This is an art object

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Sophia Loren - From In the Kitchen with Love (1972)

Women laughing alone with salad? Pshhh.  Try “women smiling alone with ambrosia!”  Or maybe that’s potato salad.  I don’t know.  In any case, we’re taking it up a notch.

Sophia Loren - From In the Kitchen with Love (1972)

In case you were really hankering for some more “women alone with salad” pictures.

Jay DeFeo - Untitled (Four Figures) 1973

Jay DeFeo - Fillmore Street Studio (1960 - Photo by Jerry Burchard)

Dora Maurer - Minimal Movements (1981)

Dora Maurer - Time (1972)

Dora Maurer - Seven Twists (1979)

hoodoothatvoodoo:

hoodoothatvoodoo:

Marilyn Monroe contact sheet

By Bert Stern

communicants:

Colleen Choquette-Raphael, “The Flower Eaters #5” (From Friction)

“In a neglected corner of a Seattle junk shop I find a box of neuropathology slides; samples of brain tissue taken from patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City in the 1930s. They are beautiful, these unique configurations of matter that lay suspended in an amber emulsion; they look like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. What horror there is in acknowledging the reality of what they are, and in pondering what sort of system allowed these wayward relics to end up here, in this shop, to be purchased by someone like me. Paired with vintage cartes-de visites and pinned to a lacquered white board, the glass slides act as a transparent mask or hairpiece over the faces of the women and children in the photographs. A dialogue ensues between surface and interior, and between science and sentiment. They are absurd. I feel an affinity with the Surrealists who thought that hysteria was one of the greatest poetic discoveries of the century. One might view these anti-modernist pieces as puppets, as nostalgic kitsch, or perhaps as the object opera of the hysteric herself.

The friction in this work lies in the pairing of two such disparate ways of knowing, of layering trace upon trace to seek evidence of the mutability of a human life. The work also promotes tension in how it hovers between object and image, between sculpture and photography, never staking a claim in either realm.

I find that the essence of photography as a vehicle to distill the flow of existence is akin to the collective desire to give form to that which is formless. And as feminine experience is often aligned with formlessness I use cliché artifacts of sentimentality as my materials. The romanticism inherit in a vintage photograph is unraveled when pitted against the cold hard empiricism of the medical specimen.e, A type of wayward alchemy is demonstrated through these conflicting signifiers.”

Bruce Conner - Marilyn Times Five (1968-73)

Harry Callahan - Eleanor (1954)

Harry Callahan - Eleanor, Chicago  (1951)

Cindy Sherman - Untitled #153 (1985)