10pm

Eating paper

‘A few months before Salvador Dali died I was at a gallery in San Francisco, who featured him. They had a video playing continually of him, rolling paper up in a ball and eating it. True. I was for whatever reason intrigued by that. Questions in my mind mounted about him. It seemed desperate as far as art expression goes to find value in eating rolled up paper wads. Was he going mad or had he always been mad or was I somehow being short sighted and missing some extraordinary expression of artistic courage? Was I ‘not hip’, not in the inner circle of knowing what makes real art? I did not know much about Dali then and I confess I thought it odd and actually kinda coo coo?’

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2098127

I’ve kept this to myself for many, many years. Not out of shame for actually eating paper, but because I was embarrassed about having been so fat and desperate.

http://www.fatmanunleashed.com/eating-paper-to-los…

“the japanese say that your paper should be pure enough to eat”. so this boy says with a grin, “can i eat it?” the other kids are leaning in at this, and he’s got the devil in his eye. “sure”, i said. the pulp is a milky soup and in has a few plant bits, ferns. so now it’s up to him to save face, and hesitating only a tiny bit he scooped out a handful and popped it in his mouth. the cheer went up, he gulped it down. because i met his dare, we were buddies. and we continued to make paper and the kids all really joined in.

http://velmabolyard.blogspot.com/2010/01/eating-pa…

Last year during a residency in Estonia at Polymer Culture Factory I first disclosed my desire to eat paper. The process of making paper requires the material to be mascercated or chewed which is usually done by machine except in the case of wasps who originally invented paper from wood fibers. I make paper because it represents transformation and in doing it by hand make the human the instument of change. In eating the paper I become the wasp, independant of machine or tool.

I have been reading ‘Coded Messages’ by Mary Douglas from the book ‘Consuming Passions, Food in the age of anxiety’ who talks about the idea that food is a system of communication and as such it has a grammar. If I a to consume paper the act of eating will refer to our food conventions and to the myths around eating paper as being animalistic, ‘coo-coo’ and as a way to loose weight.

As a woman performing these acts it will communicate very specific messages about image, identity, hysteria, and also refer to logic verses nature. Therefore as I have have learned from my experience with re-enacting Loving Care that a great deal of attention should be paid to how an audience will interpret and respond to this and what messages I am sending to them. Of course as always I will consider documentation and with this I hope to use the eaten paper to print photographic images onto. I’ve tested the photograph process and it works so now on to the next step I guess.

Generally a positive response to our presentation this morning. Unlike a performance (which it was viewed by some as) it was calm, casual and lighthearted. An approach that was questioned, mainly I think because of the formal way we had set up the studio.

It was satisfying to hear that despite that, many people had picked up on the ideas we were attempting to illustrate so overall I feel like we did a good job under the circumstances. We were lucky to be in a group that could communicate effectively, but not all of us were so lucky. There were of course many flaws in all of our presentations because of these circumstances (being assigned a task apprentice style) but this helped us to experince presentations as audience and presenters.

The experience of the audience is something I am very interested in in my own work. As I have mentioned before most artworks are not experienced first hand but through documents proving or illustrating the work either a photograph, text, video or word of mouth and so as well as considering how we present work for the first audience we are always conscious of the need to document it.

In the past I have been dissapointed by photographs. Documentation has either been forgotten or left to the last minute and done badly. So with the MA my focus is on the document. I’m already obsessed with paper and the way we document our lives and how paper can become powerful depending on how it is used so now I want to work on how and why the document is created and which is the appropraite medium for it.

To start with I have been looking at photography and writing (this blog for instance). Today I picked up the photographic prints I made over the last few weeks. It’s a long process and now that I have made this object (which it now its more than just a photgraph) I am reluctant to scan it and digitize it. I think what I need to do now is compile what I have been doing, review it, and decide on the next step. I’m going to make use of the peer critiques I’ve set up and get myself a deadline to get this stuff together. Can it be done in a week? I hope so.

continued from last post

This is interesting that Antoni did not see the first performance as a success. I had not considered that she may have performed ‘Loving Care’ more than once but it seems that it was performed on several occasions. Also there is the idea of the relic. A relic refers to an object kept that relates to an important person and in religious terms it is imbued with the essence of that person or saint as a way of connecting directly with that person. It holds power. An Oxford dictionary definition is a ‘person or thing that has survived from an earlier time but is now outmoded’. Her statement suggests that this is how she approached the first act; as a trial run that would test how the act was perceived but not in her words ‘a performance’. It seems that the first time she did it was part of making it and that through making it she realised that the audience was key to the work. It was them that gave the work power. It is interesting that she uses the world relic with its religious connotations, but perhaps this is a red herring.

