So… after reading some articles in class yesterday and hearing about a tutor’s experience with a women in architecture hack-a-thon, I’m curious to know if I could organise one for women photographers.
This post is serving as little more than a bookmark to make me do something about it.
So, Osborne has cut bursaries for nurses. As my post the other day indicated – I’m struggling to see a problem with this. At all. It seems to me that nurses will be better off while at university if they take a student loan instead of a bursary, and it will enable universities to improve their offerings and take more students – which should in turn improve the quality of education and mean that other departments don’t have to fund that degree. As well as meaning that – in the long term – we have more nurses. Great. I’m struggling to see how you can be against that at all.
However I’ve woken up to an explosion of hurtful comments about my choice of degree – and it’s hard not to take it personally. Well, not about my degree specifically, but about how we should – as a nation – not fund ‘pointless’ degrees.
There seems to be a strong belief amongst many that the government should fully fund and bursary ‘essential’ degrees. Largely this includes degrees for teaching, engineering, maths, medicine, nursing, dentistry, etc. And that everyone else should have to pay full price – and often this belief also suggests that we shouldn’t give a student loan to anyone not doing an ‘essential’ degree.
If I had to pick one of those ‘essential’ degrees, I would fail. I failed maths at A Level. I don’t exactly have the bedside manner to be a nurse or a doctor. Engineering largely doesn’t interest me. And teaching children, well, that career is off-limits to me than more reasons than ‘I don’t like children’.
Besides if we *all* did those jobs it would be a total race to the bottom. We’d end up working for nothing because there would be so much competition (oh hey, just like photography and/or the art world can be sometimes/most of the time).
“But” you say “Of course we would limit the amount of people who can do those degrees.” Well, ok. So that means that anyone not capable of doing ‘essential’ degrees has to pay for their own degree. Thus enforcing the two-tier system that the British university system has been trying to move away from for years. If you make people pay for non-essential degrees up front (and pay for their expenses while they do those degrees) then you end up with only the rich being able to afford education. And that would be a very bad thing (again).
I love this drawing. I’ve seen it pop up time and time again and I think it’s just great. Not because it places art as one of the most important things in an alternative hierarchy of needs, but because I think it reinforces the fact that in our modern society it shouldn’t be about ‘existing’ it should be about living. I think people don’t understand that society is so much wider than just the essentials. Without the complex interaction that compliments the other subjects we’re just fucked. And we’re possibly even more fucked if those complex interactions are led by only those people who can afford to self fund a degree at 18.
But I often feel like people misunderstand what I do on my degree in particular. Art History is a subject that is all about research and analysis. It’s a very powerful degree, it enables you to take both written and visual sources and turn them into something extremely meaningful (well, you hope that anyway). It’s not all about art. Modern art history is as much about the society that creates the art as it is about the way that the works were produced. It is a subject that helps us to make sense of the world around us, to see what has happened in the past and apply those lessons in the future.
It seems that a subject like art history (amongst many others) is as essential to a productive and happy society as any of the aforementioned ‘essential’ subjects. So why do so many people tell me that my degree is worthless, pointless, and a drain on the social benefits system?
Since I’ve now had my results back from my second year at university, I can post the final essay for my Culture, Gender and Sexuality module. I got 80% overall in this module – 70% is required for achieving a 1st.
Enjoy!
Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?
There is little doubt that the New Art Histories revolutionised the way that many art historians saw the world and participated in art historical academia in the 1970s (Rees and Borzello, 1986a, p. 3). The term ‘The New Art Histories’ came into use because of the book of the same name which tried to summarise emerging methodologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rees and Borzello, 1986b). Other authors interpreted the term as an umbrella phrase for critical theory (Jõekalda, 2013, p. 2) and most would agree that the term the New Art Histories cover political, feminist, psychoanalytical and theoretical approaches (Fernie, 1995, p. 19). This poststructuralist approach marked an important shift away from art as objects and focussed instead on social context rather than concepts such as connoisseurship and biography. In this essay I will focus on how feminist art history methodologies do not address queer artists and artworks adequately, however it should also be considered that non-Caucasian, non-Western, and disabled people are also not addressed by mainstream feminist theory either – amongst other personhood statuses. The word queer itself is complex but for the purpose of this essay I will be using it to represent non-default gender, sex and sexuality.
