Kali Ivancevic

Words Kali Ivancevic

Who am I?

I am a gift from God

But I am sin

I look like an angel

But I behave like a whore

I am beauty

But I am wicked

I am kind

But I am stupid

I am graceful

But I am weak

I am loved

But as temptation

I am cherished

But for my flesh

I am young

But I will age

I am pretty

But I am vain

I am pure

But I am evil

I am my mother

But I am my father

Who am I?

The inspiration for this piece came from three self-portraits:

Without context, this is about female suffering. ‘Who am I?’, the title of this piece reveals that it is my name. I am creating a version of myself in artistic forms to deconstruct. This is a narrative about my ‘self’, where the central conflict is that the self is split.

The framing of the poem implies the subject is a woman, even though gender is never mentioned, because the diction being used to describe the subject is culturally associated with women. This is a woman describing herself as she’s come to know herself, through the male perspective. My intention with this poem was to convey clichés associated with female forms, in art, in a way that reads both uncomfortably personal and deliberately vague. The reveal that the poem’s title is Kali Ivancevic, reframes the meaning of the narrative; this is a woman speaking about herself, but that self is broken. By viewing art through a male perspective, I have been trained to see female selves, and by extension, my own self, as an object. I deconstruct this objectified self. I break it and re-examine it, re-draw it, and feel unsatisfied with the result.

Art has rendered female bodies a universal landscape—a narrative tool, a framing device, which serves to progress a male story. A female body is a vehicle for male meaning. It is not an independent entity. Even when I frame my own experience in art, I feel removed from myself. Kali Ivancevic is a stranger to me, just as the framing of women in art feels familiar yet untrue. There is no ‘neutral’ third party to present the facts of who I am, rather, I am constructing a ‘subjective picture of reality’ to frame myself in these different ways to reflect the complicated female experience (Ryan 1991, p. 54). My eagerness to do so is a symptom of said experience, for male examination of female bodies makes it so women examine themselves through the same lens, which was not created with women in mind.

By using a created artistic form to examine my relationship with myself, I reframe myself with creative license; I render my ‘selves’ fictional, blurring the distinction between what I consider true and untrue (Mulligan & Habel 2011, p. 81). Even if I am speaking about myself, I am doing so in an invented ‘pseudo-reality’ which is defined by a male perspective (Mulligan & Habel 2011, p. 82). When a woman views herself in art ‘she expresses her own attitude to herself’ which differs from how a man views himself, as he sees ‘what he is capable of doing to you or for you’ (Berger 1972, p. 46). The male presence illustrates the power he exercises over others, while the female viewer cannot exert this control over her image because her ‘space’ within the world is limited (Berger 1972, p. 46). A woman is always ‘accompanied by her own image of herself’; women are ‘taught and persuaded’ to survey themselves continually (Berger 1972, p. 46). This close examination of self helps the identity of a woman become ‘how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men’; a woman’s ‘sense of being in herself’, her identity, is replaced by the desire to be ‘appreciated as herself, by another’ (Berger 1972, p. 46). By focusing on my own experience, I have not created an objective space to frame my story, instead, I have used my identity in different forms as a vehicle, to reflect the meta experience of women viewing themselves in art through what is traditionally male framing (Mulligan & Habel 2011, p. 84). Women learn to ‘interiorise’ themselves; this treatment of herself by herself constitutes a woman’s ‘presence’ (Berger 1972, p. 46-47). In art, a woman seldom creates action for her own sake, as everything she does is ‘read as an indication of how she would like to be treated’ (Berger 1972, p. 46-47). Berger (1972, p. 47) states:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

The traditional framing of women in art deliberately picked aspects of stereotyped femininity (e.g. vanity, sensuality, purity, innocence, seduction) and framed this as a ‘perceived reality’ of what a woman was, therefore promoting a particular definition, a ‘casual interpretation’ and a ‘moral evaluation’ of femininity which was not created with the woman in mind (Franklin et al. 2005, p. 108). Berger (1972, p. 51) explains:

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of a woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

Kali Ivancevic is an examination of myself through different self-portraits. The framing is pitting myself against myself. The conflict is one of identity, but what is being challenged is my learned male spectatorship of myself (Berger 1972, p. 64). Through this analysis, Kali Ivancevic has been rendered a construction to be examined with a new framing in mind. I am not speaking about myself, but rather about the ‘self’ art has taught me to see myself as. As women, we are constantly questioning the position we hold in the world because how we have been framed in art and media has forced us to question it. To not question this framing would be self-destructive, for this framing does not have our wellbeing or agency in mind. Media and art literacy are tools that only raise questions. There is no simple reaction when coming to terms with how the world has defined you. The most we can do is continue to question the ways we have been taught to look, both at others and at ourselves.