Petra Van Brabandt will explore how Charlotte Baudry's girls and bags are a spatial metaphor of women's condition. The ambiguity of the languages of seduction, eroticism, and gender identity, in which women are not only captivated, but through which they also express and empower themselves, is one of the most violent and original aspects of Baudry's work. Her work is provocative in its feminist ambiguity and deconstructive assault on our sensational, motoric and gendered body as idée fixe; her work is erotic in its playful yet self-confident exploration of seduction, voyeurism, and exhibitionism. Between pleasure and violence, identity is deconstructed and reconstructed without a fixed point. Tragedy is avoided; knife-sharp exploration encouraged. Angry young wo/men fluctuating between pleasure and violence. We get drunk, we look at you, you look at us.
Petra Van Brabandt is doctor in philosophy (University of Antwerp). She works on David Hume's socio-moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. She also writes on pornographic art ("Why do porn movies suck?" with Jesse Prinz, in Maes & Levinson, Art and Pornography, OUP, 2011). She focuses on women artists (film, literature, visual arts) and their difficult relationship to the representation of the female body and sexuality.
3.30 - 4pm: Outplacing girls. The choreography of the public in Beaudry's painting
Tom Viaene is at the one hand tempted to go to the bottom of Charlotte Beaudrys retrospective Get Drunk. At the other hand, he immediately realizes that her choreographical stage-setting of drunkenness is treacherous. How would you want to go the bottom, if the only thing (fore)seeable in Beaudrys gl(a)(o)ssy paintings is the surface? On the surface of it all is a girl. In our consumer society desire is grafted upon three pillars: the body, adolescence, and the promise of a distinctive individuality. Get Drunk seems to expose a girl as the missing link here. In Beaudrys mind(e)scape she is a variable that seems to be driven out of (or, has escaped from?) the fullscale billboards on the streets. Tom Viaene believes that the main-entrance of Get Drunk is the 'exchange value' of the girls and (her self-identifying) objects. What we get from them is a self-reflexive interruption: in the interspace of Get Drunk they are hard pressed, even struggling, to engage another space than we as Peeping Toms are used to think of.
Tom Viaene works for GYNAIKA (http://www.gynaika.be/) and writes for rekto:verso (www.rektoverso.be), mostly over music, art criticism and philosophy.