Pictures of final set-up minus the actual art work

That's it^^^ right there, the technicians come and set up the AV equipment for you before it gets assessed because there aren't enough monitors etc to go around. Imagine those three monitors on top of here with the sound on and the lips etc and thats what it was. Underneath the tablecloth (which was a sheet) are heaps of different words for vagina. You can barely see them so either have to look closer and find the deeper meaning or just ignore them.

Video Art: Dead or Alive?

Chris, Cynthia. Video Art: Dead or Alive. Afterimage; Nov/Dec 1996, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p4.
ISSN [03007472]

This article proved to be a little bit irrelevant because it was so old although the last one i read was incredible!! This pales in comparison, here's what i did salvage from it;
From what i gather the author thinks that video as a medium peaked in the 1990's and now due to budget cuts and is image as a medium for students and amateurs it is DEAD.
The temptation to cross over from video art to film and earn real money money money drew a lot of artists away from it. Video was seen then (and is now) as lacking in critical legitimacy when compared to film, and almost as a testing ground for artists that want to venture in to film making. Salla Tykka looks to be one of these people (that is a very shallow statement) but she draws on film history using a score reminiscent of Hitchcock, and her films have a kind of narrative, they are constructed and not performances with some sort of narrative.(note on her website 'the F wrod' haha) Her works Zoo and Cave are one of the very few video pieces that i actually sat down and watched, that along with the current exhibition of Yinka Shonibare. I was pissed off to find that his video looped after watching it for ages, i never did see the whole thing :( Video with narrative does not work as well as a reversed loop i feel. I find that if a video work is part of an installation i am less likely to watch it and more likely to give it as much attention as i would a painting. For this reason i decided to show my video works by themselves and not as part of a wider installation.
"Video, it has been noted, is a field in which it is harder than usual to make money"-Martha Rositer, 'Video, sharing the utopian moment'. No shit.
The article then goes on to state that few artists are 'able' to turn their work into something commercial. This lady is missing the point... In the early 90's it was TV culture, that has been replaced by net culture. Net culture is awesome. Anybody can make a video, most people in NZ own or have access to something that can capture footage. That doesn't make video redundant as a medium with this sudden influx of accidental snapshots and film that look good made by aunty Di and Granny Cush.

Hair ideas from ages ago...

Thought i better put these up and discuss them a little bit. I really didn't know what to do with the hair, after bathing in it, eating it, making balls, photographing it, drawing with it, i'm out of ideas. When i arranged them like this i liked that you could see each individually formed ball. The linear format suggested time which i liked because it showed the process of collecting the hair each day. I thought about putting each ball with other items and objects i had cast off that day such as make up removing pads, dirty clothes etc. This would be a lot like Tracey Emin's 1999 work 'My bed' in the way that it would use things just 'as they were' as such just taken ot of context. THis would not convey the message i would like though, i want people to look at the work and be fascinated and drawn to the aestheitc of it as well as feeling uncomfortable and repulsed.Some of them are quite beautiful and sculptural, the way the hair curves and is so three dimensional. It also looks beautiful just stuck to the wall of the shower, very art nouveau with the curves, dark lines and organic shapes. The above image is like some sort of mythical bird or fairy i heart it.

Real Bodies: Video in the 1990's

tele- distance

Real Bodies: Video in the 1990's
Art History [0141-6790] Lajer- Burcharth, Ewa. Year 1997 volume 20 pages 185-213
Fantastic article i read online in the database, 29 pages long so i skimmed it but wish i could have read the whole thing!

Gary HillI believe it is an image in light of the other (1991-1992)

Video work using images of text and the male body, rotating as if to imitate the turning of pages which can be heard through the audio with the installation. Hill 'defamiliarizes' the body, uses the screen as a mirror. Ok. i took down notes too quickly and now i have no idea what context they were in. Lajer-Burchart mentions Lacan a lot, firstly his idea of " The Real", experiencing ones bod as a remnant or loss, incompleteness of the self under the gaze.
The monitor is a ubiquitous object that structures our experiences and reality of ourselves- how true is this for the majority of the population?

