Art is impotentti

Art the language

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Do you speak art? Do you understand art? Do you get and like art talk? Why should art even be a spoken tongue? But it talks, has a voice, tone, presence, ideas and message. To those who are interested message is there to be caught, to resonate with and think about. Then on what kinds of things does it depend how we understand what we see and what we want to see? Do we analyse art via our bias and preconceptions? We have to care about what we see to actually see what it is we see. We have to be alert and open to cultural references, meanings, links, traditions, to philosophical and cultural grounds art and makers spring out. Where is it, who sees it, who is speaking, who speaks about it if anyone, who is given a voice? It is complicated when you start to think about what art is about, why we do art, present it in the ways we do, one particular piece of art is worth lengthy analysis, not to speak of the whole of contemporary visual art. How much of it is about taste, objectification and luxury, about cultural intellectual shifts we experience today, politics, our progress as humans and about continuation to Art History, to institution and conventions of fine art and the tradition of Modern Art.

Contemporary art can be avoided completely in everyday life. It is almost strictly isolated in institutions and galleries as a specific expertise field where hierarchy, finance and knowing people make the rules of this peculiar set where one idle person does not accidentally enter or feel comfortable being in. Reference to temples and palaces is quite accurate. How to learn to speak this language and is it necessary are very relevant questions especially when some of art is meant to be political, game changing, radical and new. How political art is inside a palace which has an entrance fee? Well one can wonder. What can be achieved by isolated snobbish fame hungry scene other than decay and a circle that does not achieve the things it dreams about in the art it likes to present.

Let’s get back to Flashdance: There is more to the movie than the plot. It is more clever than you give it credit for.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

It is a fairytale kind of spectacle or anti-spectacle in a spectacle, if that is a thing. Anti-spectacle in the sense of changing of the perspective towards gender, class, work and art, romantic is the spectacle, a pattern we expect. The spectacle we are used to seeing and thinking in terms of movies and in general how class, work, gender and art function and are, are thought to represent and be like. The American dream in this case where a beautiful young woman reaches out for her dream, a place in the sun and ends up getting more or ‘all’, a romantic relationship with a Man with a Porsche, who is also the owner of the factory where Alexandra, the woman in question, works at as a welder. One big plus of the movie is it does not highlight the work Alexandra does, welding is just work with men as co-workers, it makes the movie hugely more interesting though, and her the one who lives outside the box and is allowed to do so. She is not harassed by her co-workers, her abilities are not questioned. It is truly a beautiful setting, which her choice of work, most definitely would be seen weird still today.

To explore deeper into what the movie is all about is worth our while as it has been deeply overlooked as many romantic movies that are meant for women usually are. To pay attention to details, characters, camera shots, what is being looked at and told via tensions between women and men and why those tensions exist. What happens between the sexes, between women especially, what are sexes both expected to do, look and be like. Movie is a language as is dance as is sex, sexuality, clothing and gender. You have to focus on to read it all and actually think what are we looking at, what happens there and why all the time. It is not just an entertaining show where you can relax and forget what is going on, this is told via contrasts between sleazy bars, working men and art, how women are treated in different settings and how these settings differ, how women want to be treated and what do they desire of their lives to be. Movie is never just a movie that is meant to entertain, not even those that are made for that purpose, nor is music or the dance acts that seem to be out of place. Point is easily missed when the romantic is what stays interesting and in the focus.

In a bar where ambitious fit and talented dancers show their art, act for paying customers who are watching and are a bit amazed by the unexpected shows. Contrast is also to the other bar where dancing is not the primary interest of anyone, only nude female bodies, that move in a certain way. Women are dancing for money but in a show-your-ass-kind of way, but they still want to be discovered and dream of making it. What are people watching and why, who gets attention? Watching happens for instant gratification, simplicity of getting pleasure cheap and for fun. A bar is a world of something else than the workplace and not a place of thought, burdening oneself. Customers of the bar are not the assumed ordinary art lovers, but that is the point. Why should people be provoked to think more than is necessary, why not give them what they want? To whom is art for and why is it a class issue? What is art and where is art, who is capable of art and why it is a special occasion in a special place? High and low seem to be repulsed by each other, classes stay separated  like oil and water. The dance acts, art and artists, are really in the right place. Intention of the movie is not to depict a straightforward story in a manner of this is what happens: this is what we dream of happening to us. It is not a children’s story and it is not pink. It seems light, but is heavier when one starts exploring. That are the expectations and frame women are supposed to fit in, want, act upon and are shown in the movie, that those who dare, can change the game. There is social critique hidden there to be found.

