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Photography and it’s Expanded Practices Sarah Blaikie BAP1
POST-MODERNISM. APPROPRIATION:
• The posh word for STEALING! • Linked to the use of found images and material • Using what is already there → Richard Prince, Andy Warhol…
• The opposite of ‘Structuralism’ as in Modernism DECONSTRUCTION: • Ambiguous, there’s no right/wrong • Rules are DISCARDED
A questioning of what has gone before and has a SENSE OF HUMOUR. Pastiche, Irony/Satire, Critical Approach. ORIGINAL IDEAS: ➢ Revert back to video portraits touched on in Sixth Form. • Filmed people listening to ‘Montagues & Capulets’ by Prokofiev in order to note the reactions of each to the music, especially as it became increasingly more recognizable. I enjoyed producing these videos as well as the post-production elements and seeing what I could retain from them. • Play with the music/play with them? (Appropriation of • Adjust the environment in which they listen to it? music material) • Mix the videos with music videos or change the background music.
BETTINA VON ZWEHL: Alina
A series of 12 portraits of young women from the Royal College of Music in London in 2004. Zwehl set up a dark studio environment in which the women could become as absorbed in listening to the classical piece ‘Fur Alina’, composed as a gift for a young Estonian woman living alone in London, as possible. The piece is quite a dark and slow, melancholic one written for the piano. Zwehl waited until she believed the women had been given enough time to become totally immersed and then uses bright, synced flashes to capture their unconscious expression. Zwehl specialises in creating uncontrollable environments for her subjects in order to see them in a more real light, so that there’s a heightened authenticity and in search of individuality. I’m toying with the idea of playing music of different kinds to people in a controlled environment which is very similar to this except rather than flash the subjects for a momentary record of their reaction to the environment I was thinking more about filming the subjects for the entirety of the experirencet to watch the reactions play-by-play and have a record of each individual’s development. Whereas before I played ‘Montagues and Capulets’ by Prokofiev I feel like I should do some reseacrh into music of very different fields and backgrounds, particularly around the post-modern period, in order to further develop this idea. I feel like it needs a stronger foundation for a more interesting outcome.
Profiles Three:
Zwehl works in Portrait a lot as it is an ancient and timeless approach. Shot on large format, it was extremely hard keeping babies still enough for the correct eposure.
Untitled One:
Zwehl shot this series of people from above looking straight down at them as they lay on the ground. The angle gives them an uncomfortable and awkward quality that we can’t quite put out finger on until we understand the set-up.
My other original idea for this project kind of came about after I received a package containing a superwoman costume, this one pictured. It was in time for a superhero fancy dress party that a friend & I had tickets to but I was so excited about the outfit that I put it on straight away & then found that I continued to don the dress whenever I found myself in unmotivated circumstances or having to do tasks that were menial or that I was simply struggling to bring myself to do. There was something about the dress that made me feel quite empowered and motivated and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what, but I realised it had the potential to be a great self-portrait series.
SUPER WOMAN!
DOING VERY NORMAL THINGS SUCH AS HOOVERING & WATCHING TV & WRITING ESSAYS & PICKING UP GROCERIES...
WHY I DON’T THINK BECAUSE I’m very aware that it suggests femiI’LL GO WITH THIS nism which is both a subject I am not well-read on or passionate about. I also feel like I know where IDEA THIS TERM: the project would be going to already. I feel like the video project has morespace to develop and tacts to work with.
PETER SAVILLE
The Album Artwork: Using Post-Modernism as a starting point I was thinking about what came about in the late 70’s/80’s that I know of or enjoy listening to so I watched a documentary on Factory Records and looked into the work of Peter Saville. Joy Division was the first major success story of Factory and their album cover for Unknown Pleasures broke previos rules. Record covers became more about the artwork & therefore more desirable to own. Saville’s infamous sandpaper album was inspired by the Situationist author Debord who published one of his books in sandpaper, designed to ruin the rest of the collection. Ironically, the cover slowly ruined the LP inside it also, so the artwork wasn’t all that practical!
