When asked what he thought about the selection of a 12-year old to front Australia’s “Gold Coast Fashion Week,” Prime Minister John Howard did not hesitate to voice his indignation: "Catapulting girls as young as 12 into something like that is outrageous…There should be age limits; I mean there has to be.” It is not too surprising that Howard seemed to have some difficulty explaining just what it was he found to be so outrageous about this particular affair. For every attempt to be more specific would only make his hypocrisy all the more evident. After all, the 12-year old (Maddison Gabriel) who told reporters that “modeling is the only thing” she “wanted to do since age 6” hardly expressed a strange, illicit desire. Perhaps all she can then stand accused of is pursuing Madison Avenue’s ideal of feminine beauty a bit too earnestly.((In sharp contrast to the media response to the affair, Gabriel's website (http://maddison-gabriel.blogspot.com/) actually provides some social context which includes the placement of some captions under her modeling portraits that can be taken to be ironic and critical: "They make me look indifferent"; "I'm their new face." "I'm a beautiful fashion model."))
Advertisers would doubtless much prefer girls of Madison's age to become obsessed by their appearance in a more "private" way, which they can do by purchasing the latest line of designer clothing and cosmetic products. What unfortunately still does not spark enough outrage is the degree to which along with these products, a self-image is "sold" that convinces the "consumer" that her latest attempt to enhance her appearance is, in the last instance, still not quite good enough. And all too often the maltreated body is blamed for this perceived inadequacy, and then punished accordingly.
Of course, the process of socialization which “teaches” women how to turn themselves into objects that are to be looked at, possessed and judged has been singled out for attack by feminist critics and activists since the early 1970s. But “it’s one thing to know that your self-image is influenced by these cultural stereotypes,” said Alison Oakes, whose most recent series of self-portraits has been on display this month at an exhibit held at the Fluorescent Gallery on North Central Street. “And it’s another thing to claim you are in no way affected by them.”
Among the many different types of visual and performance art which have been used to draw attention to cultural attitudes toward women, the self-portrait seems to stand out as an especially effective way to create new forms of self-expression and directly confront a Western Art tradition that established the feminine standard of beauty the advertising age inherited. This explains in part why Oakes chose to work within a genre whose rich history provided her with several “models” (including Manet, Vuillard, and Alice Neel’s later works) which she appeared to synthesize into a series of nude self-portraits. In these works, Oakes seems to exploit the theatrical element of the self-portrait by emphasizing the artificiality of both the subject’s pose and the surrounding setting. So rather than viewing these self-portraits as revelations of an inner experience, it seems we are meant to regard them as performance pieces which document how Oakes attempts to separate her sense of personal identity from the act of watching herself being watched by the voyeuristic viewer.
In this way Oakes effectively transposes onto the self-portrait the sense of drama which is generated by the “duel” that takes place between portraitist and sitter: will the painter wrest control away from the sitter by capturing how she revealed more, or less, than she intended? Or: to what degree has the subject been able to control the image produced?
What that self-image is in Oakes’ self-portraits remains elusive, and the same could be said in a more striking way about her recent works. On first viewing, they seem to abandon figurative representation along with any readily identifiable connection to the history of the genre. Before she began to work on these oil paintings, Oakes said she had in fact reached the point where neither the traditional self-portrait nor the performance art pieces that “defaced” and “disfigured” the standard ideal of beauty afforded her an adequate means of representation. But while lacking the alleged shock value generated by the photographs Hannah Wilke took of herself with molded pieces of chewed gum covering her naked body, or by the videotaped footage of “Saint Orlan” undergoing elective plastic surgery, Oakes’ latest self-portraits appear to offer a less blatant and yet more disconcerting (and therefore perhaps more lasting) form of “realism” than that which is achieved by transforming the artist's body into the actual site of the work.
At first sight, each of these paintings resembles a palimpsest, a broken fragment bearing the faded, amorphous remnants of some sort of geological formation. But the longer we linger over the muted color patterns imprinted on the exposed, smooth surface of this underlying layer, the more we begin to sense that we are viewing extreme close-ups of cropped X-ray images which are somehow able to give human flesh and internal organs a skeletal and richly textured appearance.
To bring about such an unexpected and unfamiliar sense of intimacy, Oakes composed the paintings by working from blurred photographs taken of various parts of her body; each portrait then presents a “record” or afterimage of how she appeared to herself during a protracted moment that did not culminate in a definitive self-perception. But it also sets a kind of trap for the would-be voyeur who belatedly discovers s/he is viewing another's self-portrait. That is, instead of staging a scene in which she pretends not to know that she is being watched, Oakes’ self-portraits seem to impose a sense of farsightedness on viewers that thwarts their desire to visually grasp the tactile, at times tentatively recognizable forms (e.g., mouth, knuckle, lips, teeth) which appear to stain the canvas.
