FANNY - Get a Room!

[Español abajo]

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Think about ART...What popped into your head just now? a painting? a museum? the image of disheveled hair crowning a misunderstood genius? Does it ring of skill or of arrogance? is it meaningful, is it  frivolous? is it untouchable or is it close to your heart? 

Now tell me, where did women fit in this landscape? are they inside or outside of the paintings? and... why? 

This is the first of a series of 3 episodes (in English) featuring  the extraordinary art historian Fanny Curtat. She will help us answer these and many others questions, with her fascinating wit and not without a few laughs. 

🎤 GUEST

Fanny Curtat, PhD Candidate, Art historian, specialized in contemporary art but fascinated with anything and everything about art and working actively to understand the presence and perception of sacredness in art practices of recent years. Lecturer, teacher, consultant, philosophy enthusiast, history addict and feminist. 

• 📖  Academic Profile , here     
• ✏️ Transcript of the episode, here

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🇲🇽 ESPAÑOL:

¿Qué te pasa por la cabeza cuando digo la palabra “ARTE”? ¿una pintura? ¿Un museo? ¿El cabello despeinado de un genio incomprendido? ¿Te suena a talento o a arrogancia? ¿Tiene valor o es algo frívolo? ¿Es algo intocable o que te toca el corazón?

Bien, ahora dime, ¿dónde encajan las mujeres en este paisaje? ¿Están dentro o fuera de las pinturas? ¿y por qué?

Éste es el primero de 3 episodios (en inglés) con la extraordinaria historiadora del arte Fanny Curtat. Ella nos ayudará a responder estas y muchas otras preguntas, con su fascinante ingenio y magnética personalidad. 

BIO: Fanny Curtat, candidata a doctorado, historiadora del arte, especializada en arte contemporáneo pero fascinada con todo lo relacionado al arte. Trabajando activamente para comprender la presencia y percepción de lo sagrado en las prácticas artísticas de los últimos años. Conferencista, profesora, consultora, entusiasta de la filosofía, adicta a la historia y feminista.

Transcript

“GET A ROOM”
Transcript - Episode 03

Guest:

Fanny Curtat

Host:

Patricia Morales Cid de León

INTRODUCTION: 

Every now and then, when I crave for a healthy dose of tangy wit I turn to Virginia Woolf, I repeatedly enjoy her classic “A Room of One’s Own”. This gem of a book contains pearls of lucidity such as:

 “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size.”

 and morsels of humour such as:

 “Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry… and these were biscuits to the core."

 Saint Woolf begins the book with the question of women in fiction, and then she proceeds to dismantle the notion to shreds. Do we mean; women as characters in fiction? women as writers of fiction? as muses of fiction? women as barred and subordinate afterthoughts in fiction? 

 And so, my thoughts caper and I wonder what about Women in art? all kinds of art! in a time where a banana peel stuck on a wall is art, what even isn’t? And have we contributed to this shift in the creative landscape? Or are women still inane objects with no say or agency? 

 Enters Fanny Curtat, brilliant academic of the arts, an artist herself and literature junkie. Spot-on for our conundrum today, so…

QuasiFeministas lets shred this topic to pieces, on this episode we discuss, women & art history.

INTERVIEW

PATRICIA:

So just to get us started, what do we consider art? and I know this is a titanic enterprise but please give us a little trip of what is art, let’s start there.

FANNY:

Yeah, since we know that this is an impossible question let’s use it for its potential and use the forbidden shortcuts of history. Quite interesting is because it associates art with talent and it is true that we associate some sort of mastery of elements with art but that’s going to allow us to get Very quickly into why did we got to the banana? And how much did women contribute to that switch

CHATTY PATHY:

This is Fanny extremely bright, irresistibly charming and stubbornly humble, if only she was  arrogant, she’d be Zeus

FANNY:

Because why do we say, this is a talented person? We tend to associate it with a capacity of an artist to represent reality. In the days of old we associate it hyper realistic paintings to somebody who is really talented , Renaissance painting, we had this idea that something that looks real, that imitates nature it’s sort of what talent is but the thing is that nature was never really imitated properly. What you’re looking at is choices that an artist made in order to represent what we think is some sort part of reality. 

