If you are a female, having a career within the art world means that you will be confronted with several issues with which your male counterparts won't necessarily have to contend. To women working in the narrower field of illustration and the F+SF genre in particular, some of these issues are more glaring and others less obtrusive, but all still meriting our attention. Since inception in 1985, an anonymous band of feminist artists called The Guerilla Girls, have been bringing these issues to the fore with its sharp and funny insight into the corporate art institutions' sexist, racist, and corrupt practices and policies, The group has illuminated for over a generation what remains unfair and patently ridiculous about corporate arts culture.
Several of the issues that the group has identified are: unequal representation in museums and national shows, the almost complete lack of representation for artists of color, the fetishization / glamorization of violence against women, unequal pay in the marketplace (women artists earn only *1/3* of what male artists do), having to choose between a career and parenthood, being seen only as another's protege, reinforced hetero-normative values, having your work labeled as "feminine", and so on.
Are any of these issues personally familiar to you? You will have, as a female artist, person of color, or different sexual orientation, undoubtedly bumped up against some aspects of this culture at some point in your career. Many other illustrators who've worked in the publishing industry for any length of time will recognize many parallels in their own working sphere.
When we examine more closely the specific experiences of women illustrators working in the F+SF field, we find that many of these issues are simultaneously nullified and amplified.
Of the many artist friends with whom I've conversed about these issues admit to mostly having difficulties with spousal support of their career. Artists who are also parents are expected to automatically shoulder the domestic and child care duties in addition to busy careers, particularly if the spouse with whom s/he shares a household is a higher wage earner. Some aspiring young artists feel that they are inevitably faced with a choice of career vs motherhood, and decide to forego the latter entirely. Though partnered, these artists are still expected to attend to the daily household chores. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, cooking, etc., take a substantial chunk of time, time that could be spent on one's career.
And let's be honest for a moment: for a man, choosing a career in art it is thought to be his "calling." He is considered a professional artist. His wife becomes the high priestess in service to his mission, both of them working hard to ensure that he "makes it big" someday. But the reverse commitment is rarely true. A woman's choice to have an art career is not often heralded with equal enthusiasm and may be dismissed as only a dabbler, a dilettante. Oh dearie me, an art career? Well, you need to get married so someone can support your hobby. Yes, this double-standard really exists.
Persistent issues of fewer work hours, lack of domestic support, and general lack of emotional support of women's artistic endeavors are tied insidiously into the issue of lower pay. But add to this the industry's insult by way of "ghettoization' of women's creative work, and you have a perfect system that makes it incredibly more difficult for women to successfully establish themselves as professional creatives. That the publishing industry labels women's work as "feminine" and perceives it as a liability is a well-known fact. It is why many female authors choose male pen names and often write about male heroes and protagonists instead of female ones.
Some may say that the more disturbing aspect of swimming in these testosterone-filled waters, where the industry's profits come mostly from the discretionary money of white males 14-40, is feeling that one must cave in to creating the work that the industry wants. Because gratuitous violence, aggrandizement of war, and gratuitous female nudity (masturbation melons?) is the bulk of we see in the comic book industry /F+SF, many of us conform to this industry standard by offering up the same kind of work, a general regurgitation of the sanctioned stories within the accepted formulas that has been in force since the genre was born.
Well, what's wrong with it? You might decide that it's perfectly okay to reinforce the status quo and perpetuate the sexualization of violence, misrepresentation (or entire lack of representation) of women and other people on the margins, the romanticization of specific gender roles, etc. You can do this by creating work that is exactly like what has been published for several generations in the western market.
Or you can do something more fun. You can subvert it. Use the form and turn it on its head.
Several contemporary realist painters offer some insight into how this might be done. In an earlier post, I mentioned the work of contemporary fantastic painter, Odd Nerdrum. I offer his work as an example of a classical, Renaissance-style painter who is not a romanticist. John Currin's another one. His beautifully rendered work, while amusing, is deeply disturbing in its candor. And Lisa Yuskavage's seductively grotesque work "one-ups masculinity" by amplifying the female body in all the right places, adding that touch of a soft romantic glow in the colors and value structure, yet the combination of her style and the content leaves the viewer feeling more than a little queasy about one's suddenly realized assumptions.
These painters have taken the traditional form of romanticist realist painting and subject matter (formal portraits, the fantastic-heroic, and sexuality) and have used it to subvert that which it was originally used to aggrandize. Their combinations of fantasy and realism help to drive home their message of the myth and how it depersonalizes. They insist that we take an uncomfortably close look at the ways in which we have fetishized ourselves.
