Intervention or enough said?

The JD Set, a collective of four young documentary filmmakers, will be present at the screening of their first full-length feature Katy Perry Dumped Me for a Straight Girl during the Highlight Queer Film Festival. It is rumoured that Beatrice Krill worked as screenwriter on the project, but when asked The JD Set said, ‘we did dial her phone number. But she doesn’t really answer the phone. We bumped into her one night at a party and she was really enthusiastic about what we were doing. After that we lost touch. She has a credit in the film though. We called her ‘Fog, Mist and Wind operator’ even though the film is dominated by clear skies.’

warning, large font up ahead

So, who is BK?
(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

or assembly of voices

So when I look at

or

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.

It makes me engage with ways this distance is manipulated, warped, disturbed, celebrated, starved, stuffed, morphed, draped, stowed, pampered, persuaded, nagged, shuffled...is it what we do with the distance that matters, and does glbt experience make one a little more able to tackle it, in difference to hetero gender/power play distance, which seems to world-dominate (ok, so I'm generalising, but it's necessary to my point)...

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.

Does BK Like Baba Ghanoush?

Beatrice Krill

I feel some momentum... Or perhaps some curiosity... building...

Who is this Beatrice?

And as the sea roared 2009

binoculars are her weapon...of today

So much great stuff in your post Marnie:

I love the hyperbola perception applied to Cotan's paintings - and really love the photograph that you and Clare produced - it really taps into image as object infused with many voices/tricks/intimacies - a very evocative staged fiction, if you will. I guess Hito S would relate it to a 'bruising' that leads to curious kinds of tangibility.

I'm certainly open to pushing the public address potential of these light-boxes works in relation to contemporary homosexuality, and in a way I haven't perhaps done before. I think the tangents and stories in these posts are generative in relation to how the public address might function - it's scope, too.

I really enjoyed reading the piece by Hito Steyerl Marnie, especially in the possibilities suggested:

‘This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates.’

‘The contemporary opium of the masses – an apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists foreclosure’

I thought I'd include an excerpt from a piece I recently wrote for Enjoy about Lee Kit's exhibition/residency. Kit's work opened up some interesting things for me in terms of the readymade/everyday

Language functions at times in Lee Kit’s work as a border territory. Language borders abstraction; it touches the personal; it bites into the airtight. Language is important to the act of thinking, which one could say helps a person distinguish responsible action from obedient action . These border companionships that language lit up in Kit’s work and exhibition could be seen to operate as staged fictions. These fictions entailed tangible responsibilities, and though it is unusual to think of fictions compelling philosophies of action – this was a key part of the terrain that Kit’s work underscored.

The viewer and artist in good faith undertake the fictions of the (Ready-made) Everyday. The title of Kit’s exhibition is apt here. It suggests that the potential for individuals to live a life or series of lives, short or long, and yet rich and full, is contingent on the ability to think in time with others, for the absence of thought leads to disaster. It is the exhausted un-thoughtful life that is worth resigning from. The thoughtful 2-second life takes place in the border territory of the ‘Ready-made’ and the ‘Everyday’.

After the exhibition closed, Kit asked people he had just met, or didn’t know, to take his works away with them, and to store them, display them, possess them and sometimes, after a short time, give them away again. Kit’s gesture connected again with the as yet un-disclosed 2-second life, which can be seen to be less about usurping the future for its benefit or warning it of the past, and more about thinking the 2-second life into existence.

Marnie, I've taken up some of your ideas - perhaps a little too literally - but I liked the idea of working with the staged fiction of a film/movie - weaving in the binocular booklet colours and some imagery and putting Beatrice Krill in the protagonist/driver's seat. I worked up an imagined poster for the film, integrating the value of the light box location to operate as sign/ad/image/text:

I've also attached some original images from the Binocular booklet for you all to preview. I can post more if you're interested in following this line of inquiry - I'd be quite interested in perusing works which utilize this booklet. There are some excellent situational drawings of people using binoculars for different activities which I will try and post in the next few days.

I really like the idea of somehow incorporating perforations/holes in the images. Here is a link to a short film by Jeff Keen that feels inspirational:

http://artforum.com/video/id=24702&mode=large&page_id=3

Word-out.

tolerances in alignment

I’m planning to produce some works for our two week exchange around this phrase ‘tolerances in alignment’ which comes from this 1950s booklet called ‘Binoculars and how to choose them’. I’m also keen to follow on from ‘inverted’ drawings I’ve been doing as seen on my temporary blog/noticeboard The things that Rachel O’Neill did – I need to try this inverted drawing business out on the mini lightbox and see how they go but I like the print phenomenon that is black line turning into white/coloured space – simple but effective perhaps as far as the lightbox backlighting goes. Could work with a range of marks from fine line to woodcut to human/animal/vegetable silhouette/curvature…

I have a narrative in mind for the drawings which draws on, reworks and somewhat fictionalises what’s going on in the binocular booklet – its language and technical drawings - emphasising what I think will be some invention story of a ‘happening lense’* (*name subject to change), which accelerates tolerances and alignments – a central character or two will drive the narrative. I have a character called Beatrice Krill who could be a good trial subject for the ‘happening lense’.

This projected work isn’t much collaborative in nature I realise but thought I’d put it out there and it might lead to discussion/directions when we skype.

Also interested in thinking about the scale of the boxes – where the viewers eye line will be – how to draw viewers closer and where needed maximise long distance effect. The boxes also seem to work in pairs – due to fan-like pattern of layout in the square. Any way we could torque this in an interesting way?

How might we arrange images that face the road or the pedestrian area for example?

Random thoughts here – text on the street side/image on the footpath side? Text/image interlocking? Guess I’m thinking about how we create the undulations Marnie first mentioned – would be great to get at this in the content as well as the formal flow of the works and how we want them to read…

Curatorial brief:

For me it’s important to have a way of describing this project so that it’s true to our wider practices and also that we’re not ‘generalising’ who the audiences are. It’s also important for me that the project brief doesn’t suggest we are coming up with a new (by default as emerging artists) ‘description’ of homosexuality, definition of glbt culture or map of the Homo landscape. In this sense I know what I don’t want it to be so hope to do some thinking with you all about what it could reveal when the project traverses into language.

Personally I don’t usually align my work with blockbuster tags such as feminist, or lesbian, or queer. This isn’t because I’m not prepared to talk, given the time and space, about the work in relation to these things. For me, it’s more that the work itself is directed at burying clues, and revealing opacity's around how a viewer chooses to motivate or make inactive their (identity, but more like their accurate fictions of self) or my accurate fictions of self (if at all) in relation to public/private concepts, declarations, modesties, fears, hopes and facts/fictions etc.

What are your thoughts – want to be overt, less overt than overt, slightly a little bit overt, kinda maybe...no…yes?

I'd like to find some way of using the notion of 'accurate fictions of self ' in relation to this brief...there is this literary genre which is the most popular published form in the US at the moment called Creative Non-Fiction which basically translates as 'accurate story' + 'style' - this informs how I imagine what an accurate fiction might be - how it might behave...where it might be taking the left hand of darkness...