Shiloh: Parsing out celebrity fashion

“…Shiloh reportedly selects boys’ clothing from stores and insists on being called ‘John’.”

I decided to buy a magazine at Union Station on Tuesday to help pass time during the 13 hour train ride from Toronto to New York. The Economist caught my eye with an image of pink formal girls’ shoes (http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15606229) containing all the cues of femininity I critique in my art. The cover said ‘GENDERCIDE: What happened to 100 million baby girls?’ Economics prevailed, as I realized I could get a hot chocolate and a less intellectually demanding publication for the same price. I settled on Life & Style Weekly but as I waded through my whipped cream, I thought back to the term, gendercide. I knew that parsed linguistically, it literally means ‘to murder gender’ (as opposed to infanticide, which is what the article is actually about). Later, I looked up the root ‘cide’ and learned that it can also mean ‘to cut down.’ Being a concept, gender cannot be annihilated per se, and if you want to get technical, culturally driven infanticide may reduce the numbers of the female gender, but it actually reinforces the gender dichotomy. And, if the cover of Life & Style is any indication, gender is alive and well–more on that in a moment.

Generally, I don’t buy celebrity magazines. They aren’t a guilty pleasure that I will read at a hair salon or over a passenger’s shoulder on a flight if I’ve exhausted my own reading material. I couldn’t resist this issue of Life & Style though, because the cover practically screamed, “Why is Angelina turning Shiloh into A BOY?” As a blogger and artist concerned about gender socialization, I was anxious to read the contents.

Let’s not forget that Shiloh has two parents, so fixating on Angelina Jolie alone is ridiculous. If Shiloh were playing into social norms, would Brad Pitt be singled out as the hero? Let’s also not disregard the existence of agency. Androgyny could be Shiloh’s preference. If the article is to be believed, that seems to be the case, as Shiloh reportedly selects boys’ clothing from stores and insists on being called John.

The juxtaposition of images on the magazine cover contrasts Shiloh’s apparent comfort with the transition to a tomboy version of herself. We see a happy looking Shiloh with sparkling eyes and clothing deemed “trendy but still feminine” (according to a caption alongside a second printing of the photo in the article, p. 26). Beside it on the cover, we also see a boyish portrait. Poorer in quality, the presumably digital photo has a yellow cast (read: sallow skin) and Shiloh has downcast eyes. Her cropped ‘do confirms a statement from an ‘eyewitness’ that her hair was formerly longer and blonder. Is the implication of this comment that the free-spirited celebrity couple has dyed their three-year-old daughter’s hair? Might we not assume instead that her hair is changing colour naturally in sync with toddlers all over the world?

What disturbs me is not the notion of gender bending, but the gender norms being imposed on Shiloh against her will. A case in point is a promise allegedly made by her nanny: “If you get your nails done, then I’ll give you a prize later” (p. 28). This anecdote strikes me as representative of the pressures of femininity in general: abide by the code, and you’ll get a prize. And what is the prize? Prince Charming? Have I jinxed myself by not painting my fingernails, even for my own wedding?

The first image of Shiloh in the story shows her wearing a pale pink dress. Although it is a casual dress, the caption says, “Girlie in a Gown” (italics mine, p. 27). The caption goes on to compare her to a princess. In closing, I ask, why is it worse for Shiloh to be dressed as a boy (which she is not) than as a princess (which she also is not)? Fantasy and fashion go hand-in-hand and who is to say if her alignment with boys is more or less appropriate than little girls pretending to be royalty?

The heart of the issue is hinted at in an expression appearing in the subsequent article about Shiloh’s parents. In it, a quotation from Jenny Paul’s book released yesterday, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: The True Story, reads, “Angelina wore the pants at first, but now Brad’s wearing them” (p. 32). Watch out: Shiloh could be a going concern like her mother. She’s wearing pants, and not just in the literal sense.

SOURCES:

-----, "Shiloh's Shocking Transformation", Life & Style, March 15, 2010, pp. 26-29. Print.

-----, "Bombshell Tell-all!", Life & Style, March 15, 2010, pp. 30-33. Print.

Lick it

“You don’t have to be very visually literate or media savvy to get that Kirstie Alley’s finger in the ad is only marginally bigger than the average erect penis.”

