Ambiguity and Persona

Persona (1966) is one of the landmarks of art cinema and also of director Ingmar Bergman’s career. Art cinema has been considered a way of making films in which the conventions of Hollywood are often disregarded. The three principle characteristics of art cinema as defined by David Bordwell in his essay The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice are realism, authorship and ambiguity. In this essay it is ambiguity that is the focus, specifically how Bergman uses it in the film Persona. Ambiguity is when events or behaviour are not explained clearly in a film, when there are many possible interpretations or no answers at all. It is usually related to causality, temporality or spatiality. Ambiguity tells us that life is complex, and that there are no easy explanations for peoples’ behaviour.

Persona follows Alma, a nurse who cares for an actress, Elisabet. Elisabet appears to have had a mental breakdown and is mute by choice, for reasons which are never fully explained, though it is perhaps related to the recurring theme of ‘the silence of God’ in Bergman films; her reaction to the horrors of the world may have triggered it. This detail and many other scenes throughout the film are kept largely ambiguous; we are constantly unsure of what is happening and as viewers  we are trying to work out what is going on.

Persona is a minimalist film, using very sparse settings, props and characters. The film has only five characters, only two of whom appear onscreen for more than a few minutes, and of whom only one has more than a few lines of dialogue. Most scenes also have blank or very plain backgrounds, and the only props shown are ones that are used onscreen. The two central women spend their time isolated in a summer house by the beach. This minimalistic structure allows this relatively simple tale to seem like the only important thing that is going on. It is the absolute centre of our attention, there are no minor or sub plotlines, nothing extraneous to distract us from these two characters and their interactions.

The film is also quite realistic, though not necessarily in the way classic Hollywood films are. It is the characters that are realistic, in that they are psychologically driven and not goal-orientated; their inner feelings can be unclear to us, but their actions and reactions to events are psychologically realistic. The realism is thus primarily focused on the characters rather than the narrative or plot. The film also has a clear sense of authorship, with characterisation so typical of Bergman that it’s instantly recognisable, the women with a strong sense of sexuality, and frequent discussions of morality and loneliness.

Persona makes heavy usage of ambiguity to engage the viewer with analysing the onscreen events. This is exemplified in a scene that takes place in the second half of the film, where Alma is awoken by Elisabet’s husband, Mr Vogler, shouting from outside the summer house. In this scene Mr Vogler mistakes Alma for his wife, Elisabet, and while Alma at first corrects him, she then accepts her role as his wife and they make love, in front of Elisabet. There are two key points of ambiguity here. First there is a causal ambiguity: why does Mr Vogler mistake Alma for Elisabet in the first place? And why does Alma go along with it? There is no logical explanation for these actions. Is it really happening, or is it a dream or imagined? If it is a dream, whose dream is it, Alma’s or Elisabet’s? There is also a temporal ambiguity; from the point when Alma agrees to be Mr Vogler’s wife to when we see them in bed together, how much time has passed? We cannot tell if it has been a few minutes or possibly several days. No clues are given as to how much time has elapsed, as the scenes simply crossfade and resume, and we cannot see daylight or the characters’ clothes easily. In a Hollywood film there would be many clues which would give us a sense of time. There would be establishing shots, perhaps a shot of daylight changing, or a calendar flipping forwards. There would be a conventional explanation of why Mr Vogler makes love to Alma. This ignoring of Hollywood norms is very typical of art cinema.

In Bordwell’s essay he writes that when confronted with such ambiguity we will seek out explanations, either ones of realism, or ones of authorship. Is it the ambiguity caused by the character deliberately lying or dissimulating, or by the inevitably subjective nature of life, or is it perhaps the director trying to say something to us? With the case of Mr Vogler mistaking Alma for Elisabet there is no clear answer as to why he does this. Is it perhaps that he does not recognise his wife’s face very well, or that he has spent such a long time apart from her that he has forgotten what she looks like? But then why would he ignore Alma’s cries that she is not his wife, especially when his actual wife stands right next to them? Perhaps it is something to do with Elisabet’s silence and Alma having to talk for both of them, Alma’s personality has absorbed Elisabet’s into itself.

Is there an ambiguity around identity between the two characters? Their physical and internal selves (their ‘persona’ or masks) seem to shift and merge into one, most prominently near the end where Alma appears dressed exactly the same as Elisabet. Alma then tells Elisabet the story of Elisabet’s pregnancy, a story in such detail it is impossible to believe it would be in Elisabet’s medical file, so how does Alma know all this? This is all shown through long takes and close-ups that only show Elisabet and her reactions to the story. The scene then is repeated, almost verbatim, but this time the camera looks at Alma instead of Elisabet. This repetition is important as it invites the viewer to try and spot any differences between versions. It also allows us to focus in full on each character’s emotional state as the story is told. Alma is quite calm, almost taunting Elisabet with the story, and Elisabet is very distressed and upset to hear it. There is more possible ambiguity regarding identity and their reactions to the story here. Are either Alma or Elisabet sure who is who? Alma is telling Elisabet her story, yet it is Elisabet who is reacting with more surprise. If this is the case it may emphasise how the characters are interchangeable, emphasising the subjective reality of this film. To go further, is the audience sure who is who? This might reflect on the nature of subjectivity, the extent to which one can empathise with a character. The repetition here is another example of ambiguity; we can assume that it does not actually happen twice as this would be illogical. However, we are again not given any clues to prove this to ourselves, we simply have to piece together that this is only repeating for dramatic effect, and should not be taken as factual causality and temporality. As Alma reaches the end of the story the second time, the camera moves to a close-up showing just her face. Just after Alma finishes the story half of her face is replaced with the face of Elisabet, before returning to being only Alma’s face. Alma now repeatedly states that she is not like Elisabet, then says ‘I am not Elisabet Vogler, you are Elisabet Vogler!’ Perhaps Alma is being fearful of their similarities, which are not minor. They both have a past they are ashamed of and they also look quite similar. Alma is afraid of the possibility of their merging identities, and wishes to refute it now that she can see it happening. She seems to be successful, as in the next scene she has returned to her nurse’s uniform, which she hasn’t worn since the two women left the hospital at the beginning of the film.

