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The use of abstract and figurative images to evoke emotive qualities characteristic of women's sexuality

This research paper examines the implications of a feminist appropriation of the fetish and the use of the theory of abjection, as a disruption of phallocentric binary labelling and its notion of idealised femininity. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section includes an analysis of Emily Apter's articles 'Fetishism and Visual Seduction in Mary Kelly's Interim' and an analysis of Janine Antoni's installation 'Gnaw' which form a contextualisation of the issues on which my own visual research is based. These issues revolve around the creation of multiple subject positions for women as both artist and spectator, the recuperation of the seductive image without creating the same power relations apparent in the male gaze and the deployment of an abstract visual femininity to scopically seduce the viewer. In section two, part one, Praveen Adams' article 'The art of analysis: Mary Kelly's Interim and the discourse of the analyst is examined. In this article Adams uses Lacan's theory of discourse to hypothesise that the space of production in Interim is an analogue to the space of production in pyschoanalysis. Part two consists of an examination of the application of the same structural analysis to Antoni's 'Gnaw' and my own 'Compulsive Beauty,' and explores the possibility of a new contextual analysis of feminist art / Master of Arts (Hons)

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/269878
Date January 1995
CreatorsMurray, Kendal, 1958-, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Faculty of Visual and Performing Arts
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
SourceTHESIS_FVPA_XXX_Murray_K.xml

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