performativity of gender


  • judith butlers performativity of gender
  • the gender that was performed for me growing up
    • woman should be pious
    • woman should be mother
    • woman should be wife
    • woman should be thin
    • woman should cook for man
    • woman should be beautiful
    • woman should be loving
    • woman should be pure
  • this performed gender is the presented ideal
  • my reality does not align with this performed ideal
  • the mirror moment is the collision or collapse of reality and ideals
  • this collapse of time and space is a moment of disappointment
  • the surface of the work is the psychological baggage of these disappointments made real
  • surface rife with debris, bulbous and overflowing, sticky and sweet and dirty and deep
  • the work is a collapse of time and space on the surface of a surrogate for my own body
i want to represent my experience
i do not want to add to the baggage of women by creating another impossible representation
i use abstraction to avoid creating further ideals

history of abstraction in modernism-- gendered ---- jackson pollock ejaculate
lack of representation of female artists throughout history, but specifically in modernism

lee krasner in a show with jackson pollock listed as "mrs. pollock" -- jackson pollock and his wife

abstraction and abstract expressionism in general have been masculine///men have been praised for their mastery--- motions have been an ASSERTION OF THE SELF

"""But it did enter the discussions of Abstract Expressionists, particularly through Harold Rosenberg's notion of "Action Painting," which understood the painter's creative process as an act of necessary self-assertion, an expression of freedom and authenticity"""""

this self assertion tended towards the violent loud and masculine

masculine - ejaculate --- poop
feminine - menstrual

mine --- poop and cake



raised doing gendered work with parents--- each valued in different ways
cake - mother - feminine - highly valued
poop - father - masculine - labor



define:
representation
surrogate
ideal
impossible
baggage
experience
performed
identity


assertion
self
at