Narratives and Spaces

I have decided to put my doubts to one side for now. Sometimes an idea can take a long time to cook – I need to be patient and carry on with the work I had planned. If I down tools, I won’t be able to think. Making is good for thinking.

I have begun harvesting the lost frames that link scenes of the cinefilms. They are difficult to capture from a dvd. Mine plays in Quicktime – and I just can’t work out how to play it slow so I can easily find the frames I want. I have a nasty feeling this is a feature that only comes with an expensive upgrade.

Anyway, I have begun. I’m hoping I can make a ‘lost film’ from all these fragments. Some are really interesting images, but it is almost impossible to isolate more than one workable frame. I’m laboriously scooting forwards and backwards, then taking a screenshot of each one. Annoyingly the Quicktime toolbar keeps popping back and appears in several of my screenshots. This is a very slow process!

I unearthed the iMovie programme buried in the unused applications on my macbook, and start playing. I have EVERYTHING to learn… but I can get several images to roll like one film. I’ve tried to load it here, but for some reason it will not work. So here’s a screen shot:

I mentioned my dissertation in an earlier post and should explain what it involved, because my current work has been affected by it.

It bothers me that everyone sees life from an individual perspective, and considers they own their personal story, and yet history only records some of these. The cine films I am using in my project are typical of this effect. Different edits and re-tellings have distorted and destroyed the original collection of individual films and stories. Some people who filmed them or were filmed have died, and their stories have lost place to the stories of filmers or film-ees who still survive.

This was an important idea behind my dissertation research. Generally, if you can get your story accepted by the power system of an establishment, it will become The Story. This makes life unfair for many groups of people, but the situation of women in art is really interesting. They have been excluded as artists from art’s power system while being defined as essential but passive objects for male ‘genius’. Some female artists have claimed status by making work that explores the experience of being female, but others have tried to redefine the rules of the system that has excluded them. I wrote about four female artists who did this by appropriating male artists’ work, why they did so, and what they achieved.

I love the way appropriation is ‘not-art’, because it is copying and therefore ‘un-original’, and that these women, copying men’s art, made themselves ‘not-artists’ and ‘not-women’. This should have removed all their power. What interested me was how they reused the men’s work they appropriated and, by being women, overturned art’s conventions about women to give this work a new and powerful narrative, and claim this creative genius for themselves.

I looked at the Guerilla Girls’ witty but accusing iconic poster (no title),(1985-90) and their source, Ingrés’ Une odalisque, dite La Grande Odalisque (1814):

I also considered Sturtevant. She denied that she was interested in ‘gender discourse’, but some of her work demonstrates her need to ‘trump’ her male source. I looked at Sturtevant’s Duchamp Wanted, (1969) and her source, Duchamp’s Wanted, $2000 Reward, A Retrospective Exhibition by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy:

Next I looked at Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #224,(1990) and her source, Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, (c. 1593), Young Sick Bacchus. Sherman is particularly inspiring because she makes no claims to knowing much about art theory, yet she uses this single photograph to unpick and reorder established assumptions about the relative positions of male and female artists. She makes it look effortless and teasing, but her appropriation has radical outcomes.

Finally I analysed Sherrie Levine’s Bachelors, (1989), and her source, Marcel Duchamp’s (1915-23) The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

Levine makes no pretence to ignorance of art theory and the politics surrounding the status of women artists, and she uses her Bachelors to overturn the status of Duchamp, the ‘master’ of appropriation, and the patriarchal art system that established his power.

Levine is one of my favourites. I feel like I ought to dismiss her because her work is exclusive – you can’t understand what she does if you don’t know what makes the source she’s appropriated ‘important’, and the context that surrounds it (I saw her Crystal Skull, (2010) on a recent trip to Venice, and had very little idea what it was about!) Reading about Duchamp’s Large Glass alone was exhausting… But I can’t resist the madness of her viewers needing to do homework only to find out how she has demolished the subject they’ve revised so earnestly. There is something gleeful about the obsessive dryness of her methods. And something zany about the way she finds endless ways to undermine her source.

Anyway, this was the stuff I had been absorbed with before I began my cine project. I really found it fascinating and very badly wanted to see if I could use what I’d learned in my work. Although I feel compelled to try and work through some sort of appropriation, and that the issue of the films’ lost narratives is at the heart of my work, I really feel uncomfortable about moving away from being original. Intellectually I can see that the ‘underhand’ act of appropriation has given female artists a power to say things with their work that male artists can never do. But I’m not sure how to achieve this myself, and so far the feeling of being weak by ‘copying’ is stronger than any feeling of achievement.

I think my problem is that there is no strong ‘them and us’ behind my ideas. My dissertation was about the opposite positions of women and men in the art world, but my work has become about the remembered and forgotten – which is not at all precise! This means that my work feels empty of meaning, and reduced to a series of repetitions.

Do I need to narrow my focus – maybe just deal with the lost female narratives? Or am I already up a blind alley?

Since my last post I’ve been shopping. My inks are similar colours to the watercolours I’m used to working with and mixing. The tracing papers are two heavier grades than the cheap stuff I have been using for this project so far:

I’ve made the two images I’ve worked from to date using ink on stretched 112g tracing paper. The paper did tear a little in this image once I’d painted on it, but not as much as the original thin paper did. The colours are more solid on this thick paper, even against the window:

With this image the heavy paper withstood plenty of wetting and inking and did not tear. Against a window the colours remain vibrant. Where I’ve applied thicker layers of pigment, there is a new feeling of depth to the image when light comes through it. It is slightly 3D, and even though my painting is not so good as in some earlier versions, this means there is a slight – weird- feeling of movement.