Whatever the answer to these mysteries is, we cannot truly know, we can only speculate. As to why Alma goes along with it, there may be more plausible explanations; perhaps Alma wanted revenge for being hurt by Elisabet’s letter, the one Alma opened and discovered that Elisabet felt she was studying Alma, and also divulged some of Alma’s secrets. Or possibly Alma is just of weak character and decided to go with it anyway. The most obvious explanation for this scene is that it has been imagined, but who is imagining it, and why? The film does not give the viewer sufficient information to judge whether what is happening is real or not. Though the events would make it seem obviously not real, the scene is presented in such a way that it is indistinguishable from any other scene in the film in terms of using markers such as focus or mise-en-scène that typically denote reality.

This presentation of something that breaks our usual perception of the real calls into question what we have seen before; can we really trust anything as being ‘real’? In an earlier scene the two of them stay up late at night, with Alma talking to Elisabet constantly. There is also a moment in this scene foreshadowing the future, where Alma says to Elisabet that she thinks they are alike in many ways. Alma goes on to say that she thinks she could turn herself into Elisabet if she really tried, but how easy it would be for Elisabet to turn herself into Alma. After a while Alma puts her head down on the table and Elisabet speaks for the first time, telling Alma that she should go to bed. The scene then cuts to Alma in her bedroom and Elisabet walks in and the two embrace. The next day Alma asks Elisabet if she spoke last night, and she says no; she asks if she was in her room last night, and she says no.

Are we perhaps seeing this from the subjective viewpoint of Alma? In Bordwell’s essay he writes:

In the classic detective tale, however, the puzzle is one of story: who did it? How? Why? In the art cinema, the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? How is this story being told? Why is this story being told this way?

The answers to these questions for Persona are very tricky ones. When the film transitions from the hospital to the summer house there is a male narrator explaining to us that they have moved location, telling us how much the two are enjoying themselves here. This narrator never returns, and is not a character present in the film. The very fact that there is a non-diegetic narrator leads us to believe that this story is being told objectively. However, this is clearly not the case when we factor in Elisabet’s husband mistaking Alma for his wife, and other such dreamlike or surreal scenes. In the traditional Hollywood film the narrator’s purpose is to clarify and make sense of the story, to give it a viewpoint. Another purpose for a narrator is to bridge scenes together in terms of spatiality or temporality, which is the only thing the narrator in Persona seems to do. However, this narrator is only in one scene where spatiality and temporality are not issues (an onscreen character has recently explained to us that this is what the two characters will do), and then is not present in any other scenes where spatiality and temporality are quite large issues. The presence of this narrator then adds another level of ambiguity: why is he there at all, what purpose does he serve? He is present when we don’t need him, and then not present when we need him most.

The film also has moments of breaking the fourth wall which allude to spatial ambiguity as to their relation with the rest of the film. One example of this is the introductory sequence which involves rapid flashes of images, before cutting to show a boy who reaches out towards the blurry face of a woman. Around half way through the film there is another sequence like this where the film seems to tear itself apart, and then resumes in a blurry shot of Elisabet moving about. Finally, moments before the end of the film, there is a shot that shows the film crew, and then shows the same boy from the beginning, again reaching out to a blurry face, before the final shot of a cigarette being lit. These shots can be treated as non-diegetic in terms of the narrative, but are important to one of the purposes of the film: Bergman wants us to be aware that we are watching a film, to draw attention to this. This realisation is unsettling, and causes us to raise questions about perspective and identification. If we are seeing this story from the subjective viewpoint of a damaged mind, how can we be sure of anything we see? Or does the story shift view points, from one character’s to another? If this were the case it would be even harder to work out the objective story of the film, due to constant shifts in perspective the film offers.

In classic Hollywood cinema the purpose is to tell a story, and to do this you want to ensure your audience understands what is going on. Thus ambiguity is something that Hollywood strives to avoid, whereas in art cinema it can be a major objective to create this ambiguity. The telling of a story is of relatively little importance; instead the film opens up a space for multiple interpretations of what is going on. The use of ambiguity allows Bergman to force the viewer to analyse the story and piece together what they understand from it for themselves. This is in contrast to Hollywood, where the story is supposed to be clear and concise. By forcing us to try and understand the story for ourselves we gain a better understanding of the characters and the purpose of the film. We engage with it more by thinking about it, rather than merely absorbing information. This moves film from being just entertainment, a formulaic package conforming to certain expectations of narrative arc and stereotyped two-dimensional characters, to one inviting its audience to deeper reflections on how we make meaning and sense of the world, and how we develop as individuals: positioning the audience as co-creator of the film’s meaning and significance.

Bibliography

David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Film Theory and Criticism, sixth edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 774-782

Final Mark: 75%, 1st

Strike and the Montage of Film Attractions

Strike (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature length film, begun when he was only 26, is one of the first films made in the Soviet Montage style, and quite exemplary of it. The most typical features of Montage are the use of many rapid cuts, overlapping editing and the non-diegetic insert, as well as themes such as collectivism over individualism. Strike is most famous for one sequence in particular which contains all of these key features of Montage. The scene is the one which shows the final liquidation sequence, when the military step in violently to put an end to the strike. The way the scene is presented conveys the effect of the strikers being brutally slaughtered like animals.

The sequence is very short, just under a minute and a half, but contains over 30 shots. This rapid cutting is typical of the Montage film which on average has a greater number of shots than any other type of filmmaking of that era[1]. The scene begins by showing the striking workers running, hundreds of them, and also shows the military advancing and firing, but it never shows the military in the same shot as the workers. The military chase the striking workers and then gun them down in a field. We don’t see any people being shot, but instead we see all their bodies lying there after the slaughter. This footage is intercut with non-diegetic shots of a bull being killed in a slaughterhouse. The use of a non-diegetic insert is another common Montage device.

The bull being slaughtered in Strike has no causal, spatial, or temporal relation to the workers. Its non-diegetic image is inserted…not to suggest that these two events are happening simultaneously, but to get us to see the massacre as being like a slaughter.[2]

The effect of this non-diegetic shot of the animal being killed is to make the viewer see the deaths of the men in the same way.

