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RantWhy can’t there be good art of women?
I was doing a little idle scrolling and read a blurb about a statue for the Ferry Building Plaza in San Francisco. Of a woman. And I was intrigued because the sculptor (a man) was quoted saying he chose a woman as the subject because there are very few women depicted in public art.
I clicked through and it’s going to be a 45 foot high NAKED WOMAN. La sigh. I mean, why do all the women have to be nude? The longer article explains that the artist has become prominent at Burning Man and got into the large scale there and also? So many of the women at BM were close to or fully naked and no one mentioned or noticed it.
Which, sir. That’s mentioned IN EVERY ARTICLE ABOUT BURNING MAN.
And then I flashed on the statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, which is a big hunk of metal with a tiny naked woman arising out of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sculpture_for_Mary_Wollstonecraft
It’s not just me, right? All over there are large statues of famous and not so famous men and they have clothes on.
But the women? GOTTA BE NAKED, even a statue about the first feminist. Ugh.
All the "artistic nudes" of men are anonymous men (or at least not known to the average person). You won't see nude statues honoring Napoleon, George Washington, or MLK Jr because men would see it as weird and undignified. But Mary Wallstonecraft? Just put her tits out and decorate her like the Silver Surfer! It makes no sense. And you would never guess that the statue was honoring a feminist hero if you saw it out of context. But men did it anyway because they don't respect us
Like, for real, could you just imagine if they built the Lincoln Memorial to showcase Abe Lincoln lounging shirtless and giving the viewers bedroom eyes? 🤣
You won't see nude statues honoring Napoleon, George Washington
Ask and you shall receive! 😁 Both by Antonio Canova, often considered the greatest neoclassical sculptor,
Roman emperors were often depicted in the nude, but of course, the heroic nude is very different from sexualized women in art.
It's always bothered me how seldom statues of women represent a specific woman too. Even ones that supposedly represent a specific woman, like that Mary Wollstonecraft one. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony was on the U.S. dollar coin, and when everyone complained it was too close to the size of a quarter, it was replaced with a slightly larger coin and Susan was swapped out for a pretty, idealized portrait of Sacagawea carrying her baby. And that's now the only woman represented on American currency--not one who fought for women but one who helped white men explore the continent because her husband told her to.
And here's what happened to the first statue of American women's suffragists in the U.S. Capitol:
"One of the most famous statues to women is the Portrait Monument that’s in the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. The statue, which honors suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was sponsored by the National Woman’s Party in honor of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
It remains an unconventional monument: the heads and shoulders of the three busts of Mott, Stanton, and Anthony seem to emerge from a massive, eight-ton rough-hewn Carrera marble block. The artist Adelaide Johnson purposefully left the block incomplete to symbolize that work of the women’s rights movement was unfinished.
The unveiling ceremony for the monument was held in the Capitol Rotunda in 1921 on the 100th anniversary of Anthony’s birthday and was attended by representatives of over 75 women’s organizations. But just 24 hours later, a group of congressmen had the monument unceremoniously moved to the basement, to a space known as the “Crypt.” Here it earned the derisive nickname: “Three old ladies in a bathtub.”
It remained in the Crypt for decades, until consistent lobbying efforts by a coalition of women’s groups finally spurred the monument to be moved back to its prominent place in the Rotunda in 1997.
More recently, you can see the Portrait Monument in the background in many of the photos from the Jan. 6 riot in the Capitol."
But just 24 hours later, a group of congressmen had the monument unceremoniously moved to the basement, to a space known as the “Crypt.” Here it earned the derisive nickname: “Three old ladies in a bathtub.”
This makes me so fucking pissed. Imagine if this had been done to a statue celebrating any other civil rights movement.
When I finally visited Washington, D.C., I didn't know that they had finally moved it back to the Capitol. The moment I laid eyes on it, I started crying. Surrounded by all the male monuments, the sight of this small tribute to the early Suffragettes took my breath away.
Reminds me of the Boston Women's Memorial, which always bothered me because all the men's statues in the area are raised and dignified looking, but the women's are grouped together and they seem to sort of slither on the ground. Looking it up now, it is a female sculptor, but I wonder if the powers-that-be chose a vision that didn't make the women look important.
I went down the rabbit hole on the subject of monumental statues in the U.S. and it sounds like this is just the trend now--to be interactive, bring the heroes down to everyone's level, provide a selfie opp, etc. But it really doesn't send the greatest message when this is the only monument to influential women in history!
It depends what you want to represent. For example, if i was a sculptor, i might put harriet tubman on one end of a bench, with an rifle casually resting over her lap. So you kind of sit next to her when youre tired, but also looks like she might f you up if you tried anything. Boudica or someone like that Id put on a rearing horse, right near a path and facing it, so you feel like she might trample you as you walk past.
The problem is women never being shown in positions of power and dominance, even when its appropriate.
Yea and the Wikipedia on it has no story either. It's just "Here it is and this is what it's called"
Wow!
Yea and if you look further and try to view the pages of other statues related to women's sufferage there's not even pictures of them
I wonder how many American women even know who these women are anymore. I think I only knew about Susan B. Anthony as a kid because of the dollar coin that came out with her face on it. I found out about Elizabeth Cady Stanton in college because I found her autobiography (republished by a feminist press in the early '80s) at a thrift store. And to this day I know very little about Lucretia Mott. There was that Ken Burns documentary on the suffragists that came out in the late '90s--the main takeaway people seem to have from that is that suffragists opposed black men getting the franchise before women (I think largely because the two movements had been working in tandem up to that point), and how evil that was.