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.- Bill hicks

Inasmuch it is always taking place 1990

'You constantly see and thus imagine yourself and the world as a screen image'-pg 190 Lajer- Burcharth, Ewa

This work features sixteen caseless monitors, why didn't i think of that? Each shows a fragment of his body; foot, torso, chest, back, diddle. By saying diddle did i make it awkward...? These images together create a whole but fragmented body, intimate close ups of skin that barely seem to move creates abstract shapes and textures. In the article his work is described as 'anti- television', it does not tell a story, has no narrative, (it loops) and destructs the television as an object, taking it out of its original frame and letting the artists skin become the screen.

You relocate trust and knowledge of your body to the image on the screen. An example that comes to mind is looking fat in a photo, you're going to believe what the image tells you. Rather than looking down at your physical body you judge yourself based on images of it in photographs and videos because you believe that this is what other people see. By YOU i mean humans collectively and not necessarily everyone or even the person reading this. We think that technology knows us better than we know ourselves, and we put our trust in it. Scales to weigh yourself, personality tests online, the women onscreen having ideal bodies, faces, hair. wan.

Mona HatoumCorps etranger 1994

This work is my favourite of Hatoum's, it consists of a cylindrical viewing booth with circular projections on the floor of endoscopic views of the inside and outside of her body. Being projected from above you have the option of walking around the image or through it, becoming the screen yourself. She has recorded the sound of her heartbeat and breathing which plays inside the installation. The Real Bodies article describes the work as a sexual threat, vulgar, disturbing and distasteful (awesome :)) The images projected move between interior and exterior views and are all unfamiliar views of the body that are usually excluded from images of the self. These views of the body have been made visually intolerable by dominant cultural representation of the body. We are use to seeing images such as the ones i have made, 'pretty', sexual, feminine. The viewing booth is like when you go to a sex shop and pay $10 to go and have a beat while watching porn. eeew. This is so unlike porn even though it is images of the artists vagina and anus among other things. The extremely close up microscopic views are like medical images so you don't get those erotic connotations of sex, penetration etc.

My work definitely has those sexual connotations. The video of the lips (Edit 1) it very sensual, the dribbling slightly removes it from being purely sexual, making it clumsier and dirty. Mastication of the self is very different to this, more violent, dirtier in a literal sense, more feelings of abjection, disgust. It feels like the lips are now in control, they are still the same lips but have shown that they are not purely a sexual object. The hair being consumed is of the same body as the lips. Both hair and lips are fetishized, revered, beautiful, feminine. This is all subverted when the female is consuming itself. Apart from the fact that nobody would be willing to eat hair for an art project, it is important that the lips belong to me, that it was my idea to 'endure' this act and I'm doing it to myself without (direct) pressure from someone else.
Red Porn is my favourite as i feel it can stand on its own as a video work. It combines the previous two videos in the way that it is still sexual but the more you watch it the more you are repulsed by it. It is something you want to look at but in the same tone feel that you shouldn't be viewing. The image of the lips first came about when trying to imitate screen siren posters with their seductive smiles and inviting pouts. Stills from my footage could be mistaken as a still from a Hollywood film.

