The Nude, The Male Gaze

John Berger's 1972 television show, "Ways of Seeing," episode 2: on the nude.

"Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt on. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at."

The Guerilla Girls on Pussy Riot

via The New York Times, August 26, 2012.

“Pussy Riot are our kind of girls: feminist activists in masks making trouble,” Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls, wrote in an e-mail. “But,” they added, “we live in a very different culture where art is not as dangerous, and we can pretty much do what we want...

One really inspiring thing about Pussy Riot is that they always make it clear that their actions are political and feminist,” the Guerrilla Girls wrote. “The world needs more feminist masked avengers. We urge everyone to make trouble, each in her own way.”

Guerilla Girls

Divisions in the Guerilla Girls. Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, May 30, 2005.

In October, 2003, on behalf of Guerrilla Girls, Inc., two of the original Girls, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz,” filed a federal lawsuit against the on-tour and broadband entities, and against several of their former colleagues, including Gertrude Stein, charging them with, among other things, copyright and trademark infringement and unjust enrichment.

Guerilla Girls

We discovered that it was only in the twentieth
century, with the establishment of art history
as an institutionalized academic discipline, that
most art history systematically obliterated
women artists from the record.

-Griselda Pollock,
Vision and Difference:
Femininity, Feminism,
and the History
of Art (1988)

Unchain the women directors!

Do women have to be naked...?

Free the Women Artists

Guerilla Girls, Horror on the National Mall, 2007

The Birth of Feminism

more on Guerilla Girls here.

Illustrations for excerpt from John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"

The Venus of Urbino by Titian (c. 1487-1576)

Olympia by Manet (1832-83)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (p. 272 in Grewal and Kaplan): One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight...

In the art form of the European nude, the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the person treated as objects usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.

In modern art the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question it. In this, as in many other respects, Maet represented a turning point. If one compares his Olympia with titian's original, one sees a woman cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewht defiantly.

The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the "realism" of the prostitute--who became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth-century painting..."