Recent Work: Red Lipstick Project

I've recently embarked on an investigation of red lipstick. It began when I decided to start wearing red lipstick every day to see how it would affect my daily mood/experiences, and snowballed into a video project, which I'm still in the middle of compiling. I started out with the idea of recording myself performing everyday actions while wearing the lipstick, in order to document the aesthetic transition that occurs once red lipstick has been applied (if/how connotations shift, if/how behavior is adjusted, etc.), and then decided that it would be richer to ask many people to experience this with me--I asked people I know to record themselves 1. applying red lipstick in a mirror, and 2. performing some mundane activity involving their mouth, and then to send me the footage. I've received 10 contributions so far, and am still open to accepting more. I've been keeping track of my personal thoughts/feelings about the experience in a document I'm calling Red Lipstick Reflections, and a few of the current participants have contributed their thoughts as well. It has been and continues to be a really fascinating experiment.

Here's a draft of the video (hope this works...):

And some stills:

Chris Sucking Lollipop
Me Drinking Beer
Rick Shaving
Danielle Peeing

3/12/12 Critique

Me: The audio in the installation is coming from a dream archive I've been keeping since 2007--I've started using it as a way to access myself through personal material. Imagery in the photos is from a 1938 dating guide for single women--I kissed them, scanned them, and blew them up. For the video, I asked people to film themselves applying red lipstick and performing an action--it's a rough copy.

JW: What about the paper form in the installation?

Me: My original idea was to write out the dreams and incorporate them physically into the structure. I built the structure to be this interior space inside another interior space--sort of a parallel to my internal dream space, and once I had it, I decided a sonic environment would be better than directive text.

SPW: Is this the way you imagine the video being installed?

Me: No. Ideally, each vignette would have its own screen

SPW: Organized how--cube, circle, stands?

Me: Something like the Isaac Julian piece at the ICA--surrounded by screens, sometime the images sync up, with choices of where to look. It's been frustrating to have to put it together this way--one sequence

AL: Are you editing them more to focus on the lips?

Me: I haven't cropped or edited them--part of the interest for me was seeing how the people I asked would frame it for themselves--they're not directed

SD: In your previous work, you're creating an aesthetic. What is it like to now be pulling together found images/ other people--a given aesthetic.

Me: Initiating something and then responding to what I get. Embracing my impulse to archive, record, organize--different approach. Only way I could think to make work.

SD: What's your relationship to "archive"

Me: Impulse to record what might matter, organization. The dream archive was never intended for anyone else/ to be shared, but I wanted to make something personal, and it's the most personal thing I've got

SD: Most artists have an archive of some form--hoard images to have an archive that nourishes the work/ feeds us. It's different when that archive actually becomes the work

Me: Investigation of that impulse/ what it's about--initiating and gathering community

SD: Why this action (applying lipstick)?

Me: Thinking about red lipstick as a social signifier--personal experiment: wearing it to see if it changed my mood/day. It did, so I wanted to open it up to more people to explore the relationship of the gesture/material--if the context/associations changed when it wasn't just me

SD: But you're still aestheticizing them--you're not asking them to wear it all day and write about their feelings/experience.

Me: I didn't want to impose it on them...

SPW: What does it signify socially?

Me: Glamour, beauty, power, sex--that's how it's sold

SPW: Interesting to choose video as medium because cinema is used in the same way. History of application of red lipstick

MS: Interesting to see people choose to apply lipstick in the bathroom--very private space

SD: If you're really investigating, you should be skeptical of your own responses to social norms/ tropes--really break things down/ let it expand, rather than stay within agreed-upon response/tropes. The color red is a powerful color in general (if you're walking in the woods and you see something red, you stop to look at it--danger, poison, etc.)--maybe that's why it's come to be used as cultural signifier

Me: Yeah. I want to talk about those tropes and why they're agreed-upon/ expected

SD: That's a trope too, of art language--re-examining the historicized perspectives of eras like the 50s with our "updated" viewpoint. Why not use current source material?

