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I had this idea of making a video that skipped through itself. Really, it was a faff with little pay off and this is quite a poor example probably due to the painfully banal source material and very little planning of when it should skip. Ah well. Maybe I'll use this some time. Something most peculiar has happened in the last couple of days. I have actually become sort of quasi enthusiastic. This is most unlike me and I am unsure how to deal with it. I think it has something to do with a number of art references I have been given. I actually feel inspired! Unfortunately, this has coincided with a lack of ideas. It sounds very contradictory, I know. But simply put, I suppose what I mean is that I feel oddly excited by the prospect of video art and what is possible, but totally at a loss with how to use this information! Alongside some of the artist's I talked about earlier, I have also been looking at another couple; Heather Phillipson- whose work I came across a couple of years ago, but whom I recently rediscovered and Steve Reinke who was completely new to me yesterday, but whose oeuvre I have since been working my way through. I think what appeals to me about both of them is their use of the voice, and the way they blend the personal, confessional even with speculation and information regarding the extrinsic and absurd. [inexplicable font change that it won't let me remove] Not only is her voice clear, serene and infinitely listenable, Phillipson combines humour and pathos in a touching, human way. Not satisfied with her video collage essay conglomerates- she constructs environments to control their context which become a hall of mirrors to our already absurd world.I have entertained the idea of doing similar, and branching out into installation but I do find the sheer scale of these works intimidating. I feel if I attempted the same, it would be as low key and ramshackle as I feel I am myself.
Reinke's work, though personal in places, often appears more academic then personal. It is often very self aware and analytical. Sometimes I find myself wondering to what extent comparisons like this are rooted in the spectrum of gender. Many of the women I know write in terms of imagery and emotions, whilst men I know borrow from the language of science and philosophy to explain concepts.... I don't know and I should probably stop generalising like this... but what really appealed to me here (again of course humour and the absurd for which I am apparently a sucker) was the way his videos appear to span sporadic content, linked occasionally by music and a voice over, but more often than not purely through style and formal links. Here was me trying to make everything thematically neat, but this looks much more fun, AND it turns out, you can make lonnnng videos and someone somewhere might not mind sitting through them! I have the sudden desire to set about some more ambitious video essays.. but we shall see Recently, as a means of spurring my practice on a bit, I have been taking a look at artists that use humour and or video. Being a total pessimist at heart, I always find this a bit of a futile task. If the work does not interest me, I'll be left with no ideas. If I like it, I simply wish I'd done it myself and become paranoid about the potential implicit plagiarism of creating anything too similar. 'Still' as an unhelpful theology lecturer once said to me 'we persevere.' Someone I was told to look into was the American artist, Doug Fishbone. His recent intervention 'Made in China' saw the artist collaborating with the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He contacted a Chinese workshop and commissioned an inexpensive replica of an Old Master he found in the Gallery's collection. The imitation was then hung, in place of the original, on the gallery wall and visitors were challenged to spot the fake. 'Made in China' lands somewhere between a joke and institutional critique. Fishbone's work is carried out with a relaxed irony, and the work is not exactly didactic but playfully nudges gallery goers to take up a position of severe scepticism in their encounter with every work. However casual, it is gesture of irreverence, a wry comment on authorship, the canon, connoisseurship and elitism. A lot of Fishbone's work takes on the form of the lecture. 'The World According to Me', and 'Towards a Common Understanding' are both talks that offer artist's personal take on various issues, complimented with presentations of still images. Having worked with this kind of format before, I find it intriguing, particularly the artist's deliberate blurring of opinion and fact. The works read less as art, and more as pseudo academic theory. There is something of the vlog about them, moreover the forced acting of the romcom-esque sketches that accompany 'The World According to me', have a definite ring of the YouTubeian manner. They are seemingly "low" art in their often crass humour and their appeal to popular culture but what this translates into is something accessible (up until the creepy animated porn shots). Fishbone selfconsciously employs his still images, sometimes to seamlessly accompany a literal reading of the text. Sometimes to jar against other images or with his script hence creating new meanings. 'Towards a Common Understanding' becomes, at times, a meditation on apophenia, and Fishbone uses his pictures to deliberately orchestrate his viewer's interpretation. For a few moments, the artist pauses his script to hint at the health and environmental impacts of McDonald's, and the USA's paranoid relationship with the Middle East. He need not say anything. Media images are enough to illustrate a certain viewpoint. Apophenia and juxtaposition are one of the few things I think I find genuinely interesting in art. I am not easily enthused. I found Fishbone's use of these stills reminiscent of some of John Smith's work. (On a side note, it is funny to compare these two bearing stereotypes in mind. Smith's work is a musing. It is subtle, personable and gently witty. Fishbone's seems quintessentially American. He attempts to inhabit a place of authority and his American accent which I already subconsciously associate with mainstream media contributes to a brashness in his work.) Smith's 'Associations' I found to be one of those artworks I discover, and kick myself that it isn't my own! Last year I had planned to write something entirely in dingbats or images. Smith's film has done this with more humour and ingenuity than I could have hoped to muster. It also correlates to a film I have already started; 'condensation' the visuals for