Women were often left out of the traditional art historical canon and the New Art Histories enabled feminist art historians to rethink the past. Initially there was a push to rediscover women artists and attempt to place them within the traditional canon. This was primarily achieved by questioning assumptions about the difference between art and craft – many feminist art historians at this time believed that these definitions of art and craft were one of the primary reasons for women’s art being seen as inferior (Fernie, 1995, p. 20). However this approach relied on traditional canonical and biographical methodologies and the late 1970s saw a move by feminist theorists to challenging the discipline of History of Art itself. Academics began to suggest that merely inserting women into history was not the same as writing women’s history (Fox-Genovese, 1982, p. 6) and Griselda Pollock put forward the idea that women’s studies were not about women but rather the social systems that allow and maintain the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1). One of the formative essays for feminist art history was Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (Nochlin, 1978) which warned against the idea of simply trying to name women artists who might be considered ‘good’ and insert them into the traditional male-dominated canon.
Feminist methodologies, especially when combined with Marxist theories, gave academics a powerful and alternative way of looking at both history and the present, yet feminist methodologies as applied to the history of art have remained reasonably static in their approach. While feminism as a political movement has moved on with successive waves of ideologies, feminist methodology for history art often still works from the same seminal texts (such as Nochlin’s) that broke the original ground.
In many respects feminist methodologies fit neatly into hegemonic, patriarchal culture – as much as their practitioners would like to suggest that they now champion intersectionality (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). They support the notion of a bigender society and specifically exclude those who exist outside of the gender paradigm that society currently uses to view the world and write history. Feminist art historical methodologies may well be the fight against the male dominated view of the history of art, but when viewing the history of art as a queer participant these methodologies only serve to reinforce the patriarchal structure and act as another hegemonic barrier that needs to be removed before a queer history can be composed. Traditional and New art histories combined act as a complete patriarchal version of the histories of art, a history that could potentially be rewritten by a new queer methodology.
Introducing queer methodologies to the history of art is unlikely to be as simple as just viewing the world from a queer point of view. Queer methodology must be counterhegemonic in its nature, allowing new paradigms to be enacted. It is not simply a case of rewriting the history of art from a gay or lesbian perspective, or even a transgender perspective. In order to create a truly queered history of art the bigender paradigm should not be used and another must be found; otherwise queer methodologies will become just another pillar that supports the dominant patriarchal norm by acting in support of male masculinities and female femininities (Halberstam, 1998, pp. 3–4). Stephen Bann’s suggestion that a new cultural critique can gain strength from the fact that old positions have already run their course is as relevant now as it was when he discussed the idea almost thirty years ago (Bann, 1986, p. 19) and so queer theory must learn from the limitations faced today by feminist theory. As McCall discuses in a paper on intersectionality, feminist researches are already very aware of the limitations of using gender as an analytical category (McCall, 2005, p. 1772).
‘Feminine success is always measured by male standards’ claims Halberstam (2011, p. 4), and so by acting outside of the expected standards we can relieve ourselves of the pressure to conform. Some ‘renegade’ feminists, Jack Halberstam argues, have addressed that failing might be better than success while in pursuit of the counterhegemonies and this is a lesson that could potentially be learned by any new approach to the history of art. For instance lesbians do not conform to the expected heterosexual framework so they therefore fall outside of patriarchal societies and could redefine what gender means to them (Halberstam, 2011, p. 4). This way of thinking allows us to begin to construct a different gender narrative for the viewing of the history of art, by enabling those outside of the patriarchal hegemony to apply their own definitions of gender and sexuality. However most feminist history of art is largely unconcerned with sexuality or gender-fluidity and therefore this is not a tool that would be used by most feminist art historians. In most feminist art history the assumption is that the artist is heterosexual, white and often middle-class; there is no discourse available for the kind of alternative femininities and masculinities that Halberstam addresses in their text on female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998).
