(and yes, she was teased by her high-school friends with affectionate fervency at Burger-time)
Let's talk about voice baby, about all the good things and the bad things that make me - I want to talk about 'Lebanese' voice
Body + Voice x 10 = default plurality ??
What if there appear to be 100 voices to a body at one time...
A flock
So when I look at
I treat the image/object as a kind of depot for voices.
I wonder what voices are in there, why they're there, have they traveled far, how long will they stay, who are they looking for in the audience, are they flirting and with whom, will they leave together or go their separate ways in the chlorinated slipstream of the night...
BK is potentially a ficto-accurate image/object voice depot playing hardball.
She's my way of working through this question, what does it mean to say I'm a lesbian, but to be in two minds about it.
To be in two (or more) minds connects to how I think about everyday experience in a lot of ways; that being in two minds is an access point to perceiving or experiencing the irrefutable distance between myself and all the others (or just an other), which can't be collapsed.
The voices are distances that bruise the image, the object, the subject, to use a Hito phrase. BK is also a way to understand how homophobia might be integrated into a conversation about female same-sex experience. Like a lot of figures in my work she works along a scale of meekness and aggression, which have always had a queer resonance for me. I guess this is one voice in the distance-depot I'd like represented amongst these works, thus trying to figure it out, within and beyond the aesthetics of the depot.
Any thoughts, feelings, mumblings in the dark welcome! I think I'm ready for a bigger font, lucky this is the LARGEST.
I am pretty besotted with the terming of the image as a depot, and a character as a hot space of contested voices and images. How to make this hot space-distance of movement, talk, light, shape, desire, language confusion appear and disappear?.. because perhaps the most exciting things move in a non-linguistic sphere. Or are always flitting across image and language (and perhaps, as you say R, LGTG perspectives might be a position, amongst others, who understand the relationship between language and image as political in a particular way). These are the things I like to think about as points of possible sharing because they don't belong anywhere, to anyone, until they settle (but this can happen as many times as whatever, there is no limit, no point of exhaustion).
ReplyDeleteI guess I am trying to say that I like the distance, I like its flavor, yes, perhaps, the distance is something I like to make BIGGER, rounder, palpable in my work. I don't want to deal with it, I want to create micro-revolutions in there.
I am a little confused by the point you make about voices being distances... I have an intuition that refuses to conflate these two... but I could be misreading your point here?...
But, to stop the slippery slope of head-scratching and nail-biting, I would ask how does BK appear? Within this space of distance, what are the conditions of voice for you?
Also, a few days ago, I wrote a list of questions. I was making drawings, and a few things really seemed urgent for me in terms of actually how this project speaks between appearance and the concerns we have been looking into via blog/skype:
ReplyDelete- how to make a conversational link between the light boxes?
- How to move beyond formal display? Or, how to run with it? How to learn to love the bomb?
- How to work with images and text in a way that claims a vocabulary but also can speak outwards?
- What is the space between ambiguity and the political? Is this a space we want the project to move within and simultainiously define?
- What is the difference in signification between personal lesbian desire and a collective politics?
Mmm, perhaps these are helpful here? I am cautious of over articulating areas such as the political etc, with the fear of creating a hands-off kind of gulf for us, but I am also perhaps getting a bit lost in this project at the moment. Time pressure-panic anyone?
Yes, good articulate question - 'How to make this hot space-distance of movement, talk, light, shape, desire, language confusion appear and disappear?'
ReplyDeleteYour next point interests me too, as it comes back to the indefatigable reader/viewer, how our works might unravel what the in/exhaustible reader/viewer is about - how it seems part of contemporary life, that a person must be 'available' to engage with images and objects 24/7- what your getting at though is also an empowerment too that can come from this play and how it might play out within a glbt/lesbian/female same sex experience framework?
You wrote: 'I like to think about as points of possible sharing because they don't belong anywhere, to anyone, until they settle (but this can happen as many times as whatever, there is no limit, no point of exhaustion).'
I really get that with distance you 'like to make BIGGER, rounder, palpable - I want to create micro-revolutions in there.'
Is this because maybe the distance is non-human, can't be experienced as such, and is a-political - do you ignore the distance to amp the political dynasty of living in it's wake - distance is always up ahead, like the community?
I guess when I was talking about voices being distances, I meant that voices carry the desires of multiple addresses to this distance - often in ways that make me angry! In many everyday images/texts there is a shutting down or controlling of some voices by attempts to humanize the distance, to represent it via one-dimensional political points, to assume leadership of it, or sometimes distance has been reduced to a question of power - some voices do try and control distance - a totalitarian act.
I guess I was thinking of an instance where an image which pro-ports to address a same-sex audience, is really addressing a non-same sex audience, so there is an attempt at pushing same-sex into the limelight, but how does the reader then imagine the same-sex perspective and then, where must same-sex readers go to see their perspectives represented?
'I would ask how does BK appear?'
BK is a lesbian filmmaker who makes films about living in a world where distance is often falsely represented as having prescribed power and meaning - so it's co-opted for totalitarian purposes even though it doesn't exist as such. And yet, she has to deal with this shit, all the time, and sometimes doesn't know when to be invisible and when to be visible in order to move as a citizen of the world - or a denizen. This is why she makes films, to work this through, but sometimes 'working through' is too slow, too fast, too convoluted and this is where it gets really interesting for me to have her appear, perhaps in some of these works as a voice, but as a voice that is recognizable inhabited by many other voices. She represents or moves this voice-depot theory out into the world.
She could also be a figure who does a performance in relation to the lightboxes - rather than be 'on' them, she speaks on the radio, or gives a talk, or does some you tube video's...