Hiiii. I'm posting.
1. Our culture has taught us that the power of women has slowly evolved and progressed. The woman today, or even 1979, supposedly has much more power than those of the past. Our society has recognized the wrongs that have been done unto women, and has, to the best of its ability, reformed that. Think of sufferage, divorce rights, property ownership.HOWEVER, Judy Chicago seemingly is telling us just the opposite. She says that the power of women, our spirit, our knowledge of what trials and tribulations we have and still face is limited. She paints the picture that society, more specifically that male population, is somehow doing us wrong by not giving us enough credit for all of our accomplishments. Is her way of thinking unfair? Overly feminist? Or have we had it backwards all this time? Is she right and it's just pretty hard to admit that we have been fooled into thinking us gals have been getting the pat on the back we deserve these past hundred years?
2. Which brings me to my next question; Is this complication, or, even better, traumatic realization that I stated in the latter paragraph a form of what Adrian Piper is talking about in his "Ideology, Confrontation...."? Am I justifying my belief (that the feminine population has not been taken advantage of and that we have gained more power and respect over the past century) by writing off Chicago as an overly-feminist antagonist?
3. I hope we can discuss Nancy Spero's idea that "the body is a symbol or a hieroglyph...an extension of language..." and how that pertains to the performance artists' reasonings. Furthermore, she says she wants to change the "idea of a woman's body to transcend that which is a male ideal of a woman in a man-controlled world." She's trying to bring woman onto an equal, if not higher, plane than man. She's serious about her subject matter, yet in this discussion she seems to have a more playful approach to it (i.e. the goddess with the dildo). She's not really attacking men so much as celebrating women and our control. Does her technique seem more validating and approachable than Chicago's to anyone else?
Well, that's it. I think I'll go listen to my Bikini Kill CD now.
GOOD NIGHT
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1 comment:
The Midnight Spank questions rule. You have brought up one of the most important issues all of us (gals and guys) are dealing with. The Situationists called it 'recuperation', but it is our inheritance from histrionics.
How do we deal with radical ideas from the past? Are they still valid? Are the problems still unresolved or is there a game of switch-a-roo going on?
Morning Spank,
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