Some feminist academics have begun to offer a kind of queer methodology – although still under the banner of feminism. The idea of introducing sex, gender and sexuality to feminist approaches is proposed by Mimi Marinucci (Marinucci, 2010, p. 105) and can be seen as part of the wider movement of mainstream feminism towards an intersectional approach. In some ways this approach works very well – there is real solidarity between the experiences of many women and those who are LGBT* (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) due to the basic understanding of what it is like to be born into a state of patriarchal oppression. However there is also tension between the feminist and queer movements and as Marinucci points out there has been a history of feminist studies showing bias against lesbian women, gay men, minority sexualities and transgender people (Marinucci, 2010, p. 106).
It could be suggested that art history is now in a state of post-feminism; where equality has begun to be achieved in academic writing and galleries. Certainly the large art institutions in the United Kingdom, such as the Tate, have no problems with showing large retrospectives dedicated to twentieth-century women artists. Marlene Dumas (Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, no date) and Sonia Delaunay (The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, no date) are currently showing major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London, Cathy Wilkes is showing at the Tate Liverpool (Cathy Wilkes, no date) and the Tate Britain has hosted retrospectives of well known women artists such as Susan Hiller (Susan Hiller, no date) and has a Barbara Hepworth exhibition opening in June 2015 (Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, no date). I am aware that naming the exhibitions being held of women artists pushes me precariously close to being guilty of what Nochlin warned against, however it does certainly appear that women artists now have a roughly equal number of major exhibitions as artists who are men when considering twentieth and twenty-first century art. Most feminist art historians can be categorised as using one of the other approaches to art history (such as connoisseurship, biography or iconography to name just a few) so it could be suggested that feminist art historians should just continue to work under those banners rather than identifying as feminists since the feminist art historian label seems to be no longer required.
Marunucci presents the idea that queer feminism provides a new direction for feminism as a critical perspective. Introducing questions of sexuality into feminist art history would greatly increase the scope of the methodology. According to the label on the front of the book Art & Queer Culture it is ‘the first book to focus on the criticism and theory regarding queer visual art’ (Lord and Meyer, 2013). If this statement is indeed true it means that no feminist (or any other) art historian has been addressing the criticism and theory of queer art. This raises the question – if feminism was truly interested in any sexuality, sex or gender other than heterosexual women who were identified as women at birth, wouldn’t this book have been written years or perhaps even decades ago?
Even if feminist art historians use approaches borrowed from gay and lesbian studies, this does not go far enough. A relatively recent biography of photographer Claude Cahun (Doy, 2007) is a good example of why feminist approaches are often inadequate even when combined with gay and lesbian studies. Cahun was a photographer who lived from 1894 to 1954. Originally identified as female at birth, Cahun had romantic relationships with women and in 1915-1916 began using the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun instead of the assigned birth name of Lucy Schwob (Claude Cahun – Chronology, no date). Most of Cahun’s body of photographic work is self-portraiture and Cahun presents as outwardly male in a large portion of the images. Where Cahun presents as a woman in images it is often an exaggerated and drag version of femininity. The biography by Gen Doy deals extensively with Cahun’s theoretical interests in sex and sexuality and also recounts her preference of living with a woman multiple times, however the assumption is always made that Cahun is a lesbian woman. Not once is the idea entertained that Cahun could possibly be transgender (and therefore potentially heterosexual) or genderqueer and Cahun is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘lesbian’ throughout the text without any explanation. Both feminist and gay and lesbian studies have failed as approaches when it comes to artists such as Claude Cahun since they refuse to engage with major political and personal aspects of the artist’s life and work. A queer approach may well have shed more light on this popular photographer from the early twentieth-century.
According to government surveys only 93.9% of the adult population in the UK identified as heterosexual in April 2011 to March 2012 (Woodsford, 2012). Estimating the amount of transpeople in the UK is problematic due to the difficulty defining transgender status within current gender paradigms (do we consider self-identification as with sexuality or is medical intervention the standard for defining a transperson?), but a 2008 European study suggests that there could be as many as 1 in 20 transgender individuals within the male population alone using the most wide definitions – and this number is increasing exponentially (‘Transgender EuroStudy’, no date). Going forward feminist approaches do not offer enough scope to record and analyse these important aspects of an artists work and personal life.
