The Assignment
In class, we examined the ideals of beauty and evolutions of beauty standards as seen through social media, advertisement, and culture. The representation of people through advertisements can either enlighten views on stereotypes or perpetuate ongoing stereotypes of created identities. Collage/montage artists like Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman are some examples we looked at that focus on using appropriation as a method of art-making. The following list of vocabulary helps guide the conceptualizing for this project.
Hybridization – the process of mixing diverse cultural influences in an artwork; a new identity is formed.
Layering – piling images on top of each other changing meaning from what they originally meant or were intended for.
Mixed codes – images in a form usually used for one thing, then used for another.
Recontextualization – positioning a familiar image in relationship to pictures , symbols, texts not usually associated in order to generate meaning.
Intertextuality – shaping ones sign’s meaning by other signs; need to know what those original signs mean.
Dissonance – lack of harmony or agreement between elements. This can also be how multipleimages are used together.
Final
For this project, I wanted to focus on the beauty and identity of the geisha, a refined and traditional Japanese form of entertainment that has been around since the 18th century. In Western media, the geisha is often stereotyped to be these hypersexualized women, oftentimes prostitutes or subservient women. By deliberately sexualizing the kimono (the historic garment that geikos and maikos wear) and sticking chopsticks in their hair, white women like Katy Perry or Kylie Minogue (both present in the piece) misconstrue the real beauty and traditional of the art form. For the first piece, I was inspired by Barbara Kruger and the way she used bold captions to convey her message. I decided to layer on various images starting with an image of two traditional geikos in a silkscreen room (the background) underneath various examples of whitewashed geishas, which included misinformed Halloween ads to incorrect “geisha-inspired” makeup. I used the bold red text behind an authentic image of a geisha to recontextualize my message. For my second piece, I used white acrylic paint to cover/erase the image of the real geisha as commentary of how the beauty of the geisha art form has been watered down/appropriated by Western culture.
Process