I barely know because I didn’t get taught it in school much and am currently focused on learning about the second wave. The first wave is mostly a mist to me
Why can't there be good art, period. Sigh. Architecture seems to be a competition for the most "modern" monstrosity nowadays, too. How about some beauty in art again? And non-naked women, I agree. Shouldn't art make us have grand feelings? Maybe I'm getting jaded.
Architecture is awful now. Everything is designed like a warehouse with some giant kindergarten shapes and colours stuck on for 'art'. Look up "the peoples palaces", soviet era trakn stations. Its so inspiring to see what architecture could be.
Even houses look like shit, just a bunch of squares and rectangles.
I don’t expect men to sculpt women in a way that shows their humanity, only women.
I agree. Modern art seems to want to be either edgy or unintelligible.
Kehinde Wiley has some graceful paintings of women, but he does more men.
No one wants to see penis, everyone wants to see tits. That's the crudest politically incorrect way I can put it.
So much of women are sculpted as "appreciation of the female form" but it's really just heterosexual men doing their male gazing. It's why female nude models for life drawing are vastly more popular and requested for than the male ones.
(Men in life drawing can be absolutely disgusting about the models. They think it's like their porn subreddits where they can rate the model, instead of idk. Fucking drawing the human form. And they lose interest when a male model shows up.)
I don't wanna see tits. Straight men and lesbians do maybe, but not me. I don't want to see dicks either. " Everyone loves breast thing" kinda bothers me. I don't find them aesthetically pleasing at all. Straight men want to see naked women, that's the only reason why we see them everywhere.
Concur. I want more male objectification. I want more Chris Evans holding a helicopter, more (fit) Thor. More male insecurity as they fall short of the standard.
Same, I want more male objectification too.
The blatant in your face objectification of Hugh Jackman in DvW was hilarious. You could hear all the het women in the theatre start screaming lmfaoooo and the look of pure unadulterated masked interest Deadpool had on was funny as hell as well
Wish I had been there for that. I did see Magic Mike in cinema with a room full of women (and maybe two guys). The atmosphere of a (nearly) women's only space was half of the fun.
More movie scenes like that, please.
For statues, Id be fine with more that take after Michelangelo's David or Laocoon or Apollo Belvidere or more of Ammanantis male statues.
I think that would be hilarious hanging on the corner of a building.
Men need to git gud.
I have to say I was REALLY happy to see the model rules at my local community art class center.
Taking ANY photo or doing anything that could be interpreted as pointing a phone at the model, talking to the model, or making any comment about the model are all grounds for ejection and banning without argument.
You know all those rules came from separate incidents of men being turds, but they're not brooking any "oo, what if it was an innocent mistake~" horseshit.
Even the statue of Anne Lister, a 19th century lesbian known for her conservative attitudes and her very strict sense of dress, is shown half-naked in flimsy underwear.
I hear you. It's annoying.
I was happy when I found this statue of Emmeline Pankhurst when I visited London.
I also love this Aging Woman statue in a locale near me.
Does anyone else want to share some favorite statues of clothed women?
Memorial of Edith Cavell, the British nurse who helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escape during WWI and for which was executed by a German firing squad, in St Martin's Place, just outside the National Portrait Gallery
Donatello's Judith, initially on the Piazza della Signoria, now in the Palazzo Vecchio (a copy still stands on the piazza)
the statue of liberty is clothed, if that counts.
She falls into that class of “women as symbolic of ideas.” But, yeah, she doesn’t have a bared breast, like Liberty Leading the People (although not a sculpture).
It is weird and bitterly ironic that concepts like "liberty," "victory," "justice," etc. are always portrayed (by men) as women. What are they thinking? Wait, I know--opportunity to paint or sculpt a woman with her tit out.
No, I think they subconsciously know that they have no morals and must look to us.
Maybe it is a grammatical gender kind of thing? These words are all feminine in some languages like Latin...
https://www.associationforpublicart.org/apa-now/story/the-few-monuments-to-women-in-philadelphia/
There’s a nice range here. I need to take a trip to Philly and look at some larger-than-life representations of women!
I loved living in Philly. Don't listen to all the crap about that city. It is wonderful. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent there.
Now in SF, where this stupid statue is being set up. Maybe Women are Real will take this on. I do not want to see this statue. It sucks to live in TiM central.
Also, John Berger, discussing the male gaze in all of Western art and giving a group of women the opportunity of giving their own views on the subject. Recommended viewing.
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2013/01/23/guerilla-feminism/
Reminds me of Guerrila Girls, which someone on this site introduced me too.
The proliferation of male artists is a huge part of the problem.
The history of the Guerrilla Girls is beautifully documented in the film Women! Art! Revolution!
Incredibly powerful film about the feminist art movement.
I like Mary Cassat
I do as well. I think her studies of mothers and children are just lovely.
Yes! She’s my mom’s favorite artist and we always had prints of her paintings up. First artist whose name I ever learned.
Thanks for mentioning. I had never heard of her before. Her paintings are sweet.
Legit rant.
I want statues of women in cool clothes on horseback.
Horses are iconic symbols of power and I don't care if the modern preference is "rising out of amorphous blobs" instead.
And I want a statue of a woman stabbing a sexpest with a hatpin on public transit. As in, I want the statue on a train so the message gets through.
It's always women as an object to look at, and never women being powerful. Sculptors are the worst about this imo. Like do a woman on a horse with a sword pointing to the sky type deal, show me something.
So, the link to female statuary in Philadelphia has one of Joan of Arc on a horse in her armor!
And I will add on to the hatpin sticking on public transit Edith Garrud doing some suffra-jitsui
I didn't realize how much I wanted the same thing till you mentioned it. Now I must have it!