Exoticisation of the Persona

Exoticisation of the Persona

(Video still from live recording of Strippers in Space by Amy Statik/Instagram @thealienspaceprincess)

Inspiration from watching underground strip shows and drag shows…

Back in October 2016, I was invited to an event by an artist friend who shares my interest in performance. The event was called ‘Deep Trash from Outer Space’ produced by CUNTemporary and was held at the working Men’s club in Bethnal Green. CUNTemporary is a non-profit organisation that works with individuals and groups that explore feminist, queer and decolonial art practices and theories such as perspectives on the body, femininity and objectification. I entered with no expectations and remember feeling inspired and eager to perform on my way out. I look back to one particular performance by Amy Statik called Strippers in Space. The immediate allure of the UV lighting bringing out the flourescent colour in her dress combined with David Bowie’s ethereal voice in Moonage Daydream as a soundtrack was enough to fix anyone’s attention. This immediate colour attraction attached with mysticism created this hunger inside the observer in me to communicate emotions untranslatable through words that I think performance has the power to achieve.

As it was a few years ago since I saw this performance, I wanted to make sure I could credit the performer. Amy Statik was difficult to trace online and during my search I came across an Instagram profile of another stripper named @pennyvalent a.k.a Katie Valent. She titles herself as ‘the anti-showgirl, dancer, fire performer and burlesque baby’. One of her posts that struck me most was her poetry which perfectly described my emotions as I was watching Strippers in Space by Amy Statik.

“It is like all your senses had been muted for so long you forgot you had them and now they are functioning into overdrive. You can hear and feel the entire universe outside vibrating through you; a cacophony of laughter and conversation and rumbling tube trains, the stench of city traffic in summer and all the beautiful colours of the theatre posters you walk by every day. There are dogs playing jubilantly in the sunshine, you see the hazel flecked with gold in the barista’s eyes as she gives you your coffee and your joints seem to have been oiled, moving ever more effortlessly through once awkward mechanical movements. Fluidity, running wild. It is as if you can feel the whole world turning on its axis whilst gravity holds you in place. You are feeling everything, every atom and every particle rushing up through your toes, your fingertips and your spine, like all the circuits inside you came on at once and all these fragile pieces of you, pieces you so delicately glued back together are blistering with electricity and fracturing under this force and you are utterly powerless to prevent it. When nature first forged you the memory of all who once moved and loved imprinted themselves there too within you, in the very make up of who you are. That is why when you dance you do not feel alone. You remember all who once danced and they dance with you. All long lost souls dance with you. And together, you feel... alive.” - L.H.L

(Live recording of Strippers in Space by Amy Statik/Instagram @thealienspaceprincess)

(Photo of live drag performance at Vastavirta club, Pispala, Finland.)

I renewed the liberating feeling I got from watching the Strippers in Space performance a few years ago when I watched an underground drag performance at Vastavirta club in Pispala, Finland this summer. According to Wikipedia, ‘drag queens are performance artists, almost always male, who dress in women's clothing and often act with exaggerated femininity and in feminine gender roles with a primarily entertaining purpose.’ In a broader sense, ‘doing drag’ is an activity which has many motivations, from individual self-expression to mainstream performance. Drag queen activities among stage and street performers may include lip-syncing, live singing, dancing, participating in events such as gay pride parades, drag pageants, or at venues such as cabarets and nightclubs.

With the drag performance I saw, I was impressed by the performer’s ability to appropriate the music she found through her careful choreography which extended to the finer details of her hand and finger movements accentuated by the cat like claws attached to to the silk gloves she was wearing. She created a unique identity through a collage of found materials.

Mr Mango was somewhere in these trees…

As a contrasting story for the topic of exotic personas, I would like to turn to an exotic bird and resident in my home town Croydon. His name is Mr Mango and I encountered him a few years ago when his owner, Becky Page, was going out for a walk with him whilst he was perched on her shoulder. Mr Mango, an animal that the performers I have already mentioned could have been inspired by when designing their performances and acts on stage. Mr Mango is a Macaw parrot born with striking multi-coloured feathers that nature equipped him with for him to survive in the tropical environment of a rain forest. Seeing him against the monochrome backdrop of Croydon’s central flyover built up with concrete was a stark image that I never forgot.

