THE WORST art is feminist art," I once heard a professor say to a group of art students and faculty at school. Those words epitomized a sentiment that I struggled against for years -- in my own work as well as in the academic environment.
It was difficult -- I was intrigued by feminist artists such as Sue Coe and Cindy Sherman, who boldly took on everything from the media's image of femininity to violence against women in our culture.
Secretly, I wanted to address those issues myself. But I was daunted by the knowledge that such art was not popular with many of my professors.
Eventually I found teachers -- sometimes they found me -- who encouraged the expression of feminist views in art and who were happy to help me discover my "take" on feminism. I didn't always avail myself of their help, however. I had come to art school to study the very tradition that feminist art challenges: the ancient tradition of portrait and figure painting in which the painter is "master" and woman represents everything except herself.
I wanted to be the master and the ideal. My early self-portraits reflected that in their emphasis on technique and their idealized renderings. But deep down, I was struggling to see myself through my own eyes, not those of the Old Masters.
My desire for an alternative view of myself showed in my curiosity about feminist art, as well as in the distaste I felt when viewing such works as Edvard Munch's "Vampire," a depiction of a beautiful woman sucking the blood from a man's neck.
"Hey! That's not fair!" I thought to myself. At a time when women were struggling for basic civil rights, this guy was depicting us as monsters.
My more liberated side also showed itself in drawings I did on the sly, exploring alternative images of myself in huge hairdos and goofy, unidealized features. Although I didn't realize it at the time, these images asserted my right to do "girl things" such as decorating just for the sake of decoration -- a right that is one of the tenets of feminist art.
I wanted it all -- I wanted to be an Old Master and a feminist. I wanted to paint idealized images and be that idealized image, too.
For a long time I managed not to confront the reality that those goals were incompatible. I didn't know that my experience repeated a conflict that has always existed among artists, that of tradition versus change.
The problem is difficult because the artist, being a product of her culture, knows that the values of that culture probably will appear in her work. It's like noticing something about your parents you can't stand, being determined to be different from them, yet turning out just like them anyway.
However, it is the elements of both tradition and change that makes art interesting. In the art of the late Middle Ages, for example, you can see that European culture was dominated by the church. But in the increasingly lifelike treatment of the human form you can also see that Europe was rapidly turning away from a preoccupation with religious, otherworldly concerns to a joyful rediscovery of the physical world.
I don't know if the artists of the Proto-Renaissance really cared whether they painted religious imagery or not, but I know that I shiver when I see myself inadvertently re-creating the very images by which I feel oppressed.
It's hard for women artists because so much of tradition clearly is against us. It almost inevitably makes the element of tradition in our art somehow menacing.
In my case, I had to literally tear apart my more traditional works to make room for my own view of myself. One semester, I became so frustrated with my inability to change or comment on those idealized images that I began cutting them up.
The result was a collage -- my first real "piece" -- which finally incorporated my love of decoration, my more human images of myself, my parodies of the ideal and the ideal itself.
This piece reflected, in its crammed composition, my determination to have it all. It contained the ancient conflict of tradition versus change. I realize that I will always struggle with that conflict. I only hope that the more I become aware of how I have internalized the values of this male-dominated society, the more I can control how and when they show up in my work.
Kate Stevens is a graduate of the Maryland Institute, College of Art.