ART

While flipping through a 20th and 21st century female artist collection, which featured women artists from all over the United States and Europe, a frightening pattern emerged before my eyes. On every other page, women artists’ nude bodies were splattered in various angles, propped up and twisted in positions more fitting for a pornographic magazine than a sophisticated and progressive art anthology. Tracey Emin’s work typifies the neurotic bodily fixation corrupting contemporary women’s art. Although some of her pieces are attractive for the integration of words and form, overall, I was disappointed with the immature and undeveloped depiction of sex and sexuality so prominent in her subject matter. Women’s artistic obsession with sexuality and sexual exploitation has become so cliché in Western art that I consider these women pop culture imitators who, in their pursuit to win a place in the art world, have fed into generic representations of women’s sexuality to achieve shock value status. Granted, women have been sexually oppressed for thousands of years, which might explain their narcissistic obsession behind the lens, yet, the prevalence of these manufactured images and themes--the most prominent being the overdone “crotch shot”--makes me question whether female artists would have a place in the modern art world at all without using sexually charged and painfully explicit subject matter to leverage, what seems to be, their creative deficits. Of all the artists I reviewed, only one woman had the courage to expose a raw, candid, and sincere side of herself and of femininity -- her battle with breast cancer in middle age. The rest of the images and works were renditions of each other—young female artists expressing a lot of rage and aggression. Don’t female artists have anything else to reveal to the world besides their own naked bodies?

When an image is created merely from a physical point of power, something is lost in its appeal and intensity. Emin’s depiction of female sexuality perfectly reflects a larger societal issue of how women, who on one hand complain of their oppression, and on the other hand, use it for their benefit when convenient, undermine the beauty and essence of women’s artistic expressions. A scantily dressed woman sitting on the floor, embracing a wad of bills and coins in between her legs, the words “Psycho” and “Slut”, along with several other sentence fragments sewn in between small squares and images of cowboy boots and sperm hunting for an egg to penetrate, and an installation of a bed with its usual appearance: rustled sheets with several empty bottles of booze and piles of clothes strewn on the floor, convey a cheapness and emptiness-a lack of authenticity-largely due to the misuse of the same sexual theme over and over again.

By and large, it is unfortunate that even modern women artists, in their undeveloped and artificial attempts to communicate sexuality, continually feed into the stereotypes that they are seemingly trying to reject. When these artists can no longer use their bodies as commodities behind the lens, similar to porn stars who are cast out of the industry once they begin to age, I hope that they will feel creatively secure enough to approach art with a little more originality and depth. After all, pop culture pieces become obsolete with inevitable cultural shifts; what makes a piece genuine is not the “shocking” or explicit details, but whether or not it invokes the viewer to explore more deeply within.