Blather Blather
Just to give people here a sample of some of the overacademized drivel I end up writing in preparation for shows... though this artist statement isn't public.... it's just for the benefit of the curator so she can write her catalog essay. My writing is usually tighter though in these contexts typically just as pretentious.
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In October of 2003, I did a performance piece for the Landing show at Southern Exposure in San Francisco called Loose Wig, in which I knitted a long red and black dress, the end of which I attached to a victrola. I then danced around and around for more than an hour until the entire dress became unravelled.
I suppose that in itself, the idea of exploring the disjunction between clothes as embellishment and the physical body underneath is not unusual. I believe that everyone to some extent has in some way attempted to modify their gender attributes through their clothing. I was however interested in dramatizing the unmaking that occurs when a person undresses and reveals-what? Another layer, yes, but one that remains less mutable than the layer over it.
When I was asked to participate in this exhibition, the initial idea was to recreate the performance, to continue its cyclical trajectory, as I had in the meantime re-knitted the dress from the yarn that I had unravelled. But in the intervening two years, I became aware that my concerns at the time that I made the original piece have in themselves branched off into another tangent, one that further complicates how art functions to signify gender. I’ve found myself becoming more interested in aesthetic forms.
In grappling with the original performance, I became aware of some of its baroque, hysterical, and melodramatic properties. The makeup, the struggle, the tears, all contributed to the original performance and resulting documentation becoming so much more a “female” piece, something made to grapple with the intricacies of womanhood. There was in itself nothing wrong with that, but I ended up feeling bound by the work, wanting to escape an easy feminist read of, “See how hard it is to keep up that charade of femininity?”
In dealing with the video of the event, I found msyelf deciding to make it silent, and to choose the camera angle that is furthest away. I wanted to drain the drama from the original piece so that a tension could develop between what the video portrays and how the video looks. This was when I began to conceive of the video itself not as a documentation but as a study, albeit reversed in time. Studies are traditionally done as a way of understanding the elements of a larger piece. The video ended up functioning that way for me, even though the piece that it is studying had already been made.
So I started to think about other ways to “study” Loose Wig, and ended up finding aesthetic inspiration in the Western minimalist tradition-Lewitt, Judd, Serra, etc.-typically associated with male artists and male thinking in general. I took out some graph paper and started representing the visual elements of the piece as simple blocks on paper. The result is a series of 88 drawings that follow the logic of the paper, as they document the slow “unraveling” of a dress, represented as a block of color. This piece lacks the dramatic quality of the original event and, in truth, is quite difficult to interpret without the original performance. But once the reference is made, the drawings serve as a way of representing the ideas of the piece while using a different visual logic, one that relies on a certain cold efficiency lacking in the performance itself. By employing this visual scheme, I wish to destabilize gender dichotomies in a different way, to move away from the body as metaphor towards the more elemental realms of seeing and thinking.
Then there’s the matter of the yarn. Having decided not to re-perform the piece, I momentarily considered at least exhibiting the dress. Once again, I found this idea limiting in the way that the dress only functions as a visual reminder of the performance as it commenced. I became much more interested in the aftermath, realizing in the end that my initial conception of continually reperforming the piece would be a lie if carried out, because its performance, rather than reminding me of the cyclicality of womahood, actually opened up new avenues and tangents for me. And so I have chosen to exhibit the yarn unmade in one sense, yet newly produced in another. It once again borrows from minimalism as the piece snakes around the gallery, though it carries with it the connotations of “dress” derived from its original use. It literally dresses the exhibition according to the word’s overlapping meanings: to decorate, to garnish, to protect, all reverberances that strike me as domestic, womanly. While the original performance tackled issues of gender’s relationship to the body, I have ended up being more interested in the less determined areas of the brain and the eye.
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In October of 2003, I did a performance piece for the Landing show at Southern Exposure in San Francisco called Loose Wig, in which I knitted a long red and black dress, the end of which I attached to a victrola. I then danced around and around for more than an hour until the entire dress became unravelled.
I suppose that in itself, the idea of exploring the disjunction between clothes as embellishment and the physical body underneath is not unusual. I believe that everyone to some extent has in some way attempted to modify their gender attributes through their clothing. I was however interested in dramatizing the unmaking that occurs when a person undresses and reveals-what? Another layer, yes, but one that remains less mutable than the layer over it.
When I was asked to participate in this exhibition, the initial idea was to recreate the performance, to continue its cyclical trajectory, as I had in the meantime re-knitted the dress from the yarn that I had unravelled. But in the intervening two years, I became aware that my concerns at the time that I made the original piece have in themselves branched off into another tangent, one that further complicates how art functions to signify gender. I’ve found myself becoming more interested in aesthetic forms.
In grappling with the original performance, I became aware of some of its baroque, hysterical, and melodramatic properties. The makeup, the struggle, the tears, all contributed to the original performance and resulting documentation becoming so much more a “female” piece, something made to grapple with the intricacies of womanhood. There was in itself nothing wrong with that, but I ended up feeling bound by the work, wanting to escape an easy feminist read of, “See how hard it is to keep up that charade of femininity?”
In dealing with the video of the event, I found msyelf deciding to make it silent, and to choose the camera angle that is furthest away. I wanted to drain the drama from the original piece so that a tension could develop between what the video portrays and how the video looks. This was when I began to conceive of the video itself not as a documentation but as a study, albeit reversed in time. Studies are traditionally done as a way of understanding the elements of a larger piece. The video ended up functioning that way for me, even though the piece that it is studying had already been made.
So I started to think about other ways to “study” Loose Wig, and ended up finding aesthetic inspiration in the Western minimalist tradition-Lewitt, Judd, Serra, etc.-typically associated with male artists and male thinking in general. I took out some graph paper and started representing the visual elements of the piece as simple blocks on paper. The result is a series of 88 drawings that follow the logic of the paper, as they document the slow “unraveling” of a dress, represented as a block of color. This piece lacks the dramatic quality of the original event and, in truth, is quite difficult to interpret without the original performance. But once the reference is made, the drawings serve as a way of representing the ideas of the piece while using a different visual logic, one that relies on a certain cold efficiency lacking in the performance itself. By employing this visual scheme, I wish to destabilize gender dichotomies in a different way, to move away from the body as metaphor towards the more elemental realms of seeing and thinking.
Then there’s the matter of the yarn. Having decided not to re-perform the piece, I momentarily considered at least exhibiting the dress. Once again, I found this idea limiting in the way that the dress only functions as a visual reminder of the performance as it commenced. I became much more interested in the aftermath, realizing in the end that my initial conception of continually reperforming the piece would be a lie if carried out, because its performance, rather than reminding me of the cyclicality of womahood, actually opened up new avenues and tangents for me. And so I have chosen to exhibit the yarn unmade in one sense, yet newly produced in another. It once again borrows from minimalism as the piece snakes around the gallery, though it carries with it the connotations of “dress” derived from its original use. It literally dresses the exhibition according to the word’s overlapping meanings: to decorate, to garnish, to protect, all reverberances that strike me as domestic, womanly. While the original performance tackled issues of gender’s relationship to the body, I have ended up being more interested in the less determined areas of the brain and the eye.