What’s your work about?

I feel this blog has reached its natural conclusion. It’s achieved what I wanted it to – I now feel better placed to talk about my work. I think its something I’ll never feel 100% comfortable about and there’s always room for improvement, but at least the bare bones of a strategy are now in place!

I think the time is right to start a new blog in the New Year – one with a different focus.

Many thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this discussion.

So, where have my text experiments led?

I’m learning to trust my instincts, so I begin by flicking through magazine and newspaper articles ranging from the more well-written and serious to the sensationalised. What leaps out is material with a fashion bias, which reflects my enduring fascination with the seductive qualities of the stereotype of the feminised image in mass-media. I’m irresistibly drawn in by it whilst simultaneously being repelled – ensnared in its ‘…golden thread of glamour.’ (1) I work as always by setting a series of rules – this time to switch gender references so female become male and so on and to change any distinguishing data such as identities and brand names.

Articles with a strong stereotypical gendered perspective give interesting results. In the most extreme cases, the switch results in ‘wrongness’ that is clearly distinguishable. However, other articles are more subtle producing something ‘slippery’ – they don’t read quite right without being completely clear why. Printing the entire article seems unnecessary and over-kill. I’ve used the same picture format as recent collages – it replicates ratios used on 1930’s film star promotional cards. I’ve positioned the crop to reveal the columnar roots of the original text, so part of the second column shows with truncated text leaving an incomplete meaning for the viewer to reconstruct.

I suspect the power of these lies in repetition – I see several presented together, giving sufficient clues of my intentions to the audience. Production means will be mass-media based – a poster to keep the results flexible rather than the static, fixed nature of something like a board. Scale will be large and assertive – likely 2m on the longest length – hung simply. They need to honour their graphic origins so I think colours are best left neutral. Black text on white will hover on the gallery wall, whereas the reverse makes a stronger, more forceful statement. Not sure as yet which will be best.

This is the first time I’ve made work that doesn’t involve a representational or abstract image of something. I don’t have the same relationship to them I usually do – I wouldn’t want them on the walls at home – but they feel like an assertive communication that fits what I want to say and I can’t wait to see how they look in a gallery setting. I realise my response to them isn’t aesthetic but is positioned in the intellectual. It feels like I’ve made a step forward with the titling issue – no longer apologetic but assertive – appropriated in the spirit of collage from current research material

Bibliography

1. Stephen Fry, Inside Claridge’s, BBC2, 10/12/12

What role should text play in my work?

For Barbara Kruger, it serves as another layer of disruption accompanying other forms of disjuncture to disturb the clichéd perfection of the mass-media images she uses, transmuting them from a fantasy of perfection to something closer to Real-I lack.

W.J. T. Mitchell refers to complicity between image and text; an ‘…inextricable weaving together of representation and discourse, the imbrication of visual and verbal experience.’ He posits that the relationship between the visible and the readable may be an infinite one; put alternatively, that word and image may be ‘…simply the unsatisfactory name for an unstable dialectic that constantly shifts its location in representational practices, breaking both pictorial and discursive frames and undermining the assumptions…’ that underwrite ‘…the separation of the verbal and visual disciplines…’ (1)

I think he has a point; the existence of either pure text or image is pretty much impossible. Even as I contemplate a picture, my thoughts cannot avoid conjuring associated words and phrases, as much as I may strive to suppress this. And any act of reading is accompanied by the inevitable involuntary invoking of image.

The notion words and text can be separated is a flawed assumption:

‘The image you bring enters the text, and finally the text, at a given moment, ends up bringing out images; no longer a simple relationship of illustration, and this allows you to exercise your capacity to think and to ponder and to imagine, to create.‘ (2)

Image-text used as a deliberate act of conjuncture – a montage of disparate influences that force the viewing experience apart to enter an arena of thought, reflection, imagination and creation; it acquires a readability. Two options are possible; one where picture and words work together in a unified way to offer mutual support, or another where one hits out in opposition to the other, undermining and subverting it.

To date, I’ve avoided working with text – it makes me uneasy. Even naming an art work in anything approaching a meaningful way has seemed impossible. But, I already appropriate material into collage – extending this approach to find ready-made names to title each work seems a valuable direction to head. I can also see possibilities for completely text-based work – something I’ve never considered before – also acts of appropriation, from various mass-media sources, but where I enact a simple switch of gendering positions. Will anything interesting happen?

(1) Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture theory. London: The University of Chicago Press Ltd. p:83

(2) Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2008). Images in spite of all. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. p:139



Mass media sources tend to echo traditional perspectives – to maintain a position of status quo. The nuances of such perspectives may be so deeply ingrained as to be unrecognisable – part of a natural background interference – affecting the nature of our gaze in terms of the way we interpret what we see, even though are largely unaware of the effects.

But what if the tables were turned to undermine, or reverse the status quo, to give voice to positions that, generally, are never heard? What mechanisms could be used? What tone should be adopted, and what might be uttered?

Perhaps the results might be factual and to-the point – an authoritative poster or a pamphlet? They may co-opt the newspaper, or slightly chattier format of a magazine? Or would they best shout in an assertive manner through the guise of a poster or banner? They might be found lurking subtly and insidiously, buried within a seemingly innocuous piece of text?

I’ve not used text in my images before, apart from an on-off struggle with the titling (or Untitling) of the work. Creating a purely text-based piece is well outside my comfort zone but, even if it doesn’t work, I think it may give clues as to the best way to proceed.

Bibliography

Nina Power film screening & talk, Afterall Film Club, Central St Martins, 6^th December 2012



Fashion images reveal the unreal – they portray a perfection that fails to exist and which resists any hint of unpleasantness. So, do they have any value at all? Seemingly trivial details of fashion – the turn of a collar, the cut of a jacket – are perhaps more revealing of the cultural environment in which they were created than they might intend, and hiatuses in fashion consistently mirror periods of change and revolution – perhaps arising from an impetus for to change, or maybe another device fuelling the momentum for change itself?

The image crops I’ve been using largely dispense with clothing to focus on the face, but I feel this may be a flawed decision. Montaging faces across time does produce both points of disjuncture as well as harmony, but differences in clothing are perhaps even more telling and extreme in their effects.

Bibliography

Sharon Kivland, lecture at Wimbledon College of Art, 7^th December 2012