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In selecting my Critical Analyses I have focussed primarily on exhibitions and Books.

References
 

Body Art/performing the Subject - By Amelia Jones

The Body in Contemporary art - Sally O’Reilly
Art&Sex - Gray Watson

Women, art, power and other essays - Linda Nochlin

Fear and Art in the Contemporary world - Caterina Albano

Modelling Heads and Faces in Clay - Berit Hildre

The Colour of Sculpture (1840-1910) - Van Gogh Museum, Henry Moore Institute

Louis Bourgeois - Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, Allan Schwartzman

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Many female artists took as their subject the bodily experiences that are specific to women, often working against the visual taboos sometimes associated with such depictions: menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. 

In this book, it explained the pregnant body in art which related my research question: By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to material subjectivity, disability,abortion and 'prosthetic' pregnancy, it asks whether the 'monstrous' can offer different kind of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential power of the pregnant subject. It also claims that: Certainly female sexuality is still something to be created collectively, an open-ended quest, in which artists can play a leading part. It need hardly be said that this gives an enormous sense of opportunity. 

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Crypt church makes me feel wonder and mystery. When I went into the basement of the church, I felt chill and scared. It reminded me about corpse and zombie.

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Fear and art in the contemporary world - Caterina Albano

This book defined the meaning of fear in academic area: Fear is regarded as an emotional state linked to strategies of survival. Although there is little agreement among psychologists, brain scientists, philosophers and historians on how emotions may be defined.

Albano, C (2012) navigate the way through the contemporary culture of fear through the lens of contemporary art using four broad categories that correspond to the four chapters in this book: bodies, objects, narratives and spaces.

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In this book, Louis Bourgeois claimed that:  The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become psychological? When does the physical become emotional? It's a circle going round and round. Pain can begin at any point and turn in either direction.

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To me, pain means fear. The existence of fear cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. It has surroundings, I simply want to look at them and express them. In Bourgeois's work Cell IV, in bed, crouching in fear, the person in this cell is hiding. What he is hiding is his state of sickness. 

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Exhibitions and Artists

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Kiki Smith is a west German-born American artist. Her work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration.

I can not stop thinking about pain, helpless and terror when I saw her artwork, especially the one she use wool fabric from lower body of the sculpture. It looks like bleeding from genitals. It remind me about women's period and miscarriage. The other sculpture  interests me a lot is a female born from a deer. In my opinion, it seems ridiculous that the mature woman rebirth from a deer, but it is actually reveals nature and the connection between humans and animals.

Kiki Smith once stated that ninety-nine percent of her work is psychological which opens it up to many possible interpretations. She has commented:"I always liked the idea of making things that are really open, everybody can come to with their own ideas and responses". 

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Caroline Schneemann, Interior Scroll (1975)

Caroline Schneemann - American visual artist known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender.

She used her body to examine the role of female sensuality in connection to the possibilities of political and personal liberation from oppressive social and aesthetic conventions. In 1975 Schneemann performed Interior Scroll in which, standing naked on a table, she read from scroll as she pulled it slowly from her vagina. The words on the scroll attacked the overly cerebral sterility of a structuralist approach, proposing instead an art that reclaimed 'the personal clutter/the persistence of feeling/the hand-touched sensibility/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess'. This would become an iconic performance, one that can be read in terms of its bringing out a specifically female wisdom from a previously hidden private realm into the public cultural arena.

Watson, G (2008) claims: As a pioneer feminist working in the 1960s, Schneemann emphasis on the tactile and her rooting of the visual in bodily experience were for her partly a means of attacking what she saw as the typically male over-cerebral nature of most of the work which was at that time receiving recognition.

I think it is interesting she takes advantage of female naked body to express art. When I saw this performance it looks mystery and sensuality, after I understand the background of the artwork, it doesn't seems sexy but powerful and painful.

Louis Bourgeois - Tate Modern 2016

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Cells of Louis Bourgeois's artwork remind me of Fear and Screaming. I asked myself: Fear is a thing? The emotion? That is the colour of fear?  Actually, Fear to me means weakness and painful. 

 

Bourgeois described the cells as being about different forms of pain: emotional, psychological and physical. The central, two or three-headed fabric sculpture in this work represents different aspects of a single individual, reflecting the multiplicity of human nature.

 

The cells enclose psychological and intellectual states, primarily feelings of fear and pain. Bourgeois stated that the Cells represent “different types of pain; physical, emotional and psychological, mental and intellectual… Each Cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain… Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”

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Cecily Brown is a female British artist. Her work presents a distinctly female viewpoint. Sexuality and attraction are important themes in her work, which she explores through semi-figurative and abstract means.

The way she handles paint within her work, becomes the subject matter itself by engulfing her figures within the paint or to use it to add a sense of humor to her sexual imagery.

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At first, I paint nude female body as statement (This is Holy Shit) claims women needs freedom. I cannot deny Brown's color and art form influenced my work. At the beginning I paint women but I am not satisfied with final work, then I shifted my form to sculpture and start to investigate the emotion of human beings. 

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