Are Women from Venus? Ladislav Sutnar’s Series as a «Male Graze»

book chapter

English

Ladislav Sutnar was not only a designer who estheticized his erotic desire, but he was also a writer and theoretician with the ambition of a systematic, structured and critical thinking of visual communication. He criticized modernist approaches in visual communication, whose ornamentality obscures the gist, or, having referred to Moholy-Nagy’s Visions in Motion, he made an appeal to designer’s social responsibility . Nevertheless, he could not resist the sexism represented by Venuses. Like Teige to whom Sutnar frequently referred, he failed to grasp that, speaking of the women equality they promoted, the representation matters and the ways that had been dominated by privileged white men have a power to casually influence the transformation to the equal society that must have wished for. Shouldn’t we change the way we handle the cycles: not to turn them into esthetic and estheticized issues and present them – if we should present them at all – like illustrations and evidence of negative phenomena that accompanied the construction of modernity based on patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and heterosexism?

Ladislav Sutnar; Laszló Moholy-Nagy; Karel Teige; Venuses; feminism; feminist theory

JACKSON, L.

26. 4. 2022

Západočeská univerzita v Plzni

Plzeň

978-80-261-1087-3

Shapes: Venus, Discourse, Photography, Drawings Unearthed

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https://www.fdu.zcu.cz/cs/Exhibitions/LadislavSutnarGallery.html