anna deavere smith

Anna Deavere Smith 

An actress, writer and playwright from Baltimore. She has been doing a project since the late 1970s called "On the Road a Search for American Character". This has involved recording conversations with over 2,000 people which she then re-enacts generally without props or costumes. The aim was to "absorb America". She is able to embody the character regardless of their age, race, gender etc. 

I like the idea of using scripts from conversations or interviews and reconsidering them out of their original context. Might experiment with film or sound of Katie and I- identity, compare/contrast, mirror, repeating, expectations etc...

Timecode at DCA Dundee

This weekend I went to the Timecode exhibition at the DCA, Dundee. Since it's the DCA's 10th anniversary year the work was all linked with the theme of time passing.

There was a really interesting sound piece from Kelly Mark titled "I really should" which was a spoken stream of consciousness where Mark listed things such as "I really should check my blood pressure... I really should go and see the world... I really should have used primer... I really should join the going trend. I really should celebrate my uniqueness." This list had originally been a film but was translated to a written piece on a fridge and now as this sound piece. 

Another interesting piece was Beacon by John Thomson and Alison Craighead using a mechanical railway flap sign to display internet searches someone somewhere is making at that moment in time. Every few minutes the public information sign changes acting like an "endless piece of concrete poetry; the authors of each line of text remain totally anonymous, whilst the viewer experiences a random stream of information that indicates current interests and preoccupations."  Reading each line as it appears gives you a real curiosity for who was searching, why they were and what results they read etc. 

the twin thing

the body as a site of cultural representation 

I had a look at The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century so that directed a lot of my thoughts towards considering the body as object and objectification of the female body. 

I was also reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which is really interesting in its discussion of a fictitious future society where people are conditioned to fulfill certain roles in society. "Community, identity, stability" 

Stemming from ideas around Henry Ford's mass production this society uses the Bokanovsky Process (cloning) to produce "ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines". 

me and Katie

The recurring images surrounding twins and identity were particularly relevant to me as an identical twin. 

(The Savage's description of scenes at the hospital, pg 185)

"Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came - a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face - for there was only one between the lot of them -...the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed between the beds, climbed over, crawled under..."

"High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors."

Am I an I or a We?

e-how "How to Find Your Identity Despite Being a Twin"

Article about twins and identity-young age

some of the artists from my research

Jenny Saville

Ghada Amer

"Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963; she now lives and works in New York. Viewing Amer's hand-embroidered paintings, with their delicate traceries of stray threads, involves a visual shift, as what appears to be a mass of abstract lines gradually comes into focus as highly ero

tic figures, displayed in a repetitive pattern. The work refuses to bow to the puritanical elements of both Western and Islamic culture, and what could be called "institutionalized feminism," with its own persistent myth of feminine virtue." 

Claude Cahun

"queried the notion of a single, knowable femininity and flaunted the artifice of both femininity and representation itself." Art of Reflection, Chapter 3

Frida Kahlo

 "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." 

Orlan

"The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, which started in 1990, involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with respect to some of the most well known historical paintings and sculptures. Supported by her Carnal Art manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future." 

Franko B

Franko B 

is best known for his live performances, which he began to make in the mid-nineties. He has described these acts as focusing on the visceral “where the body is a canvas and an unmediated site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable and for the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition.” 

Karla Solano

Karla Solano

Karla Solano was born in Costa Rica, 1971.

She uses photography, film and installation to explore the body, especially her own as a subject. 

Her project "Skin" from 2003 uses close up photography to create the effect of her skin as a landscape. Thinking about skin as more than a protective layer and also as a personal history of her experiences. I like the way she has fragmented the 

skin from her body by photographing it so close that you can't really tell what part of her body you are looking at.

In some of her work Solano uses sewing into the skin

 which, when shown in film, creates a strange and disturbing image- the contrast between seeing the needle and thread pierce the skin and imagining pain but also being aware of the lack of sensitivity in the upper layers of skin and seeing no blood. 

The film "Home" shows Solano stitching an image of a house into the palm of her hand which ends disturbingly with her pulling out the thread. This is made even more eerie by Solano humming all the way through - creating a false sense of normality and domesticity - some of the songs she hums are familiar. 

http://www.karlasolano.com/images/gallery/videos/hogar.mov

Actions are reminiscent of seemingly contrasting activities of domestic sewing and self-harm, or body modification.

safety pins through the top layers of skin on my hand

National Review of Live Art

NRLA at The Arches Thursday 12th Feb

Third Angel

9 Billion Miles From Home

Performance- two artists are tied together through a pulley system and perform a ritualistic set-up process (filling a large circle with talcum powder dust) and then, after an explanation for the audience, each goes on a journey. We then get a description of what he saw and she answers questions about her experience ("How far are you from a moment of stillness?" etc)

The performance took about 1 and a half hours, reminded me of meditation- ritual, time consuming, focussed, thoughtful, self...

"We're going on a journey

  we're performing a ritual.

  We want to live in a big here, and a long now

  we want to let thinks take the time that they take.

  We are beginning to understand that we can't do that alone."

Eva Meyer-Keller

Handmade, shown in the foyer. 3 films of models representing weather catastrophes but made with everyday materials and placed inside a rotating aquarium- great reflections. 

"choreographic arts and crafts"

Billy Cowie 

The Revery Alone

3D film of female dancer on ceiling so that she seems to be hanging above the audience. Interesting what the audience will do to participate/view the work- in this case a room full of strangers, lying on the ground and wearing 3D glasses...