Gazing at Photographs

As a female artist using the method of self-portraiture as a form of expression, it’s hard to find references to fellow practitioners that do not, implicitly or explicitly, have a feminist message in their work. But I personally find the politicisation of art suffocating. So is there an argument for de-politicising the gaze? Isn’t it time to move away from such divisive and hence reductionist concepts such as the ‘male gaze’? Isn’t it time to accept that the feminist gaze is just as stereotypical as the male gaze?

90s YBA Sarah Lucas and many other female artists of her generation delivered strong feminist narratives in a way that, in a reductionist sense of the word are quite ‘masculine’ - deliberately stripped of what I would relate to as feminine emotion or empathy. As a viewer, personally, I get the message, but it doesn’t move me. It’s like reading a text message instead of a poem, but that is just me - and art moves us in different ways.

Sarah Lucas Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs 1996

Juno Calypso says about her work ‘I would consider it a personal investigation of the self, but my self is a feminine-feminist. So it also becomes political, but I wouldn’t say I’m pandering – certainly not self consciously and even more certainly not unknowingly. Feminism was never a topic I chose to exploit.’

But the aesthetic of her images has invariably raised eyebrows and criticism. Calypso declares that she loves treading the line between feminism and being erotic. Speaking about her image A Dream in Green in a 2016 interview she answers her interviewer’s question :’How would you combat the display of desire aimed at the viewer from the camera’s position from that of the desire of self within an autodidactic methodology of display?

with ‘I feel like this question is saying ‘can you still be a feminist when your camera is aiming at your ass?” If so, my answer is yes.’

Juno Calypso A Dream in Green 2015

Thinking of my own practice, my ‘gaze’ is fundamentally an existentialist one, therefore universal and transgressing gender boundaries.