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.

Cindy Sherman. lol. roflmao. lmao. lame.

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The Gaze

"If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall it's leaves? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze" Lacan, J. Four Fundamental Concepts.

It is not conscious descision or will that creates these 'paintings' but something internal/ (physics? laws, hard determinism). The painting is still a reaction to something

I have been reading this book
Bracha L. Ettinger. The Matrixial Gaze. Feminist Arts and Histories Network, Leeds UK, 1995.

It is a little off the topic but i find it so interesting!! I really need to get back in to reading Lacan and Merleau Ponty I forgot how much it made me think and how awesome it is. Feminist literature gives me the shits (can you say that in Auckland?) in other words it scares me. I wonder who the feminist writings are directed at??? moi. moi moi moi.
We look at the Gzae and we are longing for it, desiring to be looked at by it but it is always hidden from us (insert comparison with double slit experiment here). For Lacan every object or absent object is a phallic object, symbolic of the castration process. This was also true for the 'object a' of the Gaze as well.

"You can never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see"-Lacan
I see myself seeing... I have had such horrible dreams lately, one in which my skin was rotting on my face, peeling off like when you drop acid on paint and it bubbles and decays. I also dreamed about zach but he was dead but glowing green and white and I felt so privileged to have seen him. Hmmm,


Just a note, obviously my sentences are lacking in structure and have no grammar and trail off or never finish or pop up in the middle of things BUT this is just a working space for me, not something highly polished :)

Anne Noble

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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

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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.

Valie Export

Confronting Voyeurs with a body that returns the Gaze
Aktionshose : Genitalpanik 1969- Performed at a Cinema in Munich
Wearing crotchless pants and weilding a machine gun, wouldn't you be stoked if this creature stormed in to the middle of your porno?

Tapp und Taskino 1968
The curtain rises for your hands, welcoming your touch rather than your gaze. Private show people, 30seconds each and when times up I'll just start staring at you... A bit awkward, being a public place and boob groping is going on. Export just looks at her watch while the action takes place, waiting for it to be over. It makes me think of peoples stories of sex, tired of it and wanting the other person to hurry up... Breaking taboos, sexual acts in public places.
To me the box seems like a child's version of a cinema, children can create anything out of a box. It is quite informal, crafty in its use of materials.

150 words concept/ areas of interest

I want to explore the relationship between humans and animals in terms of skin and other things produced by the body that can be fetishised and commoditized. I will explore ways in which you can adorn your body and ways you can use your body for adornment. I am interested in the permanence of acts performed on the body, cutting hair, tattoos, skinning animals, shearing them etc. The way we are repulsed by images of human bodies at times, bare skin, hair is fascinating yet to wear the skin of another being is normal and not something we can relate to. I will look at Abject art and feminism and artists that deal with this such as Kiki Smith and Cindy Sherman. Lacan's theories of the Gaze and Maurice Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception will be some things i look at theoretically.