Or art that is anatomically female-centric/uses the vagina. Is it me or the second you hear “feminist” in art the mind reels to images of a woman smearing Barbies with menstrual blood and talking about that time a man on a train touched them when they were eight? When did the legitimacy of feminism become so questionable in the art world and dismissed as irrelevant? What does Marina have to say about this? That sounds like something to put on a t-shirt and sell at Lilith Fair: The New Millennium. Actually I do respond to “women’s art” rather positively even though I have this simultaneous aversion of addressing it by this limited scope.

There is a quite few menstrual blood artists: Petra Paul, Vanessa Tiegs, May Ling Su, and Lani Beloso, to name a few. They all definitely straddle this issue of being irrelevant and cheesy in their desire to use their menstrual blood as a medium; the jaded art world is just not havin’ it. But what makes their art less valid for exploring the female cycle not just as a part of “suffering” or daily life but the use of the material as a tool as well as the fear culture surrounding it in popular culture.



Petra Paul


Vanessa Tiegs


Lani Beloso

May Ling Su is one of the more recognized of the bunch since her scope is not limited to menstrual blood but also the pornographic depiction of women. However menstrual blood could be seen as natural paint or a textural version of the black and white photograph. The shock value is definitely low on the conceptual art end of the spectrum but hasn’t been fully explored for what it can do as an aesthetic medium (Vanessa Tiegs somewhat works with this in her blood watercolors but the depth of subject is a bit lacking besides the overall image). Lani Beloso has this “my pain is my art” approach to her Jackson Pollack-eqsue paintings with menstrual blood, which to her credit she has various methods of applying the blood, but it’s difficult to sympathize (she has menorrhagia, causing longer and more painful periods) for a biological issue that many women are afflicted with and have become desensitized to.

The issue that should be further explored is the overall snideness and inability to explore the nitty gritty (no pun intended, I swear) of a natural function of the body when in the art world we can accept Chris Ofili’s elephant dung paintings as genius or Gilbert & George for their photographs using the words and images of bodily fluids. What makes menstrual blood wrong and taboo? Being affiliated with women specifically turns it into this “my pain is worse that your pain” but also this aggressively female presence that is often looked down upon as not being art that can be openly viewed by a general audience. This is pretty contradictory, considering how far art has separated from the general public into the fetishization of making art for other artists. I hate to make a misogynistic argument to this, but I’m more concerned that the fantastical view of the female body makes it difficult for art that combats this to exist. Yes there is the trite factor, the womyn’s-studies-from-Smith-College attitude that makes us uneasy, but the inability to be vulnerable to bodily approach is becoming detrimental in the art world that is headed in a pop culture banality direction.

Now the image of the vagina. Metaphors, human existence, blah blah blah. The crafty etsy generation hasn’t helped remove the kitsch value of the vagina because I am just not the type who would wear a self-portrait of my labia medallion to the post office. The vagina is used on t-shirts, pillows, weird dresses, the commodity of the vagina has created an overstimulation (no pun) of the iconography of the vagina, if only one could copywrite the vagina, they’d be Steve Jobs loaded (Bill Gates is just bigger than the vagina, sorry ladies). But my question is more how can the dick still be funny and relevant but the clit is this gross, passé cavern? It’s a similar issue to how art about heterosexual relationships exists as a supposedly objective point of view but the same plotline in a homosexual context suddenly becomes “niche” art that is only catering to a specific audience. Part of this is the inevitable minority argument, though still strange since women have become the overwhelming majority in the United States, but the fringe culture (Jesus, it’s weird jokes all over the place) of the vagina is of common acceptance as that.

Basically, debate this among yourselves. I keep having to put “it’s not a joke guys!!!” in parenthesis because innuendo is just too damn easy.