It’s Easter break, I can’t do anything in the photography rooms so I’m using this time to work on my PDP which is the written side of my course.
Also I’ve started my job with census and some part time work in a bar so i could do with not trecking into uni. It feels a bit like limbo. I’m not due to attend class until 10th May and then hand in is 17th. Luckily I have my mentor who will help me to keep everything on track. So far so good – I’m on schedule.
Utilitarianism versus Moral Imperative.
I’ve been looking over some notes from tutorials today and at the end of January when I had a meeting with the head of course he wrote Utilitarianism versus Moral Imperative on my notes.
We’d been speaking about creating a cyclical work that was made to be destroyed and remade and destroyed in a continuous cycle. This was also at the time when he suggested I watched Funny Games by Michael Haenke. According to the director the reason for making this film was to make a moralistic comment about the influence of media violence on society. For example whilst Peter and paul torture the family they turn to the camera and wink at you. You suddenly feel guilty for gleaning pleasure from the scenes of violence you are witnessing.
Of course it’s just a film and we can enjoy being scared and disturbed because we know it’s not really happening. The problem is that we will build up a tolerance to violent images so that it takes more and more to affect us.
Recently Sky news were ridiculed for their portrayal of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. They’d added a soundtrack which was not at all dissimilar to a Hollywood action thriller. If we see reality as if it were a movies does this then mean that on some level we are entertained by the suffering of others?
This reminds me of what Luc Boltanski was saying about suffering in the conversation between his brother Christian and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Refereeing to a guy seeing people being massacred or dying of hunger on TV ‘the person watching certainly has ways to act; through speech, by speaking to others and engaging them in his emotions’ And so he shouldn’t be seen as inactive or perverse because he saw these images. So why did Haenke make the film? To get the message you have to witness the violence and become aware of yourself as a viewer of violence for pleasure.
Back to Utilitarianism and Moral Imperative. Just to think about that in terms of the materiality of paper.
Utilitarianism
The means should justify the end
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Paper manufacturing did cause a number of skilled people to be replaced by machines but more people had access to paper which they could use to document their ideas, communicate, use for packaging, print newspapers etc.
Also now today we have to fill in dozens of forms for every action we take, everything must be documented. In this way a clear paper trail can be followed and theoretically people will be judged by their personal paper trail rather than who they know and how charming or attractive they are.
Moral Imperative
a principle originating inside a person’s mind that compels that person to act
I make, I use my body to make. To make a sheet of paper by hand is laborious and possibly a huge waste of my time and energy. But the process of making paper for me symbolises our ability to change and transform and to overcome situations that seem immovable, like grief, loss, despair and isolation.
We are not what we are on paper. We have souls, emotions, idiosyncracies, relationships; that is what makes us who we are not the papertrail that follows us.
If we use numbers only, like Utilitarianism, we are limiting our understanding of greatest. Here there is no account of quality only quantity. I am not just 1 female living in Dorset just as Gadaffi is not just 1 male living in Libya.
Despite a long list of to do for today I spend most of it coughing, gasping for breath, snoozing and thinking about the things on my list I wasn’t getting done.
I’ve also gone from no job to three and a day which I will have to balance with the mountain of organising I have to do for my PDP. Yesterday I made a website with a wordpress blog which allows me to make a page for each of the 11 sections but this cannot be submitted alone as the university requires a hard copy of my work.
On the practical side things are simillarly vast and although I have created a large body of work all of that now needs editing and the presentation needs to be considered. I’m going to focus on the pinhole photographs I’ve made of the paper eating which I hope to work on printing these over the next few weeks. It’s a long process so I need to make time for it and the series of bank holidays make things a little tricky.
I am becoming a human mill. Masticating the pulp in my mouth and forming the sheets with my hands. All the documenting is done by hand also with a homemade pinhole camera which I operate manually of course. What can we make with just our bodies? A sheet of white paper is a symbol of creative possibility and in chewing it I consider these possibilities. Grinding it down to a consumable texture and size before spitting it out as a product of my body.