Feminist approaches to art history are still an excellent methodology for looking at artworks in the past and for discussing women’s status in society. However the fact that feminist methodologies rely heavily on a bigender paradigm, as demonstrated by the earlier discussed assumption that women’s studies are about the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1), means that they are not so well-placed to look at artists today and in the future. In a society that is slowly but steadily rejecting the idea of a clear-cut ‘male’ and ‘female’ status (Hird, 2000, p. 348) we need methodologies that can produce a discourse on this new approach to working practices. Feminism is still relevant to the discipline of history of art while examining the past, but it becomes less relevant as we move into the future when those writing about art will need to talk authoritatively on a wider range of gender, sex and sexuality than feminist methodologies currently routinely discuss.
Bibliography
Bann, S. (1986) ‘How Revolutionary is the New Art History?’, in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) The New Art History
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/barbara-hepworth-sculpture-modern-world (Accessed: 6 May 2015).
Cathy Wilkes (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/cathy-wilkes (Accessed: 6 May 2015).
Claude Cahun – Chronology (no date) Claude Cahun Home Page. Available at: http://www.connectotel.com/cahun/cahunchr.html.
Doy, G. (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography
Fernie, E. (1995) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology
Fox-Genovese, E. (1982) ‘Placing Women’s History in History’, New Left Review, (133), pp. 5–29.
Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity
Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure
Hird, M. J. (2000) ‘Gender’s nature: Intersexuality, transsexualism and the “sex”/’gender’ binary’, Feminist Theory, 1(3), pp. 347–364. doi: 10.1177/146470010000100305.
Jõekalda, K. (2013) ‘What has become of the New Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography, (9).
Lord, C. and Meyer, R. (2013) Art and Queer Culture
Marinucci, M. (2010) Feminism Is Queer: The intimate connection between queer and feminist theory
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/marlene-dumas-image-burden (Accessed: 6 May 2015).
McCall, L. (2005) ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), pp. 1771–1800. doi: 10.1086/426800.
Nochlin, L. (1978) Art and sexual politics; women’s liberation, women artists, and art history
Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge Classics)
Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986a) ‘Introduction’, in The New Art History
Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986b) The New Art History
Susan Hiller (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-hiller (Accessed: 6 May 2015).
The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay (Accessed: 6 May 2015).
‘Transgender EuroStudy’ (no date) TGEU. Available at: http://tgeu.org/eurostudy/ (Accessed: 7 May 2015).
Woodsford, S. (2012) Integrated Household Survey April 2011 to March 2012: Experimental Statistics. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/integrated-household-survey/integrated-household-survey/april-2011-to-march-2012/stb-integrated-household-survey-april-2011-to-march-2012.html#tab-Sexual-identity (Accessed: 7 May 2015).
So we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And we saw this piece. And Adam said something along the lines of ‘that would be awesome for Carthage’. So here we have it, this would be awesome for Carthage.
It’s really great finding pieces in a good museum to use as a basis for costume because there can often be a fair bit of information about the piece. You especially know that you’re onto a good thing when it’s displayed in it’s own case in the middle of the gallery space, like this kaftan is.
Looking it up on the Metropolitan Museum website gives me this page. And there’s just so much info there to be had. Starting off with a fantastic picture – click to get the high resolution image and examine the garment in real detail. Far better than my rubbish phone camera shots – although my rubbish phone camera shots do serve a purpose. They let me see the back and they let me remember details that struck me at the time.
The pinky-red fabric is all modern conservation, the beige fabric and gorgeous patterned trim is all the original bits of this amazing 9th – 11th century kaftan from somewhere near what is modern Turkey.
