6) Portfolio reflection

By using myself as the subject matter, I am attempting to show what occurs to everyone in everyday life in my portfolio piece ‘MASKED.’ 

When we first meet someone, we automatically make assumptions about that person, and quite often, we never look further into that person’s life or know that everyone is masked. And that is the message I’m trying to bring into light, through a mixture of ideas from other established artists. Everybody is masked, but by seeing the ‘Artist as subject,’ masks are taken away, and an audience can experience deep human emotions or ideas through these radical pieces.

"When we first meet someone, we immediately judge them, put labels on them, see them 

through a certain perspective.

They are who we believe them to be. They have turned into our own creation, a 

creation one can’t escape from."

The labels the world puts on us

The decision in creating a transdisciplinary portfolio piece allowed visual prompts for the audience, so they could witness the 'truth' of what society has put upon us. In many everyday photographs, people are smiling or in some sort of ‘disguise’ of true emotions, which is juxtaposing what I show, of my face being covered in labels given to me by others, and later, always being shown wearing a literal mask, or hiding my face in some way. 

Storyboard draft

William Blake's 'The Sick Rose'
1794

The following photographs in the presentation captures the actions of: sleeping (representing vulnerability), reading (representing escapism) and listening to music (representing listening to true emotions), which I portray with accompanying short poems. This idea of using different sensory prompts: visual and written, with the intention to show how language can be performed to affect one’s thinking, or in this case transforming initial assumptions made by the public. This is inspired by William Blake, who would commentate and criticise society through these mediums. 

In 'MASKED' however, I continue to use an audio prompt, of background music, the choice of song 'Lies' Marina and the Diamonds from her album ‘Electra Heart.’ This album was written taking on the persona of a fictitious character of Electra Heart, each song telling about her tragic love life. With this anthology of songs, that Marina claims that reflects on her own life to some extent, are in itself a self portrait. Many of these songs are dark and delve deep into the human psyche, with ‘Lies’ falling perfectly with the concept of how people are always masking these complexities present inside the mind. And this relates back to the idea that art is inextricably linked with psychology. 

The decision of ripping up the photo’s in my short film is representing the fragility of ones self, that once exposed to others, can easily be torn apart and discarded. And by ripping up the images of myself, I am ripping up my instillation, and by destroying my own artwork, I have in affect ‘killed the author.’ This concept is adopted by Sherrie Levine, who used "photography to examine the strategies and codes of representation...exposing and dissembling mass-media fictions." (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014)

"You may manipulate me on the outside- write all over my face, 

but inside my mind…

there is a garden of words , songs, images, that you cannot destroy.

Instillation of quotes from portfolio

 This is what is behind my mask… "

References:

Blake, W (2008), Blake and Poetry and Designs, A Norton Critical Edition (2nd edition), United States

Marina and the Diamonds, 17th July 2013, Marina and the Diamonds, Part 10: Lies, (online), retrieved 29th May 2014 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsnlBtlimBA

Metropolitan Museum of Art 2000- 2014, The Collection Online: Description (online), retrieved 29th May 2014 from http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/267214?=&imgNo=0&tabName=gallery-label

Pinterest 2014, Pininterest (online) retrieved 24th May 2014 from http://www.pinterest.com/pin/59813501274396423/ 

5) (Re)searching for art: archive of sites and practice

Art and history go together, hand in hand, with art used as a way of archiving and documenting events, views and values of societies and individual people of a particular time...

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Reading Marsha Meskimmon's book 'Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics', we can see that history (and therefore, art) holds bias and lies, which is expressed by Linda Nochlin's "account of her early feminist research, teaching and curatorial work"(Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 1):

“…it was no mere passive conduction... but rather an active engagement and participation, a sense that I, along with many other politicised, and yes, liberated women, was actually intervening in the historical process and changing history itself: the history of art, of culture, of institutions and of consciousness.” (Nochlin L, 1999 pp. 33)

which describes "the significan[ce] of long-forgotten women and their art" that has "beg[un] to unfold in scholarly articles, highly-charged classroom experiences and exhibitions." (Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 1) Meskimmon further discusses that the uncovering of the "substantial body of evidence" of women's impact in the cultural world, that isn't displayed in the major galleries in the world, reminded me of the artist Fred Wilson.

Fred Wilson's work 'Mining the Museum' 1992, where he rearranged the pieces in the Maryland Historical Society, promoted the idea that “What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more.” (Fusco C, 1994) Wilson's 'correction' of the museum's identity entailed "bringing things out of storage and shifting things already on view," which "created a new public persona for the historical society.” (Wilson F, 1992) This project brought to light the slavery and inequality that society was built on; exposing the gaps in the archives and exposing the 'truth.'

'Mining the Museum' Fred Wilson

One of his instillations that particularly stood out to me was the room where there were six busts: three of them already at the museum featuring Napoleon, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson, none of whom played a part in Maryland history. Meanwhile, the other three were empty busts, with labels reading Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass,  who were African-American's who actually were important to Maryland history, but  who were "overlooked by the ostensibly 'local' institution." (Ginsberg, E)

        

                                                                                                       

“Culture belongs to each and everyone one of us, right? And we’re allowed to celebrate it anyway we’d like.” (Tucker, M, pp. ix) but, as demonstrated in Fred Wilson's work, "the culture represented by European fine art has not always belonged to everyone... [with] history which violently excluded people of the African diaspora." (Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 35) It has always been the case that artists documented history, but it is only now that society is willing to display the untold stories. 

