Monday thoughts
We live in a time of terrible violence, upheaval, cruelty, greed and injustice. Now, more than at any other time in my life, it is so glaring.
I have spent much of the last 10 years particularly quietly seething and turning inwards, working in conventional media as a camera woman and director and shunning too much News, (even as I worked in the News) as it seemed as if I was just about holding on in the fragile freelancer world I was in, never knowing where the next job was coming from. Now and possibly because I feel more responsible as I age, I consume world news media with a slightly thicker skin, mostly Al Jazeera with its daily updates on world atrocities, hopelessly corrupt regimes and unwinnable wars, and I pour my feelings into making pictures.
My wanting to be an artist came from taking photographs of whores for a few months in the early 2000’s. I was amazed, perhaps naively, as now I see prostitution as so ubiquitous, so mundane and everyday. It is the ugly mirror side of our culture. It was a gut wrenching, life changing experience. Any woman, everywoman, even the most ancient can do it, any woman can find a market for a fake sexuality, turning herself inside out to play what she has learned throughout her life she ought to play, even sometimes to the extent of masochistically ‘loving’ it. And as the wealder of a camera I was in the position of uncle Tom arraying the wares for sale.
It caused a revolution in me. Mainly in viewing photographs as evidence of a performance. What has a woman to do with a whore? From pimp to photographer all she can do is market her own kind. And even though she can consume a prostitute’s services, it is only a man who can make a woman into a ‘whore’. It is an inter gender commodity relation that can alter and define the very essence of a woman. This is not to deny the trade in children and young men. I am speaking more of the alchemical change with which the appellation ‘whore’ can bring about to how a woman is viewed and in her view of herself. This shock is what caused me to want to re make and recontextualise the text that is the photograph.
I had to go back to the basics. Both in terms of ideology and craft. My feminism had slept for years. We had all assumed that the second wave of feminism had brought to light all the inconsistencies and that people somewhere were moving forward and were living enlightened lives. And if you weren’t enjoying the media hype, the pole dancing lessons, the celebrity worship, the fast track career or enjoying the fruits of mass consumerism and the ‘tongue in cheek’ sexism of the age, then you were a spoilsport.
Right now I am sitting here with several bodies of work completed but not really shown in the last 4 years since my MA. I haven’t fast tracked, applied for enough things or hassled people for shows. I was never sure my language was the right one, that my ideas were sophisticated enough, my techniques masterful enough. The main thing that has kept me going is going to shows and meeting other artists. This dialogue has been my life blood. And this is what intensifies once you leave the institution.
As regards inequality and injustice, it is all around. Perhaps there is nothing new to say, the only thing is to say it and to say it in however many ways you can, refine your language, play with your audience, entertain them and keep doing it. For it will not be you that is looked at but what you do with your words, your images, your stuff and how you show it to the world. And what if the wider world or the art world does not listen to you? Well someone somewhere will want to have a conversation with your art. You are part of something much bigger than you.