I did more research online into Croydon’s local resident Mr Mango and came across an article that was written in the local newspaper about the time when he went missing. Attached to the article was a slightly blurred photo (see below) of the tree where he was supposedly found hiding. He was found in an environment closer to his natural environment which as a domesticated parrot he would have never visited. I bumped into him again in town waiting outside McDonald’s as his owner’s friend was purchasing a fruit smoothie and he proudly stretched his wings.

I am interested in how the intended design and function of his colourful attire, that he was born with and is part of his body, is suddenly inverted once he was domesticated and homed in an environment alien to his own. One could say that his owner is appropriating his attire and creating a new dynamic by introducing him to a built up suburban town. He definitely attracts attention for her as she walks down the street and is a colourful friend to be with. All three characters I have introduced have attracted attention from an audience in different ways from the underground anarchist environment of a club scene to the everyday streets of a suburban town.

(Owner Becky Page and Mr Mango)

Croydon and its Banksy moment…

Croydon is currently experiencing a huge transformation and a lot of pressure has been placed on its persona, creating a new and attractive identity for the town that is more in keeping with recent developments and plans for its future. To kick start such plans, a few doses of hype have been added into the mix, the most recent being the arrival of the graffiti artist Banksy with his pop-up shop called Gross Domestic Product situated not far from the McDonalds where Mr Mango spread his wings. The title of the installation cleverly plays with the economic phrase that describes the measure of the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year. Static objects with no real use or purpose on display in a dummy shop pulled large crowds, not only locals but visitors from far and wide as well as collectors flying in from the USA to shop at Frieze London.

In comparison to the more heartfelt performers I have mentioned above who conceal their identities behind their dress and stage names we have another artist with a more calculated mask. It is incredible how much hype was created by an artist who’s real identity remains unknown as he hides behind his brand which strategically makes him more famous as people are intrigued by mystery and again Banksy is playing a game with us and Croydon. It is a perfect excuse to demonstrate how the public are perhaps easily pleased greeted by a display that perhaps laughs at visitors by acting as an antagonizing dummy shop and in turn critiquing human behaviour.

Writings on Hirvitalo and its surrounding community, Pispala, Finland

https://www.thesundaytribune.com/2019/07/19/finnish-art-anarchism-the-guardians-of-the-lake-forest/

A Vocabulary of Yearning

‘The aspect of transition creates a vocabulary of yearning rooted in the historical romantic movement’ quote from ‘Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism In Contemporary Art…In everyday language, the term is generally used in a reduced sense meaning sentimental, far from civilization, full of atmosphere, rapturous, picturesque. This use has only little to do with the actual movement’s complex character.’- from e-flux online journal

Generating ideas on Romanticism as an agent or power agent, admiring the beauty in classical imagery. I have been looking at representations of statues from still photographs of dancers, dancers working with stillness and actual statues.

V&A Friday Late session ‘Snap’. The night was focused on the extent to which we capture our lives on camera. ‘Our lives are a catalogue- whether in feeds or in photo albums, we capture and curate our worlds through the amassing and sharing of pictures.’ This event coincided with the opening of the Photography Centre and explores how we create, collect and preserve moments.

One of the live performances on the night stayed with me.

‘Untitled’ choreographed by Geni Lou Elie-Anne Ross (@geni_lou, genilou.com) and Frederique. “PAX” Dumas. Programmed in partnership with WOMAN SRSLY.

‘A 10 minute performance exploring perfection and deformation through popping. Three dancers stand as pieces of art- elegant, poised objects of admiration. Under your gaze, they gradually morph into awkward, trembling, deformed versions of themselves.’ Here is a shot recording from my mobile phone to briefly illustrate the ensemble of music and the awkward positioning and restraints the performers were under.

