The life raft was invented in 1882 by a woman named Maria Beasley. Life rafts are still used by women today to stay afloat in a sea of patriarchal bullshit.
Life Raft is written and produced by two working artists, Charlotte Thurman and Tara Booth. Each issue centers on a theme, which strives to challenge and discuss the gender binary. This two part issue explores female nudity through the views of female artists, creators, and thinkers. Centerfold story by Molly Walker. Cover designed by Morgan Hamilton. Submissions: liferaftzine@gmail.com Facebook.com/liferaftzine Instagram: @liferaftzine
part two
Dissections and Reflections 1 Adolescence I was sitting on the floor of my tiny carpeted bedroom. [ The room at my parents house where I spilled yellow candle wax that time in Middle School from a séance. We were trying to summon Elvis. Our séances were just elaborate excuses to do impersonations of famous people. This still scared me. ] I was looking at myself in the mirror. [Something I did all too often at that age of 15 and 16] It was a mirror attached to the outside of my closet door, an entry point to a room within a room. [Often I would isolate myself in that closet space if I needed to feel like I was totally alone; taking out all of the clothes and boxes to bring in a conspicuously large plastic CD player and my budding music collection.] That day, I decided that instead of drawing the usual self portrait of my face, I would draw my torso and my chest. {{{{ {{{{ {{{{ {{{{
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I did this in baby steps. I could only commit to drawing one breast at first. It felt like a huge leap to be doing it at all. After I drew myself, I felt like I had really gotten somewhere. I didn’t know what it meant, but I think it was similar to those moments when you realize that you’ve formulated an opinion or an observation that you
really believe in. Though I had no plans to share this little drawing, the exchange I had with myself felt like a glimpse of empowerment. I had drawn my own image with my own hand in the company of my own reflection. It was the first action I ever took to consciously chip away at whatever guilt I had before about my body. 2 Charlotticus thurmanaria My senior year in undergrad I created a piece that was in essence, a dissection of my body through other people’s eyes. I pinned numbers to my body. These numbers corresponded to comments--some positive, mostly negative--that I had received and retained through memory over the years about my body. I made a pseudo-scientific diagram to correlate the text with the specific bodily area. In a performative act, I stood behind glass in all black, and invited people to scrutinize me and read the comments. It was a way to separate these things from myself. To show the blatant objectification that others feel they have the right to place on others bodies. To highlight how our personal narratives are dictated so much by others, and to discuss the inadequacy of scientific structures for their “objective” reasoning. When I showed this piece in my portfolio to a visiting artist, she said that it was cowardly not to have done this piece in the nude. I was talking about my own body, I should have shown everyone what it was I was talking about. Of course, I had considered that option, but I ultimately decided to wear all black (mostly because there were more than a few creepy guys in the class, and I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction). If I had made a cowardly decision, than it was one that put all of the blame onto me. It is often women who are blamed for the reactions of men. But I couldn’t articulate that at the time. I felt like I was not going to be taken seriously as an artist, especially as a performance artist, if I couldn’t be nude in my own art.
3 Serious I made the piece again a few years later, but this time I was fully nude. I was lying on a wooden table, some sparse bundles of herbs hung on the wall behind me. I was like some early anatomical model or the unlucky subject of a witchcraft experiment. I was a frog in Biology class. I thought, “Now that I’m doing this nude, I can be taken seriously.” I included it in my grad school application. It was on my website. Some people saw it. I thought it gave my practice integrity and an edge. The first month of Grad school, my studio-mate slyly and knowingly brought up the images. He said that after he met me in person, he didn’t think that it could have been me in the piece. He didn’t think that someone with my personality would make that kind of work. I’m not sure what to make of that, except that it’s that same kind of reasoning that compelled me to create the piece in the first place--the tendency for some men to project their own narrative onto the lives of women.
a natural proclivity towards it? But in some ways, I felt that his comment diminished my message. Having an oral fixation could be as simple as the fact that I liked to chew on pen caps and straws when I was thinking. The implied sexual nature of it was not in my headspace when I created the piece, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in the headspace of others. 5 6,066 I started to put my video work on Vimeo about 7 years ago. In the beginning, none of my early videos got very many views, except the “Oral Fixation” one. People added it to their video collections; people with names like, “XXXVideoSultan” or “TacoBaby69.” I made up those names, but I promise they were similar. The Oral Fixation video is by far my most liked video. It currently has 6,066 views. I’m guessing that not everyone who watches this video has a critical vocabulary to discuss trends in contemporary and feminist art.
