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.

California Grunion

^^^That is my green Porno name. Sounds like i like it rough with a but of grunting and onions. If you don't know what Green Porn is you're missing out BIG time! So strange and so amusing. Isabella Rossellini is one mental bitch.
I love the informal approach she has taken, how humorous it is, her crazy voice and her matter-of-fact way of thrusting and penetrating as if she has always been a praying mantis with a praying mantis penis.
Thats all i have to say until i fully get my head around it. Watch the whale one it is awesome.

Hannah Hoch

1889-1978
bisexual.. anti war (supplies!), Hannah was the only woman in the in crowd when it came to DADA. May have something to do with sleeping with someone else but thats beside the point, that ended badly with her liking women instead. DOn't screw the crew. Whoever made up that saying is crap at rhyming its like don't pick your nose or do not push this button.
her collages feature women's bodies and ancient artefacts. She sourced pictures from magazines targeted at women and through her work showed awareness of the difference between women in the media and women in reality. Not so hard to make that correlation these days... Look at PSD's i effing love that website! makes me feel a lot better about myself, my photoshop skills, my intelligence AND my appearance.
The work on the left is titled 'Marlene' and was made in 1930. The legs in the air on top of the plinth replace what looks to have bee a phallic column of some sort. There are lips in the top right hand corner oooh lips i use lips newwwssflash relevant relevant. I love the simplicity of her montages, using just a few different images so each has weighted meaning and is carefully considered. I like these much more than the ones that look like a toy box full of random shit, my life looks like that I don't want my art to!

thinking about cutting and pasting and snipper snapping

Ava Seymour
Madame Postiche 2005

colour photographic print
275 x 225mm

Saw some of her works at a gallery, which one exactly i have no idea but they made an impression on me. I found them highLARIOUS because of the subject matter, location and the way she had put it together. That describes nothing really does it... i just like the mismatched heads and how retarded (so shoot me) they look, LOVE the boobie heads!!

The images she made in 1993, Blood and Guts in Deutschland using black and white cut outs with the only colour coming from pictures of meat and entrails are my favourites. Probably because of the subject matter, they're just so funny though! See them all here on Micheal Lett's website.

Ava Seymour
Who Done It 1993

digital photographic print
1000 x 1460mm

Elements of her work that i want to use to develop my own
stuff
well, the black and white images with only little pieces of colour work well. I like that her collages use very few images and that the images are all carefully considered. By juxtaposing certain images she an make something sexual out of something that is not sexual at all, or something grotesque from something mundane. IMAGINATION.
They seem to be fun and informal, maybe this is because of the collage medium, crafty and all that. I don't know... don't judge me. The remind me so much of Nancy Burson's craniofacial photographs. I think it is just the use of images of deformed people. Both artists have entirely different intents, Burson's is to make the people beautiful whereas Seymour is just being playful. This shows how much effect juxtaposing images with other images has on our reading of the work. State the obvious amanda. I dont like Seymours use of images of disabled people. You can achieve the same effects by cutting and pasting dfferent limbs together to make the body look distorted. Using a disability as a point of interest, fascination is not something I think very highly of. It falls in to the same category as walnut and marmite sandwiches. Growth stunting, horrible tasting, life ruining, bad memoriesdontwanttotalkaboutitanymoregoaway. Here are some words used to describe them, found on these pages
ARTSPACE "retards, cripples and amputees."
PHYSICS ROOM- "creatures"...to much to type just click the link,
I can see why her work is controversial!!!
speaking of disabilities and taking the piss out of minorities, those cadbury comedy billboards taking the piss out of dyslexics weren't funny. None of their ad campaigns were. For fucks sake. Take the piss out of the children you use to get your cocoa now theres something hilarious.

Cindy Sherman. lol. roflmao. lmao. lame.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Anne Noble

43

Anne Noble- Ruby's room 1998-2007
more on ruby's room series here, i HIGHLY recommend looking through all of the pictures to get a better sense of what she is talking about, the significance of time and why the images could be considered sexual.

"Anne Noble has long been acknowledged as a major figure in the evolution of photography in New Zealand, and today she is regarded as one of our most significant mid-career artists....
In a time when so much photography seems conspicuously posed or an artful emulation of the casual snapshot, the dignity, quietude and measured pace of Noble's photographs is strangely arresting and almost always profoundly moving."
Priscilla Pitts, Director, Dunedin Public Art Gallery source

33

27

Ruby's room 23

Confronting and provocative, innocence of childhood, experiencing things through the mouth. The reaction of the adult viewer... when so many children have been exploited, exhibitions closed for their seemingly sexual content involving children. What is she trying to say? Is it perverse? Is it art? Art school has art written on the side of it now :P
Noble captures her subjects over time; maternal observation. Looking through the series the photos do somehow become more sexual over time. I think the use of lipstick and fishnets has a huge part to play in that, and the tongue ties up with rubber bands from braces is almost a fetish portrait. Her daughter looks around 2 at the beginning of the series (i have no idea really i don't know how big babies are..), so now she must be in her teens. How wrong. wrong wrong wrong its not cute anymore its pornographic. so confused with why people think things are porno or pedo and what not. These pictures aren't exactly adhering to any beauty ideal and nor is the subject, not that beauty equates to art. faaark.

