Ballerinas We Frame in Places (3)

Kelsey

Kate

Hanna

Alessandra

Kelsey

Lauren

Keenan

Katie

Cassie

Sara

Dane Shitagi is the creator and photographer behind the Ballerina Project, clearly a popular site on Facebook with 870,000+ Likes.  There is so much about ballet, and ballerinas in particular, that are art personified.  Not only is the dance enthralling and even exalted, but also the lithe yet muscular bodies make for art.

We are accustomed to seeing ballet on stage, dancers in full costumes and musicians in the orchestra pit.  But Shitagi's photographs reverse convention on its head, and bring ballerinas to the places we walk everyday, the places with the familiar scent of steel and dust and foliage, the places where we hold on to things as a mooring.  These ballerinas bring their grace, where we seek grace, in what may be troubled, lonesome places.

Helen Reddy: Exploring Women Artists (4)

I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back an' pretend
'Cause I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again

Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
(Strong)
I am invincible
(Invincible)
I am woman

You can bend but never break me
'Cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
'Cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul

Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
(Strong)
I am invincible
(Invincible)
I am woman

I am woman watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long, long way to go
Until I make my brother understand

Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can face anything
I am strong
(Strong)
I am invincible
(Invincible)
I am woman

I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman

Reference: Helen Reddy - I Am Woman Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I loved this song, as a young teen, in the early 1970s, because I thought it was catchy.  There was an effeminate side to me, and I found it inspiring, too.  In this live performance Helen Reddy - 'I Am Woman' (Live) 1975, Reddy said that the United Nations had declared 1975 to be International Women's Year and had chosen her song as its theme.

The composition was the result of Reddy’s search for a song that would express her growing passion for female empowerment. In a 2003 interview in Australia’s Sunday Magazine (published with the Sunday Herald Sun and Sunday Telegraph),[3] she explained:

I couldn't find any songs that said what I thought being woman was about. I thought about all these strong women in my family who had gotten through the Depression and world wars and drunken, abusive husbands. But there was nothing in music that reflected that.

The only songs were 'I Feel Pretty' or that dreadful song 'Born A Woman'. (The 1966 hit by Sandy Posey had observed that if you're born a woman "you're born to be stepped on, lied to, cheated on and treated like dirt. I'm glad it happened that way".) These are not exactly empowering lyrics. I certainly never thought of myself as a songwriter, but it came down to having to do it.

Reddy’s own long years on stage had also fueled her contempt for men who belittled women, she said. "Women have always been objectified in showbiz. I'd be the opening act for a comic and as I was leaving the stage he'd say, 'Yeah, take your clothes off and wait for me in the dressing room, I'll be right there'. It was demeaning and humiliating for any woman to have that happen publicly."

Reddy credits the song as having supernatural inspiration. She said: "I remember lying in bed one night and the words, 'I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman', kept going over and over in my head. That part I consider to be divinely inspired. I had been chosen to get a message across." Pressed on who had chosen her, she replied: "The universe." The next day she wrote the lyric and handed it to Australian guitarist Ray Burton to put it to music.

Reference: I Am Woman.

Guerilla Girls: Exploring Women Artists (3)

The Guerilla Girls lead off Unlock Art: Where are the Women? and I remember seeing their work two years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  I also posted the following in my Tumblr blog wherever art is:

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Well said, ladies.  Gentlemen, any questions?

Lady Macbeth: Exploring Women Artists (2)

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry “Hold, hold!”

Lady Macbeth, from Act I, scene v.

Kate Fleetwood plays arguably the fiercest, most eviscerating lady in Shakespeare.  She does so alongside Patrick Stewart in this 2010 BBC production of Macbeth.  

Why do I bring up this reverberating passage?  Because as Jemima Kirke relates, in Unlock Art: Where are the Women? historically women were encouraged to engage in art, provided that they embodied such feminine traits as beauty, grace and modesty:

So long as a woman remains from unsexing herself, let her dabble in anything.

Shakespeare first staged Macbeth in 1611, so more than 400 years ago his Lady Macbeth would have none of that beautiful, gracious or modest nonsense.  I haven't heard anyone refer to her as a feminist, but indeed we may see her as a tragic heroine.

Tate Modern: Exploring Women Artists (1)

In this film, the Girls actress Jemima Kirke addresses the topic of women in art (or the lack them).

Kirke, best known as Jessa Johansson in the HBO series, looks at the changing role of female artists in a male dominated art world over the centuries - and how some of them eventually took on the establishment in the 1970s.

It is pathetic and ludicrous that history, men in particular, diminished and dismissed women in art.  Interestingly, though, while men commandeered painting and sculpting, women were left to find their own genre in media that were either somehow resonant their lot in a patriarchal society or something altogether different outside the purview of their male counterparts.  In other words, experimental art, as Kirke explains.  The point that they've led debates on art over the last four decades is important to know.

Tate Modern: Exploring Great Double Acts

Rock duo Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart, know a thing or two about creative partnership. Challenging the popular myth that art is made by solitary, angst-ridden individuals, they celebrate some of the art world's most interesting collaborators, such as Marina Abramović and Ulay, Gilbert & George, and Jake and Dinos Chapman.

It seems we live in a largely individualistic society and culture.  When we see art, we see solo artist and we think solo artist.  I was not surprised, for example, to hear that the surrealist master Salvador Dali had assistants working him, but it was news to me how formal and legal their arrangements were.  The assistants worked for him, and he took credit of course because it was his artistic concept and direction.  But what Hince and Mosshart speak to are closer, more equal collaboration, where both artists in a pair, for example, garner recognition and fame.

Hince: How many artists does it take to change a light bulb? 
Mosshart:  One, but it takes someone else to tell him when to stop screwing it in.

It doesn't mean that the pair isn't like a married couple, I suppose.

Tate Modern: Exploring the Nude

We humans can be positively ridiculous at times, right.  What constitutes nude and what doesn't constitute nude is as arbritary as we can be.  Dawn O'Porter gives us a short tour that is at once demure, a touch flirtatious, and informative.

Tate Modern: Exploring the Surreal

Surrealist art will always hold a special place within me, as I discovered it that pivotal stretch in my life, where I discovered art in the ways I have come to conceive.  From paintings and poetry, to Shakespeare and drama, to martial arts, perhaps art found me, too.  Peter Capaldi gives us a short tour that pays due homage to surrealism without doling out a surrealist homage.