page 3 girls - trial 3

Page 3 girl - trial 2

Looking closely at Page 3 girls ... photoshopped ...

As I am working with these images of the "Page 3 girls" from The Sun, I noticed that they are be made up, body parts beeing reassembled, made up faces added  ....

Page 3 girl - trial 1

Image from The Sun newspaper.

Trial for what could be a series. They would not all wear a Burqa; this one is just an example. It is more about hiding and not hiding women' bodies and the aggressivity of images around us and the aggressivity of sexuality, to which we can't escape.

Background research : click here and scroll down and also look at older posts.

Shadi Ghadirian

Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen

Nakedness, exposure and vulnerability.

Judith Mackrell guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 May 2011 21.30

Fears and fantasies … Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!

Photograph: Dave St-Pierre

When Sally Marie was told she had to strip off in the name of contemporary dance, she was happy to oblige – in theory, anyway. The British dancer had been cast in Dear Body, a 2009 work by Luca Silvestrini that satirised the hard dieting, gym-bound madness of body beautiful obsessives. Marie approved of the work's politics, which she felt applied to her own profession, too. "I'd been arguing for ages that we needed a greater variety of bodies and ages in dance," says Marie, who readily admits to being a stone heavier and a decade older than most of the other dancers. "It felt like an important statement to be on stage showing my tits."
But in practice, when it came to getting naked, Marie was petrified. "When you're in a sauna, it feels completely natural. But on stage, you're really exposed." Ironically, by the time she came to perform Dear Body, she was much slimmer. "I'd been too frightened to eat."
Javier de Frutos, the Venezuelan-born choreo-grapher, understands her terror. In the 1990s, his own compact buttocks and bobbing penis became a familiar sight to audiences, in works such as the solo Gypsy and the trio Grass. Yet at first, De Frutos found crossing over into nudity traumatic. "When I was young, I was the guy at the gym who had to wait until the changing room was empty before I could take off my clothes." His mentor, the US dancer and choreo-grapher Sara Rudnor, persuaded him to change. "Sarah told me I needed to explore as many emotions as possible on stage. She told me to do what I feared most. For me, that was being naked."

De Frutos and Marie may feel some sympathy with the cast of Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!, which arrives in Britain this week. A Little Tenderness for Crying Out Loud!, in its English translation, was created by Canadian choreographer Dave St-Pierre. It's a work exploring the fears and fantasies of 22 characters as they search for love in a brutal world. But it's also a work in which the dancers have to perform naked for much of the time; in fact, even more exposingly, they have to bring their nakedness right down into the auditorium, clambering over the stalls and fighting in the aisles – with their breasts, genitals and buttocks in wobblingly close proximity to the audience.

What's the justification for such aggressive nudity? St-Pierre, who is fascinated by taboos and the breaking of them, is trying to create a raw physical intimacy between dancer and audience, and he wants to make us laugh, too. Michael Watts, one of his dancers, says most people find the naked scenes funny. But, he adds, "we're being very childlike – we're behaving like six-year-old boys, and we get a lot of taps on the bottom from old ladies". They do occasionally encounter angry resistance, though. "One woman just hid her face completely," recalls Watts. "She put her jacket over her face. Another man got up and tried to run away. And a few dancers have got hit or pushed."

Choreographers may have many serious motives for nudity – be they political, aesthetic or psychological – but what some people find beautiful and expressive, others will inevitably find titillating or arousing, and others embarrassing or disgusting. What is certain, though, is that the issue of how much flesh a dancer shows has always been controversial. In 1725, when ballerina Marie Camargo shortened her skirts to ankle length to gain extra freedom of movement, there were many who went to the Paris Opera not to applaud her virtuosity but to catch a flash of calf or thigh. Camargo was credited with inventing an early form of knickers to preserve some modesty as she danced.

For Isadora Duncan, the American who began performing her radiant, radical dance recitals around 1900, the body was sacred. When she abandoned corsets, danced barefoot and occasionally let a bare breast spill out of her loosely draped tunic, Duncan wasn't simply serving the cause of dance, she was celebrating the human spirit. And her inspiration, as well as her notoriety, led to more dancers stripping off in the name of high art. Canadian Maud Allan became a superstar of Edwardian Britain thanks her near-naked Salomé routine, and Josephine Baker was dubbed the Ebony Venus when she danced in Paris wearing nothing but a belt of pink feathers or a tiny skirt of fake bananas.