COSEY FANNI TUTTI & Throbbing Gristle
Tutti is an artist working with many forms but music and performance are those she is more widely recognised for. The show ‘Prostitution’ at the ICA is the most famous and was organised by COUM Transmissions, a collective influenced by the Dada movement. When looking at music and influential movements in the post-modern era, Throbbing Gristle popped up. A band set up by Cosey Fanni Tutti, that gained success and fans who still pay to see them play now. Tutti’s artword and the general manifesto of COUM’s was quite similar. Controversial and confrontational, Tutti addressed issues in the sex industry, the selling of self & body and image, prostitution, porn & it’s social implications. The exhibition included her naked performances, used sanitary towels & syringes. Tory MP Nicholas Fairbaim referred to COUM as the ‘Wreckers of Western Civilisation’. I’ve listened to some of Throbbing Gristle’s work, such as ‘Discipline’, ‘Hamburger Lady’. Still struggling with what to make with all this material though.
Cosey Performing
Throbbing Gristle
PUNK & THE SEX PISTOLS
Inspired by war & poverty, The Sex Pistols formed and performed what came to be known as Punk; rebellios and also controversial, a statement on modern society & politics. Their movement really took off with the addition of frontman John Lydon, a very opinionated and openly cynical shop assistant who quickly became the channel of the band’s thoughts and their voice. The gathered a reputation for beng the band who couldn’t play but they seem to have gotten through to and influenced an incredible number of young artists and bands of that era who had seen them live, such as Siouxse Sioue, Billy Idol, but more famously their gig in Manchester 1976 where 2 members of the soon-yo-be Joy Division and Tony Wilson of Factory Records, as well as Morrissey, all young men and women who felt inspired enough to feel like they could achieve the same themselves.
I’ve been thinking about types of music a lot in the hope that it would help to form a more developed response to the brief seeing as I really didn’t want to attempt the same kind of project again mor just an extension of it. I want to challenge myself more and I want to be actively engaged in the material but despite all the research I’ve carried out on the post-modern era & even after toying with the idea of a music video of some sort I still don’t feel any clearer on what I want to acheive or follow through. Nothing has slipped into place yet or lit any lightbulbs so for now I’m going to start watching more YouTube videos as the video format is the one I have chosen and the sppropriation of material from YouTube seems like it fits with this project.
Andy Warhol’s ANTI-FILMS
I’ve been watching some of Warhol’s Video work. Screen Tests were essentially video Screen Tests: head shots of often very famous actors/actresses or artists that Warhols spent his tiem with and the object of the films was to turn most of the conventions of typical film-making on their heads. There were no scripts, shots were often out of focus and ran for awkwardly long lengths of time, badly timed, and at awkward angles.
Quite simply a 5 Sleep: hour 20 minute long film of Warhol’s friend asleep on a bed. Filmed at strange, preying angles and cutting scenes at unsuspecting, odd intervals it followed Warhol’s anti-film rules.
Blow Job:
a 35 minute straight-shot film of the head and shoulders of a young, unkown man; documenting his facial expressions. The title is obviously suggestive of him receiving oral sex but there are many rumours that this simply isn’t true.
CASSETTEBOY The stage name of Mark Bolton and Steve Warlin; immature and inventive recording artists.
VS. THE NEWS Focussing on their YouTube work, I’ve watched all of the videos posted to their channel as research. By painstakingly combing through material such as the BBC News at 6 O’Clock for 3 months, they are able to create often between 1.5-3 minute long compilation videos using scenes closely cut together. Their work is satirical and humorous but seldom without serious political undertones. Their YouTube videos are their most accessible body of work and harvest a great deal of attention. With that in mind their most recent upload
(as of May 2013) is one named ‘Cassetteboy & Amnesty International vs. The Arms Trade’ in which President Obama is seen to be apologising for America’s continued supplying of Arms and weaponry to 3rd World countries and wartorn civilisations. At the end of the video, it is announced that in upcoming months World Leaders will meet at the UN to agree an Arms Trade Treaty and implores viewers to show support and sign a petition (which has since happened and was successful in aiding the agreement of teh treaty). all of Cassetteboy’s videos however are out to VS. THE BLOODY APPRENTICE Not save the world. Their most popular ‘vs The Bloody Apprentice’ ammassing nearly 4.9 million views since its upload. Exagerating and elongating awkward and impossible moments, creating highly unlikely but hilarious situations in Sir Alan Sugar’s Boardroom.
