Visitors are often shocked or amused when they see ArtActivistBarbie. “They said to me that they were realising many of these works were, in their words, ‘Victorian pornography.’” As she posed ArtActivistBarbie in the Manchester Art Gallery in front of Charles Mengin’s Sappho – which portrays a topless young woman with a sheer drape covering her bottom half – two men approached her. Beard points out that most female nudes were made for the male gaze, and lines between art and pornography are not easily drawn. Photograph: Twitter Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude having recently aired on BBC2, the authority of art galleries as neutral spaces of culture has been called into question. ‘Victorian porn’… ArtActivistBarbie in front of Charles Mengin’s Sappho at Manchester Art Gallery. And then my phone never stopped pinging the whole week. “I was on the train to London and I posted it.
#TWITTER GAY PORN ART HOW TO#
“I didn’t even know how to use Twitter,” she confesses. So she set up a Twitter account, not really expecting many people to care about this decidedly academic project. The resulting mini-protest signs stopped visitors in their tracks, and the photographs of Barbie’s protests drew plenty of notice back in Williamson’s office: “I realised I had something which attracted everyone’s attention and catalysed conversations about how women are portrayed and represented not only in art, but society in general.” She handed each of her students a Barbie doll and a blank placard on a lollipop stick, then set them loose in Huddersfield Art Gallery. Soon Williamson was gathering a doll army, clothing it in pieces handmade by her feminist mother in the 1970s, with new additions created by her sister. She wondered if Barbie, that plastic idealised woman, could become a vehicle for playful commentary on the “patriarchal palaces of painting”. A few years ago, she was trying to find a way to engage her students with social-justice issues and feminist ideas, especially the problematic way women are portrayed in art.
#TWITTER GAY PORN ART PROFESSIONAL#
The woman behind the project is Sarah Williamson, a senior lecturer in education and professional development at the University of Huddersfield. Now that all museums and galleries are closed indefinitely, this whimsical protest which originated in the gallery space is continuing its vibrant life online: sometimes with placards on lollipop sticks (“ Refuse to be the Muse!”) sometimes (wo)manning her own tiny information desk. Presented for the gaze of the Victorian man under the pretext of great interest in stories of antiquity and myth? Proserpine in this case at #Ashmolean #Museum #Oxford.Īn example of what #MaryBeard has referred to as ‘soft porn for the elite’? #MuseumActivism /IvOpQz1qV6- ArtActivistBarbie February 25, 2020