CHATTY PATHY:

Hey there nice people,  all of the works we will refer to are available on a single link in the description box. Open it now it will be useful throughout the entire conversation, and because I want you to chillax, you will hear this sound [meditation bell], whenever it’s time to take a peek at the images. You’re welcome!

FANNY:

So the idea is that talent is connected with a representation of reality, but it’s never reality as we think of it. For example, (we don’t have pictures of that because he’s taking you back to ancient Greece as art history often does, and that’s a problem will get to that), but Xerxes uses a famous painter of the era in order to represent one female body, he had in front of him five women and combined the elements of each women bodies into what he considered to be better than nature.

CHATTY PATHY:

What guy! 500BC and we were already Mr. Potato Head prototypes…

FANNY:

Sometimes representing nature is about enhancing nature, or it’s about putting forward what they thought was a superior version of nature. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, a French painter, much later, he has this most famous painting which is La Grande Odalisque [ bell ]. 

You have a female body that is spread on cushions when you look at it, it’s beautiful, it has this sort of satiny, velvety texture to it, to the skin, it’s very sexy, it’s very sensual, the body makes no sense. The boob is too squished to the side, there’s too many vertebrae, the leg is not in the right angle, nothing makes sense. This body is not real. If she were to get up she would be a sort of monster. So, what we’re seeing is never really reality, it's always choices that an artist makes. Ingres knows how to draw perfectly, he knows how the body works and he can copy reality. This body, he chose to make OK?

And when you see this idea, what you realize is that it’s not just technique that is important, it’s also their choices in terms of reality. Problem is that over the course of time, here's the first shortcut... I already made one connecting Xerxes and Ingres, but bear with me... Over the course of time these choices are becoming what we associate as the reality the artist needed to represent. So, it sort of made a switch and it became a norm it became what was called the canon.

Canon originally meant measurement but over the course of time these measurements,  and the mathematical vision of the body and how it should be, became a canon in the sense of “reference”; Artists that we need to imitate. So, we are not only imitating reality, talent it’s supposed to imitate a reality that is now full on subjectivity. This ideal became not only a canon and a norm but it became an ideal. And that becomes very problematic because, not only does it describe what art  should be but it also determines what a body should be.

The thing that we have to understand is that, because you know, we can see where we’re going with this, art history is not like a flowing river where everybody was following this canon and everything was fine. The canon evolved and what shocks us today with the banana peel [ bell ], every period of time had the equivalent of the banana peel. Every period had codes that artists shattered. A good example of that is Monet [ bell ] because of the Impressionists. There is nothing more quiet or easy to look at than a Monet, like it’s on a cup, it’s on a pillow case, it’s flowers and we think that it is almost a granny sort of art, as if it is for an older audience or something. But on its time Monet and all of the impressionists were so radical. See the caricatures of the time in Paris when they did their exhibit, soldiers holding up impressionist paintings to get rid of the enemy because the enemy was so traumatized by these ugly paintings; you had a pregnant woman  afraid of going in the exhibit because the impressionist paintings will turn their baby into a monster.  Just to put it into context.

PATRICIA:

Something else that I think we put together with the idea of art is... effort, maybe? For example, if you take hyperrealism you could potentially decide whether it is close, or does it give you that feeling of “that is so real”, “it absolutely looks like skin”, “how on earth did they do that?” Effort! effort must have been put into it! I do not know. Is there a moment where we have divorced the idea of skill and effort from the idea of art? Or are we talking about a different kind of effort perhaps a more intellectual one?