This may give us the feeling that we have been offered an intimation of an inner experience that neither the viewer nor the subject of the self-portrait can possess or fully apprehend. And a painter’s ability to convey how the recognition of such a limitation can be converted into a source of creation rather than a state of privation gives expression to a new kind of beauty.
Advertisers would doubtless much prefer girls of Madison's age to become obsessed by their appearance in a more "private" way, which they can do by purchasing the latest line of designer clothing and cosmetic products. What unfortunately still does not spark enough outrage is the degree to which along with these products, a self-image is "sold" that convinces the "consumer" that her latest attempt to enhance her appearance is, in the last instance, still not quite good enough. And all too often the maltreated body is blamed for this perceived inadequacy, and then punished accordingly.
Of course, the process of socialization which “teaches” women how to turn themselves into objects that are to be looked at, possessed and judged has been singled out for attack by feminist critics and activists since the early 1970s. But “it’s one thing to know that your self-image is influenced by these cultural stereotypes,” said Alison Oakes, whose most recent series of self-portraits has been on display this month at an exhibit held at the Fluorescent Gallery on North Central Street. “And it’s another thing to claim you are in no way affected by them.”
Among the many different types of visual and performance art which have been used to draw attention to cultural attitudes toward women, the self-portrait seems to stand out as an especially effective way to create new forms of self-expression and directly confront a Western Art tradition that established the feminine standard of beauty the advertising age inherited. This explains in part why Oakes chose to work within a genre whose rich history provided her with several “models” (including Manet, Vuillard, and Alice Neel’s later works) which she appeared to synthesize into a series of nude self-portraits. In these works, Oakes seems to exploit the theatrical element of the self-portrait by emphasizing the artificiality of both the subject’s pose and the surrounding setting. So rather than viewing these self-portraits as revelations of an inner experience, it seems we are meant to regard them as performance pieces which document how Oakes attempts to separate her sense of personal identity from the act of watching herself being watched by the voyeuristic viewer.In this way Oakes effectively transposes onto the self-portrait the sense of drama which is generated by the “duel” that takes place between portraitist and sitter: will the painter wrest control away from the sitter by capturing how she revealed more, or less, than she intended? Or: to what degree has the subject been able to control the image produced?
What that self-image is in Oakes’ self-portraits remains elusive, and the same could be said in a more striking way about her recent works. On first viewing, they seem to abandon figurative representation along with any readily identifiable connection to the history of the genre. Before she began to work on these oil paintings, Oakes said she had in fact reached the point where neither the traditional self-portrait nor the performance art pieces that “defaced” and “disfigured” the standard ideal of beauty afforded her an adequate means of representation. But while lacking the alleged shock value generated by the photographs Hannah Wilke took of herself with molded pieces of chewed gum covering her naked body, or by the videotaped footage of “Saint Orlan” undergoing elective plastic surgery, Oakes’ latest self-portraits appear to offer a less blatant and yet more disconcerting (and therefore perhaps more lasting) form of “realism” than that which is achieved by transforming the artist's body into the actual site of the work.
At first sight, each of these paintings resembles a palimpsest, a broken fragment bearing the faded, amorphous remnants of some sort of geological formation. But the longer we linger over the muted color patterns imprinted on the exposed, smooth surface of this underlying layer, the more we begin to sense that we are viewing extreme close-ups of cropped X-ray images which are somehow able to give human flesh and internal organs a skeletal and richly textured appearance.
To bring about such an unexpected and unfamiliar sense of intimacy, Oakes composed the paintings by working from blurred photographs taken of various parts of her body; each portrait then presents a “record” or afterimage of how she appeared to herself during a protracted moment that did not culminate in a definitive self-perception. But it also sets a kind of trap for the would-be voyeur who belatedly discovers s/he is viewing another's self-portrait. That is, instead of staging a scene in which she pretends not to know that she is being watched, Oakes’ self-portraits seem to impose a sense of farsightedness on viewers that thwarts their desire to visually grasp the tactile, at times tentatively recognizable forms (e.g., mouth, knuckle, lips, teeth) which appear to stain the canvas.This may give us the feeling that we have been offered an intimation of an inner experience that neither the viewer nor the subject of the self-portrait can possess or fully apprehend. And a painter’s ability to convey how the recognition of such a limitation can be converted into a source of creation rather than a state of privation gives expression to a new kind of beauty.
