REPRESENTATIONION/ decypherability
VACILATION/ indecision

Jane Ostler: Hidden 1980

Mother: permitting representation
Summary:
This essay is unresolved and still being structured. 29/01/07

It was rediscovered on 30/12/25

• Role play
• Carers/Parents
• Men/Women
• Overcoming gender stereotypes - looking at their representation
• Looking for Role Models
• Beauty and Reason
• Art. High, Middle and Low Brow
  

1. The safe MOTHER, sanity: Art in the comfort zone; comfort is rational, the rational is comfortable.

Post Feminism?
In simple terms, feminism is the belief in social, political and economic equality of the sexes, and a movement organized around the belief that gender should not be the pre-determinant factor shaping a person's social identity or socio-political or economic rights.

Carers | Parents If Feminists declined to take the conventional caring role, who then, was going to?

Male/female cross dressing Grayson Perry?   Has some form of equality been achieved within gender stereotypes?  Is not hard line Feminism now a stereotype? Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document.

Whatever the individual case, whoever becomes the carer of the children, it is the family unit which needs to prosper for the happiness of the individuals in that unit. A mother may not know how to nurture, a father may not know how to provide. The connection to art may seem tenuous. Art is for recreation, art acts as a conscience, art is labour intensive, art is not a cost-effective lucrative activity, art is a mirror to life, art is part of culture, etc. Why do it? Because art can help keep you sane by providing an outlet and you need sanity to care for children.

Nurturing and Art : Gender Politics and Art : Outgrowing Patriarchy
Can artists afford to have families? Or to put it another way can parents afford to be artists? Someone has to be the bread winner. Being a parent is a part of a social profile, but so is being an artist.   We look at the personal background story with a mixture of curiosity, benevolence, ambivalence and impatience if we think that a person's ability to procreate will get in the way of our judgment of their qualities, or will bestow special treatment or an unfair advantage to the person in question; we look at the C.V. to see what obstacles may have inhibited a person, or what advantages may have helped them. It is illegal to be racist or sexist, but prospective employers can be unsympathetic to people with children.

Gender at College
Loaded comment to me at college: "You paint like a man".  

I was using the stuff off the floor, plastic sheeting dirt and all, and it attracted his attention in its unpreciousness.

It seemed that the (form of the) work was the process and the process was the (form of the) work. The question I had to answer was how to present that.

Loaded comment to me at college: "They discussed whether they should give me a first, because all I might do is go and have babies", G.D.   See Barbara Hepworth and her triplets. No one ever thought that the experience of being a parent might give a valuable insight into creativity. The primary carer for babies and children will find that having a family interrupts and reconfigures the impulse for making art. Both occupations benefit from good organisation. The suspension of the critical faculties needed for making art work is a result of being the main carer for a child. When you have a baby which depends upon you for being fed and content everything else becomes insignificanct. You are physically busy most of the time, as you attend to its cries and needs. It is hard to make coherent work until the children do not need you all the time.

Female Artists whom I know are/were also mothers

Paula Rego
Barbara Hepworth
Mary Kelly
Rachel Whiteread

Female Role Models - The Beautiful

Agnes Martin|1
Sonia Delaunay
Gwen John
Mary Cassat

and The Strange

Ida Appelbroog
Tracy Emin

Male Role Models - Brice Marden on Beauty

Q: Most people think your work is beautiful. Is the beauty of the object a consideration for you?
Brice Marden: Beauty. I really relate to form. If the form is resolved, it's beautiful. The idea of beauty can be offensive.
Q: What do you mean?
M: Maybe beauty is too easy. It doesn't deal with issues; political issues or social issues. But an issue that it does deal with is harmony . . . One of the reasons I wanted to do this work was that by using the monochromatic palette in the past basically all I could get were chords. I wanted to be able to make something more like fugues, more complicated, back-and-forth renderings of feelings. From an interview with artist Pat Steir, 1991

Rauchensberg - Applying a process to representation

Arthur Wesley Dow We are all free to "fill space in a beautiful way"
Georgia O'Keeffe "Everyone has to do just this - make choices - in (their) daily life " |1

Male - Rationality and Art. 'Rational' Oxford Dictionary definition: Able to reason, sensible, sane, moderate, not foolish or absurd or extreme, of or based on reasoning, rejecting what is unreasonable o cannot be tested by reason in religion or custom.