Except it wouldn’t have originally have been beige. The Met are helpful enough to have provided information about the garment to help us understand what it might have looked like when it was made. The ‘white card’ description says:
The original linen coat (caftan), preserved in part from the neck to the bottom of the hem, is made of finely woven linen. A decorative strip of large-patterned silk is sewn along the exterior and interior edges of the caftan. A minute fragment of lambskin preserved as the caftan’s interior attests to its fur lining. The woven patterns on the silk borders of the caftan include motifs such as the rosettes and stylized animal patterns enclosed within beaded roundels, which were widespread in Iranian and Central Asian textiles of the sixth to ninth century. The colors used in the textile include a now-faded dark blue, yellow, red, and white on a dark brown ground. The decorated silk fabrics are a compound twill weave (samite in modern classification) and the body of the garment is plain-weave linen. Two slits running up the back of the caftan make it particularly suitable as a riding costume.
Did you know that apparently in many galleries and museums the white cards next to exhibits have to have be the same standard as the national reading age – which is about 12 in the UK. These were only ever intended as basic info. So far from this description I know that:
But we need more!
Linked to the page on the Met’s website there are three journal articles written about the Kaftan and it’s matching leggings. The first is an introduction, the second is a genealogy study and the last is the conservators report on the piece. This last one is where the gold-dust lies. These three journal articles can tell us huge amounts about the garment beyond what the white card does.
Here are notes from the journal articles, with my own speculations:
So then I finished off by taking a quick look through the Vecellio book of costume (from the 16th Century and before) and there’s a remarkably similar garment in the Persian section, illustrating a soldier. Unfortunately Vecellio doesn’t make any comments about the kaftan, only the armour and the horses tack that he would wear. But it does reinforce the idea of kaftans as riding garments. I also really like the way that the front flap is fastened up to the belt. That might have to happen for fighting and stabbing.
There are also similar garments in the Hungarian and African sections of the book, although they tend to not be asymmetrical closures like this one.
So what have we learnt…
So there we have it. Time to make the pattern pieces!
A few months ago I posted this video to my blog.
Some people tell me that studying art history from a feminist point of view is pointless. That it’s irrelevant. What’s the point of writing about art history with a feminist slant when it’s so detached from what goes on around us on the street.
It’s not.
Everything has provenance.
I like the word provenance in this context. It’s other meaning is:
The chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object.
The ownership or custody… It kind of sums up the whole problem really. While attitudes towards women are gradually experiencing a counter-cultural revolution there are still many people who still have this outdated mindset. That women are there to be owned.
This is the kind of day to day problem that we’re all very used to hearing about. Popular feminist campaigns regularly make the news, everything from Laura Bates and the Everyday Sexism Project to No More Page 3. I’m an avid supporter of both (and more). But this isn’t what I deal with when it comes to my academic interests.
I’m interested in the way that women have been treated historically. I personally mostly enjoy studying art post 1900 and seeing what it can tell us about women in society and the attitudes towards them. In fact I’m currently working on an essay with the title ‘Analyse the way in which gender has affected the interpretation and status of British women artists of the mid twentieth-century.’ And their status was indeed affected by their gender, as well as the way that we interpret their work. Remember it was only eighty six years ago that women gained even the most tenuous sign of equality – the right to vote.
I like investigating the way that women (and LGBT artists, and artists of colour) have been treated in the past and getting down to the roots of patriarchal behaviour. I like examining how (or if) people tried to change attitudes and how the world responded to that. I like discovering work that isn’t considered canonical and questioning why it was not an acclaimed work. I like understanding the struggles that these artists faced.
Because I believe that it’s only in understanding our past that we can influence our future. By knowing where we have come from we can understand the journey ahead of us. If we understand the things that we tried in the past and the effect that had on society we can make plans to change the future.
But why art? Why not politics? Or history?
Because art parallels society. It is influenced by the world around it and often it will influence the world. It is a distilled journal of the world in visual form. You can look at a work of art and read the circumstances that caused it’s creation, what drove the artist to create that form. It’s just another form of historical source, except that you need different skills to understand and interpret a work of art compared to a written journal or diary.