FANNY

That is what I would argue, but definitely in the scale of the wider audience, the 60s and 70s are the clash. And that’s where women come in. Because what we see with this evolution of the canon is that Monet, even though he was shocking, well he was still a man, he was still doing paintings, painting was still a dominant dominating style, so they were still things that even though it was shocking they were also maintained. When you get to the 60s and 70s all of this just blows up, everything explodes. (I am doing a massive shortcut). It was a time where we were questioning the canon, we were questioning the Academy, we were questioning rules, and we were questioning the nomination of painting and sculpture as the main object for art. The most emblematic example would be  Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain [ bell ] . So, he took an object that was already made, rendered it useless by putting it in an awkward position, upside down, and then signed it. Of course, no talent was required in making the object, he didn't even do it, somebody else did it. What became interesting is these ideas because when we get lured by talent and by this idea of representing reality in a certain way we get sidetracked and we miss everything else. So, I would say that the same effort that would go into something that would require technical ability would then be transferred into ideas and concepts and that was more meaningful. Because, what they had to expose (And that is where women come in)  is that by going through the same idea of what needs to be art, what it needs to represent, what it needs to say, well your canon is not so much about inclusion, then about exclusion. And so, when Marcel Duchamp took this fountain and signed it, it was like saying because I am an artist this is valid work, look at it differently. It’s not an option to function as a fountain anymore. What is it? what are you really looking at when you’re looking at an artwork? And so, these questions were necessary, because this canon has been going on and on even though Monet had shocked the world at some point, it was still the same ideas. Women in the 60s were already going towards this emancipation, and in 71 Linda Nochlin [ bell ] Who is an art curator she asked in a very famous, very, very famous article: Why have there been no great women artists? Which was a legitimate question. And so, women at that time, just like men were questioning what art is and what it should be, because there was photography, publicity, Andy Warhol was taking a can of soup, we were going everywhere, we were thinking about images and the power of images. And then women were like ”ok wait” but “this whole thing that you have been describing as art, why are we not part of it? Why are you saying that this is the norm and we are nowhere to be seen in it?” That’s when women really took the opportunity to get into art in a more obvious way, they took advantage of the fact that painting was no longer the goal. They went through this odd medium like installation, video, performance... That is why a lot of their productions are very shocking to us, because we tend to think of art as sculpture and painting, which are objects that don’t scream at you, they won’t try to shock you in the same way performance or installation would. 

And so, women really took control of this, they really put forth how to use art in meaningful ways and to show other aspects of reality than what was dictated by what we now call the white male’s gaze. When women wrote this, they were like: “your point of view is very limited, we need to broaden it and we need to open up and show what really is happening” and to see that not only women were excluded but everybody else that we know of.

PATRICIA:

All these other vulnerable groups, sounds like a first approach to stop being invisible, just say hey we exist as well and this is how we see it

FANNY:

Exactly! And women have tried before, like, why have their not being grade or female artist? It’s more a question about our history and the way it records and remembers. But, there has been great female artist but they have been the exception and they were also treated more like a curiosity. Even when they were successful like for example Rosa Bonheur [ bell ] in the 19 century She was by far the most famous and probably wealthiest painter of her time but we do not remember her as much as Monet. Our history she was by far the most famous and probably wealthiest painter of her time but we do not remember her as much as money. Art history is a really good window into what happened, because it deals with images, and images are representation and representation is key. So, when we say that, you know, art involves no talent I think when people miss, is that it’s not just the effort, I think people also cling to an idea of art as it being linked to beauty images are representation and representation is key. So when we say that, you know, art involves no talent I think what people miss, is that it’s not just the effort, I think people also cling to an idea of art as it being linked to beauty And I think that when women got into art they had suffered so much because of beauty that booty was never really what they wanted to give to the world and I think that when women got into art they had suffered so much because of beauty that booty was never really what they wanted to get to the world, beauty have taken a lot from them in a sense. And so, when you see the evolution of women in art both as object and as active participants you see that, and you see how cool it is to have something in front of you that is maybe not pretty, maybe it required no effort but that points to a reality that is beautiful and when idea that is gorgeous. And that took effort to get there and that just the fact that he’s there and being expressed is a feat in and of itself. That’s what contemporary Art and that’s where it’s trying to go the beauty of ideas and excepting all kinds of different approaches to art, but it should not be put into a hierarchy of being better because it required more time to do than somebody who took his own life to be able to get to say that thing or put that object there, even though it required no effort in the uptake itself.