Spinal Tap
1984
I had never seen ‘This is Spinal Tap’ but I knew it was a classic example of a mockumentary, which is the style of video I’ve been looking into recently. I know a lot has been done in this style since but it was one of the first of it’s kind, certainly as a Blockbuster. It plays on the widespread presumptions of hard rock bands at the time (especially English ones, using similar visual concepts as The Rolling Stones and The Batles) and also mocks the hagiographic approach of a lot of rock documentaries of the time. I found the english humour particularly funny and loved just how dull their time seemed to be in the grand scheme of things.
THE MOCKUMENTARY
MONTY PYTHON
‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ was the first of the three feature length films made by the British comedians that I saw, and I remember just how much I enjoyed it to this day, it’s still one of my favourite films. I made sure to see ‘The Life of Brian’ and ‘The Meaning of Life’ soon afterward and did some research into the group behind it. None of these films are mockumentaries as such, but I like how ‘Life of Brian’ plays on serious global issues such as that of religion and play it out in such an informal and accessible way. That film in particular caused uproar in the Christian Community as it was seen to suggest the Jesus didn’t really exist as the son of man, they didn’t find it very funny...
I’ve been thinking about this mockumentary/satirical approach to film-making and how I could develop my own project using it. With the appropriation of found materials in mind, particularly from YouTube which I have been scouring, I have been thinking about my what my subject matter should be. I considered clips from Disney films and mixing them with more serious matters but realised how sadistic the connotations could very easily become and couldn’t settle on a specific purpose for their use so I’ve dropped this train of thought. The only other idea I’ve had is to take a simple cookery show programme or something equally innocent and play Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven or indeed something equally demure over the top just to shift the tone of the video and play with its purpose. I am yet to experiment.
William S. Burroughs THE
CUT-OUT TECHNIQUE
Seeing as I was watching videos that employed a choppy approach I thought I should do some research into this method itself and it’s origins. William S. Burroughs was a highly influential author of highly controversial literature from the 1950’s onwards. Good friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg he is noted as having been a major player in the Beat Generation. Most of his novels were reflections on his time as a herion addict, material often taken from daries he kept. I attempted to read Naked Lunch but realy struggled to stay focussed, even after reading some studies and tehories behind it that I found. It’s a difficult and quite grotesque text to say the least.
Christian Marclay’s
The Clock.
This video piece is a 24-hour continuous montage of thousands of film excerpts that runs in real time through the presence of often watches or clocks in the clips edited together. It was exhibited as a daily screening in a cinema-esque large, dark viewing room and incorporated all kinds of typically cinematic scenes such as car chases, meetings in boardrooms and operations in hospital theatres. I thought about this when considering the choppy method of cutting films after researching Burroughs, I had been reminded of it. Obviously nothing on this scale is possiblebut it is simple, clever video work.
Douglas Gordon: 24 hour psycho Gordon slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller ‘Psycho’ to last the length of a day, moving at approximately 2 frames per second. Gordon has said he did not wish to simply appropriate it but by altering it’s speed he hoped to force the audience to think much more about Hitchcock’s decisions and vision, far less about Gordon himself as the artist. Gordon has worked with cinema and appropriated material all of his career to great effect.
