Feminism
a breast
To express one’s chest as nude, in various forms, in all its variations, has amused us considerably for many ventures, centuries, and many times, into social elitism and fame.
To develop breast tissue is definitely a competition for many, and in all forms this growth is nonetheless painful often enough.
To assume a gender binary, a cis-trans description given a presence or absence of at least one breast seems ridiculous in a virtual world.
Today we live in societies formulated by all of human knowledge in a handheld device, uncensored, where we may see that the presence and absence of bulbous appendages in the upper thoracic becomes a choice nurtured by personal notions of self-identity.
With generations engendered through some form of arousal, we can always think of the necessity of an amount of tissue that can provide sustenance, at least for a few months after birth.
Yet we have all heard of babies who are born, yet avoid suckling on a boob by either immediate rejection, laziness, or motherly absence.
We don’t actually need breasts to exist as humans in the present.
Yet a lot of us have them, and many of us have them through exogenous hormonal intake or surgical means alone.
Let’s allow ourselves a review that honours the presence of a full chest in every chromosomal variety, as we are fully aware that our human eyes are attracted to the round shapes decorating many bodies, whether their genesis is due to puberty or surgery.
I would like to open this discussion with the curious discovery of the nude chest as presented to us by Egon Schiele in his drawing. While he implies preference to the youth of a colorful nipple, we can observe that careful attention is paid to each of two shapes drawn onto the chest. While not all of his drawings are clearly androgynous, we are certainly aware of the importance of this erogenous appeal in his art. To claim his work as feminizing for the sake of arguing gender binaries renders him vulnerable to his models’ own vulnerability in the flesh. Yet in this fashion we don’t know that he necessarily put on shoes to make art, but we do know that his models tried to keep them on as much as possible through the assortment of his work.
Yet regadless of absolute fashion, the nude series of Mime van Osen (1910) comes to mind, as the portrait of a young man with egregious areolae, where his silhouete is but a reduction of what features he expressed. The immediacy of this drawing rendered illusory by capture of his aural presence through watercolors designs for many a question of sex appeal masked as beauty, where sacred geometrical reflection provides us with the cue we need to decode his place; the isoceles and nearly equilateral triangle on the chest of Erwin Osen with matching rounded ends. In support of this we can re-read the first drawing of this man as the literal squaring of geometric appeal with the side perspective of a strange pose, where his arms create shapes demonstrating utter proportion. We can endlessly argue the pornographic feminisation of the male figure in Schiele’s drawing, but for the sake of an unpatronizing queer agenda, we must abide by the facts of the sacred promulgation of symmetry as a true bastion of today’s reading of art.
We can liken this expression to Mis manos son mi corazón (1991), Gabriel Orozco’s diptych, where his nude chest behind his clasping of clay only shows us his preferred symmetrical expression of the muscle inside his chest. He has expressed in spanish that he wishes that he would walk around with this clay form in front of his chest, speaking with his hands in this way to show his truth, which we can always bring back to the discussion of symmetrical appendages which many choose to add to their bodies to correct their generic bodily form.
In any respect, we must make efforts to speak to post-breasted individuals, humans whose purpose beyond the quality of their chest may render us aware of the precious privilege of voluptuousness. To invest our lives towards chest-worship in the face of discrimination by levels of breastedness goes beyond feminist ideas of art in our lives today.