which are derived entirely from two different one-player-games of Word Association. Each player started with the word 'Desert' and then of course, their minds went off on one. Smith also plays with the lecture form and with subtitles, for instance in his feverishly analytical 'Shepherd's Delight' which offers insight into the nature of humour. His commentary on a joke is far more human, relatable, it is funnier even than the joke itself. In 'Girl Chewing Gum' the artist narrates over found footage, and through appropriation, makes himself director of the world! I regularly employ found footage myself and find it often dictates my subject matter, dialogue and subtitles or, much like Fishbone's picture presentations, can be used to jerk through juxtaposition. Rachel Maclean's artwork takes a different approach. She choses and appropriates found dialogue, but constructs all the visuals herself, with intimidating production values. MacLean is every actor in her cast, lipsynching to every voice. Her videos are decadent and performance based, a blur of the colourful, consumerist language of the internet with 'high-art' skill and attention to detail. Rococo ClickBait. From this bizarre standpoint, MacLean builds moving collages and is able to provide a critique of politics, popular culture and deconstruct tropes and identity. The absurdity and the truth of it all generates the humour. I have long been of the opinion that there is nothing left to do but rearrange pre-existing things. As Tony Kushner said 'the imagination is finite, terribly terribly' (my quotation here being demonstrative of his accuracy). The use of appropriation in these artist's works is therefore thought-provoking and I like the idea of allowing patterns and external sources to dictate the outcome of a work. This is exactly what Annabel Frearson does in her soundpiece 'I' which uses sampled dialogue from the film 'Frankenstein'. She describes the piece as 'The sonic representation of nine words from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1831), which could be said to sum up the basis of the story, as well as the birth of subjectivity.' Formatting the clips into the shape on an 'I', Frearson allows this shape/quote/symbol of her own subjectivity to structure the sound and thereby the work itself. I have been considering finding a pattern, quote or process to structure my work as an attempt to evade creative block. One idea I have, ''The Indefinite Article' involves drawing a text by quoting lines from books bracketed by two 'the.' I have noticed that my practice always seems to start with a title (hence the puns I suppose). To badly paraphase Sol Le Witt - the title becomes the machine that creates the idea that becomes the machine that creates the art!
I've been having a bit of a dry spell in terms of creativity and I'm frankly getting tired of it. The short term gratification people get from my vapid wordplay really bothers me, but when puns are all I can think of to make- they are all I make. Recently I went to see Styna Nyberg's 'Splendour' and I really enjoyed it- nearly to the point where it bypassed my laughably short attention span. Five dancers, relentlessly making the same strange collection of gestures to the tireless pace of the techno pulse. It was a deadpan revelation. They shuffled past each other, pouting and writhing, scrubbing the floor, shaking their hips, high-fiving the air and conducting the audience until their strange grey get up was near saturated with sweat. The effort and focus that went into it seemed out of place but that simply made it all the more captivating, and all the more funny. I madly wanted to join in (atleast for the first half, after that I just started to feel exhausted on their behalf!) And it made me want to make something a bit more energetic. I have been wanting to veer into performance for a while, and taking part in Sarah Grundy's Opera du Mal only succeeded in furthering this wish. I donned the robes of a saucy nun, and spat acerbic sentiments in an alien tongue, into a crowd of strangers. It was liberating, and just for a moment I forgot myself enough to stop feeling nervous. Maybe it was Eve's carefully crafted costume. Maybe it was being directed. Maybe it was knowing it was someone else's work and that there was no escape into the usual ironical shrugs. Either way, however daft it sounds, for a split second my skin was not quite my own. I am planning things which will hopefully come to fruition for once.
I am one plagued by a nigh on pathological problem with decision making. It is a concern that has featured in some of my work, but more often it is a concern that has prevented me making any.
Whether these anxieties are the product of a sense of the finite, or rather a sense of the infinite I have not quite decided. At this particular moment in time, I would suggest that they rise from the neurotic belief that, in choosing, I am imposing limits on what initially appears an infinite assortment of options. This, coupled with a dread of irreversibility. Needless to say, it's all very deep. I have been experimenting with methods to help me let go of these ludicrous qualms: making myself bolt things down permanently, avoiding decision making altogether, routine, so far all to no avail. AND THEN the other day it struck me! Huzzah, a solution! I do not have to choose one thing, if I am two people. Alter egos are fairly common on the grand boulevards and seedy alleyways of the art world. People opt for pen names all the time to shelter their identities, and some go so far as to do it for fun. Duchamp played at being a woman with a pun for a name, Lucie Schwob similarly fuddled ideas of gender, masquerading as the striking and androgynous Claude Cahun, and Max Ernst spirit rested in some bizarre, primordial bird creature called LopLop (classic Max, always had to be different.) I decided I would start slowly, starting with Tuesdays (cos I've got less on). I shall be a different person on Tuesdays. Hence Ruby Tuesdays. Ruby can make all the art I can't let myself create because of the analytical, critiquing basketcase stomping on my pre-frontal cortex. Ruby can have a theoretically separate cortex. So far, putting this plan into action has not been so clear cut as I had initially hoped. It took me a good couple of weeks to pick the wig alone, (one simply must have a wig to be a new person) and obviously I'm not happy with the one I chose. Furthermore, now I've made the commitment of buying said wig, I'm tearing holes in the whole concept. And what on earth does Ruby Lee Watts even make and call "art"? I suppose we watch this space, on the off chance it moves.... |