Sexuality as the Female Power:

Ghada Amers Artistic Battle against Woman Stereotypes

Hoa Nguyen

AHI382 PII Contemporary Art

Hilary Toothe

4/7/2015
 Throughout the history of art as well as the history of the humankind, women have

struggled to gain equal acceptance and power from a male dominated society. Female artists

around the world have made deliberate attempts to voice their opinions and change the way

women are portrayed in art. One of the contemporary artists that have made feminism a focus of

their works is Ghada Amer. Born in Cairo, Egypt in 19631, lived and went to art school in

France, and now resides in Brooklyn, New York, Amer has made herself known internationally

with an impressive body of work that includes paintings, drawings, embroidery, sculpture, and

installations. Especially with her elaborated embroidered paintings, Ghada Amer has challenged

the traditional female representation in art in both her unusual techniques and sexual-explicit

subject matters.

Growing up in a modern and progressive Islamic household, Amer and her sisters were

encouraged to pursue higher education instead of being content with their traditional domestic

roles. In 1984, Amer enrolled in a BFA/MFA program in the Ecole Pilote Internationale dArt et

de Recherche in Nice despite her parents hesitance. This art school, also known as Villa Arson,

was helpful to Amers artistic development, but it was a difficult environment for female artists.

In this school, art education was catered exclusively to men, and the activity of painting was

considered a male activity. Despite of those obstacles, Amer still took inspiration from artists of

the day to paint, such as Diane Arbus, Edgar Degas, Kasimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, Joseph

Beuys and David Salle2. As a woman and an artist, she was conceptualizing ways of creating a

formal language while relating to history after having been denied to participate in the academic

tradition of painting.

11. Amer, Ghada. "Biography." Ghama Amer. Accessed April 7, 2015.

http://www.ghadaamer.com.
22. Reilly, Ghada Amer, 11.
 Amer started visiting Egypt annually after her parents moved back from France, and

witnessed the huge sociopolitical and religious backlash of the 1980s that visibly regress women

from their civil rights and liberties, including the control of their bodies. During one of those

trips in 1988, Amer experienced a breakthrough moment that would shape her artistic practice in

the following years. While walking along a market street in Cairo one day, Amer came across a

edition of a womens fashion magazine, in which the models were wearing veiled outfits that

combined the Western look with the Muslim tradition. Amer was struck by the combination, and

began to work obsessively with the sewing patterns included in the magazines, which resulted in

several paintings in a photo-realist style. It was during this experimental period that Amer

realized that sewing could function as an expressive medium for art. Around 1990, she began to

replace her pencil with needle and thread3. To Amer, embroidery was a representation of the

femininity with its fragility and delicacy, while painting was invented by men and has been used

exclusively by them for centuries. Putting them both together was her way of replacing the

traditional artistic medium with a traditional womens medium to make sure that the

representation was coming from a female point of view. Another female-male combination that

Amer frequently uses is adhering delicate assemblages of sewing to plywood and other

construction materials. This is her artistic response to a male-dominant art world, her attempt of

balancing the feminine and masculine, the negative and the positive, the tradition and the

nontraditional.

Ghada Amer is heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionist movement, which can be

seen in her more recent works from the late 1990s. According to Oguibe, Amers engagement

with late modernism is an intense preoccupation between the safety of disavowal the ease

with which the artist could ignore his ideological and stylist bygoners and the headiness of

33. Ibid., 13.

surrender to it4. Amer loves the rustic and earthy feeling the masculine of the movement, but

has problems with the notions of the limits of feminine ventures during that period. Ultimately,

this play of ambivalence resulted in Amer muddling the borders between figuration and Abstract

Expressionism with her narrative artwork, especially in her threaded drips technique as a

feminine counterpart of Jackson Pollocks drip painting. Letting the thread spill from the images

is her rational choice to create rhythm and visual affinities with Abstract Expressionisms swaths

of color and gestural lines. Throughout the 1990s, Amer produced a series of artworks

mimicking colors and compositional structure of famous paintings from other iconic modernist

masters such as Josef Albers, Frank Stella, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Morris Louis5.

For examples, The Grid (1996) quotes from Alberss series Homage to the Square, while Big

Drip (1999) united the colorful, waterfall-like drips of Morris Louis, and Black Stripes (200)

quotes Franz Klines gestural painting techniques. To Amer, the act of infusing the iconic styles

of the big boys of abstract painting with female imagery and female process (embroidery) is not

only an artistic challenge but an attempt to occupy a territory that has been historically denied to

female artists6.