To say Flashdance is a feminist movie is not quite what a true movie lover might expect. What do you think about the turn, that a seemingly light Hollywood movie is feminist in a very kick-ass way and about the structural difficult issue of choosing how to get ahead in life, on one’s own terms and talent, and not sleeping with the boss or buddy who has connections. What do you think about when after having seen and evaluated for example the scene where Alexandra goes and finds her friend who has gone to work as a stripper, moving herself in conventional stripper manner, she is grabbed off the stage by Alexandra and escorted out. In the scene Alexandra’s clothing and standing position compared to her friend tell a lot when friend the stripper ends up in a puddle on street wearing only panties and high heels and is cold. Money, she earned gets wet in the rain on the pavement. Alexandra’s loose pants and sneakers when she stands firmly behind the naked woman who has fallen down and sold her body for money to please men may seem easy and naive, but it is something very basic, a woman on the ground beaten down feeling there is no other opportunity for her.

After having read couple of critiques about the movie and clearly many have missed the point: When one is an art critic it is essential to see behind the expected, the image and be free of bias. What is the seen image telling us, what happens without words, what is the setting and who are the characters, what do they do. Do you need more clues, because explaining has to be done also in a very basic manner, obviously also for critics. When you are an art critic, don’t fall for the simple clichés. Such poor analysis destroys a lot, as does arrogance, assumptions and cynicism. Minimizing culture that is aimed at and is about women and girls is a normal practice. It is a learned reaction which comes without thinking. A black woman eating a banana in a scene where women talk about relationships, well sounds as cliché as anything, but it happens in couple of seconds, and is easily missed, but telling. To make it as you with your raw capabilities, without handouts and favours..

Flashdance, is a feminist movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashdance in which woman does work as a welder and pursues her dream to become a professional dancer, also in which women help each other, face sexual harassment and deal with it by acting out, consequences lurking there and threat of violence is almost a certainty. To oppose men means you have to be one and be prepared. Movie portrays different kinds of female roles, a gallery of different kinds of women. The expectations of what women should be like, playing with stereotypes with which women struggle and hold on to as coping mechanisms. They may be afraid to go against the machine or don’t know how to or should they, and those who do not fit in the accepted roles especially, seem to be out of sync or do what they need to do despite whatever. Interesting are the different kinds of female characters there, how there are systematic learned rules of behaviour that stick, codes for genders and how these codes are taken for granted. How women portrayed are in their places and obviously struggle and lack power. They try to move on up as do men, they have dreams. Men try to move inside women’s panties and sex is clearly a very basic tool of control and making it. It is the first thought, easy way out, a getaway car and motive. World of art is a dusty stagnant relic too, which needs heavy dusting. Alex, the leading women, is afraid to enter this monument of perfected trained fragile-looking fairy-like ballerinas and primadonnas. She want’s to make it on her own with her own credentials with her talent and does not need a man to do that for her.

Real life is stranger than fiction says this welder.

 

”I have a friend who has a simple test for a movie: Is this movie as interesting as the same things would be, happening in real life? A lot of movies aren’t, and ”Flashdance” sure isn’t. If this movie had spent just a little more effort getting to know the heroine of its story, and a little less time trying to rip off ”Saturday Night Fever,” it might have been a much better film.”

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/flashdance-1983

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085549/reviews

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/09/entertainment/la-et-cm-flashdance-musical-review-segerstrom-20130509

Reviews and critiques strongly reflect the persona of the critic who is writing. For some reason in this case feminist perspective does not shine through. Wonder why.

Slums that do not have sewers, take your shit to the nearest art museum. Even better if you let your children do the dirty work.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

It is a powerful feeling to hold a stone in your hand.

Something to say about women in art, in music, in any craft which have been taken over by men usually white men: Creativity by and of women how is it seen or not seen as work and valued or not.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

To begin to analyse topic of creative womanhood, creative women which is always acute, easy to make controversial, scandalous. A topic which is on the nerve still in this time is a thing of puzzle where one has to find the very issue of the dilemma existing, problem and glitch that keeps on making controversy and scare being the obstacle above which we struggle to rise, look objectively and which we tackle to solve. Generation after generation change happens so slowly it begins to look like something that cannot be but an suffocating relic a carved in stone kind of command that we fight against and it just stays like a stain. How unbearably demanding it is to listen and watch the state of denying women from being complete. It is so easy to tell us what women should be doing, look like and what women are for, tell that with threats and ultimatums. Women under, women on their backs, women in the places where women do things women do; this is the kind of way to speak that should be history, the way of instructing and ruling what women are supposed to do, what women are and stand for. How women are treated within society reflects how any kind of difference is treated and welcomed, how strict purity of society kept in the sense of bordering and limiting how people interact, who can and who can’t, who has a say, which laws are in use. What kinds of limits we take seriously and obey, what kind of border crossing is intimidating and seen as wrong. What kinds of things we get punished for and how scared we are to be?

