Blog 9 May 15th, 2017
Time in the studio – in fact lots of time in the studio – I’m there five days a week and at school two days and the feeling of pressure is growing.
In the research department have gone back to look again at some artists I was introduced to in first year of BFA – in particular Martha Rosler and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Their elevation of the domestic into the Fine Art context is a useful model especially at a time when the original aims of Feminism seem to be being marginalised by apathy and a return to conservatism.
I was particularly interested in Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975 and Laderman Ukeles Manifesto, 1969 ( https://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969).
“D Art
Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. ‘We have no Art, we try to do everything well’ (Balinese saying)”
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/semiotics-kitchen
The research into these practices continues on from the April conversation with my Mentor. Here I believe are responses by daughters to the removal of women’s autonomy after the second world war. Women who had successfully taken up roles in industry, agriculture and management, were forced into tight-waisted, full skirted dresses in quickly glamorised/modernised kitchens in the subservient roles required by a patriarchal society needing to reassert itself.
I can see that linking this work to those ideas was rather stretching the point and have agreed that it would be prudent to find a more closely aligned discourse through which to discuss the work.