In addition to using the inspirations from Abstract Expressionism as a way to challenge

the male dominance aspect of the movement, Amer also made loud statements for feminism in

the subjects of her work. In the beginning, she focused on depicting the female stereotypes and

gender roles that have existed for hundreds of year in our society. Women in her 1980s paintings

dutifully doing their ordinary household chores: cleaning the house, ironing the laundry, sewing

the clothes, In her 1992 series Happily Ever After, Amer used classic Disney princesses such

as Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Belle, to show how female stereotypes are

44. Oguibe, "Love and Desire," 69.

55. Reilly, Ghada Amer, 27.
66. Asfour, "Ghada Amers Art Is a Triumph of Conflict and Contradiction," n.p.
being portrayed to children at a young age. Happily Ever After was created to show people how

the image of a womans role and the idea of happiness had been falsely presented in the

media. According to Guralnik in his article Love Has No End: Ghada Amer7, the portrayal of

these idealized princesses are filled with irony and melancholy about the false promises of

happiness that was to follow domesticated ideals of femininity." What happens after the end of

these fairy tales? A similar idea is addressed in Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie (1995-

2000), a sculpture in which the over-commercialized romantic duo is presented as two straight

jackets hanging side by side on a wall. The declarative title suggests the absolute of an eternal

love, and Amer emphasizes this by embroidering the title obsessively over the entire surface of

each straightjacket8. The sculpture raises plenty of questions: Does that love exist in reality? Is

that eternal love a liberation or an endless prison? Does Barbie love Ken or must she love Ken?

Although her early works until the early 1990s portrayed women in stereotyped domestic

situations, Amer became well known for her controversial themes of sexual pleasures and the use

of pornographic imagery. Getting the insiders view of both Western and Islamic cultures

throughout her life, Amer battles against the conservative religious values of her native Egypt,

but rejects the old Anglo-American feminist attitude that women should behave like men and

despite make-up, miniskirts and seduction.9 In both cultures, especially in Egypt, sex is still a

taboo that people avoid discussing, and female sexuality is not encouraged.

The representative work that introduces Ghada Amers main themes of her whole artistic

career is Private Rooms (1998). Installed at the Greater New York Exhibition P.S.1, this sculpture

is made up of fifteen satin garment bags suspended from a rod stretched between two walls.

Dyed in different rich saturated colors, these bags shimmer with reflected light against the white

77. Guralnik, "Love Has No End," 103.

88. Reilly, Ghada Amer, 19.
99. Auricchio, "Works in Translation, 36.
walls, and across the surface of each bag are embroidered texts about Islamic attitude toward

women. The texts, translated to French, include every sentence about women in the Quran, the

sacred book of Islam. Throughout the texts, some references to women are loving, others are

violent and oppressive. As a collection, they expose the multiplicity of attitudes towards women

from the religious book, written specifically for men10. The divine guidance contains instructions

for men about how to treat women in specific situations, such as marriage, polygamy, dowries,

servitude, and slave of war. The woman in the Quran is therefore an Other, an inferior to men.

Other text-based works such as Encyclopedia of Pleasure (2001), an Arabic text from the twelfth

century that explores the terrain of Muslim female sexuality, consists of fifty-four cubic boxes

that are covered in explicit passages about sexual pleasures.

The theme of sexual pleasures is not only demonstrated in words but also in imagery

throughout Amers body of work. In fact, the majority of her embroidery artworks contains

provocative visuals that she takes out from erotica magazines. In the early 1990s, Amer realized

that the images of domestically suppressed women and fairy tale characters, as innovative as

they were, still could not connect to every woman. She was looking for a subject that would

contrast more radically with the embroidery, yet communicate with all women, and she made a

radical content shift to porn. Amer looks for images in adult magazines of women who are

posing erotically and/or are involved in explicit pornographic acts such as masturbating or in

lesbian contexts. She then traces the images onto vellum paper with pencil for future use, when

she eventually transfers them onto canvas and starts stitching the imagery with colorful threads11.

