dominated art scene

11. REPRESENTATION IS
NOT NEUTRAL;
IT IS AN ACT OF
POWER
IN OUR CULTURE.
Craig Owens (1992)

12. From Official History to
Underrepresented Narratives
Postmodern artists
exploring how meaning
arises, and what other
kinds of meanings and
entities are represented.
Sarah Lucas
Au Naturel (1994)

13. “Western in its orientation,
capitalist in its determining
economic tendency,
bourgeois in its class
character, white in its racial
complexion and masculine
in its dominant gender.”
(Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory)
Why have there been no great women artists?

14. Feminism and
postmodernism
have emerged as
two of the most
important
political and
cultural currents
since the 1960s.
Barbara Kruger
Untitled (your body is a battleground) (1989)

15. Many people credit
Betty Friedan’s 1963
book, The Feminism
Mystique, with
launching the second
wave of the feminist
movement.

16. Untitled Film Still #3 (Cindy Sherman, 1977)

17. Martha Rosler
Semiotics of the Kitchen
(1975)

18. hooks critiques Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminism
Mystique for placing white women at the centre of all
women’s experience:
“She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the
children and maintain the home if more women like herself were
freed from their house labor and given equal access with white
men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women
without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the
existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did
not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a
babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a
leisure-class housewife.”

19. Shift from universal histories
to local and explicitly
contingent histories.
History and identity politics:
who can write or make art?
For whom? From what
standpoint?
Crises in the
Representation of
History

20. Postmodernism
The arguments found within
postmodernism suggests that there is
more to the world than the western
straight white male norm.

21. Mass Culture
(Pop culture)
Homosexual
Feminine
Consumption
Leisure
Emotion
Passivity
Reading
A dichotomy exists between High and
Mass culture which one can see
privileges the masculine over the feminine
High Culture
(Art)
Heterosexual
Masculine
Production
Work
Intellect
Activity
Writing

22. Postmodernism
Yinka Shonibare
Odile and Odette IV (2005-06)
The postmodern project of
overcoming binary thought,
however, is more difficult than it
may appear. First of all, one cannot
simply flip the terms and privilege
what was once diminished – that
would merely replicate the binary in
inverse.

23. Psychoanalysis
• Discusses the gaze and the way
the gaze subjugates the person
looked at and by whom
• Seen in the work of Freud,
Lacan and later Mulvey

24. Allen Jones
Chair
(1968)
The politicisation of women’s art practices in the 1970s and the
development of theories about the way meaning is produced,
semiology in particular, led feminists to a more complex appraisal
of what came to be called ‘representation’ or ‘signification’ . That is
how the representations of women are produced, the way they are
understood, and the conditions in which they are situated.

25. An example of blatant racism and ignorance are
given the greenlight in the name of creativity

26. “Men act and women appear. Men
look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at. This
determines not only most relations
between men and women but also
the relations between women and
herself. The surveyor of women I
herself is male; the surveyed female.
Thus she turns herself into an object
of vision; a sight…The ‘ideal’
spectator is always assumed to be
male and the images of woman is
design to flatter him.”
John Berger, Ways of Seeing,
Penguin, London (1972)

27. Non Binary
Gender as an
ambiguous
construct

28. Sarah Lucas
Seven Up (1991)
Lucas realised she had
conflicting feelings about this,
since she identified herself as
a viewer with the traditionally
male desiring eye and as a
woman being objectified and
dehumanised through her
cultural representation.
Tabloid Feminism

29. Guerrilla Girls a group of female artists founded in NYC in the 1980s. This
group appear in gorilla masks and attempt to expose the inequalities
within the art world.

32. Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter (So Help Me
Hannah series), 1978-81.

33. CINDY SHERMAN,
Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Stills, 1978

34. Cindy
Sherman
Untitled Film
Still #54
Sherman shows that to represent the self is to reproduce an
already given type.

35. “One is not born a
woman, but, rather
becomes one.”
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex (1973)
Sarah Lucas
Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs
(1996)

36. Barbara Kruger
Untitled (I shop therefore I am)
1987
“I think
therefore
I am.”
Rene Descartes

37. Carolee Shneemann has spent several decades trying to destroy the
taboo of the eroticized female, often by appearing nude in her own
work.
“…breaking the silence
of centuries and getting
the female muse to
speak.”
Parker & Pollock, ‘Framing Femininity, Art
and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985’,
Pandora, London, (1987), p291
Carolee Shneemann
Interior Scroll (1975)

38. More than being a case of the ‘simple repression
of one group of people by another, power is
implicit in the way we come to ‘know’ the world.
For this reason postmodernism, bound up with
an ‘incredulity’ towards Grand Narratives and
‘truths’ is incredibly hard to define. To be
marginalised is to be held apart from the
‘centres’ of knowledge production and
representation. Multiculturalism, Feminism, And
Queer theory are, for those reasons, very
important aspects of the de-centralising process
defined as postmodernism. Moreover, they
might be seen to be only prominent examples in
a much broader field of marginalisation.
Jenny Holzer
Abuse of Power comes as no surprise
Power and Exclusion