Interesting stuff. Really like to read your longer response to the original post Ardyer! Galadrin, yes art is art, and we're free to discus it. I don't think I'm interested in moral absolutes, and certainly have no intention condemning art, rather reading it in context. Area23 I'd love to see your nudes. PM me if you'd be so kind (if not, no worries!) - there is perhaps something there about the atmosphere of gloom and the psychology of skinny. AranaszarSzuur - good observations, the media-image / mental-health issue is a huge one.
Meanwhile some further ruminations...
I was utterly sick of seeing brilliant artists producing painting after painting of near-naked fantasy females with chests the size of airships… I was receiving letters on a weekly basis, complaining about what people saw as exploitation of the female form.
The juxtaposition of 'sick' and 'chest' in Blanches statement seems to invite a reading in terms of Freudian symbolism around the Oral stage of psychosexual development. The small, often monstrous, alien breast that appears in Blanches work time and time again suggesting a form of under-nourishment, leads to sadism. Or perhaps it just signifies infantile lactose intolerance.
What Blanche seems to by saying by his criticism, says is that this female form:
Kate Moss - the
but not this female form:
Chistina Hendricks
are suitable for fantasy art.
Another model for dissecting the female form is that of "The Triple Goddess", an idea found in Goddess Feminism, the neopagan religion of Wicca and certain fictional and critical responses to that. This is an abstracted, symbolic, model of feminine spiritual identity, loosely based on ancient greek mythology and dreamed up by a man (Robert Graves, in his The White Goddess) and so naturally problematic, as all theoretical models are, because of its fundamental reductionism, however it can have some use as a way of thinking about female identity and critical uses as an abstract model.
The 3 forms, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone.
The Maiden is a young woman, adolescent, headstrong.
The Mother is an adult woman, fertility, nurturing.
The Crone is an aged woman, wisdom and old age, and renewal.
Maiden, Mother & Crone, by Maxine Miller
My criticism of the Triple Goddess to the depictions of the female forms concept goes something like this: Kate Moss, my poster-woman for the Maiden a skinny, high breasted woman, and has remained so through her life, and is, physically, a mother. Christina Hendricks my poster-woman of the Mother, with a curvaceous form that echoes that of a neolithic fertility goddess, says she wants no children, and so shall remain a maiden. The equation of moral, intellectual, spiritual and psychological values with 'stages' of a womans life or physical shape is absurd.
So why am I using a critical model that I think is absurd? Well, for a start life is absurd, and because it is just a model, a baseline from which we can discuss difference and deviation from that model. The models use is not that in itself it is a great 'truth' (as far as I can see, it isn't), but in the light it sheds on other things and the network of texts it can enmesh a subject in. In this case the Triple Goddess immediately and clearly highlights what is absent.
Blanche returns time and again to the image of a thin, small and high breasted female figure - The Maiden. The wide 'child bearing' hips or enlarged 'milk producing' breasts that are biologically associated with a mature, fertile female figure is entirely absent from Blanches depictions. The Venus of Willendorf has no place in his field of reference. We can admit, also, that the figure of the crone seems in absentia, but then she generally is in western culture, except when demonised as an old hag.
We could, at a stretch consider many of Blanches figures as containing both the Maiden and the Crone, as they take on much of the 'monstrous' visual nature of the aged - liver-spots, but the crone herself, the wise-woman associated with death and renewal is absent. But the pretty-young thing welded to death-concepts, threads her own archetypal thread through culture be it Neil Gaiman's Death, or H R Gigers Li or the Norse goddess Hel.
So putting aside possible oral-fixative or lactose intolerant fears of larger breasts. What is it that would make Kate Moss suitable, and not Christina Hendricks appropriate models for females in fantasy art?
One answer may be the Maiden as Huntress - she is free of child-rearing, maternal duties unlike the Mother, although we can think of pairings such as Ogami and Diagoro, Big Daddy and Hit Girl, or even Batman and Robin - paternal figures taking the children under their care into danger, the arena of death and the way of the warrior - it is rare for a mother to take on such an adventuring role. Boudica, for example, is a spirit of vengeance, whose power stems not from themselves, but in righting the wrongs perpetrated upon them, they seem not 'heroic', but ultimately tragic. The idea of a heroic mother striding forth with her warrior-children seems almost unthinkable by society.
The Tyrant Cindy Crawford
Guinevere van Seenus of the Avant Garde
Another reason could be the revolutionary punk (grunge) attitude of
Heroin Chic, the rejection of the image of over-clean, over-healthy, ideal as being the dominant image of beauty. German fashion designer Jil Sander, when questioned about 'Heroin Chic' (the tabloid mutant offspring superskinny and drug culture, not an actual thing) said in 96 'There is a generational change. We want to dress women in a way so they feel modern. I don't want them to look retro or 80's luxe -- I'm totally against it. It's too easy."
It may be that Blanche had a similar feeling, that the 80s airbrushed glamour, along with the the 70s airbrushed fantasy (epitomised by the likes of Boris Vallejo, and perhaps, as Blanche mentions White Dwarf covers, Christos Achilleos, had simply become too tyrannical. The images too oppressive, too normalised, too dull and banal, and that alternate forms of femininity - and especially 'fantasy-heroic' femininity presented a way forward. After all, bodies come in al shapes and sizes, why not mirror this diversity in art? If the healthy-breeding-stock of the glamourised Mother Goddess is out, the Crone is never an acceptable option, perhaps the Maiden with her slim hips and potential energy provided that alternative.
The 'problem' comes that all images in their time become the tools of tyranny. The mainstreaming of the waif in the 90's produced a generation blighted by eating disorders, the supermodels of the 80's drove people en-mass into therapy, surgery and the insanity of legwarmers. It is the idea that beauty itself has value - its endless repetition, cultural stagnation and oppression of human diversity that comes with it. The beauty-ideals themselves are destroyed and renewed like the cycle of the seasons, from the budding Goddess of Spring to the voluptuous Goddess of Summer, to the harridan Goddess of Winter and round again upon the next cycle, each new seasons unattainable ideal as tyrannical as the last.
Marilyn Diptych, Warhol.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell 1984
Oral-fixation, lactose intolerance, androgeny, Neopagan archetypes, german minimalist fashion designers, Warhol as Orwellian nightmare, drug addicts, no wonder Wolf off of Gladiators looks confused.
(
Barbarian, videogame 1987, Maria Whittaker and Wolf, off of Gladiators)
Femme Militant (Ratspyke? anyone know the provenance of this image?) via Goblinfunk 
.