It’s more than that though. When you look at a written source you have to believe that the author was being true to their words. You only have the words. However with an image, you see how the artist saw the world. It’s very hard to fake an imagine convincingly and convince the audience that you think something that you do not. You can see how society treated women from the artists status but also from the way that people are portrayed within the images themselves.
It’s fascinating. And I plan on changing the world. But to change the world I have to understand how much it has already changed. There’s an awful lot to understand.
I have lots of tech-savvy friends. I have lots of tech-savvy friends who discuss the merits of going paperless including lots of very technical ways of doing so.
I am not very tech-savvy. (The other night I booted up my Windows install for the first time ever and managed to get malware on it within about ten clicks of the mouse.)
However I have managed to go almost entirely paperless with ease for university. I mentioned it to someone and they said I should write down how I did it so that others can too. So that’s what I’m doing.
I decided when I started university that I wasn’t going to be one of these people who spent hours and hours trying to locate notes when writing an essay or being frustrated that I couldn’t find that little golden bit of information that I required at 3am in the morning. Yes, I’m looking accusingly at some of my friends here. I’ve been through the pain with you on Facebook.
Would you like to see the total amount of paper that I have accumulated from my first year in a humanities subject?
And actually, everything you see between the yello and the pink dividers in that shot is just one subject where we were given all the readings we needed for the module in a photocopied book. Without that it would have been about one centimetre or less of paper. The stuff in plastic folders right at the bottom is the sum total of my first four modules in Semester 1.
Of course, you’re probably all LOL’ing right now and doing something like…
And in return I’m going:
Make no mistake – humanities subjects require huge amounts of reading and note taking. Some of my friends have filled a whole lever arch file, some of them have filled more in just their first year. I have not, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve done at least as much reading and note taking as them.
Anyway. Here’s the dig of how a non-tech-savvy person went paperless. Without all your fancy gadgets.
There’s a complicated filing system going on here, as you can see. Modules that are ‘in progress’ just have their title. Modules that are finished get their module number added to them. Brookes handily uses the U pre-fix which means that they automatically drop to the bottom of my notebook list. Also it means I don’t have to remember the prefix when key wording which helps.
As you can imagine, this is pretty helpful. Much more productive than staring at a page of handwritten notes and trying to remember what the image looked like.You see it’s worth pointing out that I’m fundamentally lazy. I’ll do anything to avoid doing more work later.
Helpful, no? In fact you wouldn’t believe how helpful this is when you’re scanning through trying to find stuff you want to quote in your essay. Brilliant. Just a flick of the down arrow key and you’re onto the highlights from the next journal article.
But it’s not so bad. I keyword them so that I know what the subject was.
And that’s it really. As long as I spend half an hour a week scanning bits of paper that I’m given I stay on top of everything. I also use my phone to photograph whiteboards etc if I really need to.
It works. It means I can spend more time working on learning stuff, writing essays and prepping for exams than trying to find that random note that I wrote in some long forgotten class. It also means that I have everything I’ve ever read or written with me at every lecture. Which is pretty bloody brilliant.
In fact something I really love that Evernote does is that it shows you related notes while you’re writing. Sometimes it’s not quite right, but often when I sit down and start taking notes in a class it suggests things that I might want to review that I’ve written previously – which I always do when we come to a lull in the action.
I know that LRP isn’t historically accurate, but I don’t care. I’m an art history student and one of my favourite things to do is to research. Coming up with the concepts for S’s Mythlore costume has been a chance to research and take some inspiration from a culture that I’ve never really looked at before – Persia.
One of the things that I’m extraordinarily aware of as an art history student is the use and connotations of colour. When selecting the colours for the outfit I wasn’t just conscious of what would go well with his skin tones (he’s ginger so I’m keeping the colours muted) but also the colours that represent him as a character.
Initially I started off working with a palette of creams and browns, but it just felt too generic. I needed to introduce some other colours to create a statement about what he did. First came the blue, I won’t lie I have this gorgeous slate blue muslin that I’m itching to use on a project, and when I put it next to the grey linen that I picked up the other week they really just sung together.
