Words may be footsteps, and images the imprints of shadows trailing behind a life. 

 

Wrapping up six months of ‘Women looking at Women’ while the my relocated self had to take a long, hard look at myself I return to the sisterhood of women artists. The ones who do not relegate other women and themselves to a uneasy and marginal peripheral position to popular culture which can be more pornographic than erotic exploiting female sexuality as commodity fetish.It is the expression of the female experience women artists such as Nancy Spero, Louise Bourgois and Judy Chicago that empower women as protagonists.The content of this art is its primacy making the female experience recognizable at a greater scale in prints and the world wide web. Expression springs from self assertion through the need to be heard as well as to be seen. When such work works it challenges myths and realities because it is authentic to both pain and glory experienced digging deep beneath style and surface. This art doesn’t borrow but lives its story.It is a courageous act of self-revelation in the public domain.The work of Bourgeois, Chicago and Spero conjures tangible shapes to subconscious states that may riddled by anxiety, powerlessness and wounding, only to produce art which circles around empowerment, female pleasure and potential. Bourgeois, Chicago and Spero worked through their pain to a vision. They imprint their images not as shadowy whispers but celebrations.In the end I learned by looking at other women that female sexuality is not something that society can trivialize to be easily available goods but it is the well spring of her art and power.If she is lucky enough to take freedom for granted.

 

 

 

I spent Christmas in Sweden. These were solitary days and to distract myself from the Nordic gloom, I went to the sauna by the sea. Women would sweat in the sauna and then jump in the water for a swim. Outside temperature was around 5 Celsius, and the water was 0 degrees. At the end of the pier, outside the wood burning sauna, stood solid Swedish women, pink in their nakedness against the led grey winter sky and black sea. Their legs turned like logs, a league of female soldiers in a group of no men. So the women could be themselves.

How opposite these women appeared to the most noticeable women of Bangkok.Swedish women of no frippery nor bows, no stilettos on uneven asphalt but also of no long and slim brown legs in hot pants. Not women for show,on show - treating life as if everyday were a catwalk.

 

No so these Swedish women by the sea. Their nakedness was not of the nude, but simply unclothed flesh. Similarly to me, we had come to the sauna for silence and solidarity. I thought of the words by John Berger writing about the male gaze, and felt torn between the practical, muscular shape of my Nordic self and the feline soft lusciousness of the young Asian woman. A thought stalled between confusion and envious admiration. Sometimes, in the hearts of  Western middle-aged women, the Bangkok ladies make for a group of painfully, dangerously beautiful competitors - if allowed - of the graces of the male.   All that lovely flesh on display and I react feeling threatened while free in my Swedish identity but why do I even bother to place myself in a comparison? Why really?

 

Yet, when female flesh is all covered up I react  with irritation even when the shroud may be that of  a nun. Covering up is also a ruse - one to elicit immediate virtue?Looking at women and their images,  it is as if my body does not belong to me but what it projects bound to choices that are the voices of mass media.

 

I quote Berger:

A woman must constantly watch herself.—-From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

‘ According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible , he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic. Social, sexual- but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretense is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast , a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice , opinions, expressions, clothes, surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence, Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation , a kind of heat or smell or aura.

To be born a woman is to be born, within an allotted and confined space, in the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of split into two. A woman must constantly watch herself.—-From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

—She has to survey herself everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.

–One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women look at themselves being looked at. – 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.

From Ways of Seeing by John Berger Edition 2008, Published by Penguin pages 39-59

Between the opposite cultures of East and West, worlds so different they seem to be of competing universes, I had to examine my own image.

  

 

While the young ones show as much shiny skin as possible and totter along on high heels using the street as a catwalk- women who work ( besides the working girl) cover when ever possible faces, legs, and hands.The dust settles on the contruction worker and the road side seamstress. They become one with the pavement.

 

Smooth, flawless skin and bare legs in shorts. Smiles and languid walking, with lustrous hair and small waists. Wrinkle free and bright-eyed female young wonders. Anything else, such as ageing skin- is an offense.

