Modernity and Spaces of Femininity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Modernity and Spaces of muliebrity - Essay ExampleThe paper Modernity and Spaces of Femininity focuses on the article of Griselda pollock. The article clearly represents Pollocks feminist views. She is a credible actor being a leading cultural theorist. She has done vast research on feminist issues much(prenominal) as those that women encounter while living and working in societies as objects of male satisfaction alternatively than as important subjects that gives credit to their own abilities as women. Pollock has recommended ways to change future representations of women. She has as well provided significant insights on voyeuristic art and ties between art and human nature. She has become an activist exploitation a Marxist- fondist approach to reveal the key sexual and political biases involved in the formation of the modernist faecal matter. Currently, she is the Director for the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds with a Masters De gree in History of European blind and a PhD degree in the study of approaches to modernism. She is considered an academic jewel, having taught History of Art and Film in the Universities of Manchester and Leeds and an author of several books on her expertise on Art, History, Feminism and Modernism. In the article, Pollock refers mostly to paintings of renowned artists in the nineteenth century and how their work affected its viewers. She analyzed T.J. Clarks accounts of Edoard Manets controersial painting, Olympia which shows a nude woman reclined on a bed with her hand screening her crotch., with a black lady, presumably her maid, standing beside the bed and a black cat seated at the foot of her bed. This painting was widely criticized when it was exposed to the public, and its analysis runs from shallow comments just about its physical appearance to deeper critiques about societal representations during its time. Clark claims that Manets Olympia has been the founding monument o f modern art3, embodying a shift in what spectators argon accustomed to viewing and was subjected to a wide variety of interpretations. Pollock contends that Clark leans on the class system in analyzing modernist paintings. For him, Olympias nakedness in Manets modernist painting depicted her as a little prostitute as opposed to heavily dressed, sophisticated and fashionable women in other paintings ascribed as advance from upper classes of society. Pollock also agrees with Clark that such artwork of women catered to a masculine audience since it provokes sexual tickling which is not expected of decent women viewers. This is what she meant by masculinist myth of modernism. Male artists reigned over modernism because they are able to express their sexuality through their art, which was not a luxury granted to women artists. Pollock confirms that in that respect was a historical asymmetry in art in the nineteenth century due to social structuration of sexual differences which det ermined what men and women painted4. Clark indexes impressionist paintings to class formations and class identities that emerged in society, giving modernity a wider meaning than just being up-to-date. Modernity is a matter of representations and major myths- of a new capital of France for recreation, leisure and pleasure of nature to be enjoyed at weekends in suburbia of the prostitute taking over and of fluidity of class in the popular spaces of entertainment5 References were pointed to Charles Baudelaires essay about the modern artist being a flaneur or