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CEDRIC DELSAUX
Landscapes / Star Wars on Earth
PRIVATE RECEPTION: Thursday, September 27, 2007 - 6:00 - 8:00pm
September 15 - October 20, 2007
Please join us for a private reception to welcome Paris based photographer Cédric Delsaux in celebration of his first exhibition in the United States.
Come for cocktails while the artist discusses his latest body of work, "Star Wars on Earth".
Martha Rosler, Bathroom Surveillance or Vanity Eye, Mixed media collage on paper, 20 x 24", 1966 - 73.
Photo courtesy of Mitchel-Innes & Nash, New York
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution opens to the public tomorrow at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with the curators and a few of the artists at a press event. It was very exciting.
Being a discursive survey the immensely broad, confusing and ongoing issue that is feminism, many questions and tensions exist within the exhibition. Focusing on the socio-political movement that occurred between 1965 - 1980 (or "second wave" feminism), what strikes me most about the questions raised in the show is their significance and urgency for women (and especially women artists) today.
During this era of great social upheaval, there was a momentum and optimism for social activists. Since the 1990's, there's been a muddy navigation through the successes and failures of these previous movements. Feminists like Camille Paglia and artists like Madonna complicate moral ideas of sex, gender and liberation that were once more clearly delineated. And we all know about the studies and statistics that show that today more young women, than in the 80's, coming out of college want to become house-wives.
One question that comes to mind when sorting it all out is, should women hold the weight of their whole population when making public (clothing choices, sexual behavior,etc.) or artistic (female representation, references to male dominated movements,etc.) decisions? In terms of sexual liberation, though obviously subjective and quite private, many young women today seem to confuse making empowered decisions with exploiting themselves. Clearly, more-so in the media, but media and culture endlessly mirror each other.
Though these questions seem meanderings from the actual work, the much debated cover of the catalog, Martha Rosler's, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain , brings upon this anxiety. I personally really do wonder what a bunch of naked Playboy models piled onto each other says about (or how it helps the movement of) women. Nothing new is being brought to anyone's attention. We know that women are commodified. We know this happens all over the media. We know that women know this. And, we know that women are angry about this. The shallowness and literalness of this piece (more-so its role as representative the exhibition, which includes such wonderful subtleties and complexities of women and of the movement) doesn't make sense to me.
On the other hand, maybe the goal is to make my blood boil and incite me into action. Or maybe the medium is the message. Many of the artists use the tools and methods that once repressed women, to empower themselves. Alexis Hunter, for example, turns the male gaze back around to face himself. And of course Lynda Benglis responds to Pollock's masculine action. Rosler's Body Beautiful, may be about her manipulating the women in this collage the way a man puts together and flips through a Playboy, and in that process exists a shift in power. The result is a tension between the redundancy of the finished product, and the potency of the process. I don't know if there is necessarily an effective resonance there or not.
Spatiality is a reoccuring theme in the show. Whether dealing with the confrontation of the womb and vagina, women's confinement to the domestic space, or women's use of the subversion innate to installation work, within this theme occurs the most insightful of moments.
The importance of this exhibition today is incalcuable.
If you weren't at Dissident Display tonight, you missed a legend.
Saturday night: Opening reception here at Project 4 for Cedric Delsaux's amazing solo exhibition, 6 - 8:30 pm
Cedric Delsaux, Visuel 16, C Print
Jessica Stoller, Pony Girl Bedroom, makeup, mirrors, mdf and paint, 7' x 7' x 10', 2006.
Artists who question feminine gender roles in a consumerist society often either tackle or touch upon the question of whether girls are led to the limited view of femininity consisting of princess worship, beauty and pink innately, or due to advertising's manipulation.
The disconnect that I've always felt within this issue is between its public and private realms. Using the dictates, expectations and trends of the media world (whether subversively or not) as tools for making personal decisions about the gender roles that we adopt, how we choose to make ourselves feel attractive and what turns us on are matters I've always considered self-reliant and private, even in this flattened out world of total obscenity.
Theoretically, Baudrillard's obscenity describes the world we live in as having no private realm, because even the most private of desires, actions, thoughts, etc. are feeding ground for the media. But in practice, individuals in a free society have the right to make their own decisions based on an interpretation of the environment they live within - with all of its many complications. Basically I feel the navigation to be two-fold: People don't have to buy into anything that they don't want to, and they must keep their eyes open at all times to the manipulation and methodologies of marketing to understand what "buying into" really concerns.
I compare this argument to the argument that comes to mind when considering how television is so often criticized for its mind-mushing qualities and conglomerated views. Once you've agreed to partake in and navigate the complicated world that is capitalism and consumerism, you can blame television for barely anything; you can only turn it off.
The type of promotion of "princess worship" (which most American girls choose to take part in at some point in their lives) has an unsettling edge to it. Manipulating children just seems unforgivable. Sexualizing roles through the branding and marketing of children's entertainment is utterly obscene, in every interpretation of the word. To me, it is the final frontier of privacy.
Obviously retailers and contributors to the promotion of such gender roles will argue that the attraction to "princess worship" is innate and they are capitalizing on it rather than creating it. The answer to the debate can never be absolutely decided, but either way the results of such marketing need to be explored and questioned because there is something terrifying and extremely angering about being coerced, or worse, locked into a sexual or gendered role as a child, a time when there is no responsibility or ability for control in the world of business and marketing, and in a time of extreme emotional and physical vulnerability.
Historian Miriam Forman-Brunell theorized that there is a rise in "princess worship" during periods of upheaval. And incidently, as Rebecca Bengal points out in the July/August issue of Print, "Sales of lipsick doubled in the months after September 11."
On the surface, a retreat to the child-like innocence of fairy tales, pretty pictures and dress-up seems a harmless and understandable reaction to world war. But if by retreating one is also accepting her placement into a sexually typified position, we as a culture need to question both our tendencies as consumers and our tactics as retailers. For all individuals interested in forward movement (in whatever direction they believe in) within this society, it is their responsibility to find and realize the resonance between the subconscious tendencies of the public and the covert moves of the marketing world, and then act accordingly.
Further, for a consumer to incite social change, one needs to find, realize and then illuminate such covert moves. And in a world where individuals have access to more information and more screens into once clandestine businesses, the transition of private to public takes on a reciprocal function: aiding in social change for the public.
For example (just stay with me while I abruptly throw some bioengineering subject matter into the mix), Thomas L. Friedman summarizes a Washington lobbyist of a major global biochemical company on the paradigm shift:
"The old paradigm, she explained, was simple: Your company develops a product, government approves the product, people buy the product, and everyone is happy. New paradigm: You develop the product, you test the product, government approves the product, farmers buy the product, consumers say, 'Hey, wait a second, we don't like this product!' and suddenly there is a vast Internet campaign against bioengineering directed at your company, with people all over the world demanding: 'Who are you to play with my food?'"
The relevance is that the world today holds the potential to make being an activist-entrepreneur easier, as long as we pay attention to everything we possibly can, at every level of every process that occurs. This makes the hugest hurdle, in my mind, not the ability to create change, but the ability to not become emotionally and mentally overwhelmed.
And as for young girls and "princess worship" during periods of upheaval, along with the many other responsibilities for monitoring that fall upon parents, the responsibility of monitoring every choice that one's children make and every media that they are exposed to falls on them the hardest.
Useless closes this Saturday at the gallery!
David Ruy and Karel Klein, Prototype of Wallpaper Furniture, Laminated Maplex infused with epoxy resin
