Initially, the focus lay on representing the female portrait in a more traditional style using black ink and a selection of brown tone, white and black chalk pencils [Fig. 1]. The aim here was to relate my images to traditional art using medium but modernise it with the use of minimal line work and the obstruction of the eyes. The success of these images relies on how easily they can be communicated to a larger audience. It appears that by removing the females gaze, the question of her being the "Surveyor" or the "Surveyed" [] is overruled. Hence in that sense it is successful. However, it does raise a lot more questions which I hadnt previously addressed. For example, does removing the womans eyes give her more or less power? The artists has chosen to no longer give her control of her gaze.
The collage
[Fig. 2] is again a more obvious was of depicting the gaze. The eyes
are drawn in to look at the female figure, whom herself possesses no
gaze. She is but an object to be admired. The overly obvious tone of
this image presents the viewer to consider why it is seemingly
conforming to the concept of the male gaze in such a brash manner.
Notes:
Mulvey’s quote "The presence of a woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story line, tor freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." [1972].
“A woman must continually watch herself” [1972], berger
Susan Sontag specifies in her book On Photography [1979] that “Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep happening” [1979 pg. 178].
[Fig. 1]
[Fig. 2]
[Fig. 3]
Goldin, N "Self-Portrait in my Blue Bathroom", 1991, Berlin
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