Slightly divergent but: artist intellectual media duke it out

Rach, thought this had some bearing on our park bench pow-wow today, and generally an entertaining watch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5DKtiNcgI

binoculars on girls on safari

rough and ready - the les of the future-past/ past-perfect?


And for consideration in our list of titles: breasts of the 70s, 80s, 90s and today

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.’

friends to watch out for

• Article in this weeks NZ Listener on 'It gets better'

• The street-facing lightboxes' audience will include taxi-drivers waiting in the taxi stand. I noticed one driver today who had a cross with Jesus on it dangling from his rear view mirror

out in high school

well, I wasn't ...

here's a cunning comparison though, mmm

addicted to the media much?

Lesbian Gaizzzzz

Hey was looking around for some theories that might help with thinking about commercialised images of lesbians in relation to a viewing public, this is all i got to so far though:

"Diana Fuss tackles most directly the mobilisation of a lesbian gaze within this cultural field [fashion photography] which ‘provides a socially sanctioned structure in which women are encouraged to consume, in voyeuristic if not vampiristic fashion, the images of other women’ (Fuss, 1994:211). For Fuss this process by which women come to look as though they were lesbians entails, as she put it, ‘consuming’ images of women whose poses range from the coy to the aggressive. And this spectorial position is triggered by the distinctive codings which are specific to fashion photography many of which rely on, as Rabine points out, the fragment of the body, showing body parts in pieces, cropping the body to show either torso, or legs or in the case of the images Fuss looks at, seemingly disembodied faces ‘detatched from any visible body. These images of body parts .... "

bla bla fetish Kristeva bla bla Oedipalisation Freud bla bla

"… Fuss demonstrates how fashion photographs have to be able to generate homosexual desire so that it can be properly eliminated, but in so doing there is also a production of ‘lesbian desire within the identificatory move itself’. However, as she goes on to say, this lesbian eroticism is so apparent, so visible for all to see, that this obviousness actually also immediately negtes the ‘homoerotic structure of the look’. The illicit desire is ‘harnessed’ in the very process of being invoked as something that exists and that has to be contained and controlled. Thus there is a mobilisation of homosexual desire within an overarching visual economy which at the same time forbids it, producing it in order to say no. Or as if to say ‘better get it over and done with here and by these means’. These photographs therefore flirt with the viewer in a game which both allows the desire expression, and then reminds the viewer of the high cost attached abandoning herself to those desires. Fuss describes this as the ‘strategic deployment of a homospectorial look’(ibid: 227) So precarious is the passage for the woman or girl into required heterosexuality, that, especially in a commercial field given over to expanding the pleasures of feminine consumption, it takes immense efforts to bring this unruly terrain to order, and in a marvelous passage Fuss explains that the work of the fashion image is to provoke this desire so that it can be ‘channeled (or Chaneled)’ (idib:227). And unlike the viewing position supposed by the medium of film, the position ‘mapped by contemporary commercial fashion photography can be read … as feminine, homosexual, and pre-oedipal’ (ibid:228) …"

From: Angela McRobbie The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, 2009, Sage Publications, London, pp 106-7

Images worth linking to for article - no really!!! http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/versace-fall-08

Action around the edges; repetition, distribution of energy and phrasing

Anecdotes

I threw down a small piece of my rib. It landed on the street below my bedroom window through which I could be seen effortlessly standing. The bone was fresh out of a box that I kept in a drawer in an everyday bit of furniture.

I lost track of the small bone by forgetting about it and I would recall it by dropping it from a high place from which I could look out at it discarded as a person or group of people arrived without notice.

Today, the women are on their way somewhere, I can’t know where, and one of the women stops and taps my rib with the soft toe of her shoe. She stoops quickly and unexpectedly as if aroused by sleep, and she points at a spider and says, ‘so rare I could fold it, I mean hold it,’ aligning it with other things from her past that she’s kept deliberately effaced.

The other woman notices me, the woman looking down at her and her companion as she stands attentively below my second floor window. I stand there really no more than a shadow in a space riddled with glass, unseen in just the way a shop window can be photographed behind someone smiling with unreadable assurance.

Though it’s likely that a person being photographed would not become aware of the bit of my rib fallen matter-of-fact on the street due to a unique confluence of angles, angles that tend to fold on the retina, just as a Venetian blind can be drawn and slung over the backseat of a car.

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.