Now that more women than ever are working as illustrators and artists, we have a big opportunity here to change the industry from the inside out. We are on the cusp of a big paradigm shift. Ours is one of the few industries in which its practitioners have actual first-person control over the ways in which we can represent ourselves and tell our stories. It's a huge advantage and we should make the best of it while we can and set some higher, better standards. Are you on board?
Several of the issues that the group has identified are: unequal representation in museums and national shows, the almost complete lack of representation for artists of color, the fetishization / glamorization of violence against women, unequal pay in the marketplace (women artists earn only *1/3* of what male artists do), having to choose between a career and parenthood, being seen only as another's protege, reinforced hetero-normative values, having your work labeled as "feminine", and so on.
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| Ingres creepy extra-vertebrated creature gets a reboot. |
When we examine more closely the specific experiences of women illustrators working in the F+SF field, we find that many of these issues are simultaneously nullified and amplified.
Of the many artist friends with whom I've conversed about these issues admit to mostly having difficulties with spousal support of their career. Artists who are also parents are expected to automatically shoulder the domestic and child care duties in addition to busy careers, particularly if the spouse with whom s/he shares a household is a higher wage earner. Some aspiring young artists feel that they are inevitably faced with a choice of career vs motherhood, and decide to forego the latter entirely. Though partnered, these artists are still expected to attend to the daily household chores. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, cooking, etc., take a substantial chunk of time, time that could be spent on one's career.
And let's be honest for a moment: for a man, choosing a career in art it is thought to be his "calling." He is considered a professional artist. His wife becomes the high priestess in service to his mission, both of them working hard to ensure that he "makes it big" someday. But the reverse commitment is rarely true. A woman's choice to have an art career is not often heralded with equal enthusiasm and may be dismissed as only a dabbler, a dilettante. Oh dearie me, an art career? Well, you need to get married so someone can support your hobby. Yes, this double-standard really exists.
Persistent issues of fewer work hours, lack of domestic support, and general lack of emotional support of women's artistic endeavors are tied insidiously into the issue of lower pay. But add to this the industry's insult by way of "ghettoization' of women's creative work, and you have a perfect system that makes it incredibly more difficult for women to successfully establish themselves as professional creatives. That the publishing industry labels women's work as "feminine" and perceives it as a liability is a well-known fact. It is why many female authors choose male pen names and often write about male heroes and protagonists instead of female ones.
Some may say that the more disturbing aspect of swimming in these testosterone-filled waters, where the industry's profits come mostly from the discretionary money of white males 14-40, is feeling that one must cave in to creating the work that the industry wants. Because gratuitous violence, aggrandizement of war, and gratuitous female nudity (masturbation melons?) is the bulk of we see in the comic book industry /F+SF, many of us conform to this industry standard by offering up the same kind of work, a general regurgitation of the sanctioned stories within the accepted formulas that has been in force since the genre was born.
Well, what's wrong with it? You might decide that it's perfectly okay to reinforce the status quo and perpetuate the sexualization of violence, misrepresentation (or entire lack of representation) of women and other people on the margins, the romanticization of specific gender roles, etc. You can do this by creating work that is exactly like what has been published for several generations in the western market.
Or you can do something more fun. You can subvert it. Use the form and turn it on its head.
Several contemporary realist painters offer some insight into how this might be done. In an earlier post, I mentioned the work of contemporary fantastic painter, Odd Nerdrum. I offer his work as an example of a classical, Renaissance-style painter who is not a romanticist. John Currin's another one. His beautifully rendered work, while amusing, is deeply disturbing in its candor. And Lisa Yuskavage's seductively grotesque work "one-ups masculinity" by amplifying the female body in all the right places, adding that touch of a soft romantic glow in the colors and value structure, yet the combination of her style and the content leaves the viewer feeling more than a little queasy about one's suddenly realized assumptions.
These painters have taken the traditional form of romanticist realist painting and subject matter (formal portraits, the fantastic-heroic, and sexuality) and have used it to subvert that which it was originally used to aggrandize. Their combinations of fantasy and realism help to drive home their message of the myth and how it depersonalizes. They insist that we take an uncomfortably close look at the ways in which we have fetishized ourselves.
Now that more women than ever are working as illustrators and artists, we have a big opportunity here to change the industry from the inside out. We are on the cusp of a big paradigm shift. Ours is one of the few industries in which its practitioners have actual first-person control over the ways in which we can represent ourselves and tell our stories. It's a huge advantage and we should make the best of it while we can and set some higher, better standards. Are you on board?
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