PATRICIA:

So, I wonder how much of our ideas has been twisted by the way art history develops and what we would think is beautiful today if I had history would’ve taken a different path. For example, the idea of maternity and healthy paintings are about to come mother with her baby and this and that, and that is the view of a guy of what maternity should look like or does look like from the outside. But maybe woman says “ The most beautiful moment for me was when I was covered in blood, when my baby came out of me and they put that baby in my hands for the first time“ and maybe that is beautiful to her and maybe she puts that out there and do the guys of ours were like oh my god that’s gory that is disgusting there is blood! But why are we thinking then are we responding to that that way because we are expecting to see a calm, tender, vision of motherhood although that’s a creation, that is like you were saying, a very personal decision by a few. whereas this other, one it might not be your taste but it is representative of more people, of other people.

FANNY:

Well, art history is a mirror of what is happening in the culture and the society, it's creating and it’s reacting in almost a simultaneous way. I think that what is interesting is that even though criteria for beauty changed enormously over time, and we all know this, we have all seen previous paintings and we sometimes have these huge foreheads, and very, very pale skin, and almost fish-like eyes. And you are like, “I don’t know that’s beautiful?!” But every period of time has its own criteria for beauty. When you see a Ruben for example we have a Les Trois Grâces [ bell ] of Rubens, and we can see three women in the forest and it is cellulite! Cellulite was OK back then, and that’s great! 18 century had its perks… The thing that we need to remember is that beauty would have evolved, for sure it did evolve, it is not a fixed thing. The thing that was pretty much fixed was that it was determined by people other than women. It was imposed mostly on women and women had to adapt. Men had to do the same thing also through the course of different times; it just required a little bit less of an effort, they never had to wear a corset, for some reason, nobody invented that for them. 

When we get to the 60s a lot of the attention of women goes towards a woman's  view of herself. It’s not the first time it happened, a famous, famous example is Artemisia Gentileschi [ bell ] and it’s a representation of Judith and Holofernes. Judith is a biblical figure, she is a woman that saves her village from Nabucodonosor’s  general Holofernes by seducing him and cutting his head while he was sleeping. This motif of Judith has been represented by many, many, many artists. Every time differently, if you want to follow beauty trends over the course of art history you can take the motif and you will see how she is adapted to different periods, you can see that it is again an artist's vision of her. I put an auxiliary example of her which is Caravaggio [ bell ], it was the same era as Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio was already very famous, people were imitating his style, Artemisia actually takes up a lot from him. But what I like about this picture is that Caravaggio’s Judith is very feminine, she’s almost disgusted by the sword going through the neck and she is very delicate, she manages to cut someone’s head and still remain oddly feminine and delicate and it is like she’s cutting butter.

PATRICIA:

Yeah! She was disgusted by the person being beheaded, but she’s the one that is beheading the person! It seems like she’s kind of like photoshopped on top of it. 

FANNY:

Yeah yeah yeah! And I love putting it next to Artemisia Gentileschi because she’s going at it, there’s blood spitting everywhere, she’s got this big arm, she’s on a mission, she’s strong. Artemisia was raped when she was 19 and she went to court, there was a proceeding because she was an artist working in a private studio. But of course, they had to prove it, she was tortured, just to be sure she was telling the truth and it was a very traumatic ordeal, and a lot of people view her own experience in this version of Judith that she made. What you see is a woman’s version of what this hero had to do to save her village. And you see a woman that is not afraid she has a termination on her face, it’s not about her being a woman it’s about her being heroic, it’s about her being strong, it’s about having revenge, and all of these come true. Whereas in Caravaggio’s we have maybe a pretty picture for a very artificial one. And so, women have been going against this idea of artificial beauty for the longest time. You know there is this Japanese artist in contemporary art Shigeko Kubota [ bell ] . In one of her most famous performances, she did what was called a vagina painting, she stuck a paintbrush to her underwear and she was dipping it into red paint in a bucket, she was painting (being crouched) with his “blood”. So, going back to what you were saying about this idea of motherhood being represented in blood, that’s a little bit what she was doing. Taking something that’s hidden, something that’s taboo, putting it forward and showing or questioning why is it? Why is it taboo? Why is this something that we should hide? And so, the art of this time, especially the 60s and 70s is breaking down walls, it’s strong, it needs to send a message. Like I said, women had been trying to paint by men’s rules, Artemisia Gentileschi is an example but there were many others who tried to represent the canon, who tried to represent what men were doing, they were trying to do the same. Until the 19 century they were not even allowed in studios and art academies, so they were mostly excluded because of that. 