An article on the recruitment of air cabin staff in Korea  in the Thai newspaper ‘The nation’  states under a subheading of ‘Asia’s beauty advantage’that - ” Equal opportunities regulations enforced on Western Airlines mean that positions are not restricted to the young and ‘physically perfect’.In contrast, Asian carriers still seem to stress beauty adn youth as main criteria for judging candidates. Could this be one of the reasons why Asian airlines are miles ahead of competition? Stuart-Leach, H ( The Nation, Sunday the 13th of November 2011)

As the days unfold in Bangkok, it is power and empowerment that I become interested in, wondering why men get to lead while women choose to pose and preen. We women  are often invisible to ourselves, blinded by mass media and impossible demands to be all of that and none of this, but young!skinny!wrinkefree!non-scary!and captains of industries! We sometimes lose sight of ourselves, and a beauty which extends beyond the first visual impact. Walking around in Bangkok, I pass sex-workers,  and balding sex-pat men with barely grown women on their arms, I pass construction workers with faces covered against the dust and yellow helmets like a form of industrial burkas. I pass street vendor women working hard in the heat, cooking at the stalls. Who am I , amongst these women but their sister?

Women’s magazines instructs women to shop, charm and starve themselves. Swedish, British and Thai magazines are alike, blending the facial tones and bodytypes in to a kind of streamlined female prototype. It is the world of no difference, a landscape of airport shopping mall charisma and massproduced identities, of skin which is neither white nor dark but smoothly inbetween. This is the new global woman. I thought she had come further.

Thailand boosts a female primeminister, and on the roads and construction sites women do hard days’ work.Slowly, I map the hierarchy of Thai women from ladybosses to flower garland makers ( both entreprenurial) The new global woman with her glossy legs, high heels and airport shop charm  sits, as expected, in between, looking at men looking at her.

Graphica Creativa’s  2012:’ Women looking at Women ‘ Swedish contribution is curated by Stefano Beccari.

Graphica Creativa 2012  is one of the foremost important graphic arts events of the Nordic countries and started 1975 in the city  of Juväskylä, Central Finland. Stefano Beccari, leading the Swedish contribution,  have  invited five prominent female print based artists to view women through a female gaze, as opposed to the dominant male gaze.

‘Women looking at Women- Paper and Pixels’ is a project which draws deeply on my own multiple roles as a female artist and thinker in a century when anything goes, yet when  women are ensnared still by unexamined expectations, to the degree that we are a species trapped in our own images?

I connect to the project by combining tradtional printmaking techniques with new media- through this  blog and Facebook. If one definition of print is multiplicity, and the other as a socially enaged message, then forms of dissemenation holds no bars in current times and the potential richness of ‘ sending messages’ via paper and the ‘printer in the sky’ - the worldwide web. also, based in Bangkok where the trade in women is brisk alongside with the leadership by powerful female industrial and intellectual leaders, I am thrown between responses  first in words and then in the images I create, not the images created for me by advertising and culture.

‘Women looking at Women- Paper and Pixels’ is a continuation of the ideas presented at the International Mokuhanga Conference in Kyoto June 2011.

The Print cut loose- The mokuhanga woodcut print and society

 

Virginia Wollf’ ‘No audience. No echo. That’s part of one’s death’ (Blau 1990:1)

 

 

 

The power of the hand printed image has been attributed historically to its multiplicity and wide dissemination. The audience were the ordinary people and not their rulers, lending the print a democratic appeal as it scattered throughout the layers of society. In the 21^st century, the internet has replaced the miracle of dissemination which was once made able by cheaply printed paper.

 

Does the possibility of diffusion of images through the internet invigorate a past democratic appeal of the mokuhanga thus engaging a broader audience? Or does it threaten the paper-based print’s visceral impact drawn from craftsmanship’s meditative nature?

 

 I argue that when the mokuhanga of historical beginnings meets the 21^st century, the carved lines are not doomed to dissolve in pixels or lose a sense of the skilfully hand crafted. Instead, when the mokuhanga is ‘cut loose’ from the gallery wall it reconnects to its temporal social commentary while offering a masterful model of authenticity and craftsmanship.   A new audience meets what is genuine in an era of mass-produced images, frenzied experiences and emotions.

 

‘And whilst digital technology speeds up communications, the imposed stability of older technologies quietly resist the pressure to move, continuing to produce a ‘slow art’ shaped by negotiations between processes, systems and people.’        (Smith 2011:17)

 

Historically, the woodcut print - ‘an exactly repeatable pictorial statement on paper which easily circulated ‘and advanced ideas, was the art of the ordinary man.  (Ivins 1953:3) The agency of the print lied in its expansive dissemination and so functioned both as a societal witness and entertainment in Europe and Japan. Once, the print engaged an audience by moving through the streets of London on a cart, collected by high and low alike and handled in the tea houses of Edo. The print was part of life’s theatre performing, informing and scandalizing.

