The odour of my work is distinctively female
Let me introduce the french artist Florence-Marceau-Lafleur:
Florence answers to twelve questions about her work in the FEMALE GAZE
Florence Marceau-Lafleur, Paris, 1988
lives and works in Haarlem, the Netherlands
1. What does the Female Gaze mean to you?
There are two responses that come to mind when I read your question. One of them is the counterpart of the ‚male gaze’, that is, an objectifying way of looking at women that deprives them of any agency. In this way, I understand the female gaze as a way of looking at women as peers/equals. The other response is more personal. I have noticed that many women, in particular fellow artists, have a specific relationship with touch and vision, as if they could touch with their eyes. I remember several conversations with women in which we evoked a form of scopophilia that would not stem from the distancing between the self and the other but from the perceived union of both. Endowing viewing with the same reciprocity as touch seems quite female-specific to me. But it is also a way to look beyond women/men relations and to build a relation to the world that also involves things and our own ‚thingness‘ within it.
2. Who influenced you and your artistic work?
Of course other artists, such as Femmy Otten, Thierry de Cordier, Tacita Dean, Rebecca Horn, Juul Kraijer, Martin Assig, and many nameless artists. Writers like Hervé Guibert, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras, Catherine Millet, Francis Ponge. Researchers like Vinciane Despret, Jack Hartnell, or Philippe Descola. Often I am interested in people exploring non-modern relationships between body and world.
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To read the whole interview and the German translation – follow this link...
Female Gaze 