In addition, other than two close-ups of workers’ hands raised upwards, and not counting the killing of the bull in which there are also some close-ups, every shot in the scene is a long shot, showing many hundreds of figures at any one time. This in itself is not something typical of Montage, other than that they “avoid conventional chest-height, straight-on framing and utilise more dynamic angles”[3]. What is typical of Montage in this shot selection is the idea of collectivism over individualism. There are very few individual characters of importance, most of the story is told through groups of people: the workers at the factory are united as one unit, and the military are the same. This is achieved in part through mise-en-scène, with the soldiers all remaining faceless and wearing identical military uniform, and the workers wearing very similar ‘peasant’ looking clothes. This method of mise-en-scène is also very typical of Montage, with people being cast because they looked like the role they were going to play, for example “for Potemkin, Eisenstein chose the small, fastidious man who plays the doctor because he ‘looked’ like a doctor – though he actually made his living shovelling coal”[4]. This idea of collectivism was very much promoted at the time by the Soviet government, who were also advocates of Constructivism, the idea that art should be socially useful. Constructivism was pushed on the Montage filmmakers by the government as Lenin had been quoted as saying that cinema was one of the most important art forms for them.

Eisenstein sets out his approach to filmmaking in his essay ‘Montage of Attractions’ as follows: “For the exposition of even the simplest phenomena cinema needs juxtaposition (by means of consecutive, separate presentation)”[5]. In this particular sequence from Strike there are many examples of this juxtaposition, carried out in different ways and aspects. The first few shots for example depict the workers running. First they run from left to right, then from the back distance towards the foreground also with some movement left to right, then the third shot shows them running from right to left. This goes against  standard continuity editing as typical of American films, as obviously they have not suddenly changed direction and started running the other way; instead we are merely now watching them from the other side or direction. The first shot also shows them running downhill, while in the third they are running uphill. Eisenstein said “I should call cinema ‘the art of juxtapositions’ because it shows not facts but conventional (photographic) representations”[6]. This is evidenced by the fact that we do not see any people actually being shot, or any falling over dying, we only see them running, and then dead, with the bull in between representing that they have been killed, slaughtered as the helpless bull is. We do not wonder what happened to them; we see gunfire, and we see them dead and infer what happened in between.

The idea of juxtapositions as simply a means to an end is also the Montage director’s approach to editing, “that cuts, in and of themselves, stimulate the spectator”.[7] In the American style of continuity editing the idea was to edit in order to make time appear to flow smoothly whereas, in Montage, techniques such as overlapping editing or elliptical editing were often used. Both of these techniques are demonstrated in the scene analysed here, overlapping editing with the killing of the bull, and elliptical editing with the killing of the workers. Overlapping editing involves repeating part or all of a previous shot. With the bull we see the man’s hand strike down, and then we see him raise his hand up and strike down on the bull again. The bull falls in this shot, and then it cuts to another shot of the bull falling down from full height again. With each of these shots the characters and the bull are standing in different positions, creating another kind of juxtaposition between shots. The effect this has can be seen as creating conflict through spatial relationships as well as temporal ones, as time repeats itself but movements change between repetitions. The purpose and effect of overlapping editing is to expand the length of time an action takes, with the idea being that “the filmmakers do not guide the spectator through a clear, straightforward locale…rather, the viewer must actively piece together what is going on”[8] thus engaging and stimulating the spectator. Elliptical cutting, in contrast, creates a diametrically opposite effect. By leaving out a portion of the event, the event takes less time than it would in reality. “The contradictory temporal relations created by overlapping and elliptical editing compel the spectator to make sense of the scene’s action”[9] note Thompson and Bordwell.

The key factor for Montage films is juxtaposition, conflict in any way possible: spatial, temporal, juxtaposition between shots, visual conflicts and any other way to create opposing ideas within the films. The idea behind this developed theory of Montage was that by causing the audience to have to think about what they are seeing and then have to analyse what they have seen in order to understand it, the effect would be that the audience would engage with the scene more actively. While this may be true in part, the main criticism made against the Montage filmmakers was that the peasant classes of the Soviet Union found their films too difficult to follow, which hampered their success domestically; however, they did flourish abroad, as for example Potemkin was very popular in Germany.

Overall I found Strike very interesting to watch, the story line more engaging than Potemkin, which felt more like set pieces (albeit brilliant ones) without a particularly strong narrative tying the whole together. I also found Strike’s more frequent usage of the non-diegetic inserts very thought provoking, such as that when a ghostly micrometre surrounded the character’s head when he is accused of stealing it. Strike feels like a much further developed style of film than the other silent films I have seen.  The power of Strike to engage spectators remains undiminished after nearly ninety years.

Bibliography

Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010)

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998)

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[1]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010),, p. 117

[2]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 119-120

[3]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 121

[4]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 124

[5]Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), p.36

[6]Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), p.36

[7]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 117

[8]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 118

[9]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 117

Final Mark: 65%, 2-1

Death and Mourning

Camera Lucida (1980) by Roland Barthes is a slim book with a big influence on the subject of photography. On the surface the book is about the theory of photography and photography’s function as art. However, as well as this theoretical and critical framework Barthes’ influence of his personal life on this book is also strongly evident. This largely revolves around his mother, who had died a few years earlier; his writing of the book began shortly after. This memorial aspect of the book is made more poignant as Barthes died only months after the book’s completion.

In 1977 Barthes’ mother, Henriette, died. They had lived together for 60 years, and the loss of her was a serious blow for him. The book Camera Lucida is in no small part a eulogy to his mother. He discusses many photographs in the book, and the impact these photographs have on him. But when he discusses a picture of his mother, which he describes as ‘rediscovering’ her, he omits the photograph, saying “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’…it would interest your studium…but in it, for you, no wound.” Studium is a term Barthes creates and explains in the first part. It means to recognise the photographer’s intentions, to find what is objectively interesting in the photo. It is what makes you like a photo and be interested in it, but not love it. He is in a dilemma here, as, on the one hand, he loves his mother very dearly, and wants to share this with us; but at the same time he does not want to share her, as she is for him and him alone. However, he misses his mother so much that he cannot help but pour his heart out.  His mother is private, she is for him alone, but his feelings are open for us to read. It is these feelings that will be the subject of my essay.