Imagined resolutions- photoshop

I put a still of my footage in here, it doesn't look any different to a close up in a movie. As a still image this does nothing! Maybe i should have photoshopped one from the trichophagia clip with the hair in the mouth. I was thinking about putting the video in a more casual setting rather than a gallery situation. I think it could be cool to have it playing on a tiny TV hidden somewhere like in the corner of my desk in this computer room, just hanging out... not trying to be too art and more contented with being a video. Just as a note I like this a crotch-height, i think that would make me feel a bit weird and apprehensive about going near it.
I went in to some businesses on Queen street and left letters with them explaining my artwork and asking if it were possible that i play it on the televisions they have in store. Glassons has a block of nine case-less screens on the wall that build one large image, and Bond and Bond have an arrangement similar to the one shown above. So far they haven't got back to me saying yay or neigh neigh but fingers crossed! I would like to have it playing in there with customers around but i doubt this would be allowed. I would sneakily put it in there and play it but that is a little bit activist and would interfere with the feeling of the work.
On a big screen projected in the dark...Again it is hard to judge the effect because this is not a moving image. It looks a lot like a cinema in the dark an i think it would need to have some sort of sound with it to fully engage the viewer. I want to get away from a cinematic presentation because this work simply does not compare to a film, it is video for a reason! It is quite confrontational in this setting, you can't get away from it and I don't want it to be like that, i want to leave space for the viewer to imagine things. I found a good post on video art that provoked a lot of discussion, read it here. I have posted the lips videos on youtube, i think this is quite a good setting for them. I labeled the close up one of the lips sideways "Red Porn", not particularly imaginative but I had just watched some Green Porn. I would like to think that people would search porn and get my video as a result and find that all it is is lips. It is quite sexual in a sense but it isn't close to porn at all.
Here is a list of 'related videos' that come up when you watch mine on youtube...
Horny Lesbians having lesbo sex lesbian playtime
Free Big Booty Porn
Masturbating
Girl Fuck Porn
Lego Counterstrike...?
you get the picture.
After thinking about presenting the televisions on top of fabric or something i thought i could wrap the TV's in red sequined fabric. I made this in photoshop using a pic of a tv and a pic of the magical fabric. For me this particular fabric connotes to-be-looked-at-i-cant-help-it-but-its-hideous-ness. I want a red sequin TV. I want three.

VIDEO ART

Does it hold anybody's attention? Why do people crowd to watch it at galleries and just walk past paintings? The blog post i mentioned earlier was titled "A Painting is worth a thousand moving images". It takes more time to watch a video, if you don't like a painting you can walk past it, whereas with moving image you want to find out what happens next, humans are very inquisitive. I explored this in an artwork last year that seemed to be just Bars and Tone (that particular version omits the tone for some reason), the tone plays and people would stand there staring at these bars of colour expecting a film to start. The bars and tone just looped continuously. This familiarity with television and film is what drives us to watch it even in a gallery setting. TV is a lazy way of getting information essentially, it's fed to you while you sit there and all you have to do is stare at its carefully calculated stimulating visual images. I have a problem with playing my work on plain televisions because they are just too familiar, they're ugly and they are no longer just screens they are TV.

Final installation

I played around a little bit with the arrangement of the monitors, there's not a hell of a lot you can do but it is surprising what difference little adjustments can make to the overall feeling of the work. I would really have loved the Close up video to be played on a larger screen, or projected onto a wall BUT the lighting conditions in the studios do not allow for that. I could put it somewhere with less light but that wouldn't suit either... darkness and that image =seedy yuck.
A huge screen would be great, i looked into hiring one but it didn't quote any prices, i was thinking of getting one of those hanging screens that they use for advertising, it somehow projects from the rear of the screen.. i don't know :(
I've decided to leave the sound of the water running playing with my monitors, mainly to drown out the humming noise made by the crusty broken TV sets. I wish i had a screen with no edges, it looks great played on a mac but i would hate to have that shitty apple logo glaring at people
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which means covering the framing of the monitors with something. THEN you would need a flat surface or some sort of casing surrounding them and it all gets a bit complicated. I have had video works inside little boxes before and it didn't make a huge difference to how they looked it was just a lame formality that i felt i should use.
I really wanted to incorporate the hair i have been collecting into my final work but it doesn't seem to quite fit. I like having the hairballs arranged in a linear format in individual bunches. This could work if the TV monitors were also in a grid like formation but i would rather have them slightly facing each other so that they envelop the viewer.