4 Oral Fixation
6 Shelter
My first foray into video art, was a series of ten, one-minute clips of myself performing actions indicative of someone with the textbook signs of an oral fixation. It showed close-ups of my mouth as I smoked a cigarette, ate sunflower seeds, put on chapstick, chewed gum, licked a lollipop, etc. The audio was of myself reading Freudian psychoanalytic theory using a tape machine. I was really interested in how grotesque the mouth looked once it was segmented and isolated. How mechanical and alien it could be. I was also interested in this framework as a type of catalogue for mundane actions. As I was explaining all of this to my boyfriend at the time, he stopped me and said, “Ok, I guess I see all of that. . . but you do have an oral fixation. Right?” That comment sort of stopped me in my tracks. “I’ve never really thought of it,” I answered. It was a complicated question. On the one hand, art is an extension of the self. Why would I make this work if I didn’t have
Maybe living my life within the confines of the “Art World” and academia has made me naive. It’s sheltered me from certain realities. Here I am, supposedly a “Master” at decoding media, symbolic structures, and aesthetic spaces, and I assumed that my video would somehow make others realize how mechanical our bodies are? That people would see it as “Performance Art” and not just a young girl’s mouth. I’m not sure why I was so shocked by this misconstruing of my artistic intent. Now that I am a teacher, I worry much more about my public image and the work that I share openly online. I’m still struggling with this. 7 Still Objects Female performance artists in the 1960s and 1970s were using the
medium of film/video and performance to reclaim control of their own image. Nudity was an important part of this process, as was being alone with the camera. I realize that not everyone knows or thinks about these things. However, when I made the video and shared it, I was certainly thinking of this history. I was actively aligning myself with the values of women artists before me. I wanted to think critically about, and to participate in, shifting “the gaze.� Sometimes, no matter how much you call something serious, or art, or a meaningful performative act, people will still just see another nude figure. Did taking that leap from drawing myself for myself in my bedroom, to performing publically nude, negate the power I had over my own form? I felt so liberated that day, drawing a small portion of flesh, a part of myself that I happen to live with every single day. Once my image was in public, online, and viewable by the press of a button, something changed. Had I willinginly turned myself into an object? And did this serve to prove my point--or did it immediately lose all potential for nuance in its interpretation? Was it yet again, in the realm of being less serious as art? Appendix of Images
2
Charlotticus thurmanaria, in black 3
1
Charlotticus thurmanaria, nude Self Portrait, missing or buried
4
Notable Female Video Artists With Own Body as Subject
Oral Fixation, video stills
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Joan Jonas, From “Mirror Pieces” (1968–71) charlottethurman.com
{|} Hannah Wilke {|} Joan Jonas {|} Carolee Schneeman {|} Marina Abramovic {|} Shirin Neshat {|} Dara Birnbaum {|} Tracey Rose {|} Maya Deren {|} Ana Mendieta {|} Martha Rosler {|} Pipilotti Rist {|}Tiona McClodden {|} Mona Hatoum
Khat Patrong
is a Black Canadian who came from a place where she put her arm next to a friend’s and said: I wish my skin was like yours. For her, being in America was the best and the worst experience. In the era of social media, beauty of all geometric shapes and complementing colours is being accepted. It seems. Here, she began to accept herself despite belonging to a species that’s considered to be at the bottom of the beauty barrel. She knows this to be true because of what she sees on TV. She was fed up with being represented through a second class character with no back story. She is a first class person. All black girls are. She had to unlearn the oppression to gain a sense of freedom. She is still learning as there is always much to learn. She is a dreamer with the vision boards and initiative to match. She’s currently scratching off her goals one at a time. Kitty’s favorite quote: “People are let go from your life b/c they’re going to hold you back from where I’m taking you next.” - God @ you. She is soft spoken but determined to be heard, so listen.
And listen carefully, you were given two ears for a reason.
Khat wrote the following poem and is the creator of the (: zine which can be found and purchased at khataracs.tumblr.com
This work is not meant to be funny. This work is a depiction of how I feel women are treated in certain situations. As a joke. How many times have you heard a roofie joke? “Hey don’t put roofies in my drink when I’m gone”. Rape is a pervasive problem in society. 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (from RAINN an anti-sexuaI violence organization). I have experienced sexual violence myself and heard too many stories from the women in my life about their horrible experiences. ceramic pieces by Liz Mateson @threepeastudio
Twin Fire Art Studios is a collaboration
between Asher Haven & Lisa Newt Russell. Their imagery expresses their experiences as LGBTQ friends in recovery. #recoveryoutloud
Opening The Stables
Look Back
When I was eleven I made up a character. Her name was Billy and I drew her all the time. She was a busty blonde woman, always smoking a cigarette and always scantily dressed. She was an aging Marilyn Monroe, an ex beauty queen with leathered skin and high heels. She oozed sexuality and her tag line, which I included in all my drawings, was “Lets get this over with.� When I think about my work now I realize that Billy, and what she represents, has always been what I want to express. I am fascinated by the duality of subjects, specifically female subjects, and the contradiction of having to perform as a woman in society, and at the same time, resent it. This parallels the contradiction that occurs in the act of voyeurism, which involves both the pleasure and anxiety in looking.