It is not until Part Two of Camera Lucida that most of these more personal ideas come out. The first part is surely very personal too, since he discusses why he likes certain photos, what strikes him and why. But it is the second part where he becomes much more intimate, and exposes himself to the world. It is obvious from the very beginning of Part Two, which begins with the line “Now one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs.” Then within this same paragraph he brings up the subject of mourning. He begins speaking of how no photograph could cause him to remember his mother more than in his own mind, and he laments this greatly, describing it as “the most agonizing feature of mourning”. He wishes to write a little compilation of thoughts and feelings about her, just for himself. In short, he misses her very greatly, and wishes simply to enjoy her memory. Sadly he feels he cannot do this on his own; her death is too distant already, and he seeks out photos in which he will ‘find’ her. The first photo where he feels to have come close to finding her is one of her as a young woman on a beach. “I ‘recognized’ her gait, her health, her glow – but not her face, which is too far away”. However, he says that “none seemed to me really ‘right’…as a living resurrection of the beloved face”. He feels that these photographs do not capture her essence; no photograph can bring her back to him.

When he finds a photo of her as a child, there he ‘recognizes’ her. He sees the truth of the face he had loved. It is this omitted photo that pierces him so, the one that he decides he cannot reproduce for us as it would mean nothing to the readership of Camera Lucida. It is especially poignant that a photo of her as a child, a child he never knew of course, causes him to recognize the mother he has just lost, who died an old woman. Why does he link this child with his mother? It is in “The distinctness of her face, the naïve attitude of her hands…and finally her expression…In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever”. The key to the recognition here is memory, as is a key facet of mourning. Mourning is essentially remembering, and knowing that you cannot experience that memory again. It is loss, and the bitter sadness experienced by the absence of a loved one. When Barthes speaks of finding his mother, he really means he remembers her, but in such an intimate way it is as if he is with her, if only temporarily, and this lessens his sense of loss. He seeks to be with her, and through photographs he achieves this by finding or discovering such a strong and powerful memory.

The next chapter begins with Barthes writing “I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love. Starting from her latest image…I arrived, traversing three-quarters of a century, at the image of a child”. He pores over his mother’s life, wishing to connect to it, to her. He just wants more time with her, and yet all he can do is view her past. He finds these photos of his late mother, the woman he lived with almost his entire life, so very powerful, that he cannot distance himself from her, and he does not know how to be without her. His relationship with his mother is quite clearly a closer one than nearly anyone has with their mother. He writes that during her illness “it was impossible for me to…go out in the evenings; all social life appalled me”. By finding this photo of her as a child, he says that he resolved death. To me this would mean moving on, accepting she is gone and not dwelling or mourning too severely. He feels he has finished grieving, as if by seeing her as a child he has defeated death. She is always with him; and so he does not miss her. This is as far from the truth as can be, as all he does is mourn, and dwell on her memory. He thinks by remembering he is not mourning, but surely that is what mourning is. He ends the chapter by saying that “From now on I could do no more than await my total, dialectical death. That is what I read in the Winter Garden Photograph”. He has resigned himself to death, because without his mother he feels incapable of anything, incapable of carrying on with life. All he wishes to do is to join her in death, and after discovering her essence in this photograph, rather than alleviating his mourning as he seems to imply, the photograph has given his sense of loss shape and meaning. He understands the nature of his loss, and accepts it. Without her, his life is meaningless.

For Barthes, photography cannot defeat death. He wrote that “The Photograph does not call up the past… [It does] not restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but it attests that what I see has indeed existed”. By viewing a photo, you do not rewind time, for example, to a point before the person died. All you are doing is proving that what you once knew is true. To think of it in this way can perhaps aid in grieving. “The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” Rather than constantly trying to recapture the person alive, know they are gone, but know that they did exist. Not ‘what is’ but ‘what was’. Barthes then begins to muse on the dead in photographs.

An anonymous photograph represents a wedding…I read the date and I compute: 1910, so they must all be dead, except perhaps the little girls and the baby…it is possible that Ernest, a schoolboy photographed in 1931 by Kertész, is still alive today (but where? How? ...) why is it that I am alive here and now?

The photograph permanently fixes an image, a moment frozen in time. But time continues to march on long past when the photo was taken. Barthes is looking at these fresh living faces, and knowing for sure that nearly all of them are dead. They are in the past, and this photo is all that remains to certify their existence. The last sentence in the above quote is a particularly interesting one: the photograph is dead and everyone in it is dead, but the interpreter is alive. One day he too shall cease to be and shall die, his existence only proven through the photograph (or the book he is writing), but for the moment he is on the other side of this.

Camera Lucida, especially the second part, is more about the grief Barthes felt following his mother’s death than about photography. He seems to alternate between discussing the two, but when discussing photography it is always in relation to his grief. However, this does show how powerful a tool photography is, and how important it is to Barthes. It is certainly one of the only things he uses to understand his grief, and try to move past it. He openly discusses his grief several times in this book, “I cannot transform my grief,” he says; the photograph cannot change how he feels, merely allow him to understand it better.

At the beginning of chapter 38, death is mentioned more than ten times, beginning with the line “All those young photographers…do not know that they are agents of Death”. By capturing an image of something, it becomes dead, for death must be present in society. If it cannot be in religion, it must be “in the image which produces death while trying to preserve life”. This is one of Barthes’ musings which can be read doubly as being about photography and on death, rather than most of his discussions which keep them somewhat separate or more personal. By freezing the moment, Barthes infers, you do not preserve it, to be revisited whenever desired, but you kill that moment, to be remembered and looked back on only. Not that by not photographing it you would keep it alive, but to photograph it is to kill it. Barthes is then told by a student that he talks about death very flatly, to which Barthes remarks on the horror of death. This once again becomes very personal, as he says the horror of death is to him “nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it…The only ‘thought’ I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed”. It is remarkable that Barthes did little else in the time between his mother’s death and his own other than to write this book. There was nothing between them, as he said “nothing to say”. Because of this, many have seen Camera Lucida as being not only a eulogy to Barthes’ mother, but also as one to himself.