Catharine Hodson @ dpag

I'm taking a wild stab and guessing that this is the one that made sophie gag.

Touching the unthinkable
The artist was recently successfully treated for breast cancer. As part of her research into this disease and its clinical treatment Hodson built up a rich body of information that included recording other women's experiences and that of friends, family and medical professionals.
I'm unsure about many details surrounding this work but i can tell you how it makes me feel!
The hair in a bowl, well. its just like a trip to the hairdresser, it is not as successful as the hairballs which are far more grotesque in the way they have been deliberately crafted. More of the artists hand is shown in the hairball necklace, its not every day you see one of those... whereas taking the cut hair out of context and just putting it in a bowl is just... well it reminds me of an urn i would sleep in if i had been cremated.

vito hannibal acconci

Shelley Jackson

[AUTHOR]

TALKS WITH

Vito Acconci

[POET/ARTIST/ARCHITECT]

SJ: You’d long since left the page by this time, but in your piece Trademark you turn yourself into a printing press. You’re biting yourself, you smear the bites with ink, printer’s ink, specifically, and then you print them on—what?

VA: Anything. I could print them on a piece of paper, I could print them on the wall, I could print them on another person’s body…

SJ: So you were the writer, you were the printing press, you were also the page…

VA: Was I the page? I bit myself, but I didn’t make a bite print on myself. I used the bite to print something else.

SJ: I thought of the bite as itself a print on the page of your body.

VA: It’s a print, but it’s not a distributable print. It’s not a distributable print until the printer’s ink is applied. This was pre-Gutenberg Bible!

SJ: When I first heard about this project I didn’t realize you made prints. I thought you were just biting yourself and making marks that way—and the mouth is the place of speech, or language—so I thought of this project as the most self-referential writing loop, like you had taken your early interest in making writing refer only to itself about as far as it could go. But at the same time—

VA: At the same time there was this urge to publish! It’s like I wanted this ultimate privacy to then publish itself, then be public.

SJ: You said once that the bite mark was like a wound, but a wound that you wanted to infect other people with. That’s a strong metaphor for writing. A complicated one, because there’s this self-inflicted violence, or maybe it’s sexual, you can’t really tell… Maybe it’s hungry!

VA: Or maybe it’s very, very lonely, and there’s nothing else to do… An oral fixation seems to be operating in that piece. It’s not that you want to touch a part of your body, you want to ingest it.

SJ: You’ve said that at the time you thought of these activities as coolly systematic, but that looking back they seem pretty psychologically motivated.

VA: It was an art time in which psychological terms had been kind of abolished, so I don’t think I knew how to think that way. I was thinking I was doing a version of minimal art, except for the fact that I was using my body. But that “except for the fact that you’re using your body” makes a big difference! I remember I did a performance at the end of 1970, and also in the performance was Kathy Dillon, the person I was living with then, and Dennis Oppenheim—we were close friends then. I’m naked from the waist up. Kathy puts on very heavy lipstick and covers the front of my body with like a million kisses. Then I go over to Dennis, who’s standing at the wall, facing the wall, also naked from the waist up, and I rub the front of my body onto his back, so transferring Kathy’s kisses to him. And I remember Dennis afterward saying, “I had no idea the work was going in this direction!” We thought this was about color transfer. Wasn’t about color transfer.

SJ: It was another printing press! But a very sexy one.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,;;;;;;;;;;;222222222222222222''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

I never thought about the implicatipons of making prints with the hair or something from your body, turning a one off work into a commodity of sorts. As Acconci mentioned making the private public. I like the impermanence of the bite mark but at the same time it comes accross as a form of self harm.

High rise 1980- so cool, huge crude red penis soaring into the air.

Mona Hatoum

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this ibject quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creatres could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I likt to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journies through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me wether that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.

DAY I

First day at Elam.
New school, new people, new lecturers, new cafe that burns my soy milk. Coolies.
Project one requires that we create two works of art by next monday to present in our space (if you can call thirteen people in a room space). A smaller space brings about a new set of confinements and implications to work with so can be quite exciting. Lots of room for interaction within the room, high ceilings, grey floors that are almost the right colour to project on to. I think i will use this short project as a social experiment to get an idea of people's feelings and reactions towards the materials I plan to experiment with.
I want to explore skin, people's skin, animal skin, leather, fur, shedding skin and hair-waste, reactions to all of these materials and how they are revered/ repulsive. I am interested in how we use leather so carelessly without really a thought to where it has come from, yet we are so precious when it comes to our own skin, not wanting to burn or scar it, wanting perfection.
Tattoos and scarification do not fit the beauty norm as plastic sugery does even though sugery is far more extreme, body mods such as piercings and large tattoos are considered more extreme. WELL theyre not.
I want to use materials from humans, and my first thought was to use some of my hair. Combing my fingers through my hair a lot of it falls out. It's gross unless it's still attached to your scalp, nobody likes stray hairs! It reminds me a lot of Mona Hatoum's works, she uses both internal and external elements involving human hair and images and recordings of her internal organs.