Conductors

Watching my steps

Excerpt from 'Evocative Objects- Things we think with' Edited by Sherry Turkle

The Radio

By Julian Beinart

Walking down a street in the middle of Durban, South Africa’s most racially mixed city, I passed a boy carrying a wooden transistor radio. It was about six inches long and two inches wide, with a wooden handle and a hinged wooden dowel antenna about two feet long tapered to a small knob at its end. On top of its body, one of three square wooden buttons was pressed down. A slit of broken glass covered a rectangular dial behind which was a piece of an old paper calendar numbered one to twelve. A red pointer was stuck on three; it could never move. Although it looked like a Braun transistor radio, the object never produced a sound. I asked the boy about it and he said: “It can’t play music, but I sing when I carry it. One day I’ll have a real one.”

Everywhere there were objects of emulation and imagination. Often they were copies of sophisticated machines now made by hand out of recycled, thrown away material…Cheaply available, highly visible and linguistically subtle , material from products carrying popular brand names and out-of-context messages (Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta, among others)…design responses to a technology that could not be purchased by poor people..

‘Necessity is the mother of invention’

It is commonly misattributed to Plato due to Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic 1871 translation of Plato's Republic, where in Book II, 369c, his translation reads: "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention."  Jowett's translation is noted for injecting the kind of flowery language popular among his Victorian-era audience. (Wikipedia)

Jonas Mekas- the last interview

(Cover photo courtesy of www.indiewire.com)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/24/jonas-mekas-last-interview-godfather-underground-film-avant-garde-john-yoko-dali-warhol

“Usually, movies are full of cliches. This was based on situations, one not connected with the next. It’s not about what is happening but about what her state is. The film consists of 120 or so situations. It’s a collage.” Which is pretty much Mekas’s definition of what a film should be. Jonas Mekas on the film ‘Lady Bird’.

Winifred Knights

The Santissima Trinita, 1928, Winifred Knights

Winifred Knights’ controlled and more classical style of painting that echoes religious icon imagery is almost surreal. I am drawn to her paintings, particularly The Santissima Trinita in the way that its stillness and perfection of form creates a space for meditation, it has the power to create silence. With this painting, she creates a great feeling of a balance between the gravity of control with a lightness that helps us to focus on our breathing as we continue to gaze at the landscape represented.

Unlike the more popular abstract art of her time, Knights independently finds a style that doesn’t try to mimic or fit into the ever-changing world. It is almost as though she was taking gentle strides in such a world.

Links:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07dkjsw- Podcast discussing the work of Winifred Knights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Knights

Lucio Fontana- from The White Manifesto to Spatialism

Responding to contemporary tendencies in Pop Art, the luxurious finish of the frames hijacks the high-shine consumerist aesthetic of the 1960s by using surface appeal to draw the viewer beyond material beauty towards an appreciation of the great unknown.

In 1940 he returned to Argentina. InBuenos Aires (1946) he founded the Altamira academy together with some of his students, and made public theWhite Manifesto, where it is stated that "Matter, colour and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art". In the text, which Fontana did not sign but to which he actively contributed, he began to formulate the theories that he was to expand as Spazialismo, or Spatialism, in five manifestos from 1947 to 1952.[

strate their range and diversity. Created between 1964 and 1966, in the wake of his renowned Fine di Dio (“End of God”) series, the Teatrini condense vast cosmic reality into an objectified spectacle of space. 

http://www.italianways.com/the-agreement-between-lucio-fontana-and-ugo-mulas/

http://www.italianways.com/paolo-uccellos-counter-clockwise-clock-in-florence/

Studio Landing

Recently moving back into a studio has reminded me of the impact a stable environment can have on my thinking. My collection of objects and experiments all in one room helps me to realize relations between them and myself and therefore recognize my thinking patterns. A psychological activity in itself, a living installation or exhibition. I find it interesting how intimate spaces can become, reflecting our feelings and how their connection to us can fluctuate depending on our needs.

I found Andre Breton’s studio recreated at the Pompidou Centre to be a great example on this subject. A work of art, it demonstrates the extent to which a person can make relations to a space or a collection to project or trigger thought. Seen as a representation of “total art” and demonstrating the importance of the object to Surrealist activity.

Colour Music

Backwards Portrait

Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  April 2018. 

A public park in the centre of Rio where you can find Brazilians on family outings taking advantage of the natural rain forest backdrop to search for the perfect portrait...this was my version.

