Alice Vol. 2 No. 3

EXPOSED
Photos by Marie Walker
Text by Claire Turner
From Native American cave paintings to every piece in
the Museum of Modern Art, art has defined and refined
our culture, setting examples and breaking barriers. Art
is years spent chipping away at a slab of marble; art is the
scent of oil paint in a warehouse; art is the snap of a camera;
art is dark charcoal on fingertips. Art is a great wave
coming over the horizon; art is a sculpture of a god. Art is
a collection of fruit in a bowl; art is a woman posing nude
on a bed.
Or is it?
A great debate exists that argues whether or not nudity is
actually considered art or pure objectification. However, everything
in art is technically objectified: a tree, an animal,
an idea. According to Susanne Langer, author of Mind:
an Essay on Human Feeling, art is “the objectification of
feeling and the subjectification of nature.” Basically, this
means art is taking something of value and turning it into
an object while the subject desperately wants itself to be
known. Artist and muse, working hand-in-hand.
Think back to the classics. Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century
Birth of Venus, which depicts a long-haired nude woman
emerging from the sea in a seashell while modestly trying
to hide her body; Edouard Manet’s Olympia from 1865,
which shows a nude woman on a bed staring confidently at
the viewer; and Pablo Picasso’s 1907 The Young Ladies of
Avignon, which portrays five Cubist nude women, known
to be prostitutes. Each work was and is celebrated for the
artist’s mastery, yet in today’s world, a well-known feminist
like Emma Watson poses semi-nude for a magazine and is
criticized for being a hypocrite. Bodies define feminity at its
core: more than homemakers, more than prostitutes, more
than child bearers ... beneath it all, women are women no
matter what they are wearing.
How can a painter of a nude woman be more acclaimed
than the woman herself? The nakedness of a woman who
is cloaked in confidence and shrouded in mystery deserves
to be the center of attention. Alice wants to commemorate
women of all types, no matter their shape, color, role or belief,
and remember that a woman is a woman over and under
her clothes. *
Alice May 2017 [63]