Yesterday we had our peer critiques and I took the opportunity to share my plan to eat and document paper.
It got mixed reactions. There was a lot of discussion about what the final product would be and if I should make a book. I have planned to do a roll of images but it was suggested I could then fold it into a concertina and display it as a book. The samples I showed of the photographs on paper went down well although some said they would like to see these enlarged further. I think I will do this with another project.
I had everything ready today to go ahead with the process. I did some test shots just using the camera on my phone. Seeing these made me wonder if I should take long exposures where the motion will be blurred or whether I should make shorter exposures and pose so that the outcome will be in focus and more recognisable.
Also after yesterday’s reaction by my fellow students I am now thinking about having a live audience. I mentioned this to a sculptor friend who suggested I host a dinner and whilst everyone else is eating, I will eat the paper. In the same way with Loving Care the tension between the artist and the audience is vital to the work, I’m thinking that by carrying this work out in private I may be missing out on an important element of the work.
It’s nine but my body feels like it’s already ten. Didn’t sleep at all last night. Mainly pottered today, tied up loose ends, gathered materials, read a bit more of the Boltanski interview.
There was a piece were he was talking about repeating past works, but not those of others but his own and the impossibility of creating the same thing again. Which kinda relates to what I’m doing in a way. Also he talks about how many works an artist makes in their lives and suggests that most of it is filler and that an artist will only make a handful of significant works. The rest will be expansions of ideas or reworked and the rest will be forced because of the need to make or do something.
Still on we go. Tomorrow I’m going to make use of my fellow students to critically analysis my work to date. Must rem to bring a Dictaphone so I remember what I say, and their responses.
I’ve spent the day writing a piece for the 2011 Degrees publication. In truth most of the time was spent deleting as I had 600 words to describe the last ten years of my career.
Right now I’m watching Rocky III, the one against the Russian who has all the latest high tech machines and Rocky has well a field in the snow.
It’s all very man against machine, It’s the big struugle. How can you not love Rocky? Doing it all from nothing – just will power. I want to be the art version Rocky. I have no money, no materials but I’m going to make it using what I can find I will fight the machine that is capitalism. With Marx talking to me through the medium of free mp3’s and my own bare hands and body I can make art. It’s so romantic :)
As well as the field Rocky has Adrian and Uncle Paul. I have AUCB and a network of artists and friends throughout the UK and beyond who are behind me. I feel so blessed today. I think it was writing about the development of my career and thinking about all the people who have given me a chance along the way. I want to do more to help out those with less experience than me. Especially now facing the money making machine that is living.
more on the aesthetic of the film still
‘Hitchcock clearly preferred the staging of stills completely independent from the film. Striking publicity photographs accompanying films such as the Wrong Man (1957),Vertigo (1958), or Physco (1960) do not attempt to convert a specific scene, but rather to summarise the atmosphere of the entire movie into a single still.’ History and Aesthetic of the Film Still by Steven Jacobs
This a clearly logical approach as these stills are most likely to be used as publicity and to sell the film. The still is set up to give the viewer and overview of the film and to tell them what to expect with the view to them actually going to see the film. Similarly performance artists have used staged shots to sell or illustrate their performance like Vito Acconci’s Following Piece and Franko B’s work Oh Lover Boy.
My work will not use staging in that way although it may be interesting and useful to take digital shots during the process as a way of documenting the documentation process. For this I will need an assistant. Or maybe I can make use of the webcam. I do find the aesthetic of the webcam interesting. Here the idea of the photo-gramme returns. Because of the motion dectecting element you are capturing something in action in the same way a movie film would but without actually recording a series of consequtive images that create seemless motion.
Going back to the subject which will be an open mouth in motion I was interested to see that Jacobs addresses this image in his writing. ‘when someone shouts, the character is forever frozen with his mouth wide open. As a result, the statue gets something strange, uncannily mechanic and sometimes grotesque – precisely what happens in film still capturing characters in the midst of an action.’ Choosing to capture this moment this act which renders the subject grotesque. Looking into the open mouth of another is also deeply intimate. Is it also grotesque and what do we mean by that?