Interesting study on differences between concepts xenophobia and racism, roots and reasons for
http://philpapers.org/archive/KIMXAR.pdf Xenofobia and racism, David Haekwon Kim and Roland R. Sundström

It is interesting to see similarities between racism and misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia, reasoning any kind of discrimination, reasons for brutality and cruelty are very irrational and based on ignorance and need to use power in a violent way, how putting groups of people below is justified and happening without an end.


It is difficult to see things in different ways, from different perspectives, from a view of another, see in new kinds of ways that can be refreshing but weird, that might show something other than what has been repeated for years and years, to see another kind of truth, something one kind of truth is said over and over without much change in sight, without logic, compassion, looking for easy answers is too clear. If there has been change it has been so slow it has been barely visible, barely there or barely existing, hidden: to detect that altering in reality can be exciting, rejuvenating. So what is the scare and reluctance?

Change which is bare, powerful, instant, compulsory and challenging is something we do not wish to witness and experience since it can be too much to take and handle. It is a lot of work to learn and accept, do all over again, begin from scratch, do a total turnover when all we want is comfort and security. Change is something we like to hinder, at least some of us, comfort of old ways of thinking, seeing and doing hold on tight. It is intolerable but necessary, something we need to have in order to have meaning and value. Things that stay the same start stinking, rotting and die. It is difficult to change yourself and your views especially if you are not prepared, not willing, not ready and accepting toward the fact that you do change, like it or not, your body changes, something around you changes all the time. What are the things that do not change? How does one’s mind and brain change in the process of aging, in the process of changing without much say over, no control over one’s physicality? As it seems we let body rule which means the sex we represent dictates what we should be and do in our lives, how we are perceived as humans in comparison to others and in society, what is one’s place is the body we happen to be born in. How to understand change, the inevitability, the scary, the happening and participate?

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/french-revolution-advertising/418920/

When existence is about hating because it is the way to solve things, maybe learned, maybe the only way to react, it can be the emotion one is grown into, it is the feeling making us and them, me and those others, separation, segregation, discrimination. The way to act when there are no other effective ways to make one’s voice heard, power in the moment of powerlessness or in need to stay in power. Hate is a consuming emotion but it is creation via destruction and low. You can experience the amount of energy emotion uses in you when you are horribly angry, exhausting. Hate tires you up, it wears you out showing no way out other than hurt and causing more hurt, bringing despair and hopelessness but also a strange illusion of power, individual power in how one acts and in making one’s mark via violence, against oneself and others. What to hate? To hate is justified because you have suffered, you have a position that is threatened, you have been treated wrongly, you want to make other people feel the same pain you have felt. To be angry is purifying but it also is when felt on a daily basis eating out strength and creativity when used against others in violent way. How to use one’s anger and rage constructively is what is useful to go through consciously every day as anger is felt and is powerful as there are angering issues nonstop. You hate because you have the right and you have something to lose, something you do not want to share.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk/ n his 1962 introduction to The New Poetry, Al Alvarez famously railed against the Movement’s overriding “concept of gentility” — the “belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good.”

 

Running out of air. Where are the birds?

| Henna Timanttimetsä

 

Kuva | | Henna Timanttimetsä

Experts on gender and what is sex of anyone.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Body parts, feelings, sensations, sexuality and expectations how these issues and things can be seen and will be tolerated. Dress and behavioral codes into which to grow and be comfortable with, but to grow up to be a woman or a man is a struggle whether you are transgender man or female or not. It is a struggle with beauty standards, measures of manhood and womanhood. Very much those measurements stand on shallow ground and stay the same to the core, are extremely difficult to alter. So who is to say who anyone should be? All of society that relies on traditions, gender roles and how we perceive opposite sex and sex of ours, how we are supposed to express ourselves and can not. What to censor of ourselves because it is too much for others to take. It is totally not a free zone or neutral issue as we know and never will be. To feel compassion for transgender people does not mean all criticism must be wiped out and what a human truly is, who is to decide for anybody in the end is the person in question. To identify with gender and what is needed to belong since we are to belong or to be tossed aside quite brutally when we are too much to take or not enough. Fight is when we do not fit in our bodies, our society rejects us, our family rejects as well the oddity. Those who do not want to live by the policing codes and models given to us shall have a fight.

