Farrah and Hannah: In Flesh and Death

I've had this thing kicking around in my head for a while. Its been a few years since both artist Hannah Wilke and actress Farrah Fawcett died in 2009. For some reason when I think of one of them I think of the other, like some venn diagram of two lives. Yes, one was a respected feminist artist and the other was a sex symbol, one was high art one was low. Yet, they both were incredibly important female bodies of the 1970s.









Hannah documented her own body, oftentimes posing like a glamor model to both celebrate female beauty and deconstruct understandings of female vanity and value. Farrah on the other hand was documented by Hollywood and reproduced for teen boys everywhere to hang on their walls. At 12 million copies sold world wide, her image in that bathingsuit is one of the most distributed visual images anywhere.

Having refused to pose nude as a young actress, Farrah did her first nude spread for Playboy for her 50th birthday. It was in fact a photoshoot of her making paintings - she made paintings and prints with her body, like Yves Klein's famous prints but authored by the model herself. Before taking up acting Farrah had actually been an art major at UT Austin and was serious about it when she returned to painting and sculpture later in life. Both Hannah and Farrah took the male gaze into their own hands, creating with their own bodies.




As they grew older both women developed cancer. Farrah had anal cancer, Hannah had lymphoma. Both women chose to document it, Hannah in photos and Farrah on video, creating what can be viewed as art or documentation of the final phase of a female body. Hannah also included photos of her mother's struggle with cancer along her own in her work Intra-Venus. I find it brings both Hannah and Farrah's careers full circle and makes them whole in that they have given us the female experience not only of youth and beauty but of physicality, suffering, and mortality.
















I also find it interesting that in Farrah's famous red swimsuit photo she was wearing a one piece bathingsuit because she had a large scar on her stomach that she was afraid to show. I think that her acceptance of her body's imperfections in later life and her refusal to give us only one pleasant view of a woman was inspiring and profound. There are many ways that people live in the public eye these days, with reality tv, everyone getting their 15 minutes, and female existence being so closely interpreted as pornography or struggle. Yet, these women were ahead of their times and in both high and low they managed to give us an experience of physicality in all its glory and defeat.

Hannah Wilke's Gestures

hannah wilke_gestures from Mercedes M.M on Vimeo.

Farrah Fawcett skateboards away from a bad guy!

Sacré Farrah Fawcett !
Uploaded by HektorPekor. - Discover the latest sports and extreme videos.

The Woodmans

Francesca Woodman, fellow RISD Alum and one of my favorite photographers of the 70s is now the subject of a new film showing at the Tribeca Film Fest. I haven't seen the movie yet but it seems to be mostly about her relation to her family and the way they dealt with her death and memory since she committed suicide in 1981. Francesca's work is important due to its ability to use photography to take the at that time recent art movements of body and performance art, land art, and feminist art into a solidified and more current medium of photography. They also play with the early history of photography which in the 1800s was used primarily for portraits of the deceased and documentation of mental patients and supernatural occurances. Much of the work examines the experience of being young and female but in a way that claimed the female body as her own medium instead of someone else's muse. The work she is best known for was done while an undergrad at RISD, in the Rome honors program, and at the MacDowell Colony residency in New Hampshire.


I think its interesting that this new film goes at the topic of work through the family that was left behind to keep her memory in tact. Both of her parents and her brother are all artists and in many ways this is unsurprising. Often times the type of family that will support a child in attending art school, or in this case, support a child in getting naked and morbid and wild and taking photos of it - well often times that family has some understanding of art or already has an artist in the family. Yet, the prospect of taking care of the legacy of your deceased child's art career must be doubled in pain for parents who never reached the same level of notoriety with their own work. This seems to be what The Woodmans sets out to explore and I'm very interested in seeing the outcome.

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems was born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon to two former Mississippi sharecroppers. After high school she studied modern dance in San Francisco and in her early twenties became active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her interest in photography was sparked by the political photographs she began taking which is interesting because while she learned to see the camera more as a tool of artistic practice than documentation she still retained a political eye in all of her work. She received her BA from the California Institute of The Arts at 28 and then her MFA from the University of California -San Diego at 31. She eventually found her way to New York and the Studio Museum of Harlem. While her work was originally inspired by the work of earlier African American photographers such as Roy DeCarava and the work she first saw in The Black Photography Annual, her photography was able to not only explore the Black American identity but also gender identity, parenting, politics, and the individual.
I thought it was interesting to read about her work in relation to much of the feminist work being made at the time and even still today. She made a direct effort to move beyond the contemporary discourse about art (and life) always being about the "male gaze", she was focused on creating a new way of women using their own eyes to see themselves or others.
"These [works] were made at a moment when--as a result of theory--a woman didn't know how to construct an image of herself. The image-making was starting to follow the theory of Laura Mulvey, etc. rather than the other way around! There was a fear on the part of visual artists to take control of our bodies, our sexuality. I was trying to respond to a number of issues: woman's subjectivity, woman's capacity to revel in her body, and woman's construction of herself, and her own image."
I've been thinking about this lately in relation to how its important to be more about action than about reaction. While it can be good to be able to break down the status quo its also important to work to create your own ideal scenarios and environments. Carrie Mae Weems lives in New York these days and is in the most recent Art 21 series, which I have actively added to my netflix queue.
































































Some of these were actually from installations she did. And some were recreations/reimaginings of historical events. Some were both.


The photo above was based on the photo below of the Robert Kennedy shooting.


This one is titled The First Major Blow. I could be wrong but I'm gonna guess its of the day JFK was shot.


This one titled "The Capture of Angela" is based on Angela Davis' capture.