But blue is problematic for me to use in kit. The problem with rich ultramarine blue is that before synthetic dye was created it was only possible to obtain this blue pigment from lapis lazuli rocks (the Egyptians also created Egyptian Blue, but the recipe was lost in the middle ages). And those rocks were only found in a handful of cave systems in Badakshan Province – modern day Afghanistan.
Ultramarine blue – the name of Lapis Lazuli once it has been made into pigment – is just the most beautiful blue and it’s the one that everyone seems to choose for their kit. They don’t generally use prussian, cobalt or cerulean because those blues just aren’t as eye-catching and wonderful. They use ultramarine, because it shines and sparkles in a way that you just don’t get from any other blue.
(ETA: Hadn’t also considered indigo blue – a different kind of blue but natural dye available from the East. My focus is on European art.)
I’m not saying here that people shouldn’t wear blue kit for LRP. Of course not, that would be ridiculous because it isn’t historical reenactment. However for my costume concept the use of blue sparingly is important.
Just so that we can get an idea of the kind of blue we’re talking about, here’s Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring.
And one of my other favourite uses of ultramarine blue in the Wilton Diptych.
During the Renaissance patrons would actually specify a value of ultramarine pigment that would be used in the finished piece. The more money you spent on ultramarine then the more wealthy you would appear. Ultramarine blue was a status symbol, designed to show your wealth.
Did we see a similarity between the Vermeer work and the colour scheme in my designs? If he can use golden/mustard yellow with ultramarine blue then I certainly can.
So the key is that I’m using the blue sparingly on prestige pieces. At the moment I’m going to use it to line and trim the robe and also to create the armour and sashes. But I’m using an extremely thin and delicate fabric, a muslin. Something that wouldn’t have required too much dye – in fact as little as possible. And it’s a dark shade of blue too, so perhaps it might have been created with the remnants of a grubby dye bath that had been used for other garments beforehand. Ultramarine was almost always used at full strength in paintings so as not to dilute it’s richness – or sometimes with white added to create a tint.
Fortunately this group have a concept of being down on their luck. Once more wealthy than they are now, which allows an opportunity to play with the idea of people holding onto their kit that was once a status symbol. That is why I’m hoping to be able to create fantasy detailing to the back of the robes – this was someone who once had the money to spend on fashionable clothes, but perhaps now has been forced to sell everything he owns, and just keep his favourite pieces.
The golden yellow gown on the other hand has a different kind of symbolism. This character is cowardly and doesn’t want to fight or get involved. Judas (of Jesus’ disciples fame) is almost always painted in yellow garments and from there yellow has developed a potential reading of betrayal and cowardliness when interpreting works of art.
Here’s Judas, fourth figure from the left hand side, wearing a blue shirt with a yellow robe, in Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
And in Giotto’s The Kiss of Judas.
Yellow is not a colour of cloth that was not difficult to get hold of. In fact the Roman’s used to due their white clothes using urine. How… pleasant.
But anyway, since yellow cloth is available with far more abundance than blue, I decided to go with it for the base layers, which require far more cloth than any other piece. Yellow also has connotations of sickness and disease, appropriate for a physic I think. I’m not sure where that idea comes from, I’ve not managed to throw up any historical research (although I admit, I have not delved into any academic journals to write this – I’m doing it all from my head and class notes). If I was to make an educated guess I would assume it is due to the colour of infection. Lovely.
So there we have it. The reasons that I chose certain colours for this costume.
I also have another concern about this costume though, a little colour related. We’ve chosen muted colours deliberately. If this is a costume for a desert dwelling person, then strong colours would not stand up to the constant bleaching from the sun. Especially since this is a character who is down on his luck and may well be spending time travelling from place to place. And as I said before this kit is old, bought in times when things were easier.
But lots of larpers see Persian and other Eastern influenced nations as an excuse to wear lots of colour, so I’m afraid that this costume might stick out for those reasons. And also because of the fact we’ve opted to create entirely out of natural materials, which means linen and cotton basically for this one. The Eastern influenced nations across games seem to prefer often to use synthetic materials that have been heavily printed and so forth.
