Keeing it reel [sic]

“Let’s hope that artists who are featured in documentaries don’t feel like hostages.”

Yesterday’s panel discussion at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto posed the question, should—or how should—documentarians incorporate an artist’s life into a film without detracting from his or her art? In films like The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins: Vanessa Beecroft's Controversial Art, the interplay between personal and artistic life can be overwhelming. In this case, her marriage becomes jeopardized by her ongoing attempt to adopt twins from Darfur whom she met while doing research for an art installation at the 2004 Venice Biennale. The panel discussion was about similarly gripping characters—some equally outlandish and others more reserved. Panel moderator and film critic Marc Glassman commented, “The biographical question intrigues me…you have to somehow create a balance” between who an artist is and their practice.

The panel was co-hosted by Point of View magazine and Reel Artists, the Canadian Art Foundation Film Festival (and the only one of its kind in North America). It featured filmmakers Larry Weinstein, Matthew Akers, and Roz Owen. Weinstein, whose films portray music composers, feels that some biographical details are more pertinent than others. For instance, he believes that it is useful to know about Toulouse-Lautrec’s dwarfism to appreciate the low angles of his paintings, but that it is less critical to know that an elderly Renoir attached brushes to his wrists because of a debilitating illness. He’s qualified to make this judgment, having depicted an incredible end-of-life story already. In the film Ravel’s Brain, the composer struggles to write music after he develops aphasia, agrees to undergo risky brain surgery, and dies.

Perhaps relevance hinges on the extent to which the boundaries between art and life are blurred. Of artist Marina Abramović, Akers says, “Her art in a way is her.” As Abramović told Leah Sandals in a recent interview, in long-term performances, “You're doing life.” (1) This is an artist who has invited viewers into her personal space so much that she has been referenced on Sex in the City as the woman who is fasting at 3 am in a gallery loft for all to see. The performance on which that fictionalized account is based pales in comparison to her longest performance to date in terms of blending art and life. In The Artist is Present (which is also the name of Akers’ film), she is shown seated on a wooden chair across from interchangeable viewers, one at a time, six days a week during the MoMA’s hours of operation. I saw this piece performed three times during its three-month run, but I didn’t appreciate its duration until I saw a film clip showing her tallying yet another week on the wall only half way through its run. Witness the skill of filmmakers to help us see what we do not.

On the other end of the spectrum of spectacle is the artist-activist couple, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Roz Owen’s film, Portrait of Resistance, revisits, among other projects, their 1976 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which revealed the realities of artist life while insisting on artists’ political responsibility. Even though they have exposed this element, they remain private. Condé, for example, did not want personal details about her in the film. Owen noted that this worked out because she is such a present person that it came through in the film. Beveridge was more open to including details. The fact that his parents were communists certainly sheds light on their community-based social justice work. Ultimately, though, they wanted the film to be about the many people they have worked with and resisted the idea of it being about them lest it glorify them. That contrasts Abramović, for whom Akers says there is a lot of reverence. Her willingness to allow 700 hours of footage to be shot for the documentary doesn't exactly fight against this reverence.

Just as the boundaries between life and art entered the discussion, so did the boundaries between filmmaker and subject. Weinstein tends to represent dead composers in his films, but when they are alive he pretends otherwise to gain focus. He keeps his own voice out of the film whereas Owen, a friend of Condé and Beveridge, asks questions of her subjects openly because it feels honest and natural. Akers did not include his voice and he maintained a distance during Abramović’s performance. He feels that because the public completes the piece, he too represented the public, but he admits that there is no such thing as being the fly on the wall. The term ‘Stockholm syndrome’ was tossed around between the panel and the audience but more than mimicking hostages who empathize with their kidnappers, this filmic phenomenon seems closer related to the Hawthorne effect (in which the very act of being studied affects the behaviour of a subject). Let’s hope that artists who are featured in documentaries don’t feel like hostages. Akers said that the trick is to tell as a story as you see it, not as the subject wants it to be told. In speaking about artists he's worked with like John Cage, who are masters of constructing their identity, Weinstein says that the more you look at their art, the more you see its worth. Akers went to great lengths for answers. For instance, he flew to Naples to interview a gallerist to determine if photographs from Abramović’s Rhythm 0, in which she provided the audience with objects that caused pleasure or pain, were staged or real (as the legend goes, one audience member held a loaded gun to her head.) His question, “Where does the truth lie?” functions as a double entendre in this situation.