I had more of my original stretched tracing paper to use up, and decided it was time to try something oily instead. So I made the same image, this time in oil pastels. I have Senellier ones, which are nearly as soft as butter, so these seemed a good way to begin exploring how the tracing paper reacted to them, and how absorbent it might be.

Here’s my attempt:

It looked rich and subtle on its board. The colours are deep and blend in an interesting way that makes the image look good. They don’t seem to have been absorbed by the paper at all, but are fixed nicely.

However, I needed to see how this looks with light shining through it, so I fixed it to the studio window.

The day isn’t particularly sunny, but all the same, these pastels seem more transparent than I expected, and light comes through each mark. Their colours are a lot like those of the cine frame, but not so strong as they were with board behind. I thought this would work better than it does. While it was on its board, these marks were solid and said more than they do now. With light coming through, the image is weaker. But then, maybe I want to show how some narratives weaken like memories dim, and the voices of storytellers fade with distance? The watercolours I made on tracing paper were more satisfying with light coming through, after all. I shall leave it fixed to the studio window with the other pictures of this frame that I have made so far so I can keep looking at them and think about how they are working.

Although I really want to make images from the same frame to compare my results, I haven’t got any more mediums to use at Uni, so I have a go at a different frame, using soft pastels again on the last sheet of thin stretched tracing paper. Here is a photo of the frame I’m working from:

This is one of my favourites. I love the way the figure seems to loom from its landscape, and then fractures into pure colour shreds.

Here is my soft pastel image still stuck to my drawing board, followed by the same image stuck to the studio window:

I really like this image fixed to the window. It’s turned out well. The paper isn’t damaged of course, which is what I loved about the watercolours I have done, but these soft pastels against light are interesting in a different way.

My tutor says there are other grades of tracing paper. I’m getting some to try out. May treat myself to some inks too… Meanwhile I have had a tutorial with another tutor, who pointed out that I could make some sort of projected installation of the lost cine frames. I tell him that I’ve been keen to try and make something original from them, but he shrewdly points out that I’d be appropriating. Appropriation is my elephant in the room. It’s an activity that really fascinates me, and was the subject of my dissertation, but I have found limited ways of using it effectively. One of the most interesting aspects of my project is looking at the ownership of narratives. Appropriation is a brilliant way to do this – if I can figure out the best way to use it.

While making my cine frame pieces, I have been thinking about an essay I wrote earlier in my degree about Cornelia Parker. I love her work, and my essay looked at several pieces, including one series that connects strongly with my cine project. Parker made her Pornographic Drawings, 1996 from damaged celluloid film: they were Rorschach blots made with dissolved video porn films that had been confiscated and shredded by Customs and Excise (Brett, G. and Watkins, J. (1996) Cornelia Parker: Avoided Object. Cardiff: Chapter.)

These stains were the residue of many acts: performance recorded on the tapes, video recording, the decisions to make the films, and decisions to confiscate them, their removal, shredding, mixing with ferric oxide, chemical dissolution… Parker refined these to small, elegant images which appear to condense lots of processes, and be more about those processes than meaning. At the same time Parker used Rorschach blots that are icons of subconscious visual association with personal meanings and narratives. She added the explanatory words “suspended in solvent” to her 1996 work’s title, while her blots record her own gentle action that is innocent compared to the pornographic activity that was recorded and suspended in the original videos. Although her Drawings look dry and elegant and starkly simple, they fill our heads with sweaty action, bodily fluids, different characters, moral judgements, ideas about individual freedoms and society’s rules. Lots of different narratives, in fact.

So last weekend, when I visited my daughter in Manchester, I was very excited indeed to go and see Cornelia Parker’s work at the Whitworth. I didn’t expect to find any, because I’d heard the exhibition included very recent work but yes, she had included some Pornographic Drawings, 2005!

The drawings are on a bigger scale than I imagined, but just as clean and elegant, which is at odds with what they send through your mind as you consider them. Parker is a genius with her own editing. She chooses objects and words that are evocative in particularly specific ways. My cine frames evoke a cluttered range of narratives. Is this bad? I think people’s heads are generally cluttered with narratives that operate in a very organic UN-elegant way. All the same, I wish I had Parker’s clarity of thought. I think it is her method that is personal to Parker, not her subject matter. The works in this show are examples of her ideas and process, and I think the most personal thing about them are that they illustrate her sense of fun and the ridiculous.

The Whitworth has reopened this February after a huge refurbishment and this was Saturday, so the gallery was heaving. It was wonderful to see so much of Parker’s work in one place, and discover new pieces.

I had never come across her installation, Jerusalem, 2015, which, together with her earlier related piece, Black Path (Bunhill Fields) 2013, as the catalogue says, “carry within… form and material the echo of the Jerusalem street and place it wherever and whenever, making those places reverberate with its peripatetic context.” (Balshaw, M., Tóibin, C., Griffiths, M. (2015) Cornelia Parker, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester.) Blake wrote the Poem Jerusalem about the myth that Christ visited Britain, and Parker had cast the path in Blake’s burial ground. Our mental vision of a burial ground is a deeply peaceful place. In the gallery’s Watercolours room in a neighbouring room, I found several Blake watercolours. We use Blake’s poem to symbolise a nostalgic comfortable feeling of national identity and place. And of course I was in the city of his Dark Satanic Mills… I’ve been to Jerusalem, the centre of so much conflict, and its paths are teeming with people, so it was stirring to see Parker’s casts hovering just off the floor, ready to trip the crowds rushing round this exhibition. These pieces were all about reverberation!

I think I have to include some sort of installation with my cine film project, but what?! More thinking needed.

One of the things that underlies my interest in the cine films I’m using in my project is that they evoke lots of narrators who are unlikely to be remembered over time. Parker is a female artist who manages to give life to perspectives and narratives that would otherwise be lost. Damp grimy Manchester was unusually resonant that Saturday!