For my final project I wanted to use conceptual portraits to convey how the male gaze is not only enacted under patriarchal social standards, but how I contribute to maintaining the male gaze. I was inspired by Ana Mendieta's use of close shot photography of herself, twisting her features to express a separation of her body from a social tool of race and gender. She sees her body more in relation to the land, a sense of origin and functionality. Both connect her to her Cuban-American roots. She embraces her femininity while exploring the boundaries of gender.
Another artist that inspired my final piece was Mickalene Thomas, who uses rich colors, patterns, and textures to convey her relationship to femininity and race in her portraits of black women. I referenced her bold color tones and pattern choices when painting my own image on my face. My favorite of her works was Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires, which is a reference to a famous french painting depicting a naked woman having a picnic in the park with two fully clothed men. The scenes’ absurdity of one naked woman among clothed men is overlooked. She has become an object of the spectacle of the male gaze. Mickalene Thomas’ portrait depicts three black women looking back at the viewer as if interrupted, turning the gaze back onto the viewer. This portrait reminded me that just because I’m a woman aware of the standard of our visual and sexual society has objectified our bodies, does not make me exempt from also perceiving people through the male gaze.
How we see each other and ourselves in relation to each other ultimately controls our reality. Media plays into this by carefully controlling what and how we see within our society. This is known as the spectacle according to Guy Debord, a French philosopher. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, it is a social relation between people that is mediated between images.”(the society of the spectacle).
This absolutely includes myself and how I present my own femininity to be perceived by others. To convey this concept in my self portrait, I used pink and blue acrylic paint to represent male (gaze) and female (in the context of the male gaze) because the two colors are very universally used for gender. The base color is pink to show how I present myself in gender conforming femininity. (meaning I make myself appeal to the male gaze). My own internalized male gaze is shown in both the blue paint on my forehead where the mind's eye is typically depicted, and surrounding my eyes, which I wanted to emphasize with lines and dots emanating around each eye.
When photographing myself, I ended up taking head on pictures to show both confronting myself and the viewer on our own contribution to the male gaze. In an interview Mickalene Thomas said “To see yourself and for others to see you is a form of validation and I'm interested in that very mysterious mystical line that is how we relate to each other in the world” (ARTINFO interview).
This final project is different from my first self portrait projects because I took a lot more liberties in presenting the themes in my pictures as my own rather than replicating the works shown. I believe that I pushed myself not only in the class, but as an art major I was given the opportunity to explore more styles and techniques with less pressure of technicality. I feel more confident to push my own creative boundaries in future works.
ARTINFO interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2tJKAfyVhs
The society of the spectacle pt. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHtSPub3w8
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