Psycho Nacirema:
Much like ‘24 Hour Psycho’ this very recent video piece created collaboratively by Gordon and actor James Franco is not designed to be a homage. Franco cross-dresses and plays the part of Marlon Crane within the recreation - playing with the themes of transvestism and psychosis touched on in the original. Both of these take on material and create an entirely different purpose for it.
Lernet & Sander
Chocolate Bunny
A friend showed me this video art piece called ‘Chocolate Bunny’ which quite simply but in a strangely beautiful way shows 3 methods of melting a chocolate bunny. By paying close attention to the still life set-up around the bunny, the colours and the camera angles used the acts become mesmerizing and the melody sang throughout seems to lament it’s disappearance.
Nigella Talks Dirty When researching on YouTube I came across this spoof video made from clips of Nigella Lawson’s cookery show, montged together to make it sound like she’s talking dirty about foreplay and sex in the kitchen of her house where her shows are filmed. Nigella is known for having sex appeal and flaunting it in her programmes, she has the reputation of being a household goddess and this video plays on that and pushes it to it’s extreme. It’s very straightforward, immature humour but it works because it’s simple and appeals to the masses. It’s the same sort of approach that CassetteBoy take and the one I’m quite interested in attempting somehow.
The same applies for a video named ‘Gordon Talks Dirty’ produced and uploaded soon after the success of it’s predecessor. These videos have actually made me realise that cookey shows and programmes could actually be a good starting point for me insted of Disney clips as cooking is something I’m passionate about and I have a new-found interest in the shows. There’s a lot of potential material in it.
JAMIE’S 15 MINUTE MEALS
...& Gordon
Once I started thinking about cookery programmes my mind thought straight away about Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals, the book published with the series is one of the things I contribute with my having recently gotten into cooking so much since I moved out from home. I started thinking about creating different contexts for the programmes, most of which are readily available online, by replacing the audio of the videos to challenge their out of them. My first thought was to play something everyday normality and therefore create an art piece like ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ seeing as the purpose of the programme is to highlight how fast good cooking can be and I thought the urgency and nature of the music would alleviate that element to a humourous level. Then I considered music of a totally different tone such as Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven and realiseed as soon as I paired these up that the sombre tone gave meat & fish preparing scenes a comical vegetarian message that I hadn’t first intended.
How-To Videos
Once I had stumbled on what I thought was quite a funny anti-meat message I started scouring YouTube for more cookery videos of all styles and quickly found that the most commonly uploaded are self-help how-to style tutorials on all sorts of things included skinning and filleting an Elk as well as gutting and filleting large fresh water fishes. Seeing as I’m not a vegetarian, as much as I am still a little put off by handling meat, the sight of it being cut up didn’t really stir much emotion in me. I readily eat meat so it felt false for me to attempt to convey an almost vegetarian message in my work. However, I very rarely eat fish and have never agreed with the act of pole fishing as the men in my family often did it in Scotand and I hated seeing the fish in discomfort, them being killed and floating around lifeless in the sink after. I have seriously taken to cooking but still have no desire to attempt to prepare and cook fish, the idea of it grosses me out. I realised this as soon as I began watching tutorials on filleting fish; not only did I feel slightly disturbed by the unapologetic dissecting of the different fish but I found myself unnaturally siding with the fish, feeling incredibly sorry for it. I knew I’d finally found my subject matter!
Sockeye Salmon Sonata Having settled on the fish element I began downloading fish specific videos and gathering a collection of them. The ones that I found were the most effective in ther simplicity were the videos shot from one angle and showed the entire process of filleting the fish in what feels like a slow and sad process when muted. I then decided that Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven was the perfect piece of music to accompany the videos due to its infamously mournful nature. It felt right that as the limp, dead fish was being stripped slowly, the music should act as a lament to the fish. The version of this piece that I downloaded happened to be about 6 and a half minutes long and so I found and settled on a video of a Sockeye Salmon being filleted on a table next to another Salmon that lasted roughly the same amount of time and placed the piece over the top of the muted video. It has a slow pace but the purpose of the video is clear from the outset which aids in the humour I believe. The video is effective in lamenting the fish as I had intended to and it is easy for the audience to understand what I’m trying to communicate but this tact I’ve decided to take needs more development than this. I believe to really convey the disgust I feel about taking apart the fish I need to get closer & it needs to be gorier.