Amers figures are mostly high-heeled, garter belt-wearing, dildo-wielding, self-pleasuring

subjects with long hair, parted, pouty lips, and big heavy-lidded eyes.12 Despite displaying the

1010. Reilly, Ghada Amer, 36.

1111.Ibid.,21.
1212.Ibid.,22.
typical stereotype of mens sexual fantasies, the sensual images never show signs of

victimization or inferiority but they seem to reclaim a sense of strength and sexuality. Porn,

traditionally made by and for men, is transformed with Amers embroidery work. By freeing the

imagery from the objectifying context of pornographic magazines, Amer liberates those women

from the submission of the male gaze and puts them into an all-female space, giving them

control over their own sexuality. According to Oguibe in his article Love and Desire, with this

new theme, Amer was trying to define herself as an artist outside the confines of contemporary,

fundamentalist cultural stipulation or socially coded limitations.13

By taking explicit images of women straight from porn magazines, Amer attempts to

give the power of femininity back to women. The act of masturbation displaying in the imagery

is no longer to satisfy the male viewers but a deliberate act of sexual pleasure for women, and the

females in those erotica are no longer objects of males sexual fantasies but individuals who are

taking control of their bodies, their desires, and their pleasures. Combining the content with the

techniques that Amer uses to produce her embroidered paintings, each piece became a statement

of feminism. In Red Diagonales (2000), a 72 by 72-inch acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on

canvas piece, Amer painted the top half of the canvas with blunt strokes of bright oranges

bordered by two dripping patches of black paint, in a manner that specifically reminds you of

Clyfford Stills color field paintings. In the bottom half, pornographic images of women are

embroidered diagonally across the canvas. The loose threads align and blend in with the streams

of dripping paint, blurring the line between figurative and abstraction, making the images less

about objectification and more about sexual pleasure. In a smaller piece created in the same year,

Gray Lisa, broadly brushed strokes of gray paint are interrupted by drips and splotches of white

and black thread, evoking the handling and color of Jackson Pollocks Number 1 (Lavender

1313.Oguibe,"LoveandDesire,"72.
Mist)14 while subtly showcasing the provocative female images that fill up the whole canvas. In

the majority of Amers paintings, these explicit figures are subtly hidden and blended into the

colorful threads around them. The viewers have to come close to the paintings and look through

the curtain of chaotic lines to see the subjects, as if they are entering a private moment of the

women in those paintings. These women, being in charged of their sexuality, do not easily submit

it to the gaze. Their sexual pleasures, after all, are still private moments for themselves, not a

pornographic showcase.

Through her work, Ghada Amer encourages women to use their bodies as a vehicle of

pleasure and instruments of power, allying herself with a brand of gender politics often referred

as Third Wave Feminism or Post-Feminism. This movement, whose purpose is to reclaim the

sexuality of the female body for female pleasure, has gained more and more attention in gender

criticism in the last twenty years. While the first two waves of feminism believe that the

discussion and display of women sexuality in public are inappropriate because of the fear that

men would then objectify them, post-feminism believes that the society should embrace and

normalize female sexuality and the female body. The displaying of the human body in public,

whether the person is male or female, is not about objectification but instead giving the public

the opportunity to admire, appreciate and respect it.

Throughout her impressive body of work, whether in dialogue with fairy tales characters,

pornography, or the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, Ghada Amer has successful challenged

the stereotypical image of the domestic-oriented, submissive, objectified female with powerful

and confident woman figures who are comfortable with and in charge of their sexuality. With her

unusual techniques and approach to art, Amer has also proven that female artists have the talents

to succeed, and the rights to be recognized in the male-dominated world of art.

1414. Auricchio, "Works in Translation, 34.

 Bibliographies

Amer, Ghada. "Biography." Ghama Amer. Accessed April 7, 2015. http://www.ghadaamer.com.

Asfour, Nana. "Ghada Amers Art Is a Triumph of Conflict and Contradiction." The National.
August 5, 2008. Accessed April 7, 2015. http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/ghada-
amer-s-art-is-a-triumph-of-con-ict-and-contradiction#full.

Auricchio, Laura. "Works in Translation: Ghada Amers Hybrid Pleasures." Art Journal 60, no. 4
(2001): 26-37. Accessed April 3, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778195.

Guralnik, Orna. "Love Has No End: Ghada Amer." Studies in Gender and Sexuality 11, no. 2
(2010): 101-10. Accessed April 7, 2015.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15240651003666490.

Martinez, Rosa. On Love, New Feminism and Power: A Conversation between Ghada Amer
and Rosa Martinez at the Beginning of the Third Millennium. IEMed, 2001.

Oguibe, Olu. "Love and Desire." Third Text 15, no. 55 (2001): 63-74. Accessed April 3, 2015.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528820108576915.

Reilly, Maura, and Ghada Amer. "Writing the Body: The Art of Ghada Amer." In Ghada Amer, 6-
49. New York, New York: Gregory R. Miller & :, 2010.