Women's Views on News |
- Sports round-up: 22-28 July
- Sturtevant in the Serpentine Gallery
- An interview with Caroline Criado-Perez
| Posted: 29 Jul 2013 03:00 AM PDT
Athletics: Britain's women excelled at the IPC Athletics World Championships this week in Lyon. The undoubted star was Hannah Cockcroft, who completed the sprint double. She took the T34 100m in 17.88 seconds, having secured her first gold earlier in the week in the 200m. In an interview with the BBC she said, “Everyone is expecting me to go out and win each time and that is a challenge but I want to win every race that I can enter.” Also on the track, 16-year old Sophie Hahn won gold in the T38 100m to add to the silver she took earlier in the week in the 200m. Libby Clegg won two silvers in the T12 100m and 200m. Bethany Woodward also took silver in the T37 200m. It was joy for 16 year-old Sophie Kamlish, who won the T44 200m bronze in a personal best time of 28.71 seconds. “The 200m isn’t my favourite event so it’s amazing to have been able to win a medal in it,” she told BBC sport. Fifteen year-old Erin McBride also won bronze in the T13 400m, also with a personal best time. In field events, Hollie Arnold won the F46 javelin on Monday, and Josie Pearson racked up a bronze in the club throw and a gold in the discus F51/52/53 event with a throw of 7.09m. The latter was thrown into doubt when the American team put in an appeal over her equipment. The appeal was upheld, but then overturned when the British team put in a counter-appeal. This meant that Pearson added the World Championships gold to the gold she won at London 2012 last year. Meanwhile, in an atmosphere to rival last year's Olympic Games, some of the top names in athletics appeared this weekend in the Anniversary Games at the Olympic Stadium. One of the most eagerly watched was Jessica Ennis-Hill. She is just returning from injury and looked nervous as she took fourth in the 100m hurdles and eighth in the long jump. There is still some doubt as to whether she will be on the plane to Moscow for next month's World Championships. In better news, Christine Ohuruogu ran a storming 400m in a season's best time of 50 seconds dead. She is in great form looking forward to Moscow. Katarina Johnson-Thompson won the long jump with 6.46m. One of the most impressive displays was from the GB women’s 4 x 100m relay team, comprising Dina Asher-Smith, Ashleigh Nelson, Anyika Onuora and Annabelle Lewis, who won in a time of 42.69 seconds. This was the fastest time recorded by British women's team for 12 years. Perri Shakes-Drayton was edged out in the 400m by Czech athlete Zuzana Hejnova, but her time of 53.67 was a personal best. She too looks in fine form for Moscow. At the Paralympic Anniversary Games on 28 July, Hannah Cockcroft made it three wins in a week, winning the T33/34 100m in a time of 17.80 seconds. Libby Clegg won the T12 100m in 12.19 seconds to go with the two silvers she won earlier in the week at the World Championships. Tennis: Former British number one Anne Keothavong announced her retirement from tennis this week at the age of 29. At her peak she was ranked 48 in the world. She plans to join BT Sport's tennis coverage team later on in the year. During her career she won 20 singles titles on the ITF circuit and eight doubles titles. Her best Grand Slam performance came in 2008, when she reached the third round of the US Open. “I have given my decision a lot of thought and I believe this is the right time to move on to the next stage of my career. “I think I am leaving tennis in excellent shape with both Laura Robson and Heather Watson leading the way for Britain in the women’s game,” she told the BBC. Meanwhile, also this week, British number two Heather Watson has announced she has split with her coach Mauricio Hadad. She will now work with Jeremy Bates during the US hard-court season. Since suffering a bout of glandular fever earlier this year, Watson's ranking has slipped to 78 in the world. Cycling: It was announced this week that a women's Tour of Britain cycle race will be staged in 2014. The race will be over five days and will take place in May. Head of British Cycling Brian Cookson said: “There’s been a lot of attention recently on the need to develop women’s cycling at all levels of the sport. People are passionate about the issue and are rightly frustrated that not enough is being done. “I’m pleased to be able to confirm that there will now be a five-day international stage race for women in Britain in 2014. “The event will be separate from the men’s race, but it will be promoted to a high standard and will, I’m sure, be the first step in having a full equivalent Tour of Britain as it develops.”  |
| Sturtevant in the Serpentine Gallery Posted: 29 Jul 2013 01:09 AM PDT
The Serpentine Gallery is currently presenting Leaps Jumps and Bumps, the first solo exhibition of the work of Elaine Sturtevant to be held in a public institution in the UK. Born in Lakewood, Ohio, in 1930 and based in Paris since the 1990s, Sturtevant has made ground-breaking and enigmatic work since her first exhibitions in New York in the mid-1960s. Best known for the repetition of works by other artists – including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp and Felix Gonzalez-Torres – she made her controversial artistic debut in 1965 when she replicated Andy Warhol’s flower paintings, just months after their initial presentation. She manually reproduced paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original – closely enough to intrigue the viewer and raise the fundamental question, what am I looking at? During the era of Pop-art, Sturtevant made