COP3 REVISED PROPOSAL OUIL601
JAZZ HARBORD
Throughout the research element of this project, I feel I’ve come across a couple of issues and road bumps that have inspired me to change my initial proposal slightly. Though these changes have come as a result of, at times, frustrating dead ends and a lack of focus to my original research, I now feel confident in a more specific line of research and idea generation. I began with the question “To what extent do the individual politics of professional practitioners impact on the role and function of Illustration?� I chose this question due to an interest in Factory Records, that stemmed from my COP2 module on the British Rave Culture from the late 1980s to early 1990s. What really gripped me about this subject matter was the people involved in it; their bravery and strong sense of community. I began my research therefore based on these two principles; bravery and community. However, I found that rather quickly things began to get complicated. I found a few examples of
things that interested me that related to these two themes, but they lacked a sense of continuity or strong shared theme. While the examples fit into these two key notions, they seemed very far apart in terms of message, voice and medium. I began thinking about what inspired the bravery in each of these instances; was it austerity? Did I want to look at protest art? What is bravery in art? What makes something brave? What was each collective trying to achieve? Can you measure bravery? I found that my research began to feel very muddled and vague. I had too many themes and not enough tying them all together. I feel at this point I was trying to do too much research and look at too many things.
It was around this point however I spoke to one of my peers about my dissertation. While explaining the research I’d undertaken and what I wanted my dissertation to be about, I realised that I actually had little to no idea. Although I had been researching, it wasn’t focused and was all over the place. This lack of focus also made me disinterested in my subject matter; I didn’t know what I was really researching anymore, and I felt as though the initial thing driving me had been lost in the process of trying to ‘get something down’ in time for restarting the academic year. At this point my peer, Aidan, said something that in turn happened to be very useful. “Jazz, why aren’t you doing sad girls and zines.” Although an off the cusp remark, what Aidan had said actually made a lot of sense. I complained that I’d done too much on something entirely different already, but when I took the time to sit down and do a little research, I found that this
could actually work. Zines are usually made by collectives, and a lot of the work in femzines or GRRRL zines was brave. At the time I didn’t know much about these scenes. But zines are something I feel personally interested in, and though the notion of feminism is something I often feel quite daunted by, a lot of the work I create is inspired by personal experiences and accounts, and a lot of those are due to the fact that I’m a lady with a lot to say. I’m quite emotional when it comes to my work, and I enjoy the work of others that has a clear sense of passion and authenticity. Therefore my research has taken a slight turn, but one I hope will be for the best.
Question 2: To what extent do the individual politics of professional practitioners impact on the role and function of Illustration?
SUBJECT IDEAS • Personal politics of women’s say? issues // experiences bring them • How are female illustrators getting together? involved? How is it affecting their • Art collectives // publications // work? online communities; where and • Stronger as a collective? why? from the Punk movement – • What issues are these collectives • Born is it still appropriate today? tackling? What are they trying to
QUOTES • Rosemary Betterton – (on an unfinished patchwork she made) It carried with it a sense of feminine • identity, experienced as a mixture of satisfaction and frustration, achievement and failure, attachment and loss. In other words, a kind of uncompleted project on femininity which somehow characterized my own contradictory and unresolved relationship to the feminine. • • Rosemary Betterton – Women’s painting, sculpture, writing, dance, performance, installation, video or film all offer us ways in which the female body has been re-imagined. • Stephen Duncombe – For at the heart of the zine ethic is a definition of creation and work that is truly fulfilling: work in which you have complete control over what you are creating, how you are doing it, and
whom you are doing it for, that is authentic work.
Tavi Gevinson – This is this stuff that needed to be in pages adorned with doodles and glitter; that is revisited in times of angst and crisis, and that couldn’t be just stared at on the screen for such an occasion. I mean, to being able to actually HOLD art and writing that you love is kind of sort of really special. Amy Campbell – Since the birth of the riot grrrl, zines and gender-based activism have been entwined. Handmade, autonomous and radical in tone, these self-published manifestos might be pocket-sized, but when it comes to offering women a voice, they're a big force to be reckoned with. The paper and paste creations have been since been out-numbered by Tumblrs and Instagrams; but that doesn't mean we've abandoned the zine entirely.
BOOKS • Kingston, A. (ed.) (1999) Girl. London, United • Betterton, R. (1996) An intimate distance: Kingdom: New Art Gallery Walsall. Women, artists, and the body. New York: Taylor & Francis. • Gevinson, T. (2012) Rookie yearbook one. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. • Marcus, S. (2010) Girls to the front: The true story of the riot grrrl revolution. New York: • Duncombe, S. (2008) Notes from HarperCollins Publishers. underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture. 2nd edn. Bloomington, IN: Microcosm Publishing. • Deepwell, K. (ed.) (1995) New feminist art criticism: Critical strategies. Manchester: Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press.
WEBSITES • • • • • • • • • • •
https://riotgrrrlonline.wordpress.com/ https://i-d.vice.com/en_au http://www.dazeddigital.com/ http://flavorwire.com/ http://www.rookiemag.com/ http://femszine.com/ http://woolf-pack.tumblr.com/ http://www.barbarafrankieryan.com/#/girls/ https://onebeatzines.com/ http://www.dazeddigital.com/tag/zines http://girlsgetbusyzine.tumblr.com/
• • • •
https://issuu.com/ggbzine http://jigsawunderground.blogspot.co.uk/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bloody-hell#/ http://www.soofiya.com/bloody-hell
Girls Get Busy #18
Double Dare Ya Zine
IMAGES
Jigsaw Zine (Tobi Vail)
Bloody Hell - Soofiya Andry
Girls Get Busy Manifesto Riot Grrrl Cover (Started by Molly Neuman) first published 7th of October, 1991