When stage censorship laws were relaxed during the 1960s, however, even a coy veil could be dispensed with. The cast of musicals such as Oh! Calcutta! paraded their bodies with joy, while avant-garde choreographers began to explore the gamut of what nudity could signify. Yvonne Rainer, in 1970s New York, danced naked in front of a US flag to protest against the Vietnam war. And veteran British dancer Diana Payne-Myers developed an entire second career when choreo-graphers such as Lloyd Newson started to explore the potential of putting a much older, naked dancer on stage.

Since the late 1990s, Payne-Myers's tiny, wrinkled, supple form has evoked images of survival, defenselessness and even the joy of supposedly inappropriate elderly behaviour.
For De Frutos, as he explored the feelings of vulnerability created by dancing naked, other issues arose. He became fascinated by his audiences' natural voyeurism and by the ways he could deflect it. "I wanted to take their attention away from my genitalia to all the small muscles in the body, and show how eloquent they are. There is something irreplaceable about the sensual reality of skin, and the beauty of light falling on skin. I was always thinking how that could best be achieved."

Visually, De Frutos was inspired by none other than Caravaggio and El Greco. But in real life, the human body can be an unruly beast: it gets rashes and bruises, it's subject to weight gain, hairiness and menstrual cycles – as well as other kinds of normally private activity. De Frutos swears he never worried about getting an erection on stage when performing with other nude dancers: "Dancing naked," he says, "is the least sexy thing I've ever done." And Sally Marie was convinced that all the men in Dear Body were "very anxious. During contact, everyone was trying to keep a distance between their pelvises. It was very funny. "

For Arthur Pita, the London-based choreographer of the pastoral comedy Camp, the issue was simply his own vanity. He hadn't expected to dance in Camp, but when he had to take over from an injured cast member he went straight into an intensive regime of "squats and press-ups" to prepare for his naked scene. "I really didn't want anything to be wobbling for the audience."

Pita envies the lack of self conscious-ness shown by Payne-Meyers, with whom he has worked. "She knows full well she is an 83-year-old woman, but she is completely committed to her art and completely unembarrassed. Her body is amazing to look at. It's only skin and bone and muscle, but it's very old skin and bone and muscle. I admire that healthy, honest approach; it's something all dancers should be inspired by."

Tendresse comes with a guidance rating of 18, and all its publicity contains warnings of "explicit adult material". What's more, Michael Watts is keen to point out that if anyone in the audience obviously hates what the dancers are doing, they won't get picked on. "We can usually tell how people are feeling," he says. "They won't actually have a hairy man in a wig clambering over them."

maurizio anzeri

“I’ve been collecting old photographs for a long time. A few years ago I was doing ink drawings with them and out of curiosity I stitched into one. I work a lot with threads and hand stitching, and the link to photography was a natural progression. I put tracing paper over the photo and draw on the face until it develops. Sometimes the image comes straight away, suggested by a detail on a dress or in the background, but with the majority of them I spend a lot of time drawing. Once the drawing is done, I pierce the photo with a set of needle-like tools I invented and take the paper away; the holes are obsessively paced at the same distance to convey an idea of geometry. When I begin the stitching something else happens, drawing will never do what thread will – the light changes, and at some points you can lose the face, and at others you can still see under it.” Link

Pakistani Actress, Veena Malik, defies Mullah Accusing Her of Immoral Behavior on an Indian Reality TV Show

Question to Soofia Asad who is a photographer from Pakistan :

CSD : "A couple of days ago, I posted this video on Facebook but I would like to know more about the context of it."

