Angle 16° Marte Aas - Sitters
2016
Marte Aas is the founder of Multipress, the publisher of the Angle series. In Sitters she shows a series of portraits of Norwegian artists – most of them naked or more or less undressed. They have assumed their postures after trying them out in collaboration with Aas – in the artists’ studios, in exhibition spaces or other art-specific contexts. In two of them we see artists in action at the Vigeland Museum – heroic and monumental representations of the human body resonate in the background. In other places the naked artist’s body is more indirectly present, reflected in a picture surface or represented by a hand grasping a sculpture.
Here the naked artist becomes both practitioner and subject. The classic nude appears throughout the history of art and conventionally expresses timeless ideals. At the same time no representation of body and sex is neutral. The voyeuristic gaze has consistently contributed to the objectification of the female body, typically in artistic representations by males. When the artists themselves, most of them women, make themselves available here to the gaze of the viewer, a friction arises between the viewer and the viewed – both positions exert a reciprocal defining power. The artists’ vocabulary – fine-tuned by definition – of visual codes and aesthetic expressions is exploited in a self-presentation where creator, model and muse coincide. Visual power and naked vulnerability become two sides of the same coin.
Here the naked artist becomes both practitioner and subject. The classic nude appears throughout the history of art and conventionally expresses timeless ideals. At the same time no representation of body and sex is neutral. The voyeuristic gaze has consistently contributed to the objectification of the female body, typically in artistic representations by males. When the artists themselves, most of them women, make themselves available here to the gaze of the viewer, a friction arises between the viewer and the viewed – both positions exert a reciprocal defining power. The artists’ vocabulary – fine-tuned by definition – of visual codes and aesthetic expressions is exploited in a self-presentation where creator, model and muse coincide. Visual power and naked vulnerability become two sides of the same coin.
