Portal de Cartagena
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The work and the struggles of many women has brought to light a frightening circumstance that comes from far in time, that still remains in force and that is directly related to justice, equality and freedom in our Western societies, supposedly the most socially advanced on the planet.
Despite the growing incidence of the feminist movement in art, the path towards the emancipation of patriarchal and mercantile ideological core is still in force, however, the appearance of works such as Belén Orta create spaces of resistance that expand the borders of the emancipatory horizons.
In the universe of artistic creation and in the environments of other disciplines such as science or literature, among others, feminist struggles have brought to light, not only the exclusion of women as creative subjects, but also the fact that they have been reduced to objects of representation in artistic spaces where the creative genius is practically without variation the white, European, heterosexual and Christian man.
These facts have been developed in numerous critical studies from the 60s to the present, so we will not mention here more arguments.
From this perspective, art has revolved around women, in relation to representing the sensualized female body, as a topographic place, where beauty is inscribed as the main attribute of the feminine, which, constructed from an exteriority, has produced the objectification of the woman's body and reduction of the part by the whole.
In this sense, women in art have traditionally been represented under masculinized canons by means of uses that update the delimiting function of a dominant ideology, in a creative process that has produced, in a constant and often uncritical way, standards of the Western and capitalist societies.
We are situated before art under the reproductive function of a dominant and institutionalized ideology characteristic of patriarchal societies.
This way of representing, not only reflects the objectification of women, but also puts the point of artistic representations on stereotypes of beauty imposed on women from patriarchalized universes.
Through the standard reproduction of beauty as the main quality that women must possess, it reproduces a process that turns the woman's body into something homogeneous, thus denying individuality and the freedom of self-representation and self-reference.
These stereotypes of beauty merge with the body of the woman and make it a body of representation, we get the metaphorical image of the body of the woman as a container, an object that must house inside those canons imposed from the outsider masculinized that accentuates sensuality.
On the one hand, we are faced with the generalization of a gender stereotype given from masculinized universes through art as something that becomes a fundamental issue, since it poses a problem of definition, since, if we do not define ourselves , others will come to define themselves according to their own interests and on the other hand, since the 50s of the 20th century and even more so today, these ways of looking and these ways of producing, are being questioned from a perspective that is situated in emancipatory horizons aimed at freedom, equality and justice, which stress these old stereotypes.
The effect is an approach to artistic production and the problem of patriarchy in art that raises the question: Does not exist, perhaps, a diversity of views, subjects and places from which life, society and gender are contemplated ?
And so, where is this important subject in art, as is the perspective?
With this work, Belén Orta joins a collective of artistic production that questions the representations of women produced by the hegemonic culture and delves into a personal critique that has been a constant in feminist artistic struggles and representations, aimed at making of awareness of the tensions and contradictions that gender issues present.
Belén positions her creative process on the basis of these tensions in a contribution that, under her experience, as a woman situated from feminist conceptions, puts shapes in space configured from a creative process of trans-formation, where she breaks the biological determinations of sex and extends the cultural boundaries of the genre.
It materializes its criticism by means of a displacement so evident, that it produces a clash of conscience in the contemplation of the different representations, united by a conductive thread that provokes a unified effect in the person who contemplates it.
To achieve this effect, use a tool that is well known, but operates with it in a different way, we refer to the body as a battlefield to combat stereotypes.
The proposal consists of an inversion of the concepts with the intention of demolishing the stereotypes constructed from the masculinized hegemonic view that produces hierarchies.
Through the presentation of a clearly decodable message through the inversion of the genre of protagonists of great works of art history, Belén generates with its creation, an ideological space that remains outside the normalized space.
It places the observer in a place from which questions are raised, but leaving the answer in the domain of the subjective.
Belen is questioning the Western pattern, which, as Griselda Pollock affirms, rests on the category of "denied femininity" in order to ensure the supremacy of the masculine in the sphere of creativity.
We are faced with the use of the social body, as an element of declaration and political transformation, as a vehicle for transmitting values ​​aimed at women's emancipatory horizons, but make no mistake, not only for women.
We are placed before a look that Bethlehem channels to transfigure the historical heritage, taking stereotypes, stressing them until their dissolution and reconstructing them under the gaze and genius of a rebellious woman.
It confronts the production of a beauty canon that shapes collective identities and modifies subjectivities.
This way of conceiving beauty, leads Bethlehem to make representations of the body from a distance abysmal beauty models identified in referenced works.
It converts, in this way, his work into a multiple criticism that, on the one hand, questions the gender stereotypes in terms of gender and, on the other, the stereotypes of beauty, rejecting the role of gender and, at the same time, rejecting the concept of beauty that turns the woman's body into another product on the market and that assigns attributes such as thinness, youth, wealth or sensuality as patrimonial components of female beauty.
The beauty in the Work of Bethlehem is no longer the common place, but is located in the field of art involved, where the beautiful is redirected towards emancipatory horizons in the revaluation of the ethical and liberating dimensions of art.
In the conception of the art of Bethlehem, the beautiful is what liberates, what emancipates.
Finally, as a vehicle for transmitting these tensions and as a creation from the perspective of a woman through art, we can situate this work by Belén Orta, which she has called, Tension in stereotypes, from a double perspective, as a contribution of the feminism to the artistic medium directed towards the emancipation of art and at the same time as a contribution of art to feminism directed towards the emancipation of women, but not only of women.
To rebellious mothers, free daughters!
David Avilés Conesa
Source: Agencias
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