Oh well, hopefully it’ll fit in!
The problem with learning is that sometimes you learn things that you wish you could unlearn.
I’d been quite happy with my art historical world view provided by such feminist scholars as Linda Nochlin and others from the 1970s era of rewriting the canon. The argument that there are few women artists in the historical ‘white male canon’ because they simply weren’t allowed to be there for various reasons sat well for me. I liked this explanation, it’s neat and it allows you to write with a confident view that could easily be backed up with good sources.
Then somewhere around the late 1980s a bombshell got dropped. Someone said, ‘what if the women just… didn’t want to be artists?’. This… well… this causes me a problem.
In the same way that I don’t believe that women completely autonomously choose to be Page 3 models, I simply don’t believe that women through history would just simply choose not to be artists. I mean of course, some of them will choose. However I don’t think that choice would have just been as simple as ‘I’d rather be an engineer’ for example. Not least because that career path was, again, just not open to them for various societal reasons.
It’s kind of a bit like in your first Physics lesson at A-Level after successfully passing your GCSEs. When the teacher stands at the front of the class and basically goes ‘everything you learnt up until this point is pretty much bullshit’ and everything you thought you knew about light waves was destroyed. But then you realise that light can behave as both a wave and a particle and you understand how much learning you still have to do.
So that’s where I’m at right now. Feminist art history was simple. And now it is not. Now we have to consider that women may have made their own choices about their hobbies and employment however I still think that many of those choices will have been dictated by the heavily patriarchal world that was forced upon the women in question.
It’s tricky. But a good revelation going into my second year of study.
I love finding new labels for myself. My latest muse has been revisionism and revisionist theory. I like to try labels on, wear them for a bit and see if they fit. I also like long new words and revisionism has a satisfying ring to it that makes my tongue get tied up when I try and say it too quickly. Anyway.
There is a problem with calling yourself a feminist art historian. The problem is that you say it to most people and their eyes begin to roll back and glaze over. They’re seeing the militant revolutionists telling them to burn their bras and grow their armpit hair.
Feminist art history has never been a term that quite works for me. I am a feminist and I’m an art historian. I have a particular interest in female artists throughout history. However feminist art history implies something about striving for equality in the history of art that is blatantly not there. Yes it’s an appropriate term for going forwards, but it doesn’t necersarily work for looking backwards. We can’t suddenly make men and women equal in the Italian renaissance, history doesn’t work that way and I don’t have a TARDIS.
I like Revisionist Art History. This is a more accurate description for the things I’m interested in a historical context. But as the video said the real problem comes when you try to work out how to fit women into the canon of dead white guys. I have books on women and their place in society, I have books on women war artists, I even have books writing about women’s approaches to art history. But it doesn’t feel right, it feels like we’re singling them out as special and they weren’t special. Well they were, but no more special than their male counterparts.
Grouping women artists into a group called ‘women artists’ seems so crude. It’s like displaying a Hirst next to a Rembrant just because they were born with a penis. These women don’t belong in the same books as each other, their art is so different.
I don’t know what to do about this big old mess of wrongness. But I’m going to revisionism my way into feminism and possibly some more isms and see what I can do about it.
I am so excited that the major exhibition next year at the British Museum will be Pompeii and Herculaneum. I visited Pompeii over a decade ago while studying Latin at school and have been captivated ever since. In fact I can’t think of any place I’ve visited that has had a more profound impact on my hobbies and work.
I fell in love with art in Herculaneum. The preserved mosaics and paintings are like nothing else on the planet. Two thousand years under dust and still they have a vibrancy that you don’t see in modern paintings.
Since seeing the works that survive at Herculaneum (Pompeii has little surviving art due it being overwhelmed by lava instead of scalding ash) I’ve had more than a passing interest in Greek and Roman mythology and the images that accompany it – as you might have guessed from my last post with the paintings! It’s one of the things that inspired me to finally go on and study Art History.
I’ve been trying to get out there this year, but situations have conspired against me. But I’m almost certainly going to try and get out there for my birthday next year. Who wants to come?