PATRICIA:

Yeah! And there are plenty of stories of female artists that had their artwork stolen or the credit was taken by someone else, because they knew they were never going to make it simply because, you know, they had a vagina.

FANNY:

Yeah! And I mean, there is this great picture even when the Academy started, it’s the 18 century, for the first time there was like 34 founding members and they were two women among them, so that was great, but then you have a painting that shows just how awkward it was for men to include women [ bell ]. This painter is called Johann Zoffany I believe, and these two women Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman they are not represented in this group of men who are, I think in a nude session, and so of course women were not allowed to participate because they were not allowed to observe a nude body and so they could not learn anatomy. anatomy, it was a big deal in the canon, if we remember the canon originally means measurement of the body. So, in this painting that represents the founders, where are the two women? They are on the wall as portraits. And that is just a fitting representation of what it was. Even in 

Raphael’s School of Athens, [ bell ] we have all of these philosophers, and Plato has the face of Leonardo da Vinci (well maybe it remains to be seen), but there’s all these ideas of art being intellectual, and being a science, fascinating in a philosophical point of you. Women are part of the decor, they are all caryatid, you know, figures of a column in architecture, also a pretty fitting representation of the place in art history thus far. It’s a very troubling history and that’s why in the 70s women had to punch. It was really about punching somebody in the face. We have tried playing by your rules, we have tried to correspond to what you guys want us to do, we did paint, sculpting … Because some art was still part of being an accomplished woman, but he was considered minor, like: embroidery, painting flowers, woman and child, all of these were for women and it was not the kind. And women have tried but it never worked, so by the 70s they were punching people in the face with their pieces. “OK fine! You need to listen to us and we need to make an impression!” One of my favorite pieces of the time, it is very, very troubling and there is a great Ted talk about it, from the artist herself Marina Abramović, Called Rhythm 0 [ bell] . In the room there was a table with 72 objects on it: objects for pleasure, objects for pain, there was a flower, there was a glass of water, there was a chair, a shoe, there were all sorts of ambiguous object, like a hammer, a metal pipe, a knife, a razor blade, a gun, with a bullet.  On this table with all this object there was a note that said ration of this, you can do whatever you want I take full responsibility, at the end of the six hours, six hours mind you he’s a long time to give up your power to an audience. During this time, at the beginning people were timid, super well really go listen to her, People were sort of timid, some of them were kind of running her water or giving her the rose and then it sort of evolved somebody took the thorn of the rose and stuck it to her stomach, somebody called her with the razor blade on the neck, they carried her onto the table, they put the knife between her legs, somebody eventually put a gun to her head, then the audience started fighting amongst themselves. She says herself that she thinks that the only reason she wasn’t right was because it was an odd setting and the men were there with their wives. But still there is something very, very powerful about the fact but when you think of somebody as an object, or when you are like to think of somebody as an object it’s very easy to do things to them, because at the end of the six hours she snapped out she was covered in blood and tears but at the end of it she regained her own power and she started walking towards the audience, they lost it and disappeared and ran away. Because when you think of some white body as a human being, A woman in her own right as a person then you won’t stick sores in her belly, but when you’re allowed to think of her as an object and of course they’ll do whatever they want with her she’s the same thing as a hammer for the rose on the table. And so these were very powerful actions, it’s not about talent in the sense of putting an effort into representing our reality in a painting or such It’s about something much more important that breaks these canvas, that goes beyond What we think I should be, what we think women should be and makes us see things in a different way. It was a very powerful work, everything she does is very powerful.

