“Images have gender” words do not.
“A book is something about completion isn’t it? – the moment when you declare a collection of fragments (words, sentences, pages, images) to be a whole, and a whole that is in your authorship and ownership. You can’t copyright something you say, or even something you place on the Internet, in the same way. That’s another reason why the Internet is interesting, because you can revise pages so easily – it lies somewhere between literary and oral traditions. I just made a series of works that are one-off books – they are all printed and registered as an edition of one. I was thinking that it would be nice to make a book that’s an edition of a half; it would be necessarily and forever unfinished, which all works are in a way.” FB
Even though I like what Fiona Banner says about art, I have a difficult time conceptualizing art within the perimeters of temporality as she describes it. A nude artist painting a nude woman on stage as part of an art exhibit. How we do we capture that? Is the experience she describes as the awareness of art in memory? Yet, she writes unfinished books in a form of tombstones because they are dead once they are written. I did not see her describe any process of the imagination of reading written traditional format book. She refers to things the intimacy of holding books and touching them and building a relationship with them because as humans we need relationships but she does not really address issues of imagination. She also comment son how visual art is different in ways we communicate with color.
I opened the Heart of Darkness portfolio and I guess we never get to see the photos that are supposed to be in it…Then we realize that the photos are not taken by her, they were and assignment to Paulo Pellegrin to discover the city of London. We still never see the photos. At the bottom it reads: Accessioned into the Archive of Modern Conflict.
Okay I think I get it. We live within conflicts.
I was going through my blog feed and I’m like “crap did I read the wrong thing”!
Yea I did…
Okay, I lied, I read the right thing… I just did not look at her art yet.
I like that you went for the art rather than the reading. It gives a different perspective of Ms. Banner. I think that we are only supposed to capture the concept of a live performance if we are actually there, seeing and hearing and most importantly feeling what’s going on. No, I’m not suggesting groping the naked women- that is inappropriate and frowned upon. I mean feeling the temperature of the room, the emotions going around… The shock and awe of two naked people in the room performing… the naturalness yet, the artificiality of it all. Artificial because it is a performance in a gallery. It’s not natural like that scene on the Titanic where Rose is like “Paint me like your French whores Jack”… even though that can be argued as being artificial- but in a different way.
I disagree with her interpretation of books to an extent- I like to think books live once they are completed and published. However, I can see where they also “die” because you can’t undo what has been written in the book because it’s written in stone… Unless you write a series, but you still have that issue. Once a character shoots another character and they die and it’s published… that character can’t come back from the dead and be in it’s original form. It’s altered and changed….
Fascinating stuff, at least in my opinion.
Also, not to get technical- words do have a gender… French words have a gender and I’m sure other romantic languages do too. Many English words have a gendered/sexual background… For example look at how obsessed our culture is with labeling living things by what sex they are born? “is it a boy or is it a girl?” The fact I just wrote that and I put boy first and girl second is meaningful but I’m pretty sure that is how many people ask that question? Boys first, (boys are better), girls second (I guess girls are okay… boys are better but congrats on the kid)
( I’m a feminist and believe in gender equality- just an FYI so no one jumps down my throat saying I’m sexist or something)
Hi Derek-thank you for the response. I think she is dealing more with an art that cannot be captured twice. Her philosophy indicates to me that we have been trained to look at art in specific ways and not be able to separate art from art…her appearances of the @@@ artist painting a @@@ woman is almost a parody to me. Not only does it change the masculine gaze to a female gaze, it also changes the atmosphere in which it is done. I do like her philosophy, I just don’t know where I understand as far as male gaze goes…she does not contribute to that discussion about how a male audience would respond to the two @@@ women on stage. She as a @@@@@@ star has a different experience about the body in its “primitive” sense, as she calls it, then let’s say a middle class white housewife. I hope we get to discuss more in class…see you later. And I did not have a doubt that your reading of my post was a feminist one. And the computer will not let me post this because of two word I used so I will delete them and put @@@