Carving: A Traditional Sculpture

I'm thinking about Eleanor Antin's work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture as I think about my unfortunate wedding dress situation (thanks, Esteem Dry Cleaners of Pasadena!) and in general the cultural pressure on brides to look perfecto. The following is from Wikipedia; I think, write, and edit art stuff all day long and so am consequently too lazy at the moment to write something about it myself. I got to know Antin's work when I helped edit the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution catalogue for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2009, and I think she's pretty cool.  Description after the jump.

In 1971, Antin also created a video piece titled Representational Painting where she recorded herself applying makeup to find a satisfactory representation of herself with which to face the world. This is one of her first works that addresses society’s pressure on women to adhere to the constantly changing definitions of beauty and fashion. This idea was expanded upon in a photographic, conceptual artwork titled CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture that Antin completed in 1972. CARVING consists of a grid installation of 144 black-and-white photographs Antin took of her naked body depicting her weight loss over a 36-day period of dieting. Antin’s body becomes a sculptural work in progress documented through daily photographs from front, back and side views. The crux of this artwork lies in its physical manifestation of the sociological pressures put on females in modern Western society. Antin was inspired by how physical standards for women are continuously designed and re-designed according to trends, icons, fashions, and perceptions exuded in popular culture. Her method of carving her own body was a play on the hand of the sculptor, most often a male sculptor, in carving out the ideal physical dimensions and shape of the female form in classical art and putting that representation on a pedestal. Antin drew parallels between the hand of the male sculptor and the patriarchal hand of modern popular culture through their mutual ability to carve and define the standards of female beauty. These ideas provide a further meditation on the female as art object whose value is subject to the active gaze of the male viewer.