Working plan

Practice in Context

Why do I Care what Martha Rosler thinks? Looking at the legacy left by the ‘feminist revolution’ artists, in particular Martha Rosler and what this means to today’s generation of artists, with particular reference to how women’s roles in society are represented.

My practice is based around the representation of stereotypes of women through fifties advertisements, so to place my practice in context I began to look at

1. Artists who address roles in society
2. Artists who address women’s roles in society
3. Artists who address women’s roles in society and seek to dispel socially imposed stereotypes.

At point three there is still a vast amount of research as a topic for a dissertation. Primarily the vast amount of work lies within the seventies where there was a large amount of artwork emerging out of the feminist movement. During the seventies issues of feminism and women’s rights were still very much contemporary issues and consequently fairly radical pieces of artwork came out of the feminist art movement to alert people to the issues. In today’s world we are well aware of the issues surrounding feminism, so much so that the topic seems almost cliché and unoriginal as the basis of a piece of artwork. However although discrimination against women may have been addressed in today’s society, prejudice is still commonplace, as we often unknowingly make assumptions about social and gender roles based on society’s stereotypes. These new issues of prejudice are perhaps a little more complicated, and for this reason there has been a change of direction in order to gain the attention of the audience – perhaps a more subtle approach.

Therefore I propose to look at how a younger generation of artists are dealing with the issues that have arisen from the changing state of women’s roles in the last fifty years, coming from the perspective of a young female making art. What does the legacy left by the big players from the seventies means to us? Is it so different?

The artists that left these legacies include artists such as Martha Rosler; Cindy Sherman among many others, the work was avant-garde challenging relationships among many things in a vast arrange of subjects.

Within the discussion I hope to address the following issues;

Why do I care what Martha Rosler thinks?
What does it mean to look back?
How important is History?
What does that legacy mean to my generation?
Is it so different to now?

Written from my perspective and using other artists who address similar themes, I propose to examine what affect this legacy left by from these artists and the affect that this has played on their work.

To present this discussion I propose to use a magazine format, as this encompasses the ideas that can be gained from advertisements and mass media. This form of presentation would allow me use the same tools as the media to portray my ideas, as well as allowing me to break the discussion down into more specialised discussions in a format easily digestible to the reader. When it finally comes down to the distribution of the document I want it to be available through a wider means than that of a standard dissertation, possibly through sourcing, over periods of time. I hope it can become available to general public, i.e. inserting the magazine into local newspapers, available in libraries.