FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur
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"Une mémoire d'ombres et de pierre" - Kulturelle Differenz und Geschlechterdifferenz in Hiroshima mon amour
Get PDF“Une mémoire d'ombres et de pierre”. Cultural and Sexual/Gender Difference in Hiroshima mon amourThis article focuses on the very first pictures and takes from Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), which anticipate their strategy of inverting the cultural constructions of black and white. While the story is based on the encounter and love of two subjects, male and female, who differ in many respects, Resnais’ and Duras’ approach is to overcome and indeed transgress the processes of othering via the articulation of differences: Historicity, ethnicity, and gender as well as sexuality are intertwined with the media of skin, film, and memory
Sichtbarkeit als Aporie – Zum Diskurs über die Haut(farbe) in Douglas Sirkas Imitataion of Life
Get PDFUrsula von Keitz Visibility as an Aporia. On the Discourse on Skin (Color) in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of LifeOne of the most important efforts in the development of color film technology was to accurately and realistically reproduce human skin color. In the mid 1930s, it became possible for cinematography to depict the full spectrum of skin colors. From that time on, feature films in the Western culture established a semantic classification of the gendered person which black-and-white films had only been able to display in shades of gray. Fair female skin was closely related to a white middle-class existence and associated with a high moral tone. The darker hue of male skin was associated with vitality (and outdoor activities in general). Women with a darker skin color, in contrast, were often explicitly sexualized and were closely associated with moral transgression. In Sirk’s Imitation of Life, released in 1959, a young light-skinned woman, born to a black mother, struggles for identity in a world of racial discrimination. She passes as “white” (and the film shows us the real difference between her skin colors and that of her mother in many scenes), because whiteness is the only color that can lead to social success. Thus the film reflects on the particular problem of the visible character in a medium of visibility. By constructing herself as white and positing appearance as essence, the light-skinned “black” woman unmasks the social construction of any racial difference.
Rückblick als Vorschau? Nachträgliche Gedanken zu der Konferenz "The Feminist Future" im Museum of Modern Art, New York, 26./27. Januar 2007
No full textMedien und Metaphern des Schwarzweiß – Geschichte, Geschlecht und Bilderpolitik bei Kara Walker – mit einem kurzen Ausflug zu Cindy Sherman und Zwelethu Mthethwa
Get PDFAnja Zimmermann Media and Metaphors of Black-and-white. History, Gender and Visual Politics in the Work of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, and Zwelethu MthethwaArtistic techniques of black-and-white are loaded with cultural meaning. In part referring to color and contrast, black-and-white also always connotes racial difference. The article explores this intertwined relationship of certain artistic strategies and their cultural effects. Concentrating on the work of the American artist Kara Walker, who uses silhouettes in her work, the aim is to show how this and other related techniques are used to thwart prevailing notions of gender and race. Having created a fiercely debated body of work that has been called sexist and racist by a number of critics, Kara Walker is an example of the ambiguous effects of invoking pertinent stereotypes.Another focal point is the possible consequences for analyzing artwork that does not overtly deal with race but which nevertheless – e.g. by using black-and-white techniques –should be read in this context. Cindy Sherman is a case in point, as her work deals with representations of white femininity, but was received merely as a comment on postmodern debates about gender
Absorption/Reflexion – Oberflächem bei Kerry James Marshall und Glen Ligon
Get PDFAntje Krause-WahlAbsorption/Reflection. The Painted Surfaces of Kerry James Marshall and Glenn LigonThis article explores how Marshall and Ligon use the colors black and white to reflect alterity and hybridity in contemporary painting. By comparing the strategies of the two artists, who became known in Europe through documentas X and XI, this article makes clear that their use of black differs: Marshall works with an absorbing color, drawing attention to the invisibility of black (art) history, while at the same time creating images with which an African-American community can identify. In contrast, Glenn Ligon’s shimmering surfaces made out of coal dust can be linked to the discourse surrounding the images of black skin in Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book. Ligon’s paintings not only attract the gaze but also obscure it, a process that underscores how we view the unknown “other”. Furthermore, the reflecting and absorbing surfaces play with references to abstract expressionism in queering their “male black”