When I ‘did’ Loving Care I had a similar realisation about the audience. My reasons for ‘doing’ Loving Care was because I wanted to understand what it was to perform. Although I have had some experience within the performance arts discipline I feel that I do not understand the process for making a performance. As part of my research I felt it would be important to do practical research, to understand what it is to be the artist performing. I selected Loving Care because my only experience of it had been through documentation. Most of the artwork we experience is though the documentation of that artwork and so I wanted to create a scenario where I could explore documentation. I set up a test project in the gallery attached to my studio where I could try out ways of documenting using, pinhole cameras, a motion detecting webcam, minute taking, flip camera and still digital cameras.

I did have a live audience. Three men, two artists and a poet. At 6pm I went to get changed into my black attire. When I came back I began with sweeping the floor which I did out of necessity. The three men were unsure as to how to respond to this – was it part of the performance – should they help me, would it interrupt what I was doing? I could sense their discomfort but continued with what I was doing, until they had all moved to one side of the room, maybe out of the way? At least now I had a space where I could roll out the paper. I felt that my audience had settled now that they could see something happening. Seeing paper, an artists medium, rather than sweeping made the atmosphere change into one of readiness and acceptance.

All the while the webcam took pictures as it dected motion and the audience too took photographs. I began by dipping my head in the bucket of ink and paste and began to mark the floor. After a few moments I began to reflect on what I was doing and who was watching me. I felt degraded. Here I was with my head on the floor my rear end to the ceiling twisting and sprawling whilst these men watched. I paused and wanted to stop. I thought about what they must be thinking and feeling. I expected that they would be pretty uncomfortable so I decide to persist with my act and continue to build the tension.

I completed three rows of paper and left. I was elated when I got back. I had pushed through and hopefully felt some of what Antoni felt as she painted the gallery floor. I spoke with my audience who confirmed their discomfort and thought that I was going to give up when I paused. In response the poet Peter John Cooper wrote and performed a poem the next day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXj8G65U2Pk

I came across Antoni’s work in ‘The artists body’ a book by Tracey Warr. It was right at the beginning of my MA in October when I first saw the sticking black and white image of a woman with her head to the floor pushing away those that looked on by painting the gallery floor with black hair dye. I drew it in my sketchbook so that I could take time looking over it. She was crouched, like a cat on the floor, dressed in black with gloves that had been splattered with dye in the process. I became fascinated with this act and fantasized about being that woman. In the act of submission, mopping the floor, cleaning, but not cleaning, marking and intimidating her audience by threatening to mark them in the process.

In order to understand this work which I had only seen an image of in a book I decided that I would re-enact it in the gallery space at my studio. In this way it would be public but I knew that I was unlikely to get any kind of audience because of the location. There were several compromises I had to make to the original, as well as not being guaranteed an audience I couldn’t justify buying hair dye, nor could I suggest painting the actual floor in the gallery space as it had been sanded and cleaned by hand prior to my arrival. I remembered I had a pot of black ink that I had used for ‘Headspace’ a few years ago and there was about have a pot left. In the 99p store I splashed out on wall paper paste which I added to the ink to make a painterly consistency.

I had a roll of white paper that I could cover the floor of the gallery with. It was an off-cut from a printer in Holbeck outside Leeds that I had managed to acquire last year and there was plenty left. I cut off the colour from a back jumper and wore my sisters black shorts and thick black tights. I had now gathered the elements that I would use to recreate Loving Care. As well as performing the act it was important for me to document the event and I suppose to some extent I may have been subconsciously recreating the image I had seen in the book in October.

‘The first time I did Loving Care, it was not a performance; I did it as a relic and I showed it that way. It didn’t work! I realized that it wasn’t like Gnaw where the history was on the surface of the object and a viewer could re-create how it was made by looking at it. While making Loving Care, I realized that the power was in watching me mop the floor. The audience is the wild card. I am collaborating with them and I’m never sure how they will respond.’

Interview with Janine Antoni by Stuart Horodner, BOMB 66/Winter 1999, ART New York

 



Gabriela being shot

10am

Tuesday

In response to a series of seminars on site/place/location, body, portrait/reputation we have been assigned groups to deliver 30 minute unassessed presentations to the rest of the group. Preparation began on Tuesday, continued today and this Tuesday we will all put forward our responses which should be an entertaining way to spend 6 hours.

Our group has been inspired by Frankenstein’s Monster as a result of Dave Hazels very entertaining talk on Art and Death. Today Gabriela shot (with a camera) Tomasz in the graveyard beside Mary Shelley’s tomb. The process was uncomfortable for Tomasz. The idea is to assemble photographs of sections of Tomasz shot by Gabriella around Gabriela by Tomasz so that she assumes his visual identity. Of course she will not but the act will allude to this. More interesting was watching Tomasz squirm as he was quite directly objectified by his female photographer.

After taking the shots we moved indoors where we used photocopies of cultural theory books in place of printed photographs to re-cloth Gabriela. In contrast Gabriela was very comfortable with this process despite the proximity of Tomasz throughout the procedure. There was a humour to it and Sam was reminded of games played as a child where you would wrap your friend in toilet roll. It was quite playful and it was not the first time I’d used Philosophical Theory of Culture for an alternative means.