Art Theory - week 10 - 29/04/2019

For my theory question, I have decided to look into feminist theory and the female gaze with a side study of romanticism of romance within the female gaze.

As this subject is very interesting to look at, as I noticed that the female gaze is not agreed on as one subject matter, unlike the male gaze. 

Week 10 boot camp

Documentation is the process of documenting your researching and process of the work at hand.
Documentation in Art Theory is our Blog, which should contain all in-class work and our own researching of subjects and thought process of our project and what our question will be analyzing.
This is also an away to reflect on past thoughts and to see how you have developed from your first idea through your researching. This is also a good way to see if you are on track with your work and not going off topic or doing things of irrelevance to the question.
There should also be referencing of materials to develop and answer your question to build an answer. To give context to your question, and information.
Documentation is also, a visual way of look at the thought process to were you have started from and finished. You should always be, questioning what/why/how when it comes to the project and finishing the answer/s to the questions. It is always important to reference source materials when it comes to backing up your answer or developing and explaining your answer.



Installation concentrates on the relationships between things and their contexts rather than the one object. 

Yayoi Kusama - A Japanese Installation artist, who is most commonly known for her Psychological art that has a theme of losing one's scene of self. Her art has a repetitive theme of dots, which is a reflection of her psychological trauma and obsessiveness. She captures the moments of her breakdowns, that she has had since she was a child, of hallucinations, disassociation, and anxiety. She voluntarily lives in a psychiatric ward.

Ebook from ProQuest Ebook Central: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field

"A study of Kusama's era-defining work, a "sublime, miraculous field of phalluses," against the background of abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room--Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to "free love" and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while at the same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a room lined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabric protrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it "a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses." A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, media pranksterism, and "Occupy" movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as her admirers--Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-defining work, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) "obsessional art." Applin also discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working with environments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues as abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's." J. Applin, (2012)

Applin, J. (2012). Yayoi Kusama. London: Afterall Publishing.

Imitationalism: refers to art that focuses on things being realistically represented.

Emotionalism: An aesthetic and critical theory of art which places emphasis on the expressive qualities. According to this theory, the most important thing about a work of art is the vivid communication of moods, feelings, and ideas.

Formalism: In art history, formalism is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style. Its discussion also includes the way objects are made and their purely visual aspects. ... At its extreme, formalism in art history posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art.

As a site-specific work of art is designed for a specific location, if removed from that location it loses all or a substantial part of its meaning. The term site-specific is often used in relation to installation art, as in site-specific installation; and land art is site-specific almost by definition.

Gazes 

James Lacan and The Mirror Phase

Michel Foucault and the Clinical Gaze

Spectator’s Gaze

Intra-diegetic gaze

Extra-diagetic gaze

Camera or director’s gaze

Text-within-text gaze

Editorial Gaze

Power and gaze

Male gaze

Subversion of Male Gaze

Proposal update:

key ideas - Female Gaze, the romanticization of romance, vicarious viewing, male gaze va female gaze

Why do men choose to create media focused on the female vicious living through over-romanticized characters in the media designed through the male gazes and how the female gaze differs in comparison?

"“The Female Gaze” spotlights both the extraordinary work of the cinematographers involved—including Rachel Morrison, Natasha Braier, Joan Churchill, and Ellen Kuras—and the shocking lack of representation in the field." D.Sims (2018) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/female-gaze-lincoln-center-series-women-cinematographers/566612/

I have sent an email to Katherine about asking for help on finding critque in my area because a lot of critiques do only look in male gaze and not the female gaze so it has been quite difficult to find things relevant to my works.