Oh, happy day.

I wanted to examine the male gaze again for this video performance. This video is a comment on the pressures that women feel to wear makeup. I had a man apply the makeup as to take even that liberty away.

I wanted to explore the idea of the male nipple and male gaze.  For the nipple, it was about the over sexualization of the female nipple.  For the gaze it was a look into the difference between male and female gaze.

Video Art Project

I started out thinking about a comment that was made in class.  I can not recall at this time the context of the conversation, but I remember it being stated in not so many words that, “We can not see evolution happen in our life time.”  I thought about this for a while, because I disagree.  That one comment led me to think about how HIV is constantly mutating, and t ever changing.  It is through these mutations, and evolutions of the virus that the cure is elusive, for now. Of course that is a very broad generalization and over simplification of how the virus actually functions.  This thought then led me to begin to thing about Patient Zero.  I had recently listened to podcast about  ‘infamous’ Patient Zeros.  It was recorded in the midst the Ebola outbreak in the middle of last year.   I began to develop my idea with exploring the Ebola outbreak and I found myself becoming interested in personal accounts from people who lived in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.  I watched as they described losing their families, how difficult it was to get medical attention, and how they carried dead bodies out onto the street because there were not enough resources to keep up with those who were dying.  I also began to watch documentaries of WHO workers talking about the deplorable shacks that were set up as quarantine units.  Some WHO workers began to go into villages that they knew were infected without protective gear because the villagers would run if the WHO workers were in full gear.  My initial idea was to talk about the Ebola outbreak through the imagery of forests that had been decimated by pine beetles.  I chose this because it seems that only people who are close to forests that are affected are really in tune with how out of control the situation is. I spent some time researching pine beetles and their life cycles.  I found that a major factor to the rise in the pine beetle populations was global warming. Because the winters have not been as cold the larva are living linger.  I discovered many details of both the pine beetle epidemic and the Ebola outbreak to make a narrative, but I wasn’t satisfied.  I felt that there was something much much bigger that I could comment on.  I went back to my initial thought, about patient zero.  Patient zero is a powerful person.  My narrative is not about the infection and death that is spread by patient zero, rather it is a comment on how powerful patient zero can be.  One person can change how we view the infrastructures that in place that become no more than illusions when we really need them. There is a much bigger picture within the idea of patient zero.  With the Ebola breakout there were obvious gaps in many facets of our everyday infrastructures.  People began to lose faith and hope, especially in the heavily affected countries. They were told to bring their sick and dead to hospitals, but then they were turned away at the door because there was no room.  People were dying on the streets and no one had answers.  There is also a comment here about how it affected those outside of the immediate area.  New stories did not report much until the first infected person to flee the country came to Texas seeking treatment, and then died.  Then it was no longer an isolated ‘their’ problem.  There was fear and anger here in America, and again the illusionistic infrastructures in security, healthcare, government began to be shown.   This video is a comment on how one person, in the case of the recent Ebola out break, one little boy can change the entire world.  One person has the potential to change the world, expose the truth, and make us question everything even once they are gone. Patient Zero is a fascinating and powerful person who has the every relenting ability to make us question everything.

Q: Are artists that do endurance performance art EXTREMELY narcissistic?  

Q:  I feel that especially in video art that it is not the video that we watch that is the art, but it was the idea and then the actual performance that was the art, what we watch is just the reproduction of the event. Is it because of this quality that video art was specifically looked at as being narcissistic?  

 Question:  I struggle a lot with finding a balance with the composition of my piece and how I want the viewer’s gaze to move throughout the piece. How does an artist develop the skills to create the movement that they want the viewer’s gaze to follow?  What choices and considerations go into this?

Question: How does an art student begin to investigate how to convey the meaning of their art in a way that is interesting and understandable to others who are viewing it?

Q:  Why do we so treasure the idea of these lost recordings that have now surfaced on the internet?  

 This performance serves to demonstrate a lonely and dark truth about domestic violence, which is that it happens all the time, but that life continues on.  I chose the audio clips that I did because I wanted to go beyond the sounds of domestic violence, and tap into to the physical feelings I had when I knew that it has been happening.  Domestic violence may take place behind a closed door, but it follows the victims to work, to school, out into the world.  They carry that burden every day.  This work is not about advocating for the victims, because a lot of times that does not happen. This is the audio layering of a horrific moment in a families’ life mashed within mundane daily occurrences including recess, office gossip, and dinner time.  I am not intending this to be the answer to fixing policies or strengthening laws.  This is not a “feel good” happy endings work.  I made this sound performance because I encountered a horrible domestic violence situation and listening to these sound clips captures the experience.

Question:  Where does ‘critiquing’ happen after art school?

Question: What happens after art school once an art student is out of the ‘college bubble’? Where do we end up?  As bank tellers, late night grocery store managers, bar tenders? Where do we go from here?

Question: What will come after post modernism? The enlightenment put emphasis on sciences, and modernism was a break away from the conventions  To me post modernism is political, persona centered, and evocative on emotional levels.  Where will we go from here?

Marclay is like an analogue DJ.  He takes the idea of looping and creating new sounds, but does it in real time with the sounds that he creates.  This makes the sounds and the pieces that he creates unique in the sense that the record is scratched that way now, and that he would most likely, if not recorded, be able to produce that sound again.  The point that he makes early on in the documentary about how music that is recorded is dead, and that the music that he is creating is alive was a really unique take on his art and process to me because it makes his performances feel like creations rather than a concert.  I watched this documentary after reading, ‘cheerful-and-heroic-failure.’  The part where Marclay is talking about how Punk music influenced him greatly made me think back to the reading and how he ‘failed’ as a musician (he stated that he did not know how to play an instrument in the beginning of the documentary) and how that paved the way and Punk influenced his creations.   When Marclay is playing with the other DJs it reminded me of the idea of the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ drawing that the surrealists created.  

I suppose that I had never really given much thought to the question, ‘What is music.’  That really never seemed to be an abstract concept.  Music to me was always the idea of sounds combining together to form melodies, or create dissonance.  I have played musical pieces with other objects that are not instruments (duck call, break drum).  Thinking about that question, ‘What is music’ is what I got out of this documentary.  I found Cage and his strong reliance on ‘Chance Operations’ to be calming.  The way that he created music to mimic nature in the sense that it composed by chance was really fascinating to me as an artist, and enlightening as a musician.  I admit that in the beginning parts of the documentary I was not really sure what to think, but I was leaning towards not really categorizing the sounds that he was making as music.  Cage poses the questions, ‘ Is a truck passing by music? Which is more musical? A truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?’ and I think that this was the point in the documentary that I felt that I was beginning to understand that the word ‘music’ encompasses far more that I had thought.  

Q: How do we learn to fail as artists?

Q: What is this era’s contribution to  ‘noise-sound,’ or is there a new type of ‘Noise music?.’