I think that there is a great need for rationality in women who have had strong fathers: they look for it in their partners: and if they don't find it then they have to generate it themselves.

See "The Land Measurer's Daughter".

The irrational. Alice never gets to her desired destination until she walks in the opposite direction, or has to run like the wind just to stay in one place, "Through The Looking-Glass, And Ahat Alice Found There", Lewis Carroll, 1887. Alice has to eat cakes and drinks to shrink or grow to fit her surroundings. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", Lewis Carroll,

The rational. Finding rationality in oneself: I needed a way to start working again. I needed an excuse to paint. I took a subject and copied it. The boat was beautiful already. The original was in the collection of the University of Delaware. They consented to my using it. To start I gridded up the image and scaled it up onto a stretched canvas. The boat image was full of meanings and readings. Just by starting off the process I knew that it would snowball and become self generative again, like being given a shove on a sledge (Frog and Toad all year).

Neither Male or Female:
REPRESENTATION and Revision of our conventional categories of gender
Kate Linker the curator of
"Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" March 03 - April 21, 1985
wrote" a more intellectual artistic practice has explored the powers inherent in representation, questioning representation's privileges and authorizing force. Reversing the expected relationship, by which the human subject controls and expresses its reality, this practice has exposed the way in which the forms of subjectivity in society are developed in, and through, representation. The world of images, symbols, and, in general, language, acts to construct the subject, determining our deepest selves.

This exhibition presents some of the research, now nearly a decade old (now 3 decades!) , into the cultural formation of sexuality; although restricted to the visual arts, it belongs to a direction, encompassing literature, criticism, and ideological analysis, that has questioned a view of sexuality as natural, biological, "fixed." Indeed, much of the work shown here challenges the very idea of identity, contesting the rigid and oppressive meanings imposed on sexuality as eternal and unchanging truths. The exhibition's thesis--the continuous production of difference in language--offers possibilities for change, for it suggests that this need not entail re-production, but rather revision, of our conventional categories of gender.

As their linear structure implies, many of these works are designed as texts to be "read," to be pieced together in sequence. Most contain a theoretical subtext; they draw on psychoanalysis--in particular, the writings of Jacques Lacan--for its account of the development of sexed subjectivity. Some works were chosen for the illuminations they elicit when seen through the lens of psychoanalysis. However, on the whole, they follow psychoanalysis' injunction to attend to the small detail, to the undercurrent in the event that is consciously masked as in-different. They direct us to the insistence of sexuality in language, to the sexual pleasures that inhere in the look, and to the inscription of sexual bias in the apparatuses of representation--photography, television, film--that define our contemporary horizon. They impel awareness of how gender infuses, influences, and complicates a range of social forms, permeating supposedly neutral fields.

Supposedly Neutral Fields

water colour technique. My camera.

How do you refine your practice?   How do you do what you do, how do you create something of value which is unique?   How do you make something which Left wing artists approve of?   Do you have to make reference to French Structuralist philosophers like Gilles and Deleuze and their writings '1000 Plateaux?' Etc.   Guy Debord, 'The Society of the Spectacle', Beaudrillard, 'The Poetics of Reverie'.   Does it matter what your politics are? what about pleasure painting, unconstrained from any moral questioning? It is was though women werenot allowed the (luxury) of the pleasure of (just) painting - they had to do something to allieviate the slippage of the status of women by being intellectual about their art. I discuss this with my dancer friend, who uses a plan but if it doesn't work out in rehersals will adapt it, alter it, change it. Organically. My way of working is the same, if my process needs changing because it is too rigid, it changes and I am not appologetic about this. Flexibility is the name of the game.

The Berlin Wall fell, and Solidarity succeeded, and the Soviet Union has changed from a Communist state to a strange hybrid hierachy; all human policies have melted into one, global text.   The subtext now must be the environment and realising a sustainable future for everyone, using whatever non-destructive means we have, like the internet.   The network.   Communicating quickly and democratically.

Market Forces matter so much that the making of art is always a wobbly thing. How can the 'Creative Practitioner' expect to live by art? High, Middle and Low brow and Kitch art. Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp".

Iwona Blazwick, The Guardian, 14.12.06 "If you look back over the last 20 years, the whole idea of art movements has disappeared.   2006 marks an incredibly heterogeneous playing field.   Art is global, and all the artistic media are jostling against each other.   Anything's possible".