According to the Oxford dictionary the word grotesque means comically or repulsively ugly or distorted or incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree. Interestingly the root of the word comes from the latin ‘grotto’ meaning small cave or hollow, which sits nicely with the image of the mouth which is both hollow and in its presentation slightly repulsive.
Keeping with the open mouth, Jacobs goes on to talk about the use of close ups. By zooming in on a detail ‘they mark a moment at which the viewer transforms from and observer into a contemplator.’ A close up still image gives the viewer room to daydream. Without many visual clues the viewer is focused on a detail and with limited visual information the viewer can step in to the work and create their own narrative.
On one hand I am inviting the audience in with a close up but at the same time the repulsion of the grotesque hollow of an open mouth creates disquiet. It reminds me of Janine Anotni talking about her work. She is not aiming to threaten audiences of her performance work. ‘Certainly it’s not my goal to push the audience away or be aggressive. I am interested in extreme acts that pull you in, as unconventional as they may be. Personally, I want to broaden my audience, and I choose seduction over hostility.’ Will I seduce or push away my audience?
Considering the film still.
To document my paper eating I will be using a matchbox pinhole with XP2 35mm film. Attached to the winding apparatus will be a knotted string which I will pull on to wind the camera on from my position opposite the camera. Using a roll of 36 exposures I will eat a corresponding 36 sheets of good quality paper. The macerated paper will then be constructed into 36 sheets of continuous paper and the negatives from the film will be printed onto each sheet creating a roll of positives. The exposures will last as long as takes to chew as sheet of paper and the movement of my mouth will cause motion blur.
To understand the aestheics of this medium I have been reading ‘History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still’ by Steven Jacobs from History of Photography journal November 2010.
There are references in my process to what Roland Barthes called the photo-gramme also known as frame enlargements where a single frame of a film from a movie is selected and enlarged. These images are often blurred because of the shutter speed that a movie camera operates on. Barthes is interested in what these photo-grammes show us. There are the unseen as they allow us into a world where we can scrutinize what would usually stream past us so quickly that our eyes are unable to keep up. He talks about photographic punctum (punctum meaning a small, distinct point) which occurs when you analyse a photo-gramme. A ‘third meaning’ can be found in the analysis of a still when extracted from the moving image because you see details otherwise unseen. But by exposing the film to the duration of the motion of eating the paper, this ‘third meaning’ will be eliminated from the work and small distinct points will no longer be visible. In a way it is opposite to a photo-gramme film still as all these moments of motion are captured on top of each other.
As well as the image extract from the movie film Jacobs goes on to talk about still photographs taken by a still photographer usually on set. ‘After a successful take, actors are often asked ‘to do things once more for stills’, thereby retaining the fictional illusion of the film by staying in character and respecting the so-called ‘forth wall’ of the narrative film by ignoring the camera and the fact that they are actually being photographed’. Here again I had planned to be the camera operator and had imagined that I would be looking in the vague direction of the pinhole aware of the viewer. But this is not in keeping with the aesthetics of the still image either. Again it goes against this convention.
Jacobs goes on to point out that this aesthetic changed when magazines and newspapers printing these promotional images. ‘they eliminated static, posy art; they demanded pictures that moved and lived and had feeling. natural beauty replaced statuesque beauty perfection. heath, vigor and action supplanted precise, mechanical artificiality in still art’ and ‘the only precondition is that stills ‘do tell a story’ and that ‘they have a suggestion of an intense situation’ and ‘suggest amusing or exciting developments and sequences’.
Going back to the ‘third meaning’ that Barthes talks about and which I expect to loose in my process a possible fourth meaning can be found in the medium the work is presented on, i.e. the macerated paper. The work then becomes reflexive as the materials in the process are both the subject and the object. The subject which is the action of eating paper (by a woman, see previous post) and the resulting object is repeated images of the subject on the material that results from the process. Having tested out some images I have found that eliminating the eyes from the image recreates the ‘fourth wall’ showing the subject ‘in a condition of introspection and absorbtion’ ‘to establish the ontological illusion that the beholder does not exist’.
more on this 2morro
