art

“Male Gaze”

Can the process of representation be seen as gendered?
Have we replaced the animal nose with the human eye?
Does beauty drug us?
The male gaze (looking-active) objectifies woman.
Women (looked at-passive) must survey themselves by how they are looked upon by the dominant male culture. The perspectives from which visual representations are constructed are also gendered male. A woman surveying herself is male thus she turns herself into an object, an object of vision, a sight.

"Thus the interior of the female body is projected as a kind of lining of bodily disgust- of blood, of excreta, of mucus membranes. If the woman-as-fetish/image is the cosmetic façade erected against this wound, the imagined penetration of the façade produces a revulsion against the bodily fluids and wastes that become condensed with the wounded body in the iconography of misogyny."
Laura Mulvey

“Feminine Aesthetic”

Pipilotti Rist as well as Cindy Sherman insists that one must distinguish between the biography and the work. There is a distinction between the person and the role. I agree with the quotations of Pipilotti Rist and Cindy Sherman. I often get confronted with the opinion that my work is biographical. It cannot be denied that all work is biographical in some sense but when I depict myself in my work it is purely representative of a female. I often refer to the question “Who is Eva?” thus confirming the conclusions of Wulf Herzogenrath over a search for identity or indeed an identity crisis. My awareness of the ‘masquerade of femininity’ has kept me occupied for many years as a hair and make-up artist. Overloading my characters with ‘feminine” stereotype images make them parodies and express a violence not normally associated to femininity. (Installation: “Everything is Fine” Video: “Déjà vu”) In my commercial “Tequila Bar” I questioned the notion of "femininity” by wearing a mustache and side burns but not disguising my female body although wearing a cowboy outfit and a tequila bottle as a phallus. As a female artist, one cannot deny their femininity. Women experience life differently then men do. It is bound to affect their work in some way.