PATRICIA:

I would bet that not a lot of people would’ve thought of this idea and not a lot of people that would have dared to execute it. There’s a lot of bravery that is well beyond, and it is something that has confronted us with maybe it is our temperament, maybe it is our nature, I don’t know, but she managed, she had the talent to confront us with it. 

Years ago, I worked with a Japanese company [ bell ], they were contemporary dancers, that was fantastic…

CHATTY PATHY:

That was a “fucking fantastic” held back with considerable effort, did you catch it?

The choreography was called SHOKU which means “touch” and it was performed  by the Japanese Contemporary Dance Company BATIK.

PATRICIA:

…and there was one moment in the performance were one of the dancers, this particular moment was a solo, she danced and then she finished by pulling her skirt, (it was a long red skirt) forward (not showing her body) but then started spitting, truly spitting, this is not a prop, onto her skirt and creating this stain and then the lights went out. And I remember asking the director, she was phenomenal...

CHATTY PATHY:

The Choreographer was Ikuyo Kuroda, and I dare you to watch SHOKU and remain indifferent to her work.

PATRICIA:

… I remember asking, “What was that about?”, She said: “dancing but not enough to portray what I wanted to betray, I needed to get to the audience in a visceral way. That’s what I needed to do in that moment of my choreography.” Somebody can say “that’s disgusting! what is that?” Well, she made me feel exactly what she wanted me to feel, I was shocked, I was curious, I was shaken and she was masterful to make me go through it.

FANNY:

Yeah! And I think that what they did by showing these very troubling ideas, they picked on the power that art already had before. For me, art history is about accepting all types of art, and it’s even more real with contemporary art. It really has to do with empathy, because we’re looking at artist choices. And so real when we’re looking at a piece of art, our reaction shouldn’t be “I like it” or “I don’t like it”, it should be “why? why this way?” “She could’ve done so many things, why did she do that specifically, why that and not this thing?”. This puts you in a much more receptive mindset than most activities, it’s basically empathy and I’m nutshell

CHATTY PATHY:

This reminds me of 2019 when in Mexico City in a protest against femicides and the government’s uselessness,  a young lady spontaneously began to dance releasing her anger and her grief, she was mocked mercilessly on social media. Nobody asked why dance and not something else? but everyone reacted quickly and harshly…

FANNY:

and in this way, it engages a dialogue with art but also with the world around you and with the people behind it. Art is about connection, and I think that that is what women were trying to do. and not just women, because we will have to get into also people of color, because once you get to the 70s it is still pretty much white women against white men. it's not all against, there were partnerships let's not get carried away, but it was mostly like a white women thing. 

As it evolved through the different waves of feminism then we go to people of color with their own culture, and they were like “wait, wait but that is your version of feminism, it is your version of what womanhood is, that’s not my version”, so we can’t just have one vision of womanhood, that’s not right. So, it expanded and expanded and it keeps expanding.... and having a feminist vision of art history contributes to the same movement of queer studies, postcolonial studies, it’s about broadening everything and about activating this really empathetic level of art so when you see something you don’t understand, well you at least have to try, to understand.

PATRICIA:

That was just wonderful Fanny, art as therapy. Because there will be groups of people that really struggle with inclusion, of course this is not a justification, but simply because of their upbringing, their surroundings, their generation. 

And I wonder if a good visit to a museum, under that perspective, the idea of questioning “why?” instead of “I like” or “I don’t like”, could be a first psychological approach to not fall onto the automatic responses of disgust and attraction. Just going to a museum and thinking “OK I’m just gonna take it all in and see what happens”. And in talking about that, I was wondering if we could pull out a painting and maybe you can walk us through how you would analyze or look at a painting so that next time we are in front of a piece of art maybe we can see it with different eyes, would you like to do that?