I started sewing at 6 am yesterday, and then it was a mad dash to pack and return to Canada for an artist talk at my alma mater, Sheridan College. On the Metro North train en route to Penn Station, I wondered if I was hallucinating the poster of Kirstie Alley, her head about five times the size of my own. I had been sewing images of cupcakes ad nauseam for the past two weeks; was I just imagining the daub of icing on her nose and lips for the poster advertising her show, Big Life? (To view the image, see http://www.aetv.com/news/images/news_generic_kirstie-alleys-big-life.jpg)

The dominant text on the poster reads, “Life. Lick it.” She isn’t licking her lips, and we don’t see the dessert that is the source of the icing, so the implication is that she is licking her finger (instead of or in addition to ‘life’, apparently). You don’t have to be very visually literate or media savvy to get that Kirstie Alley’s finger in the ad is only marginally bigger than the average erect penis. The finger is surrounded by lips that are about as glossy as could be, making them look like female genitalia primed for intercourse. All the poster is missing is male hands pushing down on her head or shoulders in bad form to cast ‘lick it’ as the linguistic imperative.

Persistence of sexualized images of women eating dessert? Check. Oh, good—not in the sense that I want women to be portrayed like this, but it makes me glad that the series I’ve been toiling away at (Girls I Went to High School With--double click image on left to enlarge) is in fact relevant. I’ve been having a grand time making these embroideries of women eating cupcakes. I start with images found online and alter them, in part for copyright reasons, but also because there’s something satisfying about making them resemble girls I went to high school with. Had the Internet been the social force that it is today, I’m sure many of my classmates would have happily posed with cupcakes in a similarly outrageous manner.

Conceptually, they are enjoyable, but formally, they are as well. I work with printouts of the images pinned to a felt base. I try not to feel sadistic inserting pins into their faces in voodoo fashion and cutting away their features one by one so I can replicate the contours exactly. I assumed I would be fixated on the sculptural elements—i.e., the areas of upraised thread wound around each other, mostly in the girls’ hair and cupcake icing. It turns out that I’m also enchanted by the contours. I wanted to them to be virtually unreadable, so that all of the attention would be on the girls’ features covered in cosmetics, so I chose a pearly pink that is the same colour as the felt and unreadable from a short distance. I find myself taken by the negative space that is created once I cut out the arm, hand, and cupcake, as the arm reads like the shaft of a penis and the icing like its head. After noticing this effect, I jokingly referred to the embroideries as ‘craft porn’ and said I was cautious about aligning myself with that. My husband asked, ‘Which? Craft or porn?’ It’s a good point—one that I’ll save for another post because I do have to get back to sewing.

Teacher or student, or both?

"Can I have my (cup)cake and eat it too? Is it realistic to make work for both the general public and the gallery-going public?"

In January, I began co-teaching a class at Purchase College called Art and the Environment. An outgrowth of the campus theme from the previous year (Environment is Everything), it is a collaboration with Environmental Studies professor, Ryan Taylor. The majority of the students are from Environmental Studies, which makes me feel especially cautious about which version of art history is presented. There are so many versions; where does one begin telling the story of art?

We're covering a lot of ground, so it's impossible to highlight everything. Cherry-picking artists and theorists is daunting because I don't want to misrepresent the discipline. At the same time, though, it's liberating. For example, the students were assigned a reading from Anthony Julius' Transgressions: The Offences of Art (2002, Chicago: University of Chicago Press) to contextualize environmental artist-activists. Why is it, I wonder, that none of my former art history studio professors devoted a chunk of time to discussing artists as troublemakers (that I can recall, at least)? I know that I am not alone in my impulse to cross the line.

Because the class is for academic credit, writing is a key component, with students writing critical analyses of works of art. Contextualizing this process is Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art (2008, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson). Having worked in arts publishing and having written my fair share of art history essays (the last one was worth a whopping 100 per cent of my grade), I didn't expect any big surprises from the book. However, I did run across something that shocked me: in describing the process of 'reception theory', Barnet explains that the uniqueness of the viewer's response to a work of art has really only been valued for a few years more than I've been alive. When I think of all the insights contributed by our students, it's hard to believe that individual responses were not always of interest.

I've been thinking about viewer response lately, because I'm considering applying to a summer arts festival at the end of the month. The reason is that I'm craving conversations with the general public. Will my new work shock them? Bore them? Offend them? Make them laugh? I want my work to affect the general public and make them more aware of the implications of gender socialization, but I also want my work to have a place in the contemporary art world. Can I have my (cup)cake and eat it too? Is it realistic to make work for both the general public and the gallery-going public? That brings me to another reading I want to discuss.