 

 

In Japan the mokuhanga floated on the currents of society, playing with politics, sex and satire by using allusion (mitate- e) through the use of double entrendre and metaphors.  A visual strategy to comment on politics and subtly express discontent, the mitate-e connected to the events of the day making it temporal and topical.  Drawing on such historical examples, print’s nature is its social connectedness as well as responding to technical advancements.  Lately, the ease of dissemination which was once made possible by printed paper has been replaced by the digital. The internet has become ‘the printer in the sky’. New media shifts the mokuhanga’s audience. On the screen the image is consumed rather than intimately regarded.  In this, lie the future challenges for the mokuhanga print.

 

If the definition of print is its multiplicity and dissemination making it by hand is no longer a classification. Once, creating a print required gradually acquired skills, but now the making is replaced in a moment by a screen, a lens and a printer. The instant generates apathy and kills the need to craft an image. Yet, craft- creates a connection between hand, heart and mind.  Sennet writes in ‘The Craftsman’ that ‘making is thinking’ and so connects to feeling.  (2008: acknowledgement)

The mokuhanga’s wood-matrix becomes a collaborator in releasing the image and the process is a gift to the audience rather than a consumer item. Yet, it might be romantic to expect that the process reverberates in the audience as a beating heart of the woodcut. Roca, 2010 Philagrafika‘s chief co-ordinator, states that “Fixated on defining the realm of printmaking based on technique, some printmakers have printed themselves into a corner, away from the center of contemporary artistic trends.” (2010: introduction).  Survival calls for something more -a reconnection to the everyday, the aesthetic and the political, mirroring mokuhanga’s role in its heyday.  2011 is not the death of the print but its reincarnation.  Craftsmanship may be its past as well as its future when instant image making  reveals that something has been lost- of process and reflection though the slowing of time in shaping a print.

 

ANIMATE THE WORLD, NOW

 

 

 

MAKING IS THINKING

 

MIRROR THE WORLD

 

 

Both the world and the imagination hold the print.

 

The mokuhanga prints have an ingrained physicality to them contrary to the fleeting sense of the digital.  Mokuhanga’s future is to apply the adjacency of dissemination with the internet and printed multiplicity while making intelligent use of its craft. Just as the mokuhanga is founded in tradition as a topical art form it connects with the contemporary. The grain of the wood is the ever flowing veins of something living.  After all, the technique does not command the artist, but the vision.

 

DREAM OF A PRINTED CARPET ON THE STREET, THE PRINT TO WALK THROUGH

 

Sources

 

Blau ( 1990) The Audience, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London

 

Brooker, W. and Jermyn, D. Edt (2003) The Audience Studies Reader, Routledge, London

 

Bird. J, Isaak. J.A and Lotringer.S (1996) Nancy Spero, Phaidon, London

 

De Leeuw, I (2011) Interview unpublished

 

Hyatt Major, A (1971) Prints and people: A social history of printed pictures, Princeton, Princeton University Press]

 

Ivins, W (1953) Prints and Visual Communication, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Press

Johnson, K - The NY Times, “What Is Printmaking Today? Philadelphia Dares to Ask”, February 2010

 

MacGregor , W B , The authority of prints; an early modern perspective Vol.22, No.3 Sept. 1999 Art History pp.389-420 , Blackwell Publishing , Oxford

 

Morris, Hargreaves and McIntyre (May 2005) Never mind the width, feel the quality Museums and Heritage Show, Manchester

Roca, J  http://philagrafika.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-thomas-kilpper.html ( accessed 23 August 2010)

Roca, J ( 2010 ) Philagrafika Catalogue, Philagrafika, Philadelphia

Sacred Destinations: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/japan/shikoku-88-temple-pilgrimage.htm accessed 30 May 2011

 

Saunders, G and Miles,R (2006) Prints now: directions and definitions, London, V&A

 

Shikes, R.E (1969) The indignant eye: the Artist as a social critic in prints and drawings form the 15th century to Picasso, Boston, Beacon Press

 

Smith, S (2011)  Redundant technology? Small Print Big Impression Catalogue, Leicester Printshop, Leicester

 

Story (2003) Cultural consumption and Everyday Life , Hodder Headline, London

 

Sturken, M. and Cartwright (2009) Practices of Looking – An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford

 

Sontag, S (2003)  Regarding the pain of others, Hamish Hamilton, London

 

Tala, A 2009) Installations and experimental printmaking, London : A. & C. Black

Tala, A (2010) Harsh realities, Printmaking Today Winter 2010, pg11, Cello Press, UK

Tate’s online research journal 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09spring/meijer-scott.shtm accessed 10 MARCH 2011

