#myreflection #myapproach #interdisciplinarity #feminism #notanindividualisticchoice
In my previous academic path I faced many theoretical subjects such as visual anthropology, history of art, and other many subjects that the Fine Art Academy proposed in the program. It is true that history of art is conceived together with its theoretical elaboration. Anyway it never becames similar to methodology.
Despite polisemy and the care for historical and psychological conditioning of the audience, it did not create its own rules about visual culture. In visual production symbolic dimension is given by images, so I felt that it wasn't enough and I started to attend prof. Angelini's lessons as a free auditor at University of Macerata. There was the moment in which I found the real connection I was looking for. I started acquiring visual analysis abilities at the School Of Art studying both practical and theoretical subjects of the art field. As a feminist and as an artist I was physiologically looking for critical tools to better understand the mechanisms of the visual.
This experience taugth me to better understand also how to read the images in a pertinent way in relation to different contexts. From this point forward I embarked a journey in the world of the aesthetic-critic relativism, better outlining cultural and perceptive abitudes, historically and geographically determined, which however incisively and decisively influence my production not less than its fruition.
Reading historical and theoretical perspectivein the Handbook of Visual Culture(pag71) , a book proposed by the MA course,I learnt that Micheal Ann Holly explains the term visual culture as a "hybryd term coined to describe the situation in which one fuses works of art with contemporary theory imported from other fields, particularly semiotic and feminism". Well. I'm a reflective practioner, I'm a freethinker feminist and I've got quite a few useful notions of semiotics, history of art, antropology and sociology. We can talk.
I ended °°this°° article by saying "Being an artist is not an individualistic choice "
and I confirm what I wrote. In my view the role of art is not to produce a mere representations, but to istigate the social, political and economical forces, and process them ethically. It is an active choice in society, not a game of mirrors.
Considering feminism, I found chapter 12 -see book mentioned above-extremely interesting because it syntetises the intrinsic relationship between feminism and all sectors of visual culture, underlining the central role of the Marxist experience in relation to psychoanalysis and semiotics. I'd like to quote from pag 312
Visual studies emerged after the second wave feminist theory had already established a precence in more established dishiplines such as art history, literature and history, and after the turn to marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics were brought togheter in feminist theory work within the women's studies field.
But being a female doesn't mean a feminist approach. The feminist approach in fact includes the awareness of the need to deconstruct the binary opposition man-woman, the theory of the gaze (pdf here), the reflection of the theory in practice, as well as the awearness that art always involves the social context.