Next Barthes speaks of the death of the image. All he can do to a photograph is to kill it, that is, to throw the image away. Even the negative can be destroyed, it is all mortal. “Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.” He speaks of how, prior to photography, society functioned with memory alone. He describes memory as the substitute for life, and that then at least the Death was immortal, the Monument. The thing that encapsulated death was itself immortal, whereas photography he feels is not. The mortal photography has resulted in the Monument becoming disused. The mortal death creator has replaced the immortal monument. He seems slightly disparaging of photography here, but really I think it is death that he abhors. He loves photography or, at least, he loves photographs. Fear and hatred are intrinsically linked, and he most certainly fears and hates death. By associating death and photography as he has, he cannot help but to hate photography in spite of his feelings towards photographs.

In Camera Lucida Barthes described punctum, the prick, the wound that an image inflicts on a person. The first punctum is the personal, intimate detail that you see in an image, the one that forces you to fall in love. According to Barthes it cannot be inserted by the photographer intentionally, as that instantly will prevent it from being punctum. It needs to be present by chance, that wonderful small touch.

This first punctum was in part one of Camera Lucida, the part which focuses more heavily on critical theory. In part two he brings up a second punctum. The placing of these two punctums in the book is quite important. The second punctum is that of time, or the “that-has-been”. This idea is strongly linked to death, as his first photographic example is so clear to represent. It is a photo taken in 1865 of Lewis Payne, a man who attempted to assassinate a politician, and who was then sentenced to death. He is photographed in his cell, knowing what his future will be. For Barthes, the punctum of this image is the boy’s short future; that the boy will die soon after the photograph is taken. Now comes the crucial point, it is both “This will be and this has been”. For Barthes is so struck with the death of his mother, he can no longer view photographs without thinking in the case of old pictures that the person is both dead and will die, and in more recent photos that the person will die. Death is inseparable from photos for him, and while it is true that everyone photographed will die, having only this perspective at the centre of your views of every photograph offers a very narrow reaction. Barthes speaks of being moved when viewing a photo of a past event. It is surely not rational thinking, to associate death with everything that has been photographed. When we are fascinated by older photographs it is not because we know the person has died and will die; this is unlikely to even cross most people’s minds. Barthes’ grief has focused all his attention on understanding and explaining it. “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe”, he says; he is being far too pessimistic, and mourning has taken control of his every feeling. Even where it is not applicable, he brings everything back to death and his mother.

Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes links his reflections back to the ideas of death and mourning. This focus becomes most prominent and consistent in part two, where he discusses his mother’s death. His relationship with his mother was a very close one, he lived with her for nearly his entire life, and her illness and death shaped the rest of Barthes’ life. When she was ill, he stopped having a social life; and when she died, he kept a mourning journal and wrote Camera Lucida, discussing in depth his love and loss. I do not know if he was like this in earlier life, or how different Camera Lucida might have been if he had written it before his mother had died, but he takes a very pessimistic approach. A lot of human behaviour is linked to death, as death is the great unifier, and something that affects everyone, but I do not believe that photography in itself can be linked to death. There can be photos which remind us of death, or photos with the intentional purpose of themes of death, but as Barthes implies the inherent link of death to photography and that to photograph something is to kill it, I do not agree. I believe that it is his grief for his mother that has overwhelmed him in such a way that he cannot help but think of her, and therefore will link as many things as he conceivably can towards death, as it is at the very front of his mind, dominating his every action. It is all about memory for him, and memory of the dead. The photos do not allow you to see the thing as it was, it is not like stepping through a window into the past, but it proves what was. It proves that you knew this person, and loved them. When Barthes brings up the second punctum of time, he transforms the “that-has-been” into that of death. Barthes implies that every photograph of a person ever would have this foreknowledge of death. This interpretation seems to contradict the first punctum which discusses how it is in the important small, rare details, and that it is personal, and far from being a feature of every photo. However, it seems that this second punctum of time can be applied to every photo, specifically those of people. By looking at old photos, Barthes infers, the viewer reads the passage of time, and the potential death of the subject as being part of the photograph. The subject is simultaneously both alive and dead.

While this can be a very interesting concept, and certainly warrants philosophical debate, I do not think it satisfies the criteria of punctum as with the original explanation. With recent photos, the punctum of time is in the sealed fate of the person’s guaranteed future death. This seems a bit obvious to me; of course they will die, we all will. But this does not interest me in a photo, or at least I would not be interested in a photo for this reason. Barthes has a narrow focus on the deep feeling aroused by the anticipated death of the subject because he is overcome with grief, and has associated everything with death. In many respects Camera Lucida functions primarily as a eulogy to his mother, and possibly to himself, to the extent that the book does not just refer to death but is wholly about death and how we deal with it.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993)

Final Mark: 63%, 2-1

Studium and Punctum

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes lays out two concepts for the theory of photography, primarily concerned with being able to critically analyse photographs more coherently. The names he gives to these concepts are based on Latin words, studium and punctum. Barthes describes studium as meaning an “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity”[1]. This can be further clarified to say that it is a photo that you enjoy looking at, but on a superficial level, you do not love it. It is the objectively factually interesting points of a photo. Barthes says that the kind of interest studium refers to is political, historical or cultural. Punctum, on the other hand, is a very different thing; it is something deep in the photo that grabs your interest. It is the personally touching detail of the photo that wounds you and draws you in. Punctum literally means sting, speck, cut, little hole, a cast of the dice or the notion of punctuation. Barthes sums this up saying “the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points…a photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me”[2]. Punctum is the subjective, emotionally touching details.

