Vagina and vulva in art
Contemporary artists can still face backlash for depicting the female genitals; Megumi Igarashi was arrested for distributing a 3D digital file of her vulva.
Works created since the advent of second-wave feminism circa 1965 range from large walk-through installations (Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely) to small hand-held textile art pieces.
Sometimes these are explicitly works of feminist art: Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party to celebrate 39 women of history and myth, many of whom had fallen into obscurity.
Other artists deny that their works reference the female genitalia, although critics view them as such; the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe are a case in point.
Various perceptions of the vagina have existed throughout history, including the belief that it is the center of sexual desire, a metaphor for life via birth, inferior to the penis, visually unappealing, inherently unpleasant to smell, or otherwise vulgar.
The vagina has been known by many names,[6] including the ancient word (now considered a vulgarism) "cunt", euphemisms ("lady garden"), slang ("pussy"), and derogatory epithets.
Weir and Jerman argue that their location on churches and the grotesque features of the figures, by medieval standards, suggests that they represented female lust as hideous and sinfully corrupting.
In 1968, Monica Sjöö painted her most famous work, God Giving Birth, depicting a naked woman standing to deliver her baby, with its head protruding from her vulva.
"[28] In 1975, American lesbian artist Tee Corinne published her Cunt Coloring Book which featured multiple line drawings of women's vaginas.
American Annie Sprinkle turned her genitals into performance art with her "Public Cervix Announcement", first unveiled in the early 1980s and then reprised for her 1990s touring show, "Post-Porn Modernist".
Contemporary art, from a feminist perspective, has revisited and deconstructed the androcentric view of woman genitalia and the stereotypical identification with female subjectivity (e.g., Ana Mendieta, Enrique Chagoya, Vik Muniz, Candice Lin).
[36] The London performance art group the Neo Naturists had a song and an act called "Cunt Power", a name which potter Grayson Perry borrowed for one of his early works: "An unglazed piece of modest dimensions, made from terracotta like clay – labia carefully formed with once wet material, about its midriff".
The Brighton-based artist began the project in response to the rise in labiaplasty, wanting to provide realistic, non-pornographic portrayals of the widespread variation of anatomy.
"[40] His own project continued to evolve, displaying the Wall at Triennale di Milano museum, and casting more women at the Red Tent Revival festival in the United States.
Once he had the idea, Greg Taylor tried to persuade female artists to take it on, but they declined, so he pressed ahead, creating scores of white porcelain vulvas, "each individual portraits of different women, each as gripping as a face".
[41] Aidan Salahova, an Azeri and Russian artist and gallerist, was invited to submit pieces for the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (held in 2011).
[43] Two of her artworks previously approved by the ministry of culture were ordered to be covered and eventually removed from the exhibition a day before the opening, "because of government sensitives towards the nation's status as a secular Muslim country".
In 2012, an image of an 1866 Gustave Courbet painting of the female genitals, entitled "The Origin of the World", being posted on Facebook led to a legal dispute.
"[47] Mark Stern of Slate, who called the painting a stunning, brilliant "cornerstone of the French Realistic movement", states that the teacher then sued the website for allegedly violating his freedom of speech.
[49] A site-specific walk-through vagina was installed at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg in 2013, in the decommissioned women's prison that had held anti-apartheid activists such as Winnie Mandela.
[52][54] Stories accompanying the photos discuss various themes, including ageing, pregnancy, Brazilian waxing, first sexual encounter and poor body image.
Musical artist Usher visited JJ Brine's VECTOR Gallery, and stories on whether he did or did not charge his phone ensured widespread media coverage of Marquise's work.
[59][60][61][62][63][64] In Japan, artist Megumi Igarashi has drawn attention for her work featuring vaginas and vulvas, which she considers "overly hidden" in Japanese culture compared to male genitalia.
[65] While police charged Igarashi for her vulva- and vagina-themed artworks, there are several phallus festivals in Japan in which participants parade with massive penis sculptures, a practice which is deemed acceptable by authorities.
In 2015, Anish Kapoor, a Turner Prize-winning artist, created controversy with his sculpture entitled "Dirty Corner", a "massive steel funnel set in broken stone, placed in the garden of the...Palace of Versailles", which he claims is a depiction of the vagina of the former Queen of France.
One enters the so-called rebirth canal through a vulval soft sculpture (think Judy Chicago on acid) and then proceeds to crawl out of a round washing-machine door suggestive of a rectum.
[77] The Crafts Council credits her with coining the term "retex sculpture" (upcycling textiles),[78] and her self-taught art follows in the feminist tradition of working with fibre.
[83] The Tate holds a work by Luciano Fabro entitled "Ovaries" (1988), depicting carved marble eggs held in a pair of steel cables.
Its 2018 re-creation as a "rotating 43-foot-high neon outline of a uterus with fiberglass boxing gloves in place of ovaries" and installed on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood.
[87] In 2021, Priya Khanchandani, a curator at London's Design Museum, imagined the plethora of vulva art projects as a "re-balancing" with the past century of phallic symbolism in architecture.