her version of Warhol's flowers, John's Flags, Stella's black and grey paintings and developed this discourse a decade later after moving to Paris, with works based on Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. In the last two decades, Sturtevant has evolved a highly structured and rigorous exploration of current events, using multi-screen video works and installations. Despite early hostility to her work and ideas, her influence has grown significantly over the past two decades. Many now regard her as one of the most important artists of the 21st century, realising that she presaged the world we live in today with its deluge of unattributed information and repeating imagery. Central to her thinking is the relationship between repetition and difference. The works are not ‘copies’ but probe beyond the surface to demonstrate the power of Gilles Deleuze’s and Michel Foucault’s thinking about repetition. She does this through the wholesale re-creation of the work itself, without recourse to mechanical reproduction of any kind. As Sturtevant says, ‘The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place’. Warhol was once asked how he made his work. ‘Ask Elaine [Sturtevant],’ he replied. The intention and force of Sturtevant's work is to trigger thinking. As she has said: 'The Abstract Expressionists were all emotion on the surface, and the Pop Artists were about mass culture, so this of course triggers thinking about the under-structure of art. "What is the power, the silent power, of art? "I started thinking about that and, after a long period of thinking, I realised this would be a way of doing it. "It seems so simple, but I had to probe and reflect that it was correct. It’s always the simplest ideas that are somehow the most difficult to grasp. Since 2000, Sturtevant has embraced film and video, advertising and internet-based images, producing work that reflects the fragmented and pervasive nature of our image-saturated culture. Leaps Jumps and Bumps will showcase Sturtevant’s work since the 1970s, including core works that demonstrate the wide variety of media she has embraced. The exhibition will include the large-scale video work, Finite Infinite, 2010, and a piece comprising garlands of light bulbs, Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America), 2004, an earlier version of which was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 2000 in the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition. Sturtevant participated in the Serpentine’s Manifesto Marathon in 2008, with a piece called 'Dumbing down and Dunkin’ Doughnuts', which claimed that ‘stupidity is our new chic’. Awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Biennale in 2011, Sturtevant has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including at Moderna Museet Stockholm and Kunsthalle Zurich (both 2012), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010) and MMK Frankfurt (2005). Leaps Jumps and Bumps is at the Serpentine Gallery, in Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA, and runs until 26 August.  |
| An interview with Caroline Criado-Perez Posted: 29 Jul 2013 01:00 AM PDT
Caroline Criado-Perez has been a very busy woman lately. Not content with taking on British media with The Women’s Room, a database of female experts available to talk to the media, and mediawatch, as the woman behind the campaign to keep a woman on British banknotes, she took on the might of the Bank of England. That started following an announcement by the bank that it was replacing Elizabeth Fry – the last remaining woman on a British banknote – on the £5 note with Winston Churchill; Criado-Perez felt compelled to act. She started a petition to try to get the bank to re-think its decision, but despite gaining over 35,000 signatures and counting, the bank proved reluctant to engage with the concept of equality. ‘I’m amazed at how hard we have had to fight to get a woman on a bank note,’ says Criado-Perez. ‘It shows how far we have to go, especially with big institutions.’ One of the biggest criticisms of the campaign came from people claiming the issue was a trivial one, that the campaign was making a fuss over nothing. Why bother about a picture on a bank note when there are so many more important things in the world to worry about? But as the petition points out, a sexist culture where women are routinely overlooked, undermined and abused is made up of small issues, and if we want to tackle that culture we can’t ignore the small issues. And Criado-Perez is clear that the amount of ‘fuss’ that was made was purely down to the bank. ‘If the bank had simply engaged with the issue of equality instead of attempting to dismiss it, it wouldn’t have become such a big deal,’ she said. Contrary to the legal advice Criado-Perez received when she consulted lawyers about mounting a legal challenge against the Bank and its actions, the Bank steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the 2010 Equality Act applied to its decision. However, that changed with the appointment of a new governor of the bank, Mark Carney, who replaced Mervyn King; on July 24, the bank confirmed that while Elizabeth Fry would still be replaced, the new £10 note, due for release in 2017, would feature Jane Austen. It is without doubt a victory, but can I be the only one wondering why we couldn’t have kept Fry and got Austen as well? Presumably civilisation would fall if we had two women on currency at the same time. Criado-Perez is clear that the campaign owes its success to the new power of social media. ‘There was a similar campaign in Canada,’ she said, ‘which never took off because the instigator didn’t utilise social media. ‘Big institutions like the Bank of England just don’t ‘get’ social media and don’t realise that you can no longer just dismiss criticism in the way Mervyn King thought he could.’ After a meeting with the bank, Criado-Perez was convinced it would re-assess its decision. ‘Mark Carney arrived in his job when the bank had had three weeks of bad publicity over this. He just wanted to clear the issue off his desk,’ she explained. Criado-Perez has also used social media to great effect in her other role as founder of The Women’s Room, a site that encourages women to sign up as experts in their field to help redress the imbalance of expert representation in the media. Criado-Perez started The Women’s Room in 2012 after the BBC’s Today programme ran segments – two days in a row - on female issues; teenage girls and contraception and breast cancer. Both programmes featured contributions exclusively by men. Responding to the ensuing criticism, the BBC claimed that they had been unable to find female experts – despite their best efforts. Criado-Perez wasn’t buying it. ‘Their best efforts clearly weren’t very good,’ she said. ‘The Women’s Room has so far found nearly 3000 female experts in all kinds of fields.’ She has found, however, that there are issues when it comes to female experts. ‘There are several issues,’ she said. ‘The first being which news stories are thought to be important; that’s a value judgment for a start and you often find that women’s issues aren’t considered newsworthy, so that’s the first thing we need to tackle. ‘The second issue is who the media thinks it needs to speak to. The BBC in particular always has a thing about speaking to the person who is accountable regarding the topic in question. So it will, for example, just want to speak to the particular politician responsible for a political news story, which is fair enough in itself, but it means the public doesn’t learn anything new and it means they tend to speak only to men. ‘It’s much better to also speak to people who have different opinions around an issue so the public get a much bigger picture of what’s going on. And all of those people could be women.’ There is also, she said, a real problem with imposter syndrome for women. ‘It’s very real. The most extreme examples are women who say, “well, I’m a PhD with 10 years’ post-doctoral experience in my field but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.”‘ ‘Women tend to need to be much more certain than men about their knowledge before they’ll speak out as an expert on an issue.’ This tendency is perhaps at least partly explained by what Criado-Perez sees as the final problem. ‘There’s no doubt that there are extra pressures on women when they speak out. ‘Women get criticised much more than men for their opinions and we do sometimes feel we have the weight of our entire gender on our shoulders. A man makes a stupid comment, it’s on him, nobody says all men are stupid, but if a woman does it, all women are stupid.’ But the efforts of The Women’s Room are, Criado-Perez believes, starting to change this culture. ‘Just the fact that people are talking about it helps,’ she said. ‘The BBC now knows people are watching it, so it knows if it presents an all-male panel people will notice.’ And the BBC notices too. When a BBC programme makes it onto ‘Mediawatch’, the section of The Women’s Room site which names and shames specific programmes for gender imbalance, Criado -Perez says she has had BBC personnel contacting her, ‘upset that their programme has made it onto the list.’ The situation, although improving, is still pretty shameful, however. But Criado-Perez is optimistic about the future. ‘It only takes somebody willing to make a change. Sky News use experts from The Women’s Room regularly, because one producer there has decided to address the issue and do something about it. ‘Sky takes a wider view than the BBC, for example by asking female experts to speak about research which has been done by a man, rather than just asking the researcher himself to speak. ‘Now Sky News is doing much better at using female experts, so it can be done.’ Not content with changing the face of British media and – quite literally – the face of national bank notes, Criado-Perez has big dreams for The Women’s Room. One idea, says Criado-Perez, is to take The Women’s Room into schools. ‘I’d really like to start going into schools and talking to young girls about the ways in which the media perpetuates a culture which tells them they’re useless. ‘I have lots of other ideas about how to expand The Women’s Room, all of which, unfortunately, require funding. My time at the minute is spent finding funding streams.’ In the meantime, Criado-Perez still writes for her blog site, ‘Week Woman‘, which started it all. The reason she started writing it was simple enough; ‘I just wanted to change the world,’ she said. It’s fair to say she may well be on her way to doing just that. UPDATE: As a result of Criado-Perez’s success over the bank note issue, she was subjected to rape threats – ”about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours“ - on Twitter which is now facing a major backlash over claims it failed to deal with the threats. Sian at Crooked Rib gives a good account of why it is important to fight such abuse and also points out that it is against the law. A change.org petition has been set up to persuade Twitter to improve its current mechanism for reporting such abuse. The petition – which has over 13000 signatures to date – can be signed here. Let’s hope that Twitter listens.  |
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