While back in Newcastle, I was able to view the latest works on show at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art - after speaking to friends, I was particularly looking forward to experiencing the video pieces of Elizabeth Price in her exhibition 'HERE'. Price's practice sees her appropriate existing film, photography, music and text to create 'immersive video installations' which explore our commodity culture and consumerism. Upon being lead into a darkened room, three works were spread across three screens, 'Choir', 'West Hinder', and probably my favourite piece of the exhibit, the 2009 work 'User Group Disco', below; here we are presented with a 'Hall of Sculptures' in which various consumer goods are combined with text and the almost surreal addition of A-Ha's 'Take On Me'.
I recognised the ending quote, which suggests we will realise that we are all 'a mere appearance, dreamt by another' as a reference to Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Circular Ruins' - the story tells the tale of a wizard who dreams of a young man, and calls upon the God of Fire to bring him into existance, on the condition he accustoms him to reality. Sent to live in a distant temple, the young man becomes famous for his ability to walk through fire unharmed; the wizard hears of these stories, and visits his creation to find the temple ablaze. Walking into the flames he notices he remains unharmed - it is 'with relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.' Such themes of undefined reality and idealism I feel are clearly mirrored within Price's work. 'User Group Disco' questions the nature and language of categorisation and draws attention to the classification of objects, which I believe forces us to question whether our perception of reality is an elaborate illusion created through language. Utilising text appropriated from celebrated male authors, I found the complex weaving and subversion of various sources a great area for contemplation in relation to my own work.
Appropriation has always been a key aspect of my work; taken from the title of a BBC debate, 'Is Porn Bad For Society?', below, was inspired by a comment made on the show, in which one speaker described women in the porn industry as 'blow up dolls made of flesh'; by merging a mould of my mouth and jaw and a mannequin's head to create the bust of a sex doll. Similar to the mannequins seen through out Fassbinder's 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant', these figures represent a relationship based upon complete subordinance, and a master-slave relationship detrimental to the sexual position of women. By subverting this symbol of female domination into an object of decoration via the use of traditional "feminine" crafts, we are forced to reassess the presentation of female sexuality. As Lakoff suggests 'speech about women implies an object, whose sexual nature requires euphemism, and whose social roles are derivative and dependent in relation to men. The personal identity of women thus is linguistically submerged', and the the direct nature of the text in this work, similar to the work of artists such as Kruger and Emin, leaves us unsure as to the speaker and of to whom the "I" refers to - the sexualised yet dominated "female", or the audience for viewing her in such a way.
'Is Porn Bad For Society?' and details (2011) mannequin's head, plaster strips, appropriated and embroidered textiles, buttons
Developing from this earlier work, I began to consider the importance phrases in which the signifer has no fixed signified, and as such vary from each discursive instance. As presented by Kaja Silverman in 'The Subject of Semiotics' 'the signifer "you" addressed by one person to another immediately translates in the mind of the second person into "I"... "I" derives its value from "you"... just as "black" refers to "white", or "male" to "female".' With this in mind, the use of pronouns such as "I" and "you" present us with the chance to subvert speaker/audience positions, and challenge ideas of gendered speech. The piece below, taken from an advert for a "call girl" company, when taken from its original context, has no fixed speaker, and as such no fixed gender.
'I Wanna Make You Come' (2012) embroidery on appropriated textiles
No comments:
Post a Comment