Am I trying to be objective about transgender people’s cry over their right to choose their sex and gender? Maybe. Though I happen to be of opinion partly it is not one’s decision which sex we are but one can live by the idea of the sex one feels belonging to, and people must be free to do so. To be completely of some gender and stick to that ideal of gender is a social construction and is consciously build. We either believe it or we do not. What does free will have to do with deciding since we are not free and decision is not partly ours? Is it a question of owning one’s body and right to choose nevertheless? Ideal man and woman is an echo of past generations and unwillingness of letting go of those ideals is clear. We should be able to follow a perfect image of a woman or a man, to follow and believe norms for expressing and living gender. To be completely of some sex means to be with DNA, organs and bone structure of either sex thinking there are two naturally. What about desires and needs of women and men how do they differ and what kind of desires and needs do transgender people have in this picture? What is the bodily person in comparison to emotional and chemical person and sex? Does body win and dictate who we are and how we must manifest ourselves? Do transgender people follow traditional gender roles, imitate masculine men and feminine women? You feel you are a woman in a man’s body, nature doing tricks with us. How to live with this equation when the rest of the world does not understand or want a freak? How are transgender people to cope with this task and obvious dilemma which is mostly dilemma for those who have bias and strict views on how women and men are? Society wants us to follow nature although we do not respect nor follow nature in our ways, we disrespect nature still we justify our morals and perspectives into human sex via nature and nature being the ultimate guide to how we should see each other and our part in society.

Sex the body, sex the mind. Gender the fucking complex: how to address and dress who we are inside? Who gets to decide? Gender and sex are a big part of our identity, identity which is partly not up to you to decide, our body and emotions do a lot of deciding which is not rational. When gender is a curse or a blessing? It is difficult to be a standard representative of male or female as there are ideals which we like to imitate, there are models for us what a gender looks like and what do they do in their lives, genders, sexes, boys and girls. Which points of views do we take and what kind of aspects affect how we see female and male, how we feel in our bodies? It is clear many don’t feel good, body is always the wrong kind. Sexuality dominates, hetero sex, male desire wanting female body justifiably. Yes we are not just biological, we are not only natural. To simplify issue of how men and women are is unjustified and simply wrong as it is the complex of all complexes. To simplify is the easy way wanting to ignore complexity and being unable to face something weird nature has made. Our instincts do not, hopefully, dictate over us, but is sexuality which is very much an urge of natural origin, the biology, physiology, body and mind deciding for us? Nature is what we are afraid of. How much does society decide for us concerning gender and to what sex we belong, a lot. Fluidity is not something we can just takeover no matter how trendy it is. It is a shame.

http://www.andrewlilico.com/2015/10/24/on-why-a-feminist-will-find-it-problematic-to-describe-mtof-transsexuals-as-women/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11955371/Germaine-Greer-is-a-dinosaur-powerless-against-the-new-feminism.html?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1445875736

They don’t care if your sensibilities are upset. That’s the point, in fact. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/confronting-the-ghosts-of-feminism-in-a-lesbian-haunted-house?utm_source=broadlytwitterus

 

 

To lose femininity, to be without that characteristic of yours which is a stigma, which puts you in to a group and frame. To me it is impossible and stigma I refuse, stigma of weakness. I am first a person not my gender and sex.

| Henna Timanttimetsä
It is strange to think that women who do manly jobs which for some reason are majority of jobs, that imitate men to make it in their branch of expertise would mean losing their femininity. Femininity is still something that does not speak up, seduces, does not take over other than sexually and women have to learn how to physically defend themselves since feminine women do not know how to. Or maybe they know but the ban is so strong they are paralyzed and scared that punch on them is lethal. Something that is lost may be visible and a tradition we like to be used to, that is expected to be there, be found and it strikes as odd when it is replaced with something that does not belong there ’naturally’. Femininity is seen a natural characteristic and women are expected to bring that natural element in them forward appropriately: caring, submissiveness, beauty and fragility, helplessness, posing and being wanted, loved, looking for love forever. When women begin to help themselves they are easily viewed as to rough, outsiders, too active, outspoken which is not good for them and not having time to pay attention to their outer bodies and beautify themselves, not giving attention to their families enough, forgetting to keep themselves smelling good for joy of others.
Women’s naturalness versus beautifying is the paradox, too much or nothing at all? Finding likability as women, that niceness, kindness and gentleness which are virtues, of course, such things in a person are good to have but such unchanging obedient category where women very easily are put in and they put themselves in is not working anymore if it ever has. To be able to choose and have variety is what is good for the whole of society. Societies develop on many levels much quicker and wider when women are applauded for courage to make change happen for them experimenting their limits and limits of all in society because it is other people who have the opposition and hold up the wall for women to climb up, to fight against. Preconceptions hold on tight also in Finland. To try to work in a field which is usually for men only, not because to make a feminist move but out of pure interest for the craft, is in many ways demanding, it is adjusting and feeling the atmosphere. Bias is strong and women are seen as physically and mentally weaker which is interesting, incapable even evidence of otherwise is there and to talk with women, what topics are there that bunch of men could ever find interesting to talk with women.
When gender is not fluid and expectations are build solid thinking how things should be means exactly that, nothing much changes especially when society is very gender bound, when there are jobs specially for women and men. And how slowly things change in that area. What are women capable of and do we have to compare to men since we can do both, things that men do too.

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/353/uncategorised-freedom ”Mechanics of language and gender are performative in the Butler-sense (‘gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original’)”

Pole dancer

Kuva | | Henna Timanttimetsä