Harper’s Bazaar Article “Bodies of work”

While I was walking around Frieze and Frieze Masters today, I ran into a couple of stands with magazines from Harper’s Bazaar Art. I grabbed a couple, and later, when I got home, I started looking for articles that could give me information for my research. I found one called “Bodies of Work,” a curation piece by Jo Baring. The idea of this curation was to look at how women are portrayed, but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy and, at the same time, a lot of empowerment. They start talking about Venus, and when people think about Venus, they probably think about the painting The Birth of Venus or the sculpture that is in the Louver,. Still, people do not realize this was done long before that, and that the way she was imagined was influenced by earlier sculptures such as the Venus of Hohle Fels, discovered in a cave in Germany and believed to be 35,000 years old. In these sculptures, many of them depicted the women’s body in a very realistic way, including the vulva as well as large breasts. When people started to discover some of these pieces in the late 1800s, they began to compare them and say she was an immodest Venus, while European representations were modest. (This makes me think about the fact that they were grabbing something that already existed and someone had created and was the actual women form and something they gathered inspiration from and calling it immodest and as if it had less value. This reminds me of some of my readings about how some bodies are considered immodest, and it is similar to what they were doing around this piece.) The reason why they were considered immodest was that she covered her genitals in the Roman version, but in this one it was all exposed for the world to see. It is suggested that these were pieces done by the women themselves as a form ofself-portraiture (This is something that I find incredible: they were able to depict themselves in the nude and the way they saw themselves then, or even at the time when the Birth of Venus was painted, there was so much taboo over the female body, and even though this is something that is being fought against in society, there are different ways in which we can still see them today.)