Key points on Meyhew's 'The Naked and the Blind' excerpt

• Life drawing as images and life drawing as a practice
• Figurative representations
• Gender and sexuality
• Art images conform to the dominant social modality of figurative representations
• Gender bias, misogyny and violence in the images
• Life drawing as symptoms of a misogynist culture
• The practice of life drawing as a specific set of techniques in order to reduce the representation of women's bodies to empty surfaces upon which meaning can be inscribed
• Assumption that the artists and viewers are male and that all models are female
• Male centre spectatorship
• Collectively performed process of figurative spectatorship and responsive mark making
• Contemporary practice of life drawing often uses the life model as a pretext for executing an internalised ideal or representation of what a naked figure should look like
• Highly contrived set of stylistic conventions
• Academic life drawing
• Controlled mark making
• Copying from classical images and casts
• Copying
• Stylistic conventions
• The history of life drawing classes has been explicitly concerned with training students to generate a figurative representation based on what the knew, rather than what they saw
• The naked model functioned less as a source of visual information, then as a theatrical deice to contain and control the pedagogical theatre of the academy.