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When The Lady Talks (EN) |
 2010
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Associated projects: Ladyshave Live at Arminius
We live in a time in which mainstream media rave about the 'metro sexual' , in which a man is not afraid to be feminine and sensitive in his looks or behaviour even though he is a healthy heterosexual. On television and in newspapers one sees career women parading by in tailored suits, be it Condoleeza Rice or Angela Merkel. Pop stars have been 'gender bending' for decades - in their outfits and shows they burst out of the corset of their sex. This raises the question whether gender is an issue these days. If the masquerade, the game male and female identities has become a common occurrence in western culture, why would you talk about gender? And yet we talked about gender and identity during 'When the Lady talks' on September 11 2005 in the Arminiuschurch. Artists, photographers, fashion designers, museum curators and scientists gave their opinion on the sexes or showed work about sex in a dazzling show. And what do you know? There may be plenty of play these days, all borders of masculinity and femininity are being explored, we still think male and female. We find it appealing to relativize masculinity and femininity but at the same time we find it hard to do without that bipartition given to us at birth. Confusion is nice, but not too much of it - then we really get confused. Photographer Ari Versluis gives a striking demonstration of this. Together with Ellie Uyttenbroek he has spent years working on the successful series 'Exactitudes', groups of pictures of people who do everything to show off their individuality through their clothes and hair. But whether it's 'gabber' girls, leather boys, undistinguishable naturals or studied casual men in designer clothes - all these pronounced individuals are remarkably similar to all the other individuals with the same style. Individualism and conformism are often frighteningly close together. Versluis tells how he looks for his models in the streets, how he continues to develop a better eye for detail - the perfection of a style is in the details - and how nothing is as it seems. What you see isn't true, he emphasizes: the leather boys look masculine and dangerous, but they really are feminine. The bimbo with bleached blond hair and round bosom may tell you she's a lesbian. And that, Versluis confesses, troubles him. He comes from a generation that had to fight for their homosexual identity - and all that does not seem to matter anymore. Risk Hazekamp makes photographic art in which she portrays herself in the surreal, expanding landscapes of a western. She can look like a female Marlboro cowboy. Even though perhaps you can't call it 'female' because she deconstructs masculinity and femininity in such a way that a new form of 'femaleness' comes to life. In the Arminiuschurch she shows a film of a slender, androgynous woman with a beard wandering the streets of Paris. Her breasts are taped to her body as becomes clear when she removes the bindings from under her white shirt at the end of the film and you can see a shadow of breasts. For most of the film you’re not sure what you are looking at: a boy? A hermaphrodite, a woman in disguise? A homosexual cruising? Hazekamp likes to confuse, but it's not a game. As she states while the film runs. The system that divides humanity in men and women cannot please her; she joins Judith Buttler - an American theorist - who denounces this division in two sexes. She doesn’t feel she's a woman, or a man for that matter, she is somewhere in a continuum between masculinity and femininity that is liquid by definition. In her work she taunts cliché's but at the same time she shows that her argument about being boundlessness is idealistic if not utopic: the alienation the woman with the beard brings about forces us to face the fact that the cliché's are as alive as ever. The game played with gender and identity stretches the borders but doesn’t make them disappear as many contributions show. Jessica Gysel, editor of the late Kutt Magazine, the lesbian counterpart to the male "Butt' and founder of the new to appear magazine GLU, Girls Like Us, tells that her readers don't care too much for the game: pretty pictures of ‘regular’ lesbians are good enough. Fashion designer Marga Weimans searches in her work for an obstinate combination of European fashion history, especially dandyism - exotic African clothes and street culture from Rotterdam. This shows beautifully in her collection inspired by hip-hop. Tough black men walk proudly in carnavalesque clothes, they are virile but are dressed up in feminine robes. Yes, they love her designs, Weimans confirms, but only for the fashion shows, not for the streets - the game has its limits. Nele Bergheim shows what happens when women wear the pants in her fictional history of the pantsuit, from 'le smoking' from Yves Saint Laurent to Victor & Rolf: women in suits are very feminine and sexy. The performance by DJ Chantelle winks at the 'gynander' (man-woman) of the 'fin de siècle'. DJ Chantelle wears a tight corset but above her thin female waist a flat, bare male chest shows. The opium pipe (think of Baudelaire) in her hand, the sultry sang music; they take the audience back to a different time. Perhaps the female identity is turned inside out the most in the film about Mathilde Willink brought by documentary maker Jasmina Fekovic. Mathilde is such a super pussycat that her femininity becomes camp and is almost incredible. Gender in short, is still a subject worth talking about. We like to believe that the masquerade undermines the gender differences, that the male and female identities are more loose and undefinable than before. But whether this is true remains the question. Ken Pratt, curator for the exhibition Ladyshave points this out as does Sue-an van der Zijpp, curator of modern art at the Groninger Museum, when they touch on the subject of female artists in the Netherlands. Gender, Van der Zijpp says, reminds the world of art of the awful F-word of feminism and none wants to be associated with that. All the female artists who embroider and saw, who use soft, caress able materials, make fragile work in which their own body and femininity is often a theme, all these artists seem to only underline that the cliché's about female artists are true. It causes them to be taken less seriously than male artists who - supposedly - confuse, mock and challenge. It is an odd logic put forward by Van der Zijp because when female (and male) artists touch on the subject of gender in their work, they do just that, confuse, mock and challenge the system. Perhaps not all systems of the world, whatever they may be, but the system of the rusted relationships between the sexes. Look for example at the small paintings by Hinke Schreuder who used embroidery techniques. That symbol of good feminine housework is in strong contrast with that which she portrays: rancid pornographic images, explicit female sexuality. In the church she reads part from Little Red Riding hood and explains that the little girl is a power girl in her own time, going off the beaten track and not afraid of the big bad wolf. It's good advice that can't be followed enough. Be like Little Red Riding hood when it comes to gender and wander off the beaten path. copyright: Xandra Schutte & Showroom MAMA, 2005 |