Having set out what Barthes’ basic theory is, I shall now come to discussing my selected photograph. My photograph, which is in black and white, shows four figures placed around a bench in a Paris park. My grandmother on the left in profile, looking to the right, my mother next from left leaning down arranging the food, her sister sitting on the bench, a toddler looking to the left at her mother, and my uncle standing on the right and looking straight at the camera. It was taken in about 1970; my mother is roughly 19, her brother 17, her sister two and their mother about 48. They are having a picnic lunch which is laid out on the bench and presumably the photographer was my mother’s father. The bench is slightly off centre to the left, with all the figures contained within its width; they are maybe five feet from the camera, with the tallest person taking up about 3/5ths of the frame. There is lush grass behind them and many tall trees.

I feel this picture offers little in the way of punctum to anyone but a member of my family, as the punctum I see is a very personal one. The studium, by its very nature anyone should be able to see.  The studium of this picture could be the old fashioned coke bottles, or the fashion of the clothes on display, or sociologically it could be a family scene from 40 years ago that is interesting, as a frozen snapshot of life so long ago now. The studium of a photograph is of the order of liking it, not loving. I hardly believe anyone would love this photograph for these reasons. They may however like seeing a park in Paris on a lovely warm looking day. On studium Barthes also says “To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions…to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them”[3]. Here we see family life, the dated fashion, the peaceful park, which is empty other than them. All these things interest me, and they could do so for anyone I feel, but I do not love them, and I don’t see how anyone could.

What does prick me, as Barthes phrases it, is seeing my family at this time. My uncle and I share a great interest in music, and I know that he was in the habit of writing freelance reviews of concerts he saw for British magazines. It is as if looking at this picture I can see the fanatical devotion to music in him that we have only ever discussed. This photo was taken at the end of the 60s, a great time for music and the way my uncle is dressed evokes that era of music fans to me; he looks like how I would imagine a young critic of that time, even though he is only 17 and had not started his reviewing yet when this picture was taken, I can see it in his future.

My mother is also a great punctum to me, seeing her at the age I am now. She was at university in Paris, but was still living at home as her rather controlling parents didn’t want her to leave home. I thank her for all the freedom she has given me, freedom that her parents did not give her; indeed when she was my age she spent a lot of time looking after her two year old sister when she really wanted to be going out with friends. Also, seeing her with long straight hair in a ponytail (the preferred style at the time) is an amazing sight to me, as I have only ever seen her with short naturally curly hair. This entirely different life, so long before I was around, fascinates me.

My grandmother is also very interesting to see here. For much of my life she had dementia, and therefore I never felt like I got to know her at all, to ask her about her past. Here I see her, slightly younger than my mother is now, but showing many similarities, the hair, the way she watches her children proudly. This is the side of her I never knew; I only knew the woman who asked where her children were when they were sitting in front of her.

I suppose really the way to summarise my punctum of this picture is with Barthes second punctum, Time. “This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’)”[4]. All that I have discussed are of this nature, of the passing of time, and it is that I have not witnessed this past in any great detail that interests me so greatly. The mother who was once like me, experiencing life at university much differently, the uncle I have so much in common with (he is now an art historian), viewing him as the young music fan of the 70s. My aunt as a toddler is certainly amusing for me to see, but it does not sting me in this same way; and finally my grandmother, who I never truly knew, seeing her as a mother to her children, and much younger. If I wanted to dive even further in, I could say that this photo is taken in a district of Paris where some of our close family friends now live, and who we visited very recently, possibly even going in this same park.

Analysing a picture in terms of studium and punctum show how many ways there are to think about a photograph, and most importantly that the impact it has on you as an individual can be very powerful and very unique, I reiterate that I do not think my photograph would have any impact on someone outside my family.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993)

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[1]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 26

[2]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 26-27

[3]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 27-28

[4]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 96

Final Mark: 65%, 2-1

Ed Ruscha

"Art has to be something that make you scratch your head"

I first became interested in Ed Ruscha when I went to a retrospective on Ruscha, focusing on his paintings at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Edward Ruscha, an American Pop artist, was born on December 16 1937, in Omaha, Nebraska. His first exposure to art came from a neighbourhood friend, who was a cartoonist, and Ruscha began by drawing his own cartoons.

In 1956, when he was not yet 20, Ruscha drove to California, with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. He entered California Institute of the Arts, a fine arts school known for its training of Disney artists, where he studied until 1960. On completing his studies he was employed for one year by an advertising agency, an experience he did not enjoy at the time but that he later put to good use in a series of photographic books of the California highways, in his work as a designer for Artforum magazine and in the paintings of words that were to become his trademark as an artist in as early as 1961.

Dublin, 1960

Dublin, a large painting based on a small collage of wood, newspaper and ink was the first by Ruscha to include a hand-painted reproduction of a fragment from a Little Orphan Annie comic strip. This might qualify as the first Pop painting of a comic strip image, predating even those of Warhol and Lichtenstein.

Annie, 1962

A second painting from the same source executed two years later, consisting solely of two broad areas of vivid flat colour and the word Annie in its well-known typographic form. By focusing on the word Annie it simplifies and concentrates the image, it renders the art immediately more abstract, it isolates it from key reference points such as the girl; it makes use of the brand’s association with the comic strip and the emotional carry over from the pleasure people gained from that script. This characterized Ruscha’s subsequent concentration on words as found objects. Ruscha was one of the first Pop artists to use words as a part of his art, and it is quite disappointing to see that he is much less famous than other Pop artists when his work is at least as ground breaking and impressive.

Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962

Ruscha completed Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college. Among his first paintings, this is the most widely known, and exemplifies Ruscha’s interests in popular culture, word depictions, and commercial graphics and brands, as Warhol did with Campbell soup. These would continue to inform his work throughout his career. It was with his paintings of words that he made his most individual contribution to Pop art.

Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963

He applied the deadpan descriptiveness of the gasoline station photographs to several of his most blatant pop pictures, beginning with a large painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas; in its wide format, exaggerated one-point perspective, simplified colour palette, striking bold outlines and imagery of searchlights and triumphant signs, this homage to the service station as the temple of the twentieth century closely follows the pattern of his previous painting of the Fox logo. This painting of a gas station has been compared to Edward Hoppers 1940 painting called Gas.

Edward Hopper - Gas, 1940

In 1962 Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first "Pop Art" exhibitions in America.

