2006
2004/2005
2006
Femme fatale
Victoria van Dyke works to put feminity out of being crossed with the lowest.
In July we reported about The "Liturgie of Sex" presented by Gilbert & George in the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Although sex and sexism has already become a nearly horribly frequent topic in our journal, we'll continue it even further and worse. The reason is a quite young artist, Victoria van Dyke, who produces the most extreme art - you may call it punk - to turn up and off the lowest elements of our culture to get female sexuality out of its degration.
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Victoria van Dyke, about 26 now, is herself in a way an established artists who works seriously on her topics and developes them in a lot of numerous series. A lot of her picture plates are arranged in caleidoscopic or serial, selfrepeating forms. Items of cultural consense like national, sexual, religious or cultural symbols are crossed with symbols of extreme perversion like cannibalism, necrophilie, self-mutilation, violence and torture.
Van Dyke is represented by the feminist Art gallery "Lilith" who sell her work. She isn't an autodidact, as the Lilith-gallery article tells us, but visited the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Afterwards she started Ryerson University but dropped out. She is very interesting because of the emphasis her work is done with.
Some facts:
2001 Ms Van Dyke worked with a model and a 35mm Canon camera to create art pieces about cannibalism, censorship and sexuality. The model used in Van Dyke's 2001 works are not images of the artist, but are a model known as Kat.
2004 and 2005 Van Dyke created sketches/cartoonic self-portraits of herself with rats and poetic pieces about cannibalism, death and sexuality.
At this time, she stayed at a mental asylum because, as she told, she had depressions after being raped in her earlier youth. Released, she got depressions again and tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. People managed to rescue her, but she stayed in the asylum again afterwards. Its obviously, like her most redundant poetry shows, a way to repeat schemas of sexual violence and selfviolence like loosing ones head, and her self-mutilations, even if not really intended as fatal, are, especially in the intrusively way how they are acted out, in a way insane. But as professional artist working quite intensively this is a kind of revenge and conversion of the "femme fatale" image of women, too, and in this way a part of her art.
During 2006 Van Dyke started creating digital collages using vintage erotica, old postcards, pornography, photos of guns, flags, etc to create a new series called "Guns, Sex and Jesus".
In 2007 Van Dyke chopped off her little toe, stuck it in a jar and tried to show in an art gallery in downtown Toronto. The gallery in question (which prefers not to be named) refused.
Her "performance" got her into the newspapers. The gallery had not only refused but called the police to let her take into hospital. The police nevertheless refused, because she didn't threathen anybody and hadn't hurt anybody except herself, but even this not in a dangerous way. Taking an overview of her collages, her performance is both disgusting and quite pervers, "low" we would say. But on the other hand nearly everybody knows a now high cultural example for such actions in art with van Gogh and his ear. To cut off a little toe is perhaps even easier to keep it as art in the special context consequent. (One should of course hope that she does not want to die for her art concept at next). Like van Gogh, van Dyke doesn't sell her at objects too well. Also her selfportraits with rats, drawings, were offered to a gallery and refused. The digital collages are even in the Lilith Gallery not especially prepared for the market. But otherwise, in their stylistic and thematic consequence, they might - in huge formats - give a good impression next to Gilbert & Georges huge photographic tableaus. What is, thus, the strategy to get femaleness out of the litter, is the similarity to already accepted, in its subject similar male and high art.
In another way she manages this in her series about religion.
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In these series, the female body and how it is crossed with sexual pleasure in visual culture is used to show, how a "serious" approach religion (to guess this kindly to be possible) is endangered in a culture, that connects the nacked and captivated human body with violability and this in pictorial representations at first if not always with pornography. While the male body at the cross is in a way protected against this view, the female body shows itself to be tortured not by a not any longer existing cross but by its being crossed with an overwhelming sexualization still and historically.
See more pictures http://www.lilithgallery.com/gallery/victoria_vandyke.html
Read more about Victoria van Dyke http://www.lilithgallery.com/gallery/vandyke/Guns_Sex_Jesus.html
Fotos: by the artist
Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
