Gender specific objects and review of own gender specific work

A gender specific object is an object which was designed specifically for a certain gender with a lot of different things taken into consideration such as the colour, over all shape of the object, and details. generally objects designed solely for women are more curvy and detailed, whereas for men it is more practical. This is due to the fact that for hundreds of years men are considered the dominant species and want to show power and that they are capable of getting a lot done, whereas stereo typically women are thought to be more about appearance, vanity and beauty and impressed by trivial features such as feminine names and soft designs. Examples of this can be seen with razors.

 

This is a typical razor designed for a female. Pink is seen as a typical female colour and the packaging is curved, showing innocence. The name Venus is named after a goddess which was the significance of beauty so targets women who believe that this will make them more physically appealing than other products.



Whereas in comparison, the razors targeted towards men are completely aesthetically different. This razor is named Fusion Pro-Glide which is a much more technical name that suggests it works much efficiently than others and is more advanced than female products. The colour is a meetallic blue and black which are stereo typically seen as much more masculine colours than the female product which is pink. As well as this the box shape is more square, angular and sharp which implies more aggression and testosterone fueled than that of a soft and curvy looking package. Finally the text on the product says 'POWER' in bold capital letters which have nothing in particular to do with the overall product but adds to the appeal for a man because of their inbuilt alpha male hormones that want to be strong and powerful.

Another example of a gender specific object is deodorant body sprays, as they both are advertised in different ways. Primarily masculine sprays are designed to make girls view the male in a sexual and many way, whereas with women it is to be seen in a more romantic and innocent way.Examples can be seen below.


Lynx is one of the leading brands in deodorant for men due primarily to different advertising methods amongst different medias, on their adverts they use humour to over sexualise men after using the product and due to the humour audiences share the videos and talk about it on social networking sites so knowledge about the products get around fast, and because of the males in the advertisements being seen as very sexual it makes the buyers of the product believe that it could be them in that situation. The overall style of the product is very masculine due to claw marks which suggest ruggedness and relates to barbaric times when men were at their most masculine and strong. The black colour and overall shape gives a kind of go faster stripe that makes it seem more advanced than the generic cylindrical shape of a normal spray bottle also, and even the metallic colours used in text give a steel and masculine impression of danger.



Completely different than the masculine deodorant is the females, the first major difference is the shape of the product, being cylindrical with very little angles and mainly curved it sticks to the overall design that it was designed to be aesthetic rather than technical and efficient. The image on the deodorant canister is of a flower which is associated with beauty and femininity, and being pink sticks to the colour scheme which is thought of for women, and the text saying very pink adds to that.



This piece of art work is by a online artist who takes commisions by people over facebook and uses paint to recreate humorous suggestions made by fans, this piece is of Brian Blessed punching a polar bear, and is extremely masculine due to bears being considered ferocious and Brian Blessed is reknowned for a lot of his masculine achievements including being a black belt in karate, a huge booming voice, bushy beard and a lot of life achievements.

Give examples of how cold war affected art and design

Art and design is always changed during wars, but during the cold war which was set between 1945 and 1991 there had been an explosion of new waves of different genres of art, and since art is influenced by war and politics in a huge amount of art work, the cold war affected those decades.

Different countries held different types of competitions to prove to others that they had a more cultural and artistic community, but through the variety of different arts certain countries excelled more at specific points than others. Such as Americans kick started abstract expressionism and were the forerunners in this categories with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willim De Kooning, as well as much more.

Jackson Pollock- Mural

Willim De Kooning- Attic

Pop art is an art movement that occurred during the 1950's and was a new wave of art that was different from older genres because it included populer cultures such as comic book styles, collages from magazines and a lot of politcal satire involved within the significance of the art. Two of the huge names in pop art was Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Andy Warhol- Eight Elvis'

Roy Lichtenstein- Hopeless

neo expressionism- Jean Michel Basquiat, Frank Holliday

Neo-expressionism was developed in the 1970's as a rebellion against conceptual and minimal art and its style was unique due to artists showing a lot of raw emotion in their work by using their art materials extremely roughly and giving a lot of movement and atmosphere to their art work. This genres work was generally based around human body's.

Frank Holliday- Clown

Jean Michel Basquiat- Profit I

How is nudity used in art in different ways

One artist who uses nudity in their work is Jenny Saville, and the way in which she uses nudity is by using herself as a model and laying her body over glass in somewhat unaesthetically pleasing positions and folds and stretches her skin around, allowing everything to be visible over glass. The significance behind her art was to challenge society, and how the majority see a females body to have to be beautiful and shame in not having one, and Saville's work is a proverbial mockery to that belief by confidently making herself look ugly.







Another photographer whom involves nudity is Joel Peter Witkin, but unlike Saville however he uses nudity in a complete different way, he photographs models whom have physical impairments naked with a unique background, generally in a Gothic Victorian atmosphere. Witkins has claimed the reason he does this is because he finds beauty to be from uniqueness and difference, and that he got bored at seeing the same generic styled models being used to represent beauty when he had a difference of opinion that he wanted to express.







Man Ray is a photographer whom unlike Witkins or Saville, uses nudity in his photography to represent natural beauty rather than a signification for an opinion, one of his most famous pieces a model whom is naked with her back facing the camera and violin shaped marks are drawn onto her back, this together with her hour glass figure curves shows the beauty and simplicity of a human body, by comparing it to that of an musical instrument which is considered harmonious to listen too.Man Ray's other naked photography pieces are using the human body, not for their details or meanings as such, but more the overall shape of the outlines and the idea of un-tampered natural beauty to be positioned over his photograph, almost in an abstract style.

Collect examples of how digital affects the way that we might work and operate on art, find before and after.

One difference in digital work over time is the likes of photoshop, which a few years ago artists never had to use to edit their work, meaning that the majority of their work was done manually and in one shot, involving a lot of sly camera editing and movement to hide how they achieved different affects, an example of this was a photograph by Brian Duffy in 1978 whom was challenged in making an anti smoking campaign without using a model in the image, so decided on using a birdcage and shadow to signify that smoking is a trap that is hard to get out of.

When you compare this to a modernised anti-smoking campaign poster you can see a huge difference.

This piece of work was done by an uncredited photographer for an anti smoking campaign called 'Kill a cigarette and save a life. Yours'. and straight away you can see the difference that there isn't the need for metaphors like in the first example by Duffy because with the aid of new technologies such as photo shop, it allows producers to create virtually anything they need out of nothing, and in this example it is making a gun out of smoke. So does this mean that with a new digital age, less talent and technicality will be needed for up and coming artists? A lot of the last few artistry turner prize winners were won by digital videos so is this replacing traditional means and skills?