Okay, I'm not sure how I feel about this (courtesy of the excellent blog, Phantasmaphile). On the one hand, it's a fun art survey, a nice teaching tool, and a fabulous piece of mighty morphing power animation. It's just that it makes me go all Guerrilla Girls when I see that many women as objects of the artist's eye, when I know 99.9% of the painters were male (I think I spotted one or two pieces by women, but I'd have to slow-mo it to be sure). I can't quite put my finger on why this makes me so uncomfortable and I've watched it several times now. Take a peek yerself:
Perhaps it's the concentration of one subject that makes the "male gaze" interpretations stand out, the way the faces change from serious to coquettish, from matron to vixen, madonna to whore. And the deconstruction of features as styles progress into Cubism and Modernism is disturbing too. The animation gives that even more violence than it has when seen in a still image. The absence of anything but white women is an obvious problem too, though not surprising in a survey of Western art.
And yet, the portraits are all beautiful and I'd look at them all, happily, for hours. I see the faces of my friends here. I see expressions I've caught in the mirror. I see the ideals of beauty shift and change remarkably through the centuries.
But there's still the whiff of commodity, not in the art itself, but in the women it portrays. And that's disturbing, because it could be me.
I've seen this video on many other blogs, and you are the first to give a commentary -- one very much along the lines of how I felt when I watched it.
By the way, I've been reading your blog for quite a while now, and I much enjoy it. I have an online journal at http://e-compass-rosa.livejournal.com (much more of a straight-up journal than a blog). Thanks for your writing.
E.
Posted by: E. | June 05, 2007 at 07:30 PM