Noise, 1963

Since 1962, Ruscha has been experimenting with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings. When asked where he got his inspiration for his paintings, Ruscha responded, “Well, they just occur to me; sometimes people say them and I write down and then I paint them. Sometimes I use a dictionary.” Some people look for meaning in Ruscha’s work, whereas Ruscha is using them as a device to question meaning, to focus instead on the art as design and execution – art for art’s sake

Ruscha strives to use words differently, he explains “If you isolate a word for just a moment and repeat it ten, fifteen times, you can easily drive the meaning from the word and from the sound of the word.”

This is a list of some of his works representing single words from 1961-1966

1961
Metroploitain, Hotel ,Boss, Ace, Etoile, Espana, Comics, Paramount, Boulangerie, Par avion, Calce, Anna, Annie, Bad news, Maja,
1962
20th Century Fox, Fisk, Honk, Ace, Gas, Oof, Dublin, Annie, Spam, radio, War surplus, Service, Ice, Steak, Schwiters, Ford, Hotel, Rah
1963
Noise, Smash, Flash, Standard, Hey, Space, Electric, Motor, Room, Fuck, Automatic, cut, Look, Radio, Jelly, Blank, Paris, Also, Great,
1964
Damage, Radio, Standard, Boss, Honk, Hey, Smash, Lawyer, Electric, Scream, Won’t, 1964, Voltage, Jelly, Dimple, business, Wolf, Explosion, Book, Bull, English drama, Age
1965
fats, Annie, Nicholas, Wilder, German, Standard, Heavy Industry, Church, Foo, N.Y., Belladonna, Mud, Chaw, Gag, Fist, Pie, box, Yet, Salt, Pep
1966
Charlie, Pussy, Stardust, Pansy, Business, Eri, Piano, des Artes, Lisp, Unique, Judge, Cherish, Punk, Automatic, Important developments, Cherry, Heart attack, Sin, Ed Ruscha, respect, Sure, Surrealism, Liquids, Chemical, Glass, jazz

Faith, 1972

By the late 1960s, Ruscha was intentionally using single words that were divorced from any meaning or context. It was sufficient for a word to appeal to Ruscha simply for its graphic design or sound.

Friction and Wear, 1983

A large body of work completed in the 1980s presents text superimposed over abstracted skies. Many of these skies are brilliant gradations of red and orange that offer an arresting ground for Ruscha’s statements.

But Ruscha did not select skies because of their romantic or majestic allusions; his reasoning is more pragmatic. He said “Paintings of words can be clearer to see when there is an anonymous backdrop. I’ve always believed in anonymity as far as a backdrop goes – that’s what I consider the ground or the landscape or whatever it is that’s in a painting. I do have paintings of backgrounds with foregrounds that seem to be the words or the images. That’s why I have this kind of lofty idea of a landscape as being a pivotal point to making a picture. And so there’s a landscape that’s a background, but I don’t see it. It’s almost not there. It’s just something to put words on.”

The Act of Letting a Person into Your Home, 1983

Only a few of the major practitioners of Pop art made a decisive change of direction, Ruscha for example, created an extremely personal and original form of conceptual art that was witty and inventive in its visual use of language.

Spring Sprung, 2010.

Ed Ruscha is still alive, and still producing work, this is one of his latest pieces, Spring Sprung, produced this year. As you can see he is still evolving and trying many new styles and mediums. To me Ruscha is a key figure in the pioneering of the Pop art movement, and should be seen as such, but his public impression is much less than that of Warhol or Lichtenstein, who were no more important or influential than Ruscha.

Final Mark: 70%, 1st

The Shock of the Now - Women in Art

‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.’[1] This quote from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, is an opinion held by many feminists of why historically there seem to be exceptionally few women in certain fields, most noticeably artists, composers, mathematicians, philosophers and other similar areas.

Linda Nochlin asked in her now famous essay of the same title, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Certainly there are many fewer women artists included in what is commonly considered the canon of art than men, perhaps even none before feminists sought to rediscover underappreciated artists from the past. One possible explanation for this is Simone de Beauvoir’s, that the art history canon was created by men, and skewed to ignore women otherwise deserving the same praise. Linda Nochlin disagrees with this idea in her essay, saying

‘The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; …That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation, nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol’.[2]

This seems to be quite a concrete putdown to the argument of overlooked women, but it is not necessarily 100% convincing. She does for example say ‘there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know’, which seems to suggest that she would be open to the possibility that there are such artists out there, simply unrecognised in their talent. Also, it may be her opinion that no woman has matched those great artists, but others may differ on this, arguing that some women do compare, the most commonly used example being Artemisia Gentileschi.

If Artemisia has been ignored by writers touched by a masculine bias, she has been warmly embraced by those fortified with a feminist sensibility. She has consistently been a centrepiece in the books on women artists that began to appear in the early 1970s, notably those of Ann Harris and Linda Nochlin, Eleanor Tufts, Elsa Fine, and Germaine Greer. Greer who heralded Gentileschi as “The Magnificent Exception,” reflected the common feminist wisdom that she was, of all the women artists working before the late nineteenth century, the most outstanding, the giant.[3]

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) was an Italian Baroque painter, influenced by Caravaggio; she was the first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. She was also one of the first female artists to paint historical and religious paintings, at a time when such heroic themes were considered beyond a woman's reach.[4] At a time where it was nearly impossible for a woman to become an artist, Gentileschi achieved much greatness, but it wasn’t purely on talent that got her that far. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was an artist, and encouraged all his children to become artists. It was Artemisia who displayed more talent than her brothers, and after being rejected from one arts school, her father paid for her to have private tuition. Without this family background supporting her, it is very likely that she would not have been able to become an artist at all, instead she probably would have had some sort of domestic role without the freedom to pursue other interests, as was the norm for women up until even the mid-20^th century. Indeed, this constriction or limitation happened to many other female artists of the past, who had to give up their profession after they were married. Judith Leyster and Caterina van Hemessen are two examples of women artists who are believed to have given up art as a career after marrying.