The students read a fascinating article about how people view artwork (C. F. Nodine, P. J. Locher, E. A. Krupinski. "The Role of Formal Art Training on Perception and Aesthetic Judgment of Art Compositions." LEONARDO vol. 26, no. 3, 1993: 219-227). It describes a study that revealed significant differences in visual perception and aesthetic appreciation of paintings, depending on the viewer's knowledge about art. Learning that viewers untrained in art history "spent significantly more time looking at central and foreground figures" (p. 226) made me think about how works could cater to that tendency. Coincidentally, the work that Professor Taylor selected for the class to examine in person the day the reading was discussed showed a hummingbird--front AND center--in the palm of a hand with a neutral, non-distracting background, made by Purchase alumna, Sara Breznen. If artists were informed about the science of art viewing, would they (or should they) tailor their work accordingly? Which group would/should they choose--the group trained in art or the group not trained in art? Who would I choose?

Another article made me aware of the presumptions I make about the way viewers view. About a year and a half ago, I began making a series of sculptures in which an abstracted cocoon is represented at three points in time. I positioned the earliest/youngest cocoon on the left and the latest/oldest on the right, assuming that people would read them as they would Western language, from left to right. I was forced to rethink this assumption because of another class reading (Roger Cushing Aikin. "Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation" American Art Fall 2000, 78-89). I know, it seems like a stretch to draw connections between an article on 19th Century landscapes and my own contemporary feminist sculpture, but as my undergraduate studies in a combined studio/art history program (Sheridan College and University of Toronto) taught me, countless links can be forged between seemingly disparate media. I digress... Aikin suggests that right-to-left movement in landscapes symbolized the nationalist concept of Manifest Destiny by literally moving towards the West. He raises the issue of whether viewers read paintings in the same way that they read maps or language, which I sincerely hadn't questioned (at least in relation to language; being severely directionally challenged, I don't give a lot of thought to maps).

I want to skip back to Nodine et al. Their scientific study of tracing patterns of eye movement served as a reminder of the interconnectivity of art and science. We could have named the course 'Environmental Art' but instead we called it 'Art and the Environment'. They inform one another, not unlike artist and viewer or teacher and student.

This week on the train

“IT’S NOT PINK!”

I left the Metro North station today and looked down to discover a long brown thread clinging to my pale blue scarf. Drat. I knew I’d misplaced it while embroidering on the train. With less than six weeks to go until my show (details to follow), there is no time to do anything but sew outside of work. When my arm gets sore, I am forced to take a break, but I feel bitter all the same.

Something amazing happened the other day on the train. A woman from my neighbourhood whom I have seen countless times sat down beside me, said hello, and asked me how I was. My theory is that embroidering makes me seem like a sweet young woman (and thus, approachable).

Here's my other train anecdote:

I’ve been toying with interspersing a series of images of woman eating cupcakes with stand-alone images of cupcakes. Then I was having doubts about using the same pink background. What does pink have to do with cupcakes, anyway? Today, though, I was reminded of the pervasiveness of the female preference for pink, even when it comes to sweets. To quote a young girl seated across the aisle from me: “I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, I want a pink um, pink lollipop.” After she repeated this a second time, her father relented and she defiantly insisted, “IT’S NOT PINK!” I realize that this doesn’t really substantiate my use of pink backgrounds in the cupcake embroideries which I may or may not make (though I had better decide soon), but it made me smile nonetheless.

What colour bra are you wearing?

"Is this campaign really increasing cancer awareness or is it just baiting male fantasy?"

If you use Facebook, you’ve probably noticed a rainbow of colours appearing under your friends’ status updates. The colours, as it turns out, correspond with the bras that the friends are wearing at the time they updated their status. Since my art is largely about gender, sexuality, fashion and colour (in fact, tonight I plan to take advantage of a sale at Victoria's Secret to buy lacy underwear in as many pastel shades as possible for a new series), I cannot resist blogging on the combination of undergarments and colour.

Facebook has been used for a lot of things, many of which make me cringe. One of its functions is reminiscent of chain letters. My least favourite posts are the ones that try to guilt recipients into reposting faith-based proclamations. Sorry, but I cannot picture God monitoring Facebook and keeping score. Anyway, back to the issue at hand, the recent colour status trend was made possible by a viral campaign exchanged between women which read, “Some fun is going on.... just write the colour of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women, no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status...” The ladies are then supposed to write only a colour as their status.