Soofia Asad* : "This video is of a Pakistani film actress. She participated in an Indian reality show 'Big Brother'. On that show, she wore western dresses (like trousers, sleeveless tops and skirts) and got very close to one of the indian guys on the show, as a friend-hugging him, holding hands, sitting very close to him-regular platonic relationship. She received a lot of criticism from the traditional and religious people. People called her a slut and an immoral person who should not be representing the so called Islamic Republic of Pakistan. She in return is saying that she was not representing any country or religion there and went as a regular person. She received death threats as well.

In Islam, women are not supposed to be around and touch men who are not her husband or brother or father. One of our political ministers had to resign because she shook hands with the males of the foreign delegates...such is our hypocrisy."

Soofia Asad : Here is her website.

In the video, there is a mesmerizing moment when in split screen we see both the Mullah and the actress shouting at each other. Their voices are mixed together and the visual opposition of the beautiful (angry) woman and the bearded Mullah is at its maximum effect.

... So now we have a Feminist French governement !!

"The French government says wearing the veil is a symbol of male oppression."



Beth Lazroe - In our faces

"IN OUR FACES : Visual Assault is the only term that can describe the experience of viewing the degrading images of women, shown as objectys of sexual use and fantasy, that daily bombard the residents of Prague and other Czech cities."

Text and images from Beth Lazroe's website (best to be seen in her website).

Glamour

Self-portrait in the kitchen - 2007 ? (1)

(...)
As soon as you think or write about glamour you enter dangerous territory. Are we talking about artificiality and the lure of false values? About gold-digging seducers or women on the make? What about the ethics of fur or diamonds; or cosmetic surgery and the problems of body dysmorphia in the young? Is the idea of glamour exclusively western and white?

(...)
Does glamour empower women, or turn them into objects? It is important to remember that women practise glamour, they are not simply the object of the male gaze. And, historically, glamorous women were just as likely to be seen as dangerous to men as victims themselves. Glamour can represent self-assertion, sexual confidence, playfulness, pleasure and delight. But in the end, nothing empowers women so much as a good education and a well-paid job (2).

Glamour versus feminism? Just look at the images in the media we all adore.
Carol Dyhouse - The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010
Carol Dyhouse is a research professor at the University of Sussex. Her new book, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism



Note 1 : I personally don't have THE "well-paid job" ...

Note 2 : the point is that, so far, in my personal research through feminism etc, what makes most sense to me  is what is written here : click the link to my previous post.

Bearded necklaces series - number 3

Untitled (yet)

Chain, felt (Staffordshire sheep)

I Care A Lot - submission

Pieces submitted for Icarealot.

"Women's body hair removal is strongly normative within contemporary Western culture. Although often trivialised, (...) the hairlessness norm powerfully endorses the assumption that a woman's body is unacceptable if unaltered; its very normativity points to a socio-cultural presumption that hairlessness is the appropriate condition for the feminine body."

"Gender and body hair: constructing the feminine woman", abstract extract

From my personal experience, this fact is even more true in Middle-Eastern culture, would it also be for hygienic or religious reasons.

The two pieces I am presenting for  ICareALot were especially made to take part in the debate about Middle East, from a post-feminist point of view. They are both dedicated to the Iranian photographer Mehraneh Atashi who had just been arrested around the same time when I came across the Icarealot call for submission. The two necklaces were made thinking of the women who could wear them as a passive sign of rebellion against a certain male abuse of power. As the two pieces come as beautiful objects to wear and be proud of, my point here is not to reject the depilation practice but to remind us that this should be chosen as a free act, rather than an act of submission to the male desire, to the religion, culture or to simply the weight of tradition. More internationally, the pieces were made to draw awareness on the fact that we are all still under the pressure of culturally accepted stereotypes about women.

 “Sacrificial postiche”

Materials: human hair, red copper chain and findings

 Dimensions: chain length : 41 cm- hair legth : 21 cm

“Discrete rebellion”

Materials: human hair of friends, daughter and myself, chain

Dimensions: chain length : 18 cm- hair legth : 22 cm

From an ancient tomb in Iraq (circa 9th century BC)

Jemime Stehli - Strip series

Strip No1 Writer

Strip No3 Critic

Strip No4 Curator

Strip No5 Dealer

Strip No6 Critic

Strip No7 Writer

Raphael Danke - untitled works - 2007/9