The role of a woman
inside of the art world has been unintentionally problematic since its very
beginnings as this is seen in the resistance of this struggle by the Guerilla
Girls, Carolee Schneemann, and more recent, Andrea Fraser. Aside from the conceptual
and constructive difficulties that the average artist deals with when
attempting to successfully convey a message of awareness, idea, or viewpoint,
the isolation of genders can have an enormous impact on artworks and
participation/reaction of the audience. Women, specifically, have to kick in a
bit more effort when creating collaborative art.
My personal experience as a woman dealing with this type
of struggle has been very uneasy and frustrating when trying to achieve a set
goal in my artwork. A social practice project I titled, “Kid Nation” was to
undergo a major revision due to a distraction of my role as a woman. This
project needed a child or children to roam inside of their wild/limitless
imaginations to create his or her own individual cartoons in order to suffice
the project’s significance. In order to find children, you must first find parents
to obtain their permission for their child’s involvement in this type of
project and I had happened to go with my first mind on using an outsider’s
children to complete this project. The first issue I ran into was the intense
energy of these kids and strategizing how I could calm them down enough to
actually imagine and relay a creature/subject and a story line for me to
recreate in animation. After a short fueled game playing session, I finally got
them motivated to start their stories. The next bump in the road was making out
their story lines. I almost expected an extensive organized plot from these
kids, but I had to keep in mind that their understanding of plot schemes and
neatness aren’t developed yet and that these stories are his and her own and
NOT mine. As Nato Thompson says in his book titled, Living as Form, “ By
focusing on how a work approaches the social, as opposed to simply what it
looks like, we can better calibrate a language to unpack its numerous
engagements “, which reminded me to pay more attention to how the process is
set up because the process will visually represent itself as the art (Thompson,
p.24). The last, most damaging issue when doing this project was the
inappropriate seduction of the children’s (married) parent made towards me. His sexual connotations almost quickly turned
into harassment had I not rudely interrupted and left his home. This selfish
act absolutely killed my spirit in humanity of males for a short period, but I
had to snap back into reality that he cannot represent an entire population and
that this project can be performed again using other, trustworthy and
respectful candidates. Dan Cameron points these types of scenarios out in
Fraser’s sexually charged “Untitled” (2003) work stating, ''In this case, she's playing a little bit with what the
act really is that takes place between an artist and a collector” (Trebay).
There is a lot more expected from the artist as a female, than the audience
(collectors) by the artist at times which sparks such a disconnect of the
audience to the artwork, especially social practice. Situations like this can
negatively impact the artist’s motivation for the work, the cultural and
historical significance of the work, and disturb other participating audience
members. When jumping to the next candidates, I made sure that the previous
encounter would not repeat itself by working with a more respectful individual
and his child. Knowing I had to throw out the progress made in the last
encounter hurt me in a sense, but I know a lot of artists can relate to this. I
was on a tight time limit when starting fresh so I had to get right to it. When
it was said and done for presentation, the project definitely didn’t speak how
I wanted it to, even though it was partially representative of the work as a
whole. I was disappointed, but I was sure that this project would continue
regardless of its timely academic requirements.
This entire journey of
fully introducing myself to the physical engagement/people interaction aspect
of social practice has definitely been an interchangeable level of motivation
and emotional perspectives of humanity. “As group participation
increases, the basic skill sets which accompany group process become more
useful”, which would have been a great way to cure the first encounter of “Kid
Nation” project, however we cannot control another human’s participation(Thompson,
pg. 26). All we can do is excite potential participants and get them motivated
to fully engage in these practices. Other issues that I had control over as an
artist, learning from Thompson, is my overall construction of the piece. There
are a lot more aspects of social art that I should’ve paid more detail to that
I didn’t educate myself on, such as the level and types of participation, operationalization,
types of gatherings, types of media and medium manipulation, and most
importantly research and presentation. The last deems more important due to art
historically being, “no longer the primary influence for culture” and
presentation needing to effectively represent an accurate causal relationship
that historical context may disfigure if not researched thoroughly (Thompson, pg21).
Working with a population is not entirely negative, but there is some sort of
caution and awareness that artists may need to be familiar with before entering
social practice because people may be problematic in that they are unreliable,
uneducated, and in my case, insensitive and inappropriate towards a specific
gender.
Sources
·
Thompson, Nato. Living as Form: Socially
Engaged Art from 1991-2011. New York, NY: Creative Time, 2012.
Print.
·
Trebay, Guy. "Sex, Art,and VideoTape." NY
Times-Encounter 13 June 2004: n. pag. Web. 12 May 2015.
·
Guerilla Girls. "Guerrilla Girls:
Interview." Guerrilla Girls: Interview. Guerilla Girls, 1995. Web. 11 May 2015.
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