Saint, whore, model, vamp, or housewife - society has a
slew of roles for women whose ambiguity and mutability create a wide
spectrum of images, particularly for women artists. In the mid-nineties,
Mariko Mori staged herself as an alien pleasure robot and comic girl, a
reflection of hedonist Japanese consumerist culture - and brought about a
break with the stagnant image of women complying with the definitions men
accord them. Mori wanted to be of her own invention; she further distorted
her self-portraits on the computer, ultimately creating 3-D animation
films in which she floats over virtual landscapes like some ghostly
Geisha.
Miwa Yanagi also works with the fictionalization of Japanese women,
appearing in her photographs as an "Elevator Girl" or as a "Grandmother,"
as could be seen in the large comprehensive
exhibition at the
Deutsche Guggenheim.
Miwa Yanagi: Ai, 2004,
Deutsche Bank
Collection
These purely symbolical
stagings are contrasted by
Tracey Emin's or
Elke Krystufek's search for authenticity. In the case of Emin, who became
famous as one of the
Young British Artists surrounding
Damien Hirst, everything seems to dissolve into the biographical
details of her life, for instance when she sews the names of everyone she
has ever slept with onto a tent. Yet even this provocative statement can't
be interpreted in an unequivocally sexual way - people she went to
kindergarten with suddenly turn up on her list, expectation is undermined
once again, and the supposed scandal reveals itself to be the public's
hunger for the cheap cliché. This also goes for Krystufek, who portrays
herself naked in her drawings, photo collages, and paintings in
ever-changing variations - and uses these nude images to draw a direct
reference to the Austrian love for the allegedly so liberating
esoteric theater of a Hermann Nitsch
or
Otto Mühl's communal escapades. Krystufek exposes how the female
body has been used as material by male geniuses, which is why she
implements her intimate and obscene testimonies of self to confront the
ideal that has gone unchallenged since centuries: the muse, always pure
despite her nakedness.
|
Tracy Emin: Sometimes..., 2001,
Deutsche Bank Collection
One can also depart from
the female body completely and work with nothing but fashionable colors
and design. Or advertising's promises. This is the path
Sylvie Fleury takes when she arranges expensive
Prada shoes and shopping bags to construct her minimalist installations.
The 1962-born Swiss artist's goal is called "customizing," by which she
means that products should be customized entirely to personal demands.
Then, for Fleury, a woman would be the sum total of her consumption. In
this variation, the gender construction becomes ironically inverted, for a
product says nothing about its owner, but merely allows an empty spot to
shine forth where the ad once promised personality through purchase. "Make
more out of your type!" - in Fleury's work, this motto is consistently
reduced to a formula behind which every real woman (and man) disappears -
into a nirvana of styling and product. And in doing so, she's not all that
far from the hit lists of the art market.
|
Sylvie Fleury: Untitled, from "Happy
Clinique", 1998,
Deutsche Bank Collection
|
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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