In the 1980s a group of feminists known as the Guerrilla Girls began protesting virulently about the lack of inclusion of women artists in museums, exhibitions and the canon of great artists. They would make posters pointing out the extreme discrepancies in balance, often including a picture of a woman with a gorilla mask, and often using humour to make their point. One poster puts out the statistic that while less than 5% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum in New York are women, 85% of the nudes are. It satirically asks the question, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” They believe their posters have had an impact, citing Mary Boone as a particular example of someone who now represents a lot more women after the Guerrilla Girls targeted her.[5] The Guerrilla Girls also specifically defend Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist famous for her sexualised paintings of flowers. They complain that male art critics denounce her work for its sexualised content, but do nothing similar for men who do very sexual works. The Guerrilla Girls heavily disagree with Linda Nochlin, and take the approach of revisionist history, or “Add Women and Stir”. Their goal is to include more lost or forgotten women into the canon of great artists, Artemisia Gentileschi being their greatest champion.

It is possible that there may have been great women artists, but these have been lost or forgotten, partly because there were very few women practising art at all, due to a social structure that made it very difficult for women to get the required training, or to maintain a career. With very few women able to be artists, there would also be many less women who achieved greatness out of this. Even in the 1950s it was very difficult for women to attend art school. For example Paula Rego who attended the Slade School of Art in London, told art historian Marco Livingstone in a recent interview about how the only reason women were accepted into the school was in order for them to marry the male students, and they would then be expected to give up their art. Paula Rego did indeed marry a fellow student, but she did not give up her art. Another quote from Simone de Beauvoir explains this situation. “One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”[6]

Historically it was incredibly difficult for women to get training as artists or to be taken more seriously, and they were often dismissed unfairly.

‘Women were not allowed to study nudes in the academies from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century to learn life drawing, and this blocked their participation in the all-important genre of history painting. Northern European flower paintings that were previously admired began to seem “delicate”, “feminine”, and “weak” by contrast to large bold canvases on classical themes.’[7]

This held back women a lot, as it is impossible ‘to imagine that greatness will be manifested no matter what the surrounding circumstances. Artists need training and materials.’[8] It is only the ones with very fortunate circumstances that managed to break free of either their stereotype or the constrictions that society imposed and become successful. Even then, they often still suffered much persecution, such as Artemisia Gentileschi who was raped by her tutor, and didn’t seek punishment for him until he declared that he would not marry her. For the trial Artemisia was tortured by thumbscrews to prove her story, her rapist was eventually given a one year sentence that he did not serve. 

There is also the National Museum of Women in the Arts, opened in 1987 in Washington D.C. It is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating women’s achievements in the visual, performing and literary arts.[9] It houses a collection of over 4,000 works by nearly 1,000 artists, including those by Louise Bourgeois, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo and Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, all great artists, comparable to their contemporaries. Mary Cassatt was an American who lived in France, befriending, working with and exhibiting with the Impressionists, who had another female artist working with them, Berthe Morisot. Morisot was previously thought to have been a follower of Édouard Manet, however now new evidence suggests that they both taught each other things. Elements of Morisot’s work can be seen to be incorporated into Manet’s, and it was Morisot who introduced Manet to plein air painting, and introduced him to the other impressionists. This could be seen as an example of previous art historians attempting to lessen the importance of a woman artist by implying that she was merely a pupil of Manet, whereas now we know this not to be the case.

There could be many other women artists we are incorrectly led to believe are less important or independent than they really were.    In the 18^th and 19^th centuries some art dealers even went as far as to alter signatures, reassigning work from women artists to male ones, such as Judith Leyster’s signature being altered to Frans Hals, presumably motivated by the desire to increase the value attached to such paintings. Some of these have now been uncovered and reattributed correctly, but it is impossible to say how many more are incorrectly attributed to men.

We have to reject the simple notions that women’s art has been ignored, neglected or mistreated by art history, and seriously question the belief that women need to struggle to gain entry into and recognition from the existing male-dominated field of art. Far from failing to measure up to supposedly ‘objective’ standards of achievement in art, so unproblematically attained by men by virtue of their sex, we discover that art by women has been made to play a major role in the creation and reproduction of those very standards.[10]

There are other artists such as Alice Neel, who were not appreciated for quite a long time of their career, and who only achieved success at the end of the 1960s as a result of the Women’s Movement. Previously her work was considered simply not the “in thing”, but after receiving much attention as a great woman artist by feminists her stature rose hugely, leaving her regarded as one of the best women artists of the 20^th century.

In more recent times things have started to improve much more greatly. Women have won the Turner Prize in 1993, 2006 and in 1997, when there was an all-women shortlist. Tracey Emin was nominated in 1999, and though she did not win she garnered a lot of media attention for her work My Bed, and she is now arguably one of the most famous artists in the world.

In conclusion, there have been great women artists down the centuries. Many less than men, up until the mid-20^th century really, because of social expectations of women’s roles in family life, and the difficulty there was for women to get training or win patronage. The few women that did manage to achieve greatness can be compared with their contemporaries who have been included in the canon, in contrast to what Linda Nochlin thinks. In the latter half of the 20^th century many more women rose to prominence, and now are some of the most famous worldwide, and achieve much critical and commercial success. It seems the playing field has been levelled, and now women are able to compete on a much more even ground.

Bibliography

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans., Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier Vintage Books USA, 2009

Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, Harper & Row, 1988

Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Princeton University Press, 1989

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses, Pandora, 1981

Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon, Routledge, 1999

Cynthia Freeland, Gender, Genius and Guerrilla Girls, Oxford University Press, 2001

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[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans., Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier Vintage Books USA, 2009

[2] Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, Harper & Row, 1988, p. 149-150

[3] Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 5

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi 14th December 2010

[5] Cynthia Freeland, Gender, Genius and Guerrilla Girls, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 85

[6] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans., Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier Vintage Books USA, 2009

[7] Cynthia Freeland, Gender, Genius and Guerrilla Girls, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93

[8] Cynthia Freeland, Gender, Genius and Guerrilla Girls, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 86

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Women_in_the_Arts 15th December 2010

[10] Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses, Pandora, 1981, p. 169

Final Mark: 62%, 2-1