Andy Burns
Lecture Review #2
April 29, 2012
AMELIA JONES
Amelia Jones, a Montreal professor of Visual Culture, centered her lecture around
“queer feminist durationality”. This idea was primarily concerned with how people
perceive the portrayal of females in art. Her subject of focus was a peculiar one and
certainly was quite intriguing and revealing to me as a male student.
Jones initially began her lecture with an analysis of the contemporary works of
Valie Export. Exports images were basically shots of her in leather jackets, with crazy
hair. In some, like Genital Panic, Valie is holding a weapon. Jones seems to take these
works as some sort of queer feminist examination of women as props for men. To me
Export’s images just seem to challenge how much culture has conditioned us to associate
the vagina with vulnerability. It seems that Valie is commenting on cultural conditioning
rather than on queer feminism as Jones claims.
Progressing past Export, Jones begins to explore fetishism within what she refers
to as “cunt art”. This fetishism seems to be of a certain lesbian motivation. The
heterosexuality of some of the works is not very obvious is at times confusing to me as a
male. A particular example is Judie Bombe’s Untitled #1. This oil painting depicts a red
shape representing a vagina on a tan background. The image, as explained by Jones, is
sexually pleasing in a female oriented way. Jones mentions that the brushstrokes around
the vagina must have been pleasing to make. The gradual building up of the oil paint
around the vagina using smooth strokes seemed to appeal sexually solely to a female
crowd.
Works by Tee Corinne also seem to perpetuate that queer lesbian fetishism of art.
Corinne Yantras of Womanlove depict females having sex in images that appear to be
vaginas. These images all take women out of their usual roles in art as objects of
admiration, and makes into freely interpretive, queer items of lesbian fetishism. Jones
explained that the traditional use of women in art was as objects of admiration and
beauty. She cites Alexandre Cabanal’s Birth of Venus as evidence of this.
Jones continued her discussion with the inclusion of intersexuality within feminist
art. Jone’s motives became a little convoluted at this point in her lecture. She seemed to
use long sentences with unfamiliar words such as durationality. Her lack of emphasis on
points she should of emphasized made her lecture degenerate into a confusing mess.
Following her discussion of queer feminist durationality, Jones moves to dick art.
She examines some Paul Donald sculptures made out of wood (as in to have an erect
penis). The gatlin gun structures were apparently men to represent the aggressive, war
like nature of men’s sexual activity. I’m not sure how she interpreted this, but she was
convincing. My reaction to these images was that of bewilderment. I certainly could not
ascertain penises out of theses images. This leads me to suspect a certain element of
homosexuality amongst the artists.
Regardless, Jones’s lecture was interesting and she introduced me to some
interesting forms of art (I’m thinking specifically of cunt art). The idea of queer feminist
durationality was also interesting, despite being difficult for me to understand.