Of course! I love doing that! that's the main thing, I would say for today, and this artist she passed away in 2018 and she struggled her whole life with recognition and people realized the value of her work much later on, and I would like us to look at her work…

CHATTY PATHY: 

This is a good moment to scroll to the last 2 images in the link. The work is by the artist Laura Aguilar, from her photography series “Grounded”

FANNY:

When you were talking about art therapy and about openness she is the perfect vessel for that. That's what a lot of women and people of color brought forth in the sense that by showing themselves and by showing who they are, outside of the norm, they also offer a mirror for somebody else to see themselves, recognize themselves and form a community. I am giving away a lot of what's in the image right now… but she has a very powerful work. 

First of all, when you are in front of the object you have to ask yourself the question of scale. From which scale is this piece talking to you, assuming you are in the museum, the pandemic is over, you are in front of an art piece yourself,  is it small? Is it tall? How is it affecting your body?  What is it communicating to you on that scale? Next, when you have an image like this, you need to ask yourself what are you looking at? Describe it and get into it. 

In this case we see the artist herself, it's her own body in the desert. OK?

And having people in the desert, having views of the desert, it's a common thing you have examples in your mind. Men have dominated the style of landscape for years, but in this case it's not only a landscape it is also a portrait,  again what type of portrait is it? When you think of a portrait you think of someone looking at you, you think of these very passport photo-pose in front of you, portraits, again another thing where men have been very successful. In this case we sort of have a mix of a portrait and landscape and neither of them are represented in what you would assume they would be. What we see is the body of the artist herself but is almost as if we are not invited to see it as a body, we are almost invited to see it as the landscape, as if the landscape was accepting it or that she is accepting the landscape herself. There is this connection between the 2 of them, and the same thing as the rock that is behind her making a parallel with the shape of her body; the rock to us is natural and beautiful and something that is part of our world just the way it is, that we accept without even questioning. And in front of us we have this same shape, evocative of the rock, that we should treat the same way, that we should try to see how it connects to this landscape  and how it connects to us.  

Asking yourself, what am I seeing? is she facing me? is she from the back? is it a body? is it more like a shape? where is it in the image? what type of lighting it is? all of these questions are choices the artist made, and all of these choices are the decisions that are her language. For her especially, she was trying to communicate so much through images when it was sometimes difficult for her to express it otherwise. What you are looking at is somebodies’ message, somebodies’ impression of reality. Like in a nutshell, I went very quickly, there is a lot to be said about her work!

PATRICIA:

That was absolutely beautiful Fanny, I do not think I can add anything else. Thank you so much for our conversation today and I am kind of hoping that we can do a few more if you are up for it. For today, thank you so much it was absolutely beautiful. 

FANNY:

Thank you I am so happy, thanks to you, bye bye

CONCLUSION 

Art is an exercise in empathy, a brave and open consideration to the experience and perspective of the other. The other being highlighted, underscored and in italics. 

For centuries the other, has been silenced, shunned, belittled, ignored, condemned, ridiculed rendered powerless but this no more. Saint Woolf conclusion (spoiler alert) is that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction, unsolved”. 

Who? Today does not have a room of their own, who are people we are now keeping silenced, shunned, belittled, ignored, condemned, ridiculed and powerless. Next time you are confronted with a work of art, an idea, a person and feel discomfort may I suggest resetting starting with the question of why, because,  as Fanny said, at least we need to try.

CLOSING

 QuasiFeminista is recorded in a plethora of rooms of our own around the globe

 Special thanks to Deborah Woodage for giving a voice to Virginia Woolf

Original Music: Flor de Maria

Editing: Erika Medellin

Fact checking a comic relief: Chatty Pathy

As always, this episode is done

With the support of the Ministry of Women and the Testicular Counsel

I’m Patricia Morales Cid de Leon 

* This script is done with the help of A.I, technology, it might contain errors. Give us a shout if you spot any!