Me: I want to talk about them because they're not in the past, actually. I guess I just like the aesthetic of these better than Cosmo. When I printed them off the Internet, I pinned them up on my wall and just had them there for weeks, not knowing how to approach them, but knowing that there was something worth talking about. Binary thinking still exists--absurd, but serious (funny and bad)

AL: Others experimenting with red lipstick seem not to go to what you're talking about--it seems more like they're approaching it on the level of a daily routine thing.

Me: That's why I wanted to open it up, so it wouldn't just be me obsessing/ my biases.

SL: Want to see more--more imagery incorporated (billboards, etc.). Keep thinking of the form of the lips--Man Ray. Loaded icon. Don't feel the irony in the kiss photos

Me: I didn't feel ironic doing it

SPW: There's more sincerity

Me: Yeah, it's also just beautiful as well, so it's confusing/complicated for me

SD: Important to not just have the work reinforce original conceptual phase. All you say is trope--binary thinking. History of feminism--second generation using against itself. Could it also just be beauty of form?

GC: You need to be the one photographing them

Me: I didn't want it to be just me directing

GC: But this ends up being a collage of what you think looks good together anyway

Sean: Have you made any discoveries?

Me: It's hard to say--I think a lot of people were mostly anxious about filming themselves.

JW: Can see attraction in this. Your clip is totally different--you know what you want. The rest is just pulling together of the group. Yours is most effective. Go after it more clearly. Look at Marylin Minter's video--painting from combined materials--slipping, sliding, visceral attraction/ simultaneous repulsion--all comes from orchestrated video. Installation: house-like, room-like. I went in in the middle of a dream, and stayed through the end of the narrative--that minute and a half was very evocative--I could tell that it was something personal. Relation to you but not to others. Driving at something more forceful. Clearly pushing toward something. Drive at that much more. You going after what you want to say. Strength and conviction.

GC: Color choice. Look there at the image of those 2 lipsticks. Your choice to wear the yellow with the red and the white background--you are conscious about color in a way that those you've asked to participate might not be thinking about those compositional elements. Care less for the bottle image--we've all seen that. But the movement in the eyes in the mirror, or the other sequence when the hair cuts the image straight through...

DF: Disagree about the bottle--yes it's phallic, but when do you ever look at someone like that, just drinking

TF: Long term project, but will be worth it

SPW: Agree with JW and GC--you doing this thing. Sympathetic gesture. The connection of all of these pieces is you as a performer. Cinematic, subjected, appropriated. Not ironic/ agree with SL. Performing to it. Sexualized symbol. Reading dreams and giving people a space to retreat. collecting and performing--desire to re-situate/ document performance

MS: Might not hurt to think about how others arrange their moments (Internet)

GC: See this as bigger impulse. Very Eastern

AL: Confusion coming from involving more people. Think Cindy Sherman--self as perpetuation. What if you were embodying these things. More interested in self--more investigation of self

SPW: Always fail to embody the other as self

TF: Like lipstick as common denominator. Getting someone else to read your dreams could be just as effective (people hearing it wouldn't know). The acoustics of that room are so particular--what if you moved it to a different space. Keep exercising that. Think about focusing the video vs. open call

SD: You're using an aesthetic/ visual approach--own it. It comes through more in the choices you're making with the stills. Aggressive aesthetic action vs. inclusive editing system.

KM: Thinking about your paper pieces last year--flimsy/ fragile. Now this paper piece with igloo-like shape. Audio hard to understand

Me: Echoes/ muffled somewhat through the speaker

Joe: Like the mystery in that

Reflections on Feminist Art of the 70s, Binary Thinking, and Empowerment

Lately, I've been confronting my personal relationship to second wave feminist artists of the 70s. I have a lot of issues with second wave feminism, mostly for the reductive execution of most of the work of that period/ the inherent reinforcement of binary notions of gender. I understand the desire to construct a vaginal iconography to combat phallic iconography. I get that these women were rebelling against society's (and, particularly, the hyper-masculine art world's) notion of what a woman's role/perspective should be. By taking control of how they themselves (and by extension, women in general) are being objectified in their art, and by asserting specifically "female" perspectives/aesthetics/processes/ materials, they were attempting to take power back from the patriarchal system that determines what constitutes art/ determines the role and representation of women.

