Meeting Summary

OK!

Upon approaching our meeting today I was really distraught due to a few burning and circular questions. These included:

What is feminism?

What is the difference between pro-feminist and feminist in terms of male involvement?

(for a short definition of pro-feminist see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-feminism)

Can art be unintentionally feminist in nature?

What is feminist art?

What is pro-feminist art? and,

Art and perspective? ah? eh?

During discussion of these issues and the conflicts arising from them, we stumbled across the notion of appropriation. With talks of appropriation we also started to talk about postmodernism, and how that type of cultural borrowing/ appropriation may be a different thing entirely in that it is trying to create something that is different from a source by referencing and mixing rather than copying. For example, a cowboy wearing a punk collar (or punk wearing a cowboy hat) is different from both cowboy and punk.

Under the lose heading of negative appropriation we talked about the example of the Oil of Olay Commercail type media. In this something that is designed and scripted by a man is represented as the perspective of a woman speaking to women. This would be a woman appropriating a masculine dialogue, as well as a man appropriating a woman's dialogue, but subverting the outright contradiction of this by having it represented through a woman.

Acting and the performative dialogue may become a useful tool in trying to untangle the obstacles we are facing to this problem.

Speaking about the Oil of Olay reference has me thinking about your example, Leah, where you were talking about how you admired the spoken word style of a poet who's perspective and context highly differ from yours and that you would feel silly trying to create yourself. Consider this- if you wanted to appropriate, technically you could write this style of poetry, and have someone else read it who you thought fit into the context of narrating your piece. That would be a style of sneaky appropriation yes?

Next on topic became a discussion on how we could define for ourselves what feminist/women's art could be conceived from.

We asked ourselves:

- Is it the material?

If so, how does Patrick Trayer explore this?

-how does he employ the material? Is he appropriating or providing a contextual dialogue? How is his use of the material interpreted by others and by himself?
- Is it in the action? Or, in a different manner of speaking, performative?

If so, how does Adrien Stimson explore this?

Also, along with the notions of appropriation, how does he confront appropriation's ties with a colonialist style discourse?

Performative representation, cross dressing, style of cultural dress

-Is it in how the figure is represented?

If so, could Cassie's example of William Blake be used in discussion?

-Is it a specific manner of dialogue?

This needs more thought... ideas please!

Other Thoughts:

-subjectivity and personal perspective as pro-feminist notions

-cultural politics, exclusion and inclusion, and their relation to feminism

-Madonna and her constantly changing image- where the simulation of the real becomes more real than the real itself.

-Is feminist art simply the challenging of dominant themes and oppressive context?

-how deconstructivism and postmodernism apply to feminist art. Can the current meanings of traditionally female materials be not changed but placed in a conflicting conjunction/context in order to disrupt their contemporary or stereotyped read. Perhaps an example of this could be some of Vivienne Westwood's work.

Other interesting thoughts that may or may not relate to our topic:

Is there feminist architecture?

Why is the sky blue?

Thanks for reading folks. Enjoy the brain fodder. And just a reminder to post any and all thoughts to the blog, as well as update your facebook status with your location when you are on campus to enjoy some great company studying as well as increase the chance of random thought collision for this project.

Over and Out.