Sheer Loveliness
Sheer Loveliness subverts four classical icons to question their desirability.
Lisbeth Bang disrupts the understanding of female beauty and femininity by using classical icons as a point of departure. She stages and photographs herself with a clown’s playfulness depicting traditional female roles: the bride, the erotic dancer, the model and the ballerina, dressing in her own elaborate costumes, tailored from see-through polythene bags, bin-liners and dustsheets. This plastic material, which is usually abandoned and discarded when no longer wanted, brings with it connotations of the superficial, the temporal and the ephemeral, all also associated with beauty. ‘The lovely women’ are robed in plastic, presenting the stereotypes in a new way in order to disrupt the understanding of them.
The project consists of 4 photographs size 1400 x 1050 mm.
Rationale
I cannot recognize myself in/or identify with the way women still in contemporary times are portrayed in advertising, media and most film, as a sexualized subservient commodity. Following the research on gender in the fields of the humanities and social sciences there exists a vast body of work dealing with this convention in media, which can be called signs of sexism in mass culture. Sexism is illegal, but a political consequence of the existing research in this matter is difficult to get any exact measure of. According to the research the choice for women today to be seen as feminine in western society goes with the restraint of performing a femininity that imitates the media created picture of ‘an attractive woman’. Women’s magazines offer advice and visual help in order that women of all ages can construct their looks. Oppressive photographs of women are presented on a daily level in mass media in a large number as quite ‘natural’ images. To unveil this constructed legitimacy in a way that reveals the ambiguous message presents a challenge like a person trying to find your way through a maze. How can one visualize sexism against women being at the same time visible and invisible? What is the mechanics facilitating this process? Where and when does it occur? In the office? In the bedroom? On the street? At the movies?
The project contributes to the contemporary discourse of how women and gender are represented by advertising and mass media in photography.