Today I discovered that the chewed paper nuggets have begun to grow green mould; stark evidence of my intervention on the medium. Chewed, it is no longer of use as a medium for writing or drawing. I have consumed its creative possibilities and now it rots and decays. Its life is over. It’s potential is beginning to come to an end as it greens and furs infected with the poison of my saliva. I have guzzled up the whiteness, it has been in contact with my internal body and now it festers in my contaminated spit.
I feel sorry for the loss of this medium; what it could have been had I not had the desire to have it in my mouth. Like a child with a dummy ‘Babies use sucking to calm and settle themselves. Thumb-sucking starts before birth (there are pictures taken of babies sucking their thumbs in utero) and can be a very helpful way for babies to cope with tension.’ Daphne Metland is one of the authors of Expecting, the pregnancy bible, which she wrote with BabyCenter international editor Anna McGrail. Why did I need to put it in my mouth?
Some facts about the mouth
the mouth is functionally the first part of the gastrointestinal tract – one end of the nutritional tube which starts there and ends at the anus The teeth are the hardest substance in the body Taste is the weakest of the 5 senses The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue (relative to its size) A bolus is a compact mass created by the mouth Saliva is controlled by the autonomic nervous system (involuntary actions) Enzymes in saliva are the beginning of the digestive process There is evidence for sensory feedback from the mouth influencing the expression of the activity of the Central Pattern Generator (chewing motion) Suggestion is more arousing than exposure so male desire is displaced from the vulva to parts of the body like the mouth or the foot which symbolize or resemble it. Certain facial expressions, such as smiling, have been found to be universal, even among blind persons, who have no means of imitating them. The great eighteenth-century zoologist and anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier was once quoted as saying, ‘show me your teeth and I will tell you who you are.’
cheat post as I’m going to a friends for tea (and vodka)…
Reflection on Critique
14th April 2011
Leigh Clarke
Mr Clarke responded to my presentation with a story; his mum went through a nasty divorce, lost her best friend and lost her job as a dinner lady all in the same year. She went on to get a new job in a hotel and became close friends with the manager. The manager had had a tough life but his mum and her built up a close relationship. One day the manager asked his mum to buy a pack of four white Andrex toilet tissue. His mum obliged. A few days later she made the same request and this continued for some time but there was never any trace of the tissue. Is mum was perplexed as the hotel regularly had deliveries of toilet tissue so she questioned why the need for the Andrex. After some time the manager confided that she had been eating the Andrex. She was very specific about how she would eat it. She would tear off a sheet, peel apart the two layers and eat them singly. She could get through a pack in a day. It was her way of dealing with stress in the same way a child would chew on a blanket. Some time later the manager had to go to hospital because of pains in her stomach and inside her was a huge ball of compacted paper and that was the last he heard from her.
Why did he tell me this story?
Some other toilet paper eaters
Kesha http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kdTZK3-fcY
Crystal http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=48f_1177689142
Lance Miller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB5hmbQAm0Q
Paper eating group http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Pica-Syndrome/898682
Pica http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/31-eating-paper-in-search-of-missing-nutrients
I am not eating paper. I am reading chewing and spitting it out, but despite this the idea of eating and digesting paper is what people associate with the process. It is important therefore that I take this into consideration. I have already looked briefly at eating and anxiety in my research and coincidently my sister is currently doing research on bulimia for her social studies degree. Eating is something we need to do yet eating disorders are becoming more common in the UK (Eating disorder charity beat [sic] has estimated that at least one million people in the UK are affected. The numbers involved have increased alarmingly over recent years. It can develop in boys, girls, men and women, regardless of background. As many as one woman in 20 will have some form of eating distress, the overwhelming majority of them aged 14 to 25 years old. One in a hundred women in the UK, between the ages of 15 and 30, experience anorexia. Girls as young as five are reported to be weight-conscious, and thinking about dieting. From Mind). Is it because I am a woman eating paper that it is seen as an eating disorder rather than William Pope.L’s work Eating The Wall Street Journal?
