SEX & GENDER AS TWO DIFFERENT THINGS
SEX: BIOLOGICAL FACILITY
GENDER: SOME PEOPLE ARE WOMEN, SOME PEOPLE ARE MEN
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler introduces us to the relationship between sex and gender. To say that sex is a fact, biologically is the complete truth. I can be a woman with all the attributing qualities, there is no argument that I could be a man with them though. Yet, to say that gender is a performance is questing the very movement of life. If we all only retain a gender by construction, then does that mean we are all the same at one point, if we are just constructions of various sources of media and historical referencing?
Butler also references the claim that women are a "historical situation," meaning that woman have come to be portrayed as we are by history itself. Women are seen as gentle, soft skinned, dainty, beautiful and many other things to add but this is all a response to what we have grown up learning from one another and through art and the media. Especially for the age I have grown up in, art and media have always played a big role in my personal development, for example when I was a kid I always wanted to have shiny beautiful soft hair because of the models in magazines that looked like the ideals of beauty I dreamed of being one day.
We are performing our own visions of gender, we as people have no inherient feminity or masculinity says Jennifer Blessing author of Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. However, Judith Butler talks about the unstable nature of gender which I relate to this idea Blessing had that we don't really know where we get these ideas of what a woman is but we always refer back to it, hense it seeming "unstable." To me, gender lies in the roots of unstability, meaning we reference the social norms to construct ourselves as a woman or man following a system of evolution. Because we are ever changing, we consider this life as a woman/man as our stage to show the world who we are, it is a performance of these everyday decisions.
Everyday you get up in the morning, put on clothes that you have selected to stylize yourself, and this is one example of gender as a constructed notion. We are actors that never leave the stage, with every movement, gesture, choice we are changing and creating the ultimate performance of a simulated gender.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Light Years: Conceptual Art and The Photograph 1964-1977
Walking to the furthest corner of the Art Institute was the this exhibit. Struck by a outer layer of text, it spoke as a preface to what you were to encounter upon entering the room. Very simply this explained that conceptual art defy's our expectations of what you can consider to be "art." We are asking what the medium is, or how it is made, or the "authorial sensibility" of its maker? What can we really consider art, and why this and not that?
One of the most important arguments Light Years: Conceptual Art and The Photograph is trying to convey is the seriality of art. In every machine and/or mode of transportation there is a system that keeps these things moving and working. The parts that make up the whole of a system, are the important factors that cannot function with out each other just as a body of photographs. One without the other, convey completely different manifestations then if seen as a whole, well oiled machine.
Photography often serves as a form of communication, a language of a sort. Each image is a representation of a site-specific reality, as the viewer we can interpret this in many ways from how the scale affects my perception, to the medium it is displayed on or the physical factors of the space. This constantly can change depending on where you stand, your mood, the lights and or the people around you. I found the first room, filled with walls that made triangles in the middle of the room one of my favorite displays; I was viciously circling and each time around I would see something different. That thought brought me back to how definition of conceptual art and the photograph create a relationship that is formed through personal experiences.
One of the most important arguments Light Years: Conceptual Art and The Photograph is trying to convey is the seriality of art. In every machine and/or mode of transportation there is a system that keeps these things moving and working. The parts that make up the whole of a system, are the important factors that cannot function with out each other just as a body of photographs. One without the other, convey completely different manifestations then if seen as a whole, well oiled machine.
Photography often serves as a form of communication, a language of a sort. Each image is a representation of a site-specific reality, as the viewer we can interpret this in many ways from how the scale affects my perception, to the medium it is displayed on or the physical factors of the space. This constantly can change depending on where you stand, your mood, the lights and or the people around you. I found the first room, filled with walls that made triangles in the middle of the room one of my favorite displays; I was viciously circling and each time around I would see something different. That thought brought me back to how definition of conceptual art and the photograph create a relationship that is formed through personal experiences.
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