ARTDICK

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Part of a series of works superimposing still images from Paris Hilton’s ‘bath’ video (which has commonly been labelled a ‘sex tape’) over top of classical paintings of women bathing. See more from this series.

“Historically, the bending-bather pose goes as far back as Raphael’s tapestry cartoon. As a bodily trope, the bending single female bather traces it ancestry to Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream of 1654-1656 in the Nation Gallery, London… It may owe its longevity as a pose at least in part to the challenge it presents to the skill of the artist in terms of foreshortening. The bending-bather pose is picked up in the nineteenth century, outdoors, in the bending-bather figure of in Manet’s Le Bain/Dejeuner. And in the Twentieth [Century], it is spectacularly reworked by Picasso in his endlessly inventive series of grotesque variations on Le Dejeuner, which to me, at least, owe as much to Degas’ bathers as to Manet’s. Yet, while such tracing of the motif tells us about its long-term endurance and the challenge it offers to succeeding generations of artists (head low, long expanse of back, foreshortened view), it does not help us with the more difficult task of interpreting this image, of accounting for its vividness and seductive complexity…” (LInda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye)

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Part of a series of works superimposing still images from Paris Hilton’s ‘bath’ video (which has commonly been labelled a ‘sex tape’) over top of classical paintings of women bathing. See more from this series.

“The thrust of [John] Berger’s argument is that the artistic nude is no different from the soft porn nude, existing to fulfil male voyeurism and desire for possession. He argues that all but a few of the hundreds of thousands of nudes in European painting were designed to appeal to sexuality of the man looking at the picture. The sexuality of the woman, he says, ‘needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion. Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own… You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure’.” (John Robinson, The Judgment of Paris)

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“I define feminist art as images and visualizations and actions which readdress the suppression, the marginalization and the denigration of works made by women for… for me, for over a thousand years. That’s the repression that I’ve been addressing.” (Carolee Schneemann)

“I have been thinking about something I’m been hearing, reading, everyday, especially now with politics, how he changed his mind, he changes his mind. Changing one’s mind as something bad, evil almost. I think that changing one’s mind is one of the best things that there is… Why I was thinking today about changing one’s mind — you won’t believe me — all the papers writing and making jokes about Paris Hilton. Paris saying that she changed, that she is not what she was two days ago, three days, changing her mind. And everybody making jokes, you know, that’s about her saying this. I was thinking how people don’t believe that any change can happen that would be positive. We have become so skeptical, so negative. We don’t believe anymore in slow or sudden changes… I am not saying that Paris has really changed – I am only reacting to the press, to their reactions, to their negativity and attitude towards changing of one’s mind, of becoming different.” (Jonas Mekas)

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Part of a series of works superimposing still images from Paris Hilton’s ‘bath’ video (which has commonly been labelled a ‘sex tape’) over top of classical paintings of women bathing. See more from this series. Many thanks to Meghan Dougherty for featuring these works on Tumblr.

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