Akers states, “Every artist has a myth they create or that has been created for them.” The challenge, aside from paying tribute to an artist’s work and making an entertaining film, is to cut through that myth and portray them honestly. By including footage that makes Abramović seem superficial or, as Weinstein says, banal, he makes her seem normal and thus relatable. Such is the case with a scene in which Condé and Beveridge restage a photograph taken 34 years prior. He makes a joke about the couch they’re sitting on holding up better than themselves, and his wife retorts with an expletive.

Sources:
Sandals, Leah. Marina Abramović: The Gifts of the Present. February 23, 2012, ¶14.

The female fixation on marriage

“That’s good [said the teenager to her friend]. You have something to look forward to.”

Last night the train out of Grand Central was packed, so I was crammed in beside two young women, who had the following conversation:

“When do you want to get married?”

“Well, I always thought 27 because my birthday is on the 27th and I like the number 27. Are you thinking of marriage?”

“Definitely.”

“Really? With your current boyfriend?”

“Yeah, I know it seems crazy, but I’ve known him for sooo long.”

“That’s good. You have something to look forward to.”

“Some people think teenagers are irrational, but I realize that marriage is, like, a commitment, you know? Don’t go telling everyone in my high school.”

At first, I was fighting the urge to laugh, but then I remembered something pertinent that happened earlier in the day. It was not the conversation I had with a friend about the complexites of marriage, nor was it going to the MoMA and watching the gut-wrenching performance of Marina Abramović and her collaborator/lover Ulay as they met in the middle of the Great Wall of China after each walking one half of the distance, to say good-bye permanently. What I remembered was a short-lived and embarrassing idea that I had in my studio. When I say studio, I refer to the portion of my bedroom that is overtaken by multiple boxes of fabric, a work table, and a sewing machine in need of repair.

I hadn’t picked up a needle for two months, because I wanted to give my body a rest from the intense sewing I did in February. However, there is no time to waste, as I have to sew a pink crinoline underskirt (by hand, no less) in the next week for the ArtRages Surrealestate Wearable Art Runway Show hosted by the Boston artist-run centre, Mobius. I ended up pleating too much netting and was trying to decide what to do with the excess material. Since it’s gathered at one end and about two feet long, it resembles a wedding veil, aside from its pink colour. When I realized this, I felt a surge of excitement. Why not wear it as part of my costume? I had just booked an appointment with a salon called Shag, and surely they could incorporate the makeshift veil into my up-do. Then I stopped myself, admitting that the concept of my outfit had nothing to do with weddings, so I couldn’t justify adding a veil. I was merely reacting to a hard-wired impulse to enact (or in my case, reenact) the role of the bride.

I touched on this female tendency in a recent post (http://artistintransit.blogspot.com/2010/03/social-media-and-sexes.html) where I wrote about a brochure featuring a little girl trying on a wedding dress. A year and a half ago, I made a cocoon sculpture using a pink wedding gown in combination with underwear that said ‘sexy little bride,’ whose wording struck me as eerily reminiscent of the messages written on girls’ clothing. And in 2007, I made a cocoon sculpture with a veil that was based on a t-shirt with hearts on it and embroidered text that said, “Falling for You.” I was reminded of this piece last week-end after visiting a friend who was with me when I bought it in a post-Valentine’s Day sale in Kansas City. I couldn’t believe the shirt when I saw it. My initial reaction, since it was for a two-year-old, was, ‘what is society doing, promoting romance to someone so young’? Interestingly, I showed an image of this work to a new media studies class last semester, and one of the students took a different stance entirely. She felt that the original garment was exposing young girls to a positive view of romantic relationships. My lingering question is, why the double standard? Why don’t we see little boys’ clothing teeming with hearts? Do I believe that the association of romance with females but not males, as established through clothing, contributes to the likelihood that I will never, ever overhear a conversation between two high school boys daydreaming about what age they will marry? On some level, I do.

Doing Away with Penis Envy

“The Visible Vagina...reminds us of offensive tropes throughout art history...but it also reminds us of the victories...”