Personally, I doubt the success of this venture. For one thing, I didn’t receive the expository email until late in the game, so I initially assumed that it was about racial empowerment when an African American friend’s status read ‘black.’ Then a Caucasian high school acquaintance updated her status as white, and I found myself hoping it had nothing to do with race. Frankly, I’m not willing to disclose the colour of my undergarments, in part because I use Facebook in professional contexts, but also because it is not anyone’s business.

Is this campaign really increasing cancer awareness or is it just baiting male fantasy? Based on the reactions of male Facebook users that I’ve seen, the result is bewilderment (responses range from “?????????????” to “Hey Girls. What the heck’s going on??”) and a lack of seriousness (one male friend updated his status to ‘orange’). I’m not a complete curmudgeon. I laughed out loud when I saw his ‘orange’ status.

I’m not saying there is no power in word-of-mouth advertising (in fact, in the past 24 hours, 16 of my friends have updated their status). That’s why I’m envisioning a campaign that goes something like this: “Re. the recent colour status campaign, ask yourself, does exposing the colour of our bras really help spread the wings of cancer awareness? Consider writing a number (just a number) as your next status indicating how many months it’s been since your last professional breast exam. And send this on to your lady friends.”

By the way, my answer is two. And that information I’m proud to share. Why? Because cancer runs rampant in my family, and breast cancer has affected the lives of too many people I love.

All I want for Christmas is...a variety of sexualized images of women eating cupcakes for my art?

“… there are significantly fewer images of men eating cupcakes in Google Images than women, and only one with nudity I found, though my undertaking hardly constitutes a quantitative study.”

My artistic process is not very glamorous, as I get most of my inspiration from wandering around shopping malls while waiting for the next train. Suffice it to say, in the pre-holiday chaos, I steered clear of malls. Generally, though, they are a goldmine for me, because I can witness how gender construction is tied to consumerism. For example, while standing in line at Nordstrom Rack yesterday, I observed what I like to call colour-coded gender socialization: a young girl, about five years old, picked out a pink loofah for herself for the shower. Then her mother prompted her to pick out the blue one for her brother. It struck me that fashion is not the only way we cover our bodies with pink or blue–hygiene is another avenue. I know I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction with these things but it disturbed me that colour and nudity (and arguably by extension, sexuality) are associated so early on. If you think that the economy does not thrive on differentiating between boys and girls through colour, check out this New York Times article on the recent call for a consumer boycott in Britain by PinkStinks: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/boycotting-pink-toys-for-girls/ (Motherlode: Boycotting Pink Toys for Girls by Lisa Belkin)

I have actually just started looking beyond shopping malls as inspiration for a new series of works. In making two-dimensional embroideries with pink felt as a base and sexualized images of females eating cupcakes as the subject, I decided to use Google Images as a source rather than something like Xtube, because I feel it offers a cross-section of popular culture. The search string ‘woman eating cupcake’ retrieved some suggestive images indeed. Being a librarian, I indexed the images, and I must say, I was rather alarmed that terms like ‘nude’ were applicable on more than one occasion. Incidentally, there are significantly fewer images of men eating cupcakes in Google Images than women, and only one with nudity I found, though my undertaking hardly constitutes a quantitative study. I could not find sexually explicit images of girls eating cupcakes, even though many of the details are the same as in the photos of their adult counterparts, such as icing around the mouth, fingers in the mouth, mouths engulfing the entire cupcake, etc. The closest I could find was an image of two adolescent girls flirtatiously sharing a cupcake, which my roommate found particularly disturbing because of their age. Had I found no difference between the representations of girls and women eating cupcakes in Google Images, I would likely have embroidered both and paired them to emphasize their similarities, but apparently it is not meant to be. Frankly I am relieved that the Internet did not live up to my cynical expectations.

Unfortunately, I am ringing in the New Year with a cold. It remains to be seen if I will be awake at midnight, but I am hoping Home Alone and the sugar rush from the gluten-free cupcake I had for dessert will do the trick. The latter was for research, naturally. Happy New Year, and thanks for reading over the past year…

Controversy on campus

“…as an advocate of unbridled artistic expression and as a supporter of the Neuberger, I am compelled to write about this situation.”

While passing through the train station the other night, I was surprised to see that Purchase College, my place of work, had made the front page of The Journal News. The article ("Hindus ask museum to remove painting" by Gary Stern, December 4, 2009) reports on the impassioned request of Rajan Zed and Bhavna Shinde of the Universal Society of Hinduism, to remove a work from the exhibition, British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967 - 2009. The piece in question, Sutapa Biswas’ Housewives With Steak-Knives (1985), is part of a major show curated by Louise Yelin, which closes on December 13 at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Before I proceed, I would like to stress that the opinions in this post—unless otherwise stated—are entirely my own and should not be construed as representative of my institution.