Fall

Walhalla

Single cloud runs

A beautiful blue sky day at the beginning of spring.  Whilst gazing out of the window of the truck, the passenger switches on her camera phone to film her view of a single cloud running parallel to the undulating green hills.  The driver notices and slows down for a longer shot until he comes to a junction and needs help with the view of the traffic, he laughs and says 'we can't have you filming clouds all day now can we!'

 

Scientific reference for such clouds 'Cumulus Humilis'.  Humilis meaning in Latin:

Adjective

humilis (neuter humile); third declension

1. low, lowly, small, slight; shallow

2. (in respect to birth, fortune or worth) base, mean, humble, obscure, poor, needy, insignificant, low

3. (of mind or character) submissive, abject

 

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

By William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Counting down the days

St. George's Walk in Croydon, a walk through space, now a deserted shopping arcade paused in time as it awaited confirmation of the Westfield Croydon project.  Empty shop units that once populated the stretch are now but a few, now rather an alternative hang out space for the young and a space for sub-cultural expressions by graffiti artists and skateboarders.  Covered in layers of tagging and ghostly attempts to convert this walk into something more.

Our deep cleaning heroes get to work on giving St Georges Walk the shine it needs

A found Youtube promo video, working towards a 'cleaner' Croydon.  I found this video to be poetic in its own right as the one floor slab of St. George's Walk is cleaned by the community worker with a pressure spray.  The contrast between the young seeing it as a dream space versus this literal cleaning process.

Mark Wallinger- ID-Hauser and Wirth

(Film still from 'Ever Since' (2012) appears as covering photo, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth).

...'In this exhibition Wallinger encourages a contemplation of the self within a society in which behaviour and personal identity come under increasingly closer scrutiny.  Wallinger utilises Sigmund Freud's terms, id, ego and superego in an interrogation of the psyche, the self and the subject.  The work examines how, as human beings, we operate between our instinctual urges, our attachment to our identities, and the ways in which we judge ourselves as members of a certain culture...According to Freud, the id, driven by the pleasure principle, is the source of all psychic energy.' (ref: Leonardo da Vinci's 'Vitruvian Man' and the Rorschach test).

Works:

'Ever Since' (2012)

There in silence is a life-sized HD projection of a barber's shop front still all except for the endless, smooth and silent spinning of the barber shop pole on the outside.  Caught between an illusion of movement and the fixed gaze on the visual display.  The hyper real filmic translation of the barber shop alludes to a feeling of movement.  The eery 'endlessness' of the revolving barber's pole lives as a separate layer to the overall projection, it transcends the photographic image, constantly teasing the setup and situation.

'Orrery' (2016)

Mutually exclusive movements in order to measure movement and positioning.  'Orrery' is named after the mechanical model that articulates the positions of the planets and moons.  The work is shown on 4 screens, representing the seasons, positioned facing each other in a circle and to follow the movement of the videos, one must revolve themselves in the centre of the circle.  Created with an iPhone blue-tacked to the driver's side window, the iPhone records the New Fairlop Oak tree that was planted in the centre of Fulwell Cross roundabout in Barkingside  in 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain, to commemorate the legendary Fairlop Oak that had stood for centuries in Hainault Forest.  On its roundabout pedestal the tree appears to revolve on display as the filming frame is kept constant except for the noise of the traffic circulating nearby and the changing weather and positioning of the sun.

'Cameo of Britain' ...a short descriptive literary sketch that neatly encapsulates Britain.

I trace back to an exhibition by Ceryth Wyn Evans at White Cube art gallery last year when palm plants were displayed on slowly rotating plinths.  Whilst walking and standing at a distance in the room, the movement is not noticeable.  One needed to go up to each of the plants and remain still which reminded me of the physics of planetary positioning and the way we measure our position on Earth in relation to surrounding matter in the universe.

Telephone Jitters

Back and Forth

I come back to this image time and again.  Originally printed in an A1 size poster format, this photograph always reminds me of the feeling of closeness. Taken on the beach at ground level I observe the backs of family members lying on the beach.  I previously used this image when developing my installation These are my knees everyone! (2014) and looking at this image helped me to write the accompanying text for the installation (shown below).

Demo

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