Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance

Human being faced with many taboos since their existence. Power and guard words imposed on man; maternity and elegance on woman. Masculine and feminine statues concerned and many others bred like rabbits. Woefully man overcame this and set up today’s system where woman still fights for a gender discrimination around the world (even in “contemporary” cities). “I view gender as a social construct that is maintained and negotiated through material culture.” (Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sexuality in Ancient Art, 1996, pg.44). As human being developed, found new inventions, science etc. the gap between the discrimination expanded. In the 19th century with novelty of advertising (every advertising is commercial), the situation got pitiful. Such as, to increase selling of soap, laundry machine, dishwasher created for kitchen, and kitchen designed for who? Women: a mother. “But the mother-that has no political charge, no identity even.” (Michele Barrett, Bobby Baker, Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life, 2007, pg.178).

Bobby Baker is a performance artist, his artwork subject is on about woman and woman whose work is a mothering. Bobby Baker and Blondell Cummings art performances based in kitchen are a proof that more than food and desserts can be produced in the kitchen, such as art, creativity.

‘Kitchen’ is a factorised metaphor for years, “a space utterly identified with the feminine.”. (Lesley Ferris, cooking up the self: Bobby Baker and Blondell Cummings “do” the kitchen, 2016, pg.186). A unique stage design, use and evaluate of kitchen space by Bobby Baker and Blondell Cummings managed to break this typical simile. They both played a big rule to popularise the flow of using own lives as a material in performances. This movement memorialised as autobiographical art pieces, where forms of writing –journal, diaries, books, autobiographies were not acceptable by woman.

Stage backdate to Ancient Greek and Roman Empire. The existence of them only related to commerce and man’s animal instincts. The Ancient Amphitheatre and Arenas from Tarragona (Spain), Athens, Cyprus are all designed identically, used for similar reasons as long as I travelled, observed. They all had hidden stages, rooms under the public stage where they agitated under their ‘manhood’, violence took place and women brought inside to their space. The gender statues barbarically proceed. For these reasons, concepts and discrimination increased because many emotions captured in underground. And stage meant power which belonged to only man. Therefore, as time passed by men even played women parts on stage. They believed woman was not artistically creative and stage would scatter the naturalness of feminine creature. I suppose in their subconscious men did not want to lose governing on women.

In time power and wealth indicator: stage, turned into a form of art. As usual changes in economy and politics biasedly created new art movements. Stage is also known as performance and performance is alive art- unrepeatable; it is present. It has affected by manly anarchic, socialist movements (just like Street Art). Artists, performers turned to animate their environment, work and circumstances using the stage and their bodies. “Performance art of this period was particularly focused on the body, and is often referred to as Body art. This reflects the period's so-called "dematerialization of the art object," and the flight from traditional media. It also reflects the political ferment of the time: the rise of feminism, which encouraged thought about the division between the personal and political and anti-war activism, which supplied models for politicized art "actions”.” (http://www.theartstory.org/movement-performance-art.htm)

Associating the movements with the ‘Kitchen Show’ by Baker and ‘Chicken Soup’ by Cummings: they were two of the major art performances. In Kitchen Show, the solo performance carried metaphors of kitchen being centre of the house and ourselves. Women share their deep emotions, ideas of herself in the kitchen and in the play kitchen becomes a very moving section, a special character which covers the silence, violence and many other hidden stories.” The kitchen is the space where we serve our guests, but it is also a daily battlefield of onerous tasks and repetitive activity.” (Lesley Ferris, Cooking up the self: Interfaces, 2016, pg.196). In another solo performance, the Chicken Soup is rooted to Cumming’s childhood, where she remembers she and her family spending most of their times in the kitchen. Again kitchen is a subject that symbolises the unity of females in a family. “Miss Cummings is one of the most acute performers around,” Jennifer Dunning wrote in The New York Times in 1984, reviewing,

The Art of War/Nine Situations,” a piece by Ms. Cummings, in collaboration with Jessica Hagedorn, set to the words of the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu. “To watch her fluent hands — at one point scraping at imaginary small objects in the imaginary dust, then stretching and smoothing as they fold a shirt into a battered suitcase — is to witness rare physical acting.”( https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/arts/dance/blondell-cummings-dancer-of-lifes-everyday-details-dies-at-70.html)

Performance is a moving art and another similar form of art is a sculpture. “Sculpture is both a craft and an art.” (Judith Collins, Eric Gill: Sculpture, 1992, pg.50). Sculpture is an action of work, where it preserves life. Life is a liveliness.

Contemporary woman, Fran Cottell, justifies that art pieces should not be found in museums or galleries. It is an old fashioned statue. What a contemporary movement? We can use private houses, beaches, parks and many other public places for art pieces to be completed. Sculpture is a kind of redefining the nature of the subjects: a live given, produced art can live in a harmony with nature (their home). Thereby as you visit them repetitively, you can feel various emotions and thoughts, while you experience with other living creatures, not walls or CCTVs.

Despite all pressure and rigours for over the years, women still need to battle against prejudices in several fields. Women who are involved in art must produce more contemporary works to be a light for future women artists: just like how Baker, Cummings, Cottell and many other women artists we know or not battled against the gendered for us, today.

Blondell Cummings amazing art performance: Chicken Soup.

Video: (https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/blondell-cummings/chicken-soup/)