References:

Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” TDR: Journal of Performance Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148

Ginsberg, E, Case study: Mining the Museum (online), retrieved 15th May 2014 from http://beautifultrouble.org/case/mining-the-museum/ 

Meskimmon, M (2003), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Routledge, New York

Nochlin, L, ‘Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian’, in Representing Women (NY and London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 7-33 (quote, pp. 33)

Tucker, M, ‘Foreword’, in Cameron et al., op. cit., pp. ix, cited in Meskimmon, M (2003), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Routledge, New York

Current social practice groups

Some social practice groups that are worth visiting their sites:

Field Theory: 

Mission Statement: “We believe in making things happen. We also believe in evolving what we do”

About: This year they are working on four new projects, but past projects they raised $20 000 in six months just by asking and developing a community of support around unknown and obscure and barely conceived projects.

Field Theory (online), (2012), retrieved from www.fieldtheory.com.au

SPARC (Social Practice Arts Research Centre)

Mission Statement: “Fosters knowledge exchange and project building between artists, scientists, the public and others with a vision towards active social and environmental change. Working across disciplines, we aim to engender and support collaborations and projects that have a local, national or international impact on the public sphere.”

SPARC (2012), Social and Environmental Practice in the Arts at UC Santa Cruz: bringing together artists, specialists and the public to build creative projects for social and environmental change (online), retrieved from http://sparc.ucsc.edu/index.html 

Project V.O.I.C.E (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression) 

Mission Statement: “An international movement that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression through Spoken Word Poetry… explore and better understand their culture, their society, and ultimately themselves.”

About: Led by Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye, both spoken word poets who tour around the world to perform and to spread their love for poetry and to inspire others- project voice is focussed at school children. 

Kay, Sarah (2014), Project Voice (online), retrieved from http://www.project-voice.net 

4) CONTEMPORARY ART: Social Practice and New Engagement

Previously... Relational Aesthetics in contemporary art, focusses on the "artistic activity striv[ing] to achieve modest connections, open up obstructed passages..." (Bourriaud, N, 2002, pp 8)

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What is social practice? My own understanding of what it is, is the idea to engage with the audience, the people. This involves a 'mean' of bringing people together, to interact and engage in an activity, not dissimilar to Rirkrit Tirivanija's exhibitions mentioned previously. Artists have the intention to infiltrate subtly into a community/ a group of people, to make differences to some extent, and to establish a relationship between the audience/ participant and the art. This is eloquently explained in Rebecca Strokes article on Tirivanija's exhibition at MOMA:

“In this deceptively simple conceptual piece, the artist invites the visitor to interact with contemporary art in a more sociable way, and blurs the distance between artist and viewer. You aren’t looking at the art, but are part of it—and are, in fact, making the art as you eat curry and talk with friends or new acquaintances.n this deceptively simple conceptual piece, the artist invites the visitor to interact with contemporary art in a more sociable way, and blurs the distance between artist and viewer. You aren’t looking at the art, but are part of it—and are, in fact, making the art as you eat curry and talk with friends or new acquaintances." 
(Strokes R, 2012) 

Another example of social practice, where the 'viewer' becomes part of the art, is WeTubeLIVE- Dance Massive, where “young or old it is the same: go to you youtube and select a clip or several and from that/them make a solo.  This performed response can be a copy, a comment or an investigation of themes:so long as it fits in a 1 meter square space, pretty much anything goes.” (Speth B, 2013) This 'massive' is taking a well known space (in this case, the National Gallery of Victoria) and turning it into a place for members of the public to express themselves. 

 Ben Speth's WeTubeLive

    

New engagement with art and audience, allows artists to establish spaces where creativity can be expressed; creativity that is outside of the 'traditional' works found in already existing institutions. We can look at Linda Nochlin's article "Why have there been no great women artists?"(Nichlin L, 1971) and realise that even to this day, some national art galleries in the western world have remained to display what they consider 'the best of the best,' that "it is in our social arrangements: the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously [is] accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian." (Nichlin L, 1971, pp. 1) And this what contemporary artists are striving to move away from...

                                                                       WeTubeLive 

References:

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Presses du reel, Paris

LALA (2014), WeTubeLIVE- Dance Massive (online), retrieved from http://lalaishere.net/2013/04/we-tube-live/ 

Nochlin, L (1971), Why have there been no great women artists?, retrieved online from http://davidrifkind.org/fiu/library_files/Linda%20Nochlin%20%20Why%20have%20there%20been%20no%20Great%20Women%20Artists.pdf

Stokes, Rebecca (3 February 2012), Rirkrit Tiravanija: Cooking Up an Art Experience (online), retrieved from https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/02/03/rirkrit-tiravanija-cooking-up-an-art-experience