Thursday, 6 March 2014

girls girls girls


pg 1 introduction

since the mid 1990s, the subject of girls, girlhood and girlishness has provided a focal point for a wide range of aesthetically and affectively acclaimed art. but while critical controversy has surrounded much of this work, raarely has it penetrated omre than skin deep. critics have debated the use of girls - as images and as artist personas - in the work of contemporary artists from anna gaskell to sue de beer to eija-liisa ahtila. 

yet over a decade has passed since the eruption of girls in contemporary art, and the subject no onger qalifies as a "passing phase". The representation of girls and girhood by women artists is a phenomenon that continues to provoke questions about the state of feminism sexuality and identity in western culture, articulated by a diverse range of contemporary artists for whom politics are ambiguously blended alongside the associations of girlhood with spectacular consumer culture.

rather than siply replaying the stereotypes of femininity, the figure of the girl has been used by many contemporary artists to question the stability of sexual and gendered identity.

pg 2

Judith Butler (feminist cultural critic and philosopher) has argued, ' it becomes impossible to seperate out "gender" from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained'.

it is an exploration of the instability itsel that is aided by selecting girls as representational subjects.

"girlhood is not meant simply as an age but as an alegorical state.."

In an essay from 1980 she (Angela McRobbie) argues that the spaces girls create for themselves are ambiguous, focused on both the creation of a sexualised identity that conforms with mainstream notions of femininity and as a potential space of resistance to the requirements of heterosecuality and motherhood through the creation of an all girl subculture. "

Page 3

As Anite Harris maps out, 'girlhood is not a fixed period o time but is subject to historical and social specificities'..

Catherine Driscoll - "girlhood is also historically and culturally specific. "Girls, young women and feminine adolescents/ were highly visible in twentieth century western cultures - mostly as a marker of immature and malleable identity, and as a publiicly preeminent image of desirability.

The marketing industry has stretched the definition of preteen or tween downwards to age six or thereabouts, and in fact it is tween girls that the ever hungry consumer arker is increaslingly targeting in the early 2000s.

Page 8

"poised between the increasing use of the adolescent girl as the ideal image of femininity in visual culture, and the politicized use of girlhood in movements such as the riot grrrls, contemporary artists draw on a history of girl figures in which the potential for female agency is often held in tension wth the commodification of the female body. The teenager, as opposed to the adolescent, was a catagory of consumer who emerged in the post war economic boom in america and then europe.

focus was placed on boys from 1960s onwards.. "This blindness to girls has been redressed in the last decade, with numerous studies of girls ...

This interest in part reflects how a self conscious girl culture had grown in both alternative and mainstream venues since the late 1980s.

coinciding with third wave feminism, these musical and visual movements were decidedly femme, taking back the girl shopping mall looks of lipstick wearing cleavage flaunting and short shirt strutting with a few "sluts"  and "bite me's" thrown in. If women were to be eroticised, the grrrls would, like mainstream predeecessor Madonna... The reclamation of the girl, in this contexxt, was not about a category of consumer but a way of foregrounding an active sexuality that many riot grrrls felt had been lost in second wave feminism.

pg 9

"a new precedent for this new generation of girl art can be seen in the work of artists from the early 1990s dubbed "bad girls" - from pornographic paintings of Sue Williams to the posturing of young British artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.

pg 11

"Today, consumer culture images of the Knowing child have become particularly sexualized: knowingness, based on complex factors, becomes narrowed to images of adult sexuality projected onto girls, as in Bratz dolls and many other toys and advertisements. Conversely, much of the contemporary work featuring the girl focuses on adult womens closeness to the girl, rather than the sexualization of the child, and the points of identification or resemblance that activate moments of recognition.

pg 13

"..contemporary images of girls perform as central figures for a range of adult female explorations."

"..images of girls can function as metaphors for the developing self at a range of ages. They are also representations of feminine desire, memory, fantasy, and politcal and aesthetic commentary at a historically unique moment of broaad cultural and consumer focus on girlhood.

pg 161 essay "Baby Butches and Reluctant Lolitas: Collier Schorr and Hellen van Meene" by Catherine Grant

pg 165

Judith Butler said in her book The psychic Life of Power " Called by an injurious name, I came into social being, and because I hve a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially... As a further paradox, then, only by occupying - being occupied by - that injurious term can I restist and oppose it, recasting the power that constitutes me as the power I oppose".

Here narcissism is seen as a mode of self preservation, a way of reweorking reality by inhabiting what at first appears to be defining identity negatively.

Pg 166

...simplistic narcissistic engagement of the female photographer photographing the female model, over and over again, i will argue that bother photographers utilize narcissism and nostalgia together to provide a multiple set of identifications within each image.

167

(freud) Whilst he also acknowledged a primary narcissism present in everyone, for Freud there is an increase in narcissism for women in puberty
he said "it seems evident that another persons narcissism [the woman's] has a great attraction for thse who have renounced part of their own narcissism [men] and are in search of object - love. He also comments that children and animals are mainy attractive due to their narcissism and 'inaccessibility', linking femininity with infantilism, in need of direction.

pg 168

".. the linking of woman with the figure of Narcissus in the history of art - gazing into the mirror, enthralled by her own image, unaware of the viewer - and the narcissistic position incorporates love of the self, homosexual desire and feminization.

OH MOTHER WHERE ART THOU? SUE DE BEER'S HYSTERICAL ORPHAN GIRLS BY KATE RANDOM LOVE
pg 128

in the 60s and 70s the work of women artists was often referred to within the art historical discourse o the late 1990s and early 2000s as somehow "adolescent". This notion of adolescence' most frequently circulated around representations o the female/feminist body.

Amy Lyford " subsequently asked if there was a way to 'address the process o 'retrospection' whereby feminist art that explicitly engages the "reality" of the female body in the 1970s ends up looking like a wayward teenager?



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