Gone
was the time when people were complacent with society’s limited social and
political norms such as men being the only intellectual beings on earth and a
woman’s highest achievement being domesticity. With the tides turning new
social and political movements came about such as modernism which had its own
movements within itself and followed later by postmodernism.
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| Sonia Delaunay, costume for Cleopatre with Chernichova in the title-role, 1918 |
According
to Tate.org, modernism is “. . . a global movement in society and culture that
from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the
experience and values of modern industrial life” (tate.org). During this
movement, artists used new techniques, materials, and inspirations to better
reflect modern society at the time. This movement took prominence as artists,
especially women artists, began to gain more freedoms. In the past, artists
created art not for themselves, but specific pieces for a purpose other than
their own. As modernism came around, more artists were creating art for
themselves in the sense that they were speaking through their work about what was
really important to them. For example, Sonia Delaunay was a prominent artist of
the time. She was a Russian artist who “synthesized Post Impressionism, early
Matisse, and Russian folk art in paintings . . .” (Chadwick 260). She along
with her painter husband, Robert Delaunay, developed a theory of color they
named simultanism which she derived a lot of her art work from. To describe
simultanism, Chadwick states that Sonia along with her husband were convinced
that “modernity could best be expressed through a dynamic interplay of color
harmonies and dissonances which replicated the rhythms of modern urban life”
(Chadwick 260). Despite choosing to live in her husband’s shadow, Sonia
Delaunay “was always innovating, thinking of new ways their ideas could be
applied to the world at large” (The Guerilla Girls’ 61).
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| Hannah Hoch DADA-Dance 1919-21 |
During
the time of modernism, there were many movements that derived from modernism
that was taking precedence as well. Some of these movements such as
abstraction, German expressionism, dada, and surrealism paved the way for the modern
art of today. These movements provided women artists with a daring way to
express themselves as they were just leaving their previous societal
subservient roles and gaining new freedoms such as the right to vote, to gain a
new-found recognition not only in society, but in the art world as well. Dadaism
is an art movement where the focus of artists was on “making works that often
upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about
society, the role of the artists, and the purpose of art” (theartstory.org). Or
according to The Guerilla Girls’ dadaism is “an art movement that challenged
every convention (except male supremacy) and scandalized bourgeois society”
(The Guerilla Girls’ 66). Dada artists were known to use everyday objects that
could be bought and that required little manipulation by the artist. The use of
these objects derived questions about artistic creativity, the definition of
art, and its purpose in society. One famous Dadaist was Hannah Hoch. She was “.
. . one of the first artists to make photomontages, using images lifted from
the media . . .” (The Guerilla Girls’ 66). In many of her early photomontages,
the figures she used were caricatures of what was called “the new women”. These
were “the German media’s glorification of the independent, modern female, free
to smoke, wear sexy clothes, vote, and work. . .” (The Guerilla Girls’ 67). She
resembled “the new women” so fiercely that her photomontages began to include
androgynous figures and same-sex couples as well as rebelling against the Nazi
party by using non-Aryan figures, Africans, and South Pacific islanders in her
series called the Ethnographic Museum to mock their love of racial purity.
If
you thought modernism was daring, imagine what postmodernism was about.
Postmodernism is “. . . used to characterize the breaking down of the unified
(though hardly monolithic) traditions of Modernism” (Chadwick 380). It
developed after the second World War and wanted to highlight the manipulation society was
undergoing through mechanisms of advertising and machinery. Postmodernism
relied on the derivation of existing representation instead of the creation of
new styles. It often derives its images from mass media as well as popular
culture and has focused on the ways that sexual and cultural differences are
produced and reinforced in those images. The emergence of a set of underlying
practices within the movement led to criticism of the way media images depict
women and how society reinforces through images cultural practices of power and
possession. During this movement, a number of artists, male and female, worked
to “. . . decenter language within the patriarchal order, exposing ways that
images are culturally coded, and renegotiating the position of women and
minorities as “other” in patriarchal culture” (Chadwick 382). In other words, artists
during this period were trying to change the conversation that images were
depicting. Doing away with acceptance of representation of past patriarchal
cultural norms and readily including and redefining the position of women and
minorities. One such artist apart of this movement was Barbara Kruger. She is a
conceptual artist known for her combination of type and image that depicts a
feminist cultural critique. Her work is defined by the examination of
stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism through text placed over huge
mass-media images. Through her work she looks to bring light to the ways
language influences and weakens the assumption of masculine control over
language and viewing. She does this by shifting pronouns to confuse viewers as
to who is speaking. Another artist, Cindy Sherman focuses on exposing what Western
culture constructs in film and advertising as the fictitious idea of a “real
woman”. Her photographs “reveal the instability of gender, and challenge the
idea that there might be in an innate, unmediated female sexuality” (Chadwick
383). In 1978, she began using her own body as the subject of advertising and
film images of women. This allowed her to act out the idea of femininity being
a masquerade. This notion was a “representation of the masculine desire to fix
the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity” (Chadwick 383). Sherman’s work
looks to dispel this stability.
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| Cindy Sherman Untitled 1979 |
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| Barbara Kruger, You've Got Money to Burn, 1987 |
Works Cited
The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin Books, 2006.
Chadwick,
Whitney. Women, Art, and Society.
Langara College, 2016.
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