Influences:
Annie Sprinkle is a former prostitute, stripper, porn film star, cable television host, porn magazine editor and writer, and sex film producer. Currently, Sprinkle works as a performance artist and sex educator. Sprinkle is known as the "prostitute and porn star turned sex educator and artist". Her best known theater and performance art piece
is her Public Cervix Announcement, in which she invites the audience to "celebrate the female body" by viewing her cervix with a speculum and flashlight. The first porn star known to have earned a Ph.D., Sprinkle received her Ph.D. in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. Her work, spanning more than three decades, is studied at many universities, in theatre history, women's studies, and film studies courses.
Claude Cahun was a poet, essayist, literary critic, novelist, surrealist, symbolist, translator, comedienne, "constructor and explorer of objects", photographer, revolutionary activist. In many ways, Cahun's life was marked by a sense of role reversal, and her public identity became a commentary upon not only her own, but the public's notions of sexuality, gender, beauty, and logic. Her adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and her androgynous self-portraits display
a revolutionay way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience's understanding of photography as a documentation of reality.
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director known for her conceptual self-portraits. Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, Sherman appeared as B-Film actress. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines.
Andy Warhol, was an American artist who was a central figure in the movement known as Pop art. It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to
make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own hand in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art; his work quickly became very controversial — and popular.
Yoko Ono is an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is "Cut Piece", 1964 as a protest for peace, during which she sat on stage and invited the audience to use scissors to cut off her clothing until she was naked. Ono performed this piece in Tokyo as well as London, garnering drastically different attention. Ono's cultural background and reality as a woman, placed her as submissive, and fully covered. Cutting the clothing away would be an act that destroyed the social protections and in a way, be a rape. In Japan, the
audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security. An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the
reader, for example: "Hide and seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono's career and have formed the basis for her art
exhibitions. Ono was also an experimental filmmaker who gained particular renown for a 1966 film called
simply No. 4, but often referred to as "Bottoms". The film consists of a series of close-ups of human buttocks as the subject walks on a treadmill.
