AND RED ALL OVER

Well this surprised me. It’s Pantone’s new shade of red, Period, accompanied by the line diagram of a woman’s ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. The new new hue was developed in partnership with Swish feminine hygiene company Intimina. Pantone explains: “An active and adventurous red hue, courageous Period emboldens people who menstruate to feel proud of who they are.”

Except that this red is not the real color of blood (menstrual or otherwise), period is a euphemism for menstruation, and the diagram depicts a uterus that has no entrance – no vagina. This anatomical cartoon sanitizes the female body’s unique powers of sex, pregnancy and childbirth. Intimina peddles feminine products like rubber cups, pelvic exercise tools, and an “intimate moisturizer.” While the company is body positive and honors women including Alexandria Ocasio Ortiz, Malala Yousef and Vivienne Leigh in a blog called #whilebleeding, its branding reinforces every retrograde stereotype about femininity. Its website is an orgy of bubble gum pink, as are its rubber products.

Right now binary gender and its iconographies are under assault. Liberal parents are trying to raise gender-free children, empowered teenagers select their own gender, and adults freely switch genders. So why is a corporation celebrating biological femininity? Will we honor male bodily functions similarly? Other than to shock, what’s it for?

October 26, 2020 by Nalina Moses

MEDIA SAVVY

Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass.

The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised.

All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here.

Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum.

February 12, 2020 by Nalina Moses

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

One Woman Show at MoMA highlights Yoko Ono’s work from 1961-1971. There are films that slow time painfully, projected in endless loops on the walls. There’s an installation, Half-A-Room (1967), that collects ordinary household artifacts (a pot, a chair, a carpet) that have been sliced in half. There’s a sculpture, Apple (1966), that is, simply, a green apple. And there’s a sculpture, To See the Sky (1966), that is a monumental spiraling steel staircase that carries visitors to the gallery’s ceiling.

The rooms are packed with art but strangely empty of drama. No narrative seems to connect one work with the next. What’s missing might be the character of the artist herself. We all know who Yoko Ono is: she grew up in a prominent family in Japan, began her career as an artist in Tokyo, had a husband and then a child and then a divorce, became a vital member of Fluxus in New York, married a rock star, and was famously widowed. But who is the woman who made this art?

The most vivid piece in the show is a film of Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1964). It shows her kneeling on a stage in front of a pair of scissors as, one by one, audience members step up and cut away parts of her clothing. Here she looks like moon-faced co-ed, in a dark cardigan with a Peter Pan collar and an A-line skirt, without jewelry and makeup, her hair pulled away in a braid. Throughout the performance her expression remains placid while her eyes scan the room anxiously. There’s thick, quiet drama in the not-knowingness of who will pick up the scissors and what they will do with them. And there’s something in this, the simple mystery of the performance and the fragility of the performer, that’s more compelling than all the other high-art high-concept works in the show. We’re seeing someone take a risk, test her resolve, and construct a fresh identity for herself. We’re seeing a young woman make herself into an artist.

Photograph courtesy of Yoko Ono.

July 29, 2015 by Nalina Moses

I was honored when my two young nieces shared their favorite toy with me, a figurine of Princess Cadance (a unicorn from the My Little Pony stories) that flaps her wings and talks. And I was horrified when I heard the three things that she says in an endless loop: “I’m happy because I’m getting married today!”, “My dress is soooo pretty!”, and, finally, after a giggle fit, “Everybody, it’s time to dance now!”, at which point she plays a disco song and flashes bright lights. Each time the music started my nieces squealed and bounced around her. This figure is a cunning mash-up of all the things that little girls love: horses, unicorns, princesses, tiaras, pink, purple, rainbows and sparkles. Its less like a toy than a sociologically engineered composite.

The unicorn’s chatter is mindlessly girlish, and I wondered how this was shaping my nieces’ unformed, agile young minds. I remember when I was young my mother, to her great credit and my great annoyance, refused to buy me a Barbie doll, not because she was a feminist, but because she thought the doll was ridiculous. Princess Cadence, a six-inch-high electrified pink plastic unicorn, is also ridiculous. She has none of the surreal animal grace of a unicorn; she’s a cartoon. I ended up acquiring a hand-me-down Barbie doll, and also a banged-up blonde Barbie styling head, from a sympathetic babysitter. I can reveal here that I enjoyed them heartily, and also that they did nothing to shape my ideas about what a woman should look like and how a woman should behave. Similarly, I’m confident that when my two nieces finally grow tired of playing with Princess Cadance, they will remember little of what she said.

Image courtesy of Hasbro.

March 27, 2013 by Nalina Moses