Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

After a discussion upon my former text pieces, I started to realise the emphasis in my work upon desire, and of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid of human desires, right, beginning with the Physiological, and concluding in Self-Actualization. Reconsidering the use of bedding as an instigator for feelings of security, and the play upon words presented by Othello's Iago, in the idea of a woman only working when she goes to bed, I began to examine the image of the dormant, sleeping woman apparent throughout Orientalist paintings, and this juxtaposition between the bed as a place of security, and a place in which the woman becomes a spectacle and victim of the male gaze. We are forced through such works as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 'Le Grande Odalisque' to identify with the male as controlling the narrative, and watching such an "unconscious other". This notion of the female "performing the spectacle" links to the performativity of language, which, as Lacan suggests, constitutes desire, predicated upon absence or lack. With these ideas in mind, I created the piece below, appropriating a line from The Smiths' 'Well I Wonder', a song discussing the painful longing of unrequited love - after a tutorial in which we considered the ability of music to identity with both and male and female audience regardless of a gendered speaker, I felt that a lyric written by Morrissey, a man who has never publicly stated his sexuality and claims 'I was never a sexual person' would be particularly relevant. The contradiction between the comforting bedding with the almost sinister questioning of the speaker plays upon the desire for safety, shelter and stability, and the manner in which sexual desire can disrupt this. We are not sure whether it is the sleeper or the viewing questioning, and this uncertainty and unclarity of desire further destable or viewing position and create a disturbing sense of ambiguity.