 

Tyler A.C (1995) The idea of Design Margolin, V. and Buchanan, R.,   Chapter  ‘Shaping belief: The role of Audience in Visual Communication’ pg 104-112 MIT Press, Cambridge

Sennet, R (2008) The Craftsman, Penguin,  London

Van Toorn, J edt.( 1998) Design beyond design- critical reflection and the practice of visual communication,  The audience and political art pgs 67 - 69 Teal Triggs , Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, Maastricht

 

Warburton,T (1990)  Brokad bilder, Alba, Stockholm

 

Willats,S (2000 edt.)  Art and Social function,London,  Ellipsis

Suzuki, S The Strange and Wonderful World of Tabaimo http://nishikataeiga.blogspot.com/2009/05/tabaimo-at-moderna-museet.html accessed 2  December  2010

 

 

Stolen Voices is now called typeFACE! This is the genius naming by Emily . who wrote in an e-mail: ( edited version )

‘ There are so many great aspects to this project. As I ask other artists to participate with a description of an image they can’t describe, I’m finding that this aspect of uniting artists and talking - at various stages of life, artistic development and working in myriad ways - is becoming a really exciting aspect of the project. Wouldn’t it be great to build of a great archive of these stumbling/articulate/uncertain/strident/humorus/intelligent statements with corresponding facial expressions and typeface? [AH! Maybe we can call it typeFACE …… Emily Candela 16 june 2010

Imagine linking the 500 year old technology of letterpress, shaping the spoken words by the artists in to posters, then projections of their silent, but talking heads next to the prints…As alway s I am not quite sure where this wil take us/ me- but it feels as if the project is opening up something to something greater- like a vista of play.

Amos Kennedy’s work inspires:

” the world is big- full of connections and
ideas to be made. ”

Don’t forget it!

For the full effect of the stolen voices - go to Emily’s blog; http://emilycandela.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/pale-voce/

- and check out our moving heads. In the end these will projected on to our posters ( what is seen here is a rudimentary start up version.

A new project has started to sneak in - about the use of English in Higer Education. I am working with Emily Candela adn we will combine our expressions- printmaking , letter press and video. Language can be used as a tool for exclusion ,and in the UK it seems to be linked to the obsession with the class system. we call it stolen voices- still looking for the latin translation , playing on the academic term ‘Viva voce’ which is an exam carried out through talking - and not writing.

Emerging and older, more established artists will collaborate with us in an experiment to develop ways of thinking and working at the intersection of linguistic and visual representation that addresses the challenges faced by many artists in the area of language. Together we will create a series of text-based prints, therefore bringing language to tangible form.The artists will be filmed- as in a series of moving video portraits. These will be shown projected on the prints in a final exhibition. We also aim to produce an article in the end- returning to the written word.

The artists will collaborate with a group of artists who either experience difficulty with the linguistic requirements of their course or are being forced to speak about their practice in an academic art theory language which is alien to them. At our first meeting, each artist will bring with them an image that they believe defies simple description. The artist will be invited to speak freely about the images. We will then introduce a template for speaking about the images that mirrors the conventions of academic composition. The artists will be asked to use these to present verbal representations of the images, but will be encouraged to amend or disregard the template as they see fit. In this way, they are actively contributing to an experiment in generating a framework for synthesising image and text. The artists’ verbal descriptions will be recorded and transcribed. Selections from these transcriptions will provide the text for a series of typographic prints, created with the artists at the second meeting with them. The prints’ format will be based on the templates mentioned above, and will reflect the artists modifications to these templates.

Background:

This artwork takes as its starting point a central issue in fine art higher education: the difficulties experienced by many art art students in the linguistic articulation of their ideas (Hudson, 2009). In our own experiences working with students, we have witnessed the anxiety, self- doubt and frustration caused by requirements to apply academic language to visual artistic work. We - ourselves as foreigners,one american and one Swede, have found it challenging to modify our language to the British English academic conventions. Many practitioners are examining alternatives to conventional academic writing within art and design higher education (Candela, 2009; Orr et al, 2004). This parallels a larger conversation concerning the relationship between image and text, impacted by postmodern cultural theory (Barthes, 1977) and by 20th and 21st century artists experimenting at the interface of visual and textual representation.

This project is unique in its invitation to artists to experiment with formats for linguistic representation.The resulting prints will represent a record of dialogue and negotiation towards a new conception of the roles of linguistic and visual representation in the world of the fine art establishment.

We are not Sorry for sounding like ourselves.