Carla Cain

Female Body’s Reconsideration in the Today’s Art Today’s art mostly explores the same objects and questions as the art of the previous centuries did. Besides, the worldview shift in the today’s society presupposed the reconsideration of some basic objects of art. For example, the growth of women’s social influence made possible to transform the way, in which female bodies are traditionally represented in art. While during the previous centuries, when patriarchal social order was undoubted, females were objectified and thus treated with the primary regard to their beauty and pleasure provided by them (and their look) to males, today females are treated as persons equal to males, whose social position does not depend on any patriarchal evaluation. Today, the patriarchal stereotypes need appropriate criticism that lays in adequate reconsideration of female bodies. One of the best ways to show that females are not objects created for the pleasure of males is to demonstrate females in untypical contexts that exceed any gender limitations. As an example of the today’s art opposing to patriarchal stereotypes, I would use an artwork of Tatiana Parcero Re-Invento #16, a great piece of today’s feminist art, which I have seen in the Jordan Schnitzler Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. The artwork describes a young naked woman whose breasts are covered by her hands. The woman’s white figure is contrasted to the black background, while the figure is surrounded by different white passages of the text. As follows from the description provided in the museum, the idea of the artist (the young woman in the picture is actually the author) is to show how her body can serve as a version of the universe surrounded by different stories. In this way, Parcero’s artwork has a metaphorical meaning that presupposes the conceptual analysis through the prism of the today’s tendencies, connected with the problems of gender and female body in today’s art. Before the rise of the feminist movement that underlined the importance of patriarchal worldview’s reevaluation, females had been generally objectified and used in art just as beautiful bodies or even beautiful things. For example, Berger claims that in the majority of the world’s visual art, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. Thus, Berger emphasizes that female body’s beauty has been so important traditionally, that not only men, but even women perceived themselves as visual objects in such social context. According to Solnit’s considerations, the history of art can be reflected by the problem of female body’s relation to beauty, while the today’s claims of the feminists express the idea that “the object has dangerous agency and more dangerous porosity and is not necessarily interested in pleasing”. In other words, the transformation of the worldviews along with women’s ideological success made it possible to reach the equality between the interests of both males and females, and thus the female bodies cannot be understood as objects anymore. Besides, it is clear that the reconsideration of the previous concepts cannot just come through the denial of the latter. The today’s ideological conditions need some relevant forms of art that would express the dominant revised concepts of the today’s ideology in some new visual forms. Perry provides one example of such visual reconsideration of women’s image: “works such as Female Rejection Drawing of 1974… were produced as attempts to resist the objectification of women by developing geometric and flowerlike forms, which evoke female genitalia”. According to Perry, such pictures were provided as the attempts to express “both strength and vulnerability” of women. In fact, such approach served as a good attempt to replace the previously promoted stereotypes concerning female bodies (for instance, female genitalia as a supreme point of difference between males and females) through the prism of their multidimensional specifics apart from the patriarchal stereotypes. The same objective appears as the primary aim of Parcero, whose depiction of the female body is free from any traditional stereotypes. I suppose that Parcero tries to demonstrate the equality of all people in her artwork (with no regard to their gender or any other criterion of difference) in their relation to the universe, which includes everything and thus transcends any difference. Certainly, all people are different, but this diversity should not imply any inequality between them. I suppose that the diversity is expressed in Parcero’s artwork by the text placed around her figure: each person may have her or his own story expressed in this way, but each story is equally important. In this way, it seems to me that Parcero transcends the gender differentiation and avoids female bodies’ objectification through her appellation to a broader context of the universe, which equalizes all people with no regard to their diversities. Through the prism of the analysis provided, the main Parcero’s point was to show that her body exceeds the limitations of gendered thinking. The understanding of the female body as a universe (while the universe is total) presupposes the negation of any gender duality or even plurality: the idea of gender differences becomes too vague for any differentiation. Thus, Parcero’s example demonstrates the realization of today’s tendencies oriented against the patriarchal objectification of women’s bodies. In the case when a female body is equal to the universe, males lose their privileged status of the observers of naked women and treat females in the gender-free context.