The brief was two slides and a five minute talk. I actually showed 3 slides, as I wanted to get in the long butted up one. We went straight into the critique afterward, which was ok. There was a good deal of discussion about the piece. I find this useful, and much better than silence as sometimes happens. However it may be that people talk when they think they can improve the piece or that they would do it another way.
Declan’s comment was interesting he thought that the right hand side section felt like a painting and wanted it to slide or spread into the road (like oil paint I guess, maybe like the way Sarah’s paintings dribble and smear. This is odd because to me the line is a demarcation (boundary line) that must divide.
Someone else suggested flipping the right hand side so that the colours matched or maybe blended better, again this is not really what I wanted to happen. I want those straight dividing lines to make a clear (brutal?) statement about what a boundary is.Judith’s comments were that I have to be more analytical in my discussion and thinking about my work, for example “why is the placed object red?” originally it was blue but I re sprayed it, because the blue was to dark – not Yves Klein Void Blue.
I guess the question is did that object need to be red for the purposes of the work? It needed to stand out as ‘alien’ and red (or a really bright blue which I didn’t have) possibly yellow would have done the trick. There is a connection here between something being alien, other and being void, all are things unknown and therefore different, so this was the purpose in making the colour bright, and not green, rather than any specific colour in this work? I think so (somewhat ironically my understanding of the ‘Other’ was clarified by reading Edward Said’ s book ‘Orientalism’, and Franz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ which by discussing colonialism imply difference in skin colour as an example of ‘Otherness’) did reading this book 30 odd years ago affect my decision making process in imagining this piece? Possibly, and if so only tangentially, by helping me to understand how small cultural differences (not especially skin colour) can have a profound effect. However colour in the context of my piece is used to isolate the object from its environment and indicate a sense of alien-ness within the environment. That is a partial analysis, no a reflection, on why the red in this piece is a colour.
The presentation that really interested me was Jodie’s, she didn’t contextualise her video piece well (a problem I usually think I have) and I think that affected the response she got in a negative way.
Her video showed a woman cleaning a flat. It was boring, the sound was loud, and all she did was polish things, and from groom her rabbit. Then she started the vacuum cleaner – it had a name I can’t remember, at that moment I wanted to laugh, the endless interminable repetition of daily domestic boredom in choredom, and the recognised horror of vacuum cleaners (when they are discussed) became funny in a black sense. I’m not sure how it would have affected the men in the room, but I suspect that all the women who don’t have cleaners identified viscerally with the piece.
Housework will not go away, and most women, myself included know that their lives will revolve around cleaning a house. Depressingly it will also mean that when housework is shared the female does an unequally large proportion. It reminded me very much of the TV series ‘The Office’ where the terrible drudgery and day to day stupidity of working life was exposed throughout the country on a weekly basis. Viewers saw themselves on TV after going to work, I saw myself in Jodie’s video, much better to laugh than cry.
The interesting thing was the response in the room somebody defended the amateurish look and sound by saying she was also making slick and glossy images that could maybe contrast with this piece by being shown together. Someone else tried to suggest his way of improving the piece. I felt that there was a real concern throughout the room that this was going to be her final show piece and it looks and sounded like an amateur home video. I felt that it was maybe the only presentation that pushed peoples boundaries to the point of discomfort, hence my nervous desire to laugh. I hope that was her intention.
Said, E. (1985) Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Fanon, F. (1983) The Wretched of the earth. London: Pelican.