Semiotics Martha Rosler of the Martha Rosler was an active feminist both in her artwork and life outside of it Kitchen and this particular piece entitled ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ is a parody piece designed to highlight the happy housewife ideal and cliche. It rebels against this using dead-pan humour and a slow pace to elongate the process of using various alphabetized kitchen utensils to undertake tedious tasks one after the other. She purposely uses them in unproductive or violent ways before sometimes throwing them ‘out of the box’ of the television screen it was designed to be displayed on. I feel like it’s really successful in showing the banality and primitive nature of the housewife ideal and throwing it out the window. It’s all taken in one shot much like the salmon video which
gives it the same rolling pace and it harbours the same kind of straight forward humour despite their purposes being very different. This video stands against celebrity housewives such as Delia Smith and Nigella whose programmes I have been studying for my project. It is probably no coincidence that Delia Smith made her first appearance on TV cooking in the early 70’s just before Rosler produced this video/performance piece.
Julia Kristeva:
The Abject
Seeing as the subject I have chosen to pursue involves facing what it is that stirs real discomfort and disgust in me when I am confornted with it, I did some research into Kristeva’s concept of Abjection and what it means. By reading through some of this essay I was able to grasp some of her theories about the abject; how it refers to disgusted human reaction (such as nausea and horror) caused by a breakdown in meaning, a lack of distinction between self and other. She uses the corpse as the ultimate example as we are reminded within life of our own materiality and I feel like I can relate these principles to my own feelings of repulsion in taking apart a dead fish. I think the humour in my piece lies in the almost absurdity of my feelings of sympathy for the fish and that’s what I hope to communicate; I want my audience to side with the fish too.
My Final Idea: After a lot of various research and consideration, I finally settled on an idea for a video that would use post-modern, humorous and playful engagement with my personal, chosen subject matter that both answers the brief, works as an art piece for display in exhibition and will hopefully engage a varied audience. My plan is to produce a short video with a narratve, making it easy for a wider audience and therefore as many people as possible to engage with my message and whilst watching feel (even if just momentarily) the abjection I feel about the gory gutting and filleting of fish. In order to do this I’ve created a simple story for the audience to follow and have decided on a dramatic accompanying soundtrack to undoubtedly emphasise the scene and ensure the message is conveyed. The story is simple: fish are seen on ice in a fishmonger/supermarket scene, the bag containing the bought fish is followed on it’s trip carried home where we then see the person carrying it begin preparations for cooking it (including washing the knife and putting on gloves, placing the fish in the sink) before finally beginning to gut/fillet the fish and placing it in the pan/oven for cooking. I have chosen the piece ‘O Fortuna’ by composer Carl Orff as it is typically used to dramacize all manner of material online and on television. It is little more than 2 and a half minutes long which keeps the video short and to-the-point which should ensure the attention of the audience is held. It also has 3 obvious movements; a decisive and deliberate opening, an initially quiet but gradually increasing body in volume and intensity that moves into a dramatic and climatic finale. I can already appreciate how I could use these movements to my advantage with the video and use them as a framework for my storyboard. The storyboard presented here is evidence of my first shoot. My flatmate Liz agreed to attempt to fillet the fish for me and act as the person buying and transporting it. It was the first time I had handled a recording DSLR so I was a bit clumsy with getting focus right at first and I also realised that because I was using my own wide-angle lens there was a vignetting effect in the frame which I hadn’t intended. I went to Billingsgate Market early in the morning and bought about 6 fresh Mackerels, 2 I kept out and the others I stored in the freezer for later use. I realised as soon as I started filming that Liz didn’t know how to fillet fish and we hadn’t been able to get a hold of a filleting knife so the whole process was very messy but I knew once I had watched it back that it was the gore was effective. After discussion with my tutorial group however it was decided that the yellow gloves were distracting, they also normally serve the purpose of washing up in the kitchen so I decided to exchange them in teh next shoot for clear, barely there gloves. The pressing priority for the next shoot however was to ensure that the shots were MUCH closer to what’s going on. In order to cause discomfort in a viewer who would otherwise be unperturbed by the images I need to show as much of the gore involved as I can and emphasise it. I also began showing Liz some of the filleting tutorial videos I had downloaded so that she had a better idea of where to start and how better to go about doing it. I think I adopted the same camera angles and distances that I had seen in these videos and the cookery programmes by default as I was so used to it but it doesn’t work in context of this piece.