Celeste Morton
@where_is_my_ipod Vignettes
above painting: Couples
I stood naked before her. Ok. It was dark. So we didn’t really see each other… we felt each other. She was small. Is small. My whole arm could wrap around her and I was used to being wrapped around. I was not scared. I had been scared, when threatened, by a larger body. Maybe I had a force-field, for he did only get so close. Then others stayed off me for years…except for those pesky ones. Like gum on a shoe, I was physically attached before I even knew him. And he was stuck to a another shoe in no time. She was not him, any of them. We were slow, unpressured, calculated. The outline was clear, but we would fill in the content. [I can’t make eye contact with someone I like until I know they like me, though even then I get so nervous and find myself unable to move or forgetting how a kiss works and who should lean in when and where and what if this is not what the other person wants and then I just embarrass myself because I think she likes me and we have gone out on a date or two but I don’t really know if she wants to kiss me…]
so I say I am bad at “making moves,” turns out she is too. I had kissed other women before, their faces, lips softer, smoother than their male counterparts. And, eventually, after a few un-smoothly started kisses, she took me to bed. My bedroom door laid open by mistake. No one was home, though we remained in our clothes. This was different. I had a dream, recently, that she was sick with cancer and dying and I couldn’t get to her because all the people I hadn’t told about her were in the way, asking questions, and I realized I couldn’t explain to them what this all meant for me. She was my princess, locked away in a tower, and I wasn’t the prince charming to rescue her. I was just me.
no title (or princess) by Carolyn Shayte
“I focus on emphasizing relationships that demand to be felt. Like the fear of never being taken seriously as a woman from centuries of inequality, or the inability to escape the past and alienation that is prompted by society, despite technological advances that are intended to keep us connected.�
The Myth of Male Power Comes as No Surprise Acrylic on plastic bag, 2017 Alexa Turnbull alexaturnball.com
History Written on the Body Or, Things I Learned From Clots in my Lungs: It’s hard to remember that my body is not merely an impediment and burden, but in fact, it is me. My life as a grad student does not necessitate much more physical movement than typing, turning pages, and pouring tea. In order to, begrudgingly, take care of my body as well as my mind, I would go on long runs. However, from late October onward breathing – and everything else in turn – grew difficult. I could have gone to the doctors earlier, but instead of being curious about what was wrong, I spent energy resenting my limitations. After three months of increasing difficulty breathing and one subsequent month of doctor visits, on January 24 scans of my chest showed that I had multiple pulmonary emboli (blood clots in the lungs). Turns out, my body had been desperately functioning as well as it could for months. I spent my morning in the hospital asserting again and again that no, I’ve never been a smoker, I have no family history of clotting problems, no kidney infections, etc. I was told what this meant later: barring the discovery of a latent genetic disorder, the only explanation for why a healthy 26 year old woman would have pulmonary emboli was the synthetic estrogen in my birth control. I fell down the rabbit-hole of research, trying to understand (and by understanding, regain control?) of what happened to me. I thought back to 2011 when I started on the Nuva Ring -- I was smart, savvy. I did research then too. I was assured as long as I wasn’t a smoker and didn’t have a family history, I shouldn’t worry. I was privileged to have years of top-notch education, access to academic studies hidden behind paywalls, money and time to spend on a consultation doctor appointment, insurance that would help with the financial burden, and the time to weigh my options. How many women are that lucky?
In my body, I realized I was experiencing the cumulative effects of decades, even centuries, of history: -a long series of political, social, economic, and scientific choices that made women responsible for birth control rather than men, -that made it necessary for women to risk their lives to maintain control of their reproduction, -that created systems of knowledge and power where I and hundreds of thousands of other women have no idea that our chances of getting a blood clot on birth control is as high as 1 in 1,000 -- and doctors I have seen say their years of practice makes them suspect it could be even higher. Still, the current FDA labels say the risk for blood clots is 3-12 per 10,000 women years using the Nuva ring, which looks like a completely different story. This situation didn’t arise overnight, and it won’t disappear overnight either. In this age of post-truth and post-facts, we need to aggressively educate ourselves and our loved ones, fight these systems of power, and seek to correct these long-standing injustices casting even longer shadows.
Anatasia Day is a PhD in History cadidate at the University of Delaware. We are happy to report that she is recovering well from her blood clots and is anxious to start trail running again.
Liz Bolduc Sux @bowlduck Self Portrait baileymchick.wordpress.com