As an art librarian, I am never embroiled in artistic controversy, but in past jobs at galleries, occasionally, I’ve had to make the difficult call about controversial work. Sometimes the stakes are lower—for example, deciding whether to make concessions like lowering the volume of sound-based art to appease neighbours who work night shifts. Sometimes the stakes are higher—for example, choosing whether edgy work should be removed because the police might be called in with allegations of pornography. It’s not an enviable position, and truthfully, I’m happy to be in the less contentious world of call numbers. However, as an advocate of unbridled artistic expression and as a supporter of the Neuberger, I am compelled to write about this situation.

I don’t see it as my place to comment on the representation of the Goddess Kali in this two-dimensional mixed media work, which is at the heart of the controversy. Whether she is or is not rendered in an appropriate manner is a question that others will debate. What I will say is that reading blasphemy into a contemporary work featuring a deity, let alone in a self-portrait, seems almost inevitable, for as Heather Elgood writes, “Among Hindus the act of sculpting or painting an image of the deity is sacred.”

Google the Neuberger controversy and undoubtedly you will read that Biswas has appropriated imagery from Artemisia Gentileschi’s oeuvre through a reproduction in a flag held by one of the four hands of the goddess. While it is tempting to fixate on this element as a means to situate her work in feminism, it is a tenuous connection. This is a lengthy tangent, but I promise that there is a point. Feminist art historians have traditionally seen Gentileschi’s paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes as a feminist response to being raped by her artistic mentor, Agostino Tassi, but recent discussions—most notably by Elizabeth Cohen—counter that we should not project modern-day psychological associations of rape onto a different time period nor identify feminism in a pre-feminist era. In essence, the tragedy was that non-consensual sex destroyed Gentileschi’s honour and ipso facto, her matrimonial eligibility. Rape as a psychological violation simply did not exist as a concept at the time. As contemporary viewers, we want to see Gentileschi’s paintings as a feminist pay-back but it does not jibe. Although impassioned interpretations can seem so logical that they ought to be unshakable, consider that Artemisia’s initial portrayal of Judith slaying Holofernes was at one point attributed to Caravaggio (Lapierre). In other words, reactions to artworks can swing like a pendulum. One group can be absolutely convinced that their interpretation is correct, while another group believes that they are in the right.To return to the point about anachronistic applications of the concept of rape, just as modern day society and Baroque society seem like they would have comparable mindsets about something as horrific as rape, the art world and the religious world seem like they ought to be compatible, especially considering their relationship through patronage. However, art and religion are uncomfortable bedfellows. Assuming interchangeability with their value systems and visual codes has great potential for disappointment and offense.

Ultimately, I feel that removing Biswas’ work would be problematic on several levels. First, it would imply that museums necessarily endorse the opinions and agendas of the artists whose work they exhibit. To remove it because it is deemed to be disrespectful would mean that museums must morally agree with the content of all work exhibited. Where is the line drawn, I wonder? The art world would be bereft of pivotal works like I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys, because surely forcing a coyote to be inside a gallery is disrespectful, at least in the eyes of animal rights activists. Rather than being a moral compass, I see the role of a public gallery as being neutral—as providing a context for artwork to be considered and as encouraging dialogue. The dialogue would be cut short with the removal of Housewives With Steak-Knives. Moreover, Indian expatriate artists suffered from virtual invisibility for far too long in Britain, and their inclusion in this exhibition is critical in acknowledging the importance of Indian artists to contemporary art. Even if the Neuberger were to acquiesce, removing Housewives with Steak Knives won’t make it go away. The democratic nature of the Internet will ensure its continued visibility. The irony is that the attention which has been drawn to the work will inevitably expose more people to it than if no request for removal had ever been made. Anyone familiar with Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ or George Heslops’ Jesus on the Cross? Well, then. Where Biswas’ work differs, from what I can tell, is that it isn’t intended as shock art.

Sources:

Elgood, Heather. Hinduism and the Religious Arts. London and New York: Cassell, 1999. Print.

Cohen, Elizabeth S. “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History.” Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 31, no. 1, (Spring 2000): 47-75. Print.

Lapierre, Alexandra. Artemisia: A Novel, Endnotes. Transl. Heron, Liz. London, England: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Online. http://www.groveatlantic.com/grove/artemisia/endnotes.html