Douglas
Sharpening Gordon: Fantasy I have already looked at ‘24 Hour Psycho’, the video piece that is greatly credited with Gordon’s rise to fame. This piece was shown in Berlin in 2012 alongside two others but this one intrigues me in particular because it was shot extremely close-up, in a dark setting and projected on a screen in a dark environment. The footage is of the skilled hands of a professional tool sharpener and the video is played with surrounding, loud audio of the unnerving noise of metal scraping on metal. It is all designed to create a chilling and highly uncomfort-
able setting for the viewer. It’s this level of discomfort that I’ve been talking about trying to achieve through the build-up of the 2nd movement and the climax of the 3rd in my video. Obviously I still want it to have an informal, accessible quality which is why I’ve chosen this particular narrative and almost cliched soundtrack but if I could genuinely stir uneasiness in the audience with the gore then I will have ultimately achieved what I’m attempting to do; sickening a body of people into seeing why I side with the fish!
I Dish
‘I Dish’ is a very different video piece to the likes of Gordon’s, it holds a subtle but sad story of a young couple. Not much is clear but after having read into it I know that Parker was carefully utilising different landscapes in an attempt to reflect the varying levels of comfort and constraint within the relationship and the individuals. It is obvious that on the beach (when digging for fish) and in the pond the woman is comfortable whereas within the walls of her shared home there is a great deal of tension. The landscape is suggested to belong to the male and despite her finding, preparing and cooking of the Mackerel it seems she is in no way appreciated for her efforts and is ultimately uncomfortable, restrained. The woman in the video handles a Mackerel in a far more skilled manner than Liz did in my filming, using the correct utensil etc. However there are no feelings of abjection whatsoever as it is a clean cut job, she leaves no mess. Of course abjection has nothing to do with the message of this video and would only cause distraction if anything but seeing as that is a primary message in my piece it has influenced my decision to allow Liz to make a mess of at least one or two of the fish I have stored away. After watching this video and more cookery research I’ve realised that the easiest and quite a common way of cooking fish like Mackerel is to simply gut it, season it and then wrap it in tin foil and bake it whole. This method is ideal because it would involve the necessary gore but keeps the entire and empty corpse of the limp and lifeless fish intact which almost emphasises the sad side that I see to the story, as you are still able to look into the fish’s eyes.
Jayne Parker:
I Cat
‘I Cat’ is a short animation piece, one of Parker’s earliest, that came about after she decided to make a list of things that make her vomit - ‘cat’ being a colloquialism. It shows jolty, sketchy drawings appearing one after the other illustrating a fish becoming a backbone, engulfing and almost eating the inside of a woman. I feel like I can relate to her work, particularly this piece seeing as the video I’m about to make will also be my first and deals directly with what I find horror in, which also rings similarly to Parker’s. She has very effectively used sound also to instill another uncomfortable quality.
These are some of the 15 shots I took that I needed to cover the 15 separate notes that open the operatic music I’ve chosen. I managed to convince my manager at the shop I work in to allow me to film the fish on ice as the counter staff set up for the morning. At first I was dissapointed that there wasn’t a better selection of ugly fishes but upon reflection I think the fact most of the fish are quite tame is domestic and effective.