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WITI WOMEN
Here Come the "Brides"
In Brides of Frankenstein, an exhibition on view at the San Jose Museum of Art from July 31, 2005 through October 30, 2005, the fifteen contemporary female artists showcased are the metaphorical mates of Dr. Frankenstein. They use robotics, animatronics, computer animation, video, digital photography, the Internet, computer games, and other digital and electronic media to animate synthetic creatures with virtual life. But as artists they resemble Mary Shelley. Their creatures embody complex responses to the human and aesthetic implications of the technologies that made them.
Their diverse individual works also address the creative potential of our engagement with these technologies, and explore the possibilities for transformation, wonder, and inquiry, and for the new forms of identity, perception, movement, presence, representation, meaning, and expression that they allow. Why are contemporary women artists adopting the animated synthetic creature as a vehicle for artistic expression and investigation? In myth, history, and fiction, it was invariably men who animated synthetic creatures, from Pygmalion and Galatea and the Golem molded out of clay by Rabbi Yehuda Leow in 16th century Prague, to Lara Croft and the replicants in Blade Runner. Often, their creations reflect male fantasies of the "ideal woman" or the femme fatale. The drive to animate synthetic beings, like the impulse to create art, has traditionally been a male preserve, since supposedly men envy women's capacity to conceive and give birth to new human life. That was also supposedly why women didn't need to make art. Besides suggesting that the impulse to create is more universal and pansexual, and that technology can have a female face, this work reflects concerns about the status of the human body and reproduction. Digital technology has radically transformed representations of gender "from the virtual heroines of computer games that have turned [to] flesh and blood on the movie screen, to the digitally enhanced females on magazine covers." 1 The connection between digital and biological means of reproduction is another potent factor. Reproductive technologies such as cloning threaten women's traditional reproductive role, with profound consequences for female and male sexual identities. There are issues of embodiment: how has our use of computers altered our sense of being in our bodies? How quickly are we becoming cyborgs? The works in Brides of Frankenstein are not primarily about technology's bells and whistles, although they exhibit extraordinary facility with digital and electronic media. These artists use technology to investigate what it is doing to and for us, and vice versa: the medium is integral to the message. They make a case for a holistic, empathetic, and poetic understanding of the world; their concerns embrace the ways technology affects perceptions of our relationships with nature, culture, art, each other, and ourselves. These are works of unabashed sensibility: sensuous, exuberant, sometimes disquieting, and frequently funny. They are meant to stir the senses, arouse emotion, and provoke thought, and they do. Here come the Brides! Brides of Frankenstein appears at the San Jose Museum of Art beginning Sunday, July 31, 2005 and running through Sunday, October 30, 2005. For more information, please visit: www.sjumusart.org/Brides.
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Like Shelley's, their works contemplate our relationships - emotional, psychological, physical - with those technologies: how we interact with them and they with us. Like hers, their projects question the unreflective drive to reconfigure nature that motivated Frankenstein, and explore the social, cultural, ecological, and moral issues such activities raise. And like hers, their works view these issues from a distinctly female perspective.