It may have been a poor choice to view the closing of The Visible Vagina, a joint exhibition in New York at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and David Nolan Gallery, on the same day that I saw the new MoMA retrospective for Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. Provocative though the works in the 75-artist show may be, it was difficult to see representations of genitalia as riveting in comparison with actual genital contact at the MoMA.

When I say ‘actual genital contact’, what I mean to say is ‘accidental genital contact.’ Google ‘Imponderabilia MoMA’ and you can read a variety of tales like the following. I decided to brave the narrow walkway between two nude actors facing one another in Imponderabilia, originally performed in 1977 by Abramović and her then lover and artistic collaborator, Ulay (for image and background, please see http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/abramovic+ulay/biography/). While I worked myself up to the challenge, I watched a number of gallery visitors go first, most of them employing strategies like averting their eyes or putting a handbag through first as if to confirm that it was safe. The most common strategy was to turn sideways, which made it easier to go through unimpeded. I felt it was important to avoid this last strategy. My reason was that I didn’t want one performer to be free of voyeurism at the expense of the other, especially because both sexes were represented. As a feminist, should I not aim for equal treatment? (That may seem ridiculous, but it is what was going through my mind at the time). I wonder what stance I would have taken had the actors both been female, which is another combination Abramović has used. Like most people who have written about the experience, I found the process of making it through to the other side thrilling and panic-inducing. I believe the exact words I whispered were, “My hip made contact [with the male actor’s penis]. There was definite bumpage.”

If we can’t get past this discomfort and shrill fascination with the human body in its raw state, do we have any hope of appreciating artwork that is one step removed from corporeality? Or is representing the body rather than using the body proper the way to go? In a general sense, it may not be a question worth asking because both already exist in the art world, and both have been well received. It’s apples and oranges, really. For me personally, though, it is more an issue of deciding to stick with a singular fruit regimen or broaden my diet. I still haven’t done the performance I blogged about planning last summer. At the time, I blamed the uncooperative weather, but the truth is, I’ve been stalling because I don’t relish the idea of putting my body on display for my art.

I decided to wait until the end of The Visible Vagina to write about it, in part because I wanted to see what the fall-out would be like. Reading online comments about the show early on, I was amazed by the fixation on the title. It seemed that every commentator was quick to point out that the vagina can’t technically be seen sans speculum and therefore The Visible Vulva would be a more logical choice. Did this virtual equivalent of wrist slapping occur because the organizers were male, or was it an unconscious means to gloss over the actual content of the show because of a collective discomfort with the human body?

It’s not just me imagining widespread discomfort with the human body, and specifically the female body. As television network resistance to the ad campaign released this past week for U by Kotex (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf35wCmzWw) revealed, ‘vagina’ is unwelcome in our public lexicon. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the equivalent 98,000 inferences (i.e., 98 works x 1000 words) to a woman’s private parts in The Visible Vagina are powerful indeed.

My overall impression is that by all accounts, The Visible Vagina is comprehensive. It emphasizes the range of work featuring female genitalia in multiple media throughout art history (encompassing modern artists, Second Wave feminist artists, contemporary artists, and both male and female artists). It can’t be reduced to a peep show because the subjects are shown in states of indifference in addition to pleasure. It reminds us of offensive tropes throughout art history, like the truncated female nude, but it also reminds us of the victories, like Judy Chicago’s Red Flag (1971), a close-up photolithograph of a woman removing a used tampon (television networks, take note: the art world already paved the way for public acceptance of the pudenda some 40 years ago). It includes works that are diminutive/life-size and ones that compelled me to conclude that size does matter. A personal highlight was fibre artist Allyson Mitchell’s installation, Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism (2006-07). Evocative of a tented harem decorated in grandma’s crocheted blankets and other cozy throw-backs from the 70s, this mammoth rendition of the vagina was exquisite and walking into its mouth felt more delightful than unsettling. (For images, please see http://www.allysonmitchell.com/visualart/hungry_purse/index.cfm).

For the faint of heart, the exhibition can be experienced through the catalogue, which includes Anna C. Chave’s valuable essay, “Is this Good for Vulva? Female Genitalia in Contemporary Art.”