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1979) was an effort by the artist to metaphorically bring women to the table of history. In order to do this, she crafted porcelain place-setting portraits of famous female historical figure's vaginas, and organized them on a triangular table with 13 such settings on each side (a reference to covens).

My problem is the fact that responding to essentialism with essentialism/ to objectification with objectification/ to oppression with reactionary efforts at counter-oppression, while a valid expression of frustration at the time, did little to disrupt the fundamental polarization of "men" versus "women". Much of the feminist art of the 70s actually underscores and affirms gender division in service of a kind of "getting even" notion of empowerment/ equality. Celebrating uniquely female experiences was and is important and I understand the appeal of a notion of womanhood/femininity defined by women, but the fact remains that any definition of femininity versus masculinity reduces and limits every single human being to an identity rooted in expectations related to their biological sex. As long as this kind of thinking is perpetuated, no one will escape the sort of oppression that the core of feminist ideology seeks to deconstruct/ overcome.

We live in a socially constructed world, populated by insecure, wayward people who just want to be accepted and understood. It's easy to allow a label to do the work of determining our social standing/ capacities for us--the day we are born, the world begins defining us, indoctrinating us into our presumed roles (penis gets a blue blanket, vagina gets pink; penis gets toys rooted in action and violence, vagina gets toys rooted in passivity and domesticity). But it's up to us to decide which expectations we are willing to accept, and it's important to pay attention to how complacency or rebellion have the capacity to shape society at large. Second wave feminism, all faults considered, got people talking about gender roles, and vastly expanded the narrow definition of what a woman could be/do/think/feel. The fact that we still correlate behavioral expectations with someone's genitals (or skin color, or any other characteristic we use to other one another) proves, however, that there is still vast room for improvement.

I've been thinking about John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's War Is Over! If You Want It (1969). It resonates for me because of the implication of the power we have to shape our own society/ of the fact that our society is inherently shaped by us. Things are the way they are because we agree to it. The "rules" we follow come from us, from other human beings just as flawed and imperfect and misguided in their attempts to understand and be understood. No one ultimately knows what the fuck they're doing or talking about, so why do we tell ourselves lies like "this is just the way things are" or "it's out of my hands"? Why are we so content to fall back on fate or god or faceless authority figures and ideologues everywhere to determine our lives? Deciding not to take it anymore is the only way for things to change. Our power lies in our capacity to refuse what we're given. Binary thinking is over if we want it! It only continues to exist because we allow it.

Final Crit Notes circa 12/16/11

This is really belated, but I've finally got some time. It's February break, and I'm visiting with friends in San Francisco! This is my first time here, and I'm loving it--the weather is perpetually my most favorite incarnation of weather (mid 50s with just enough sun and cool breezes to balance each other out), and people I love are here, and the food is astounding and there are palm trees and flowers and mountains and puppies everywhere! Anyway, my friend is working today, so I'm taking a break from being enthralled in order to backtrack and mine this sketchbook before I fill its remaining few pages.

Without further ado, the notes from my final crit all the way back in December:

Me: The installation was the most significant thing for me this semester. Pretty much everything here is an artifact or documentation from it (photos, de-install video, sculptural leftover paper form, drawings made from rubbings/monoprints off of the walls)

RG: Given the energy you spent, this kind of record-keeping, how do you feel about what you're presenting versus the original installation?

Me: I think of these things as an archive--keeping artifacts that I can save or re-use, giving it a new life/ shape. It's not the same experience as walking in/ being inside the original thing, but it offers hints

SPW: I'm interested in this idea of an archive--think about how it is constructed, seeing both. If you think about archival presentation--feels like record-keeping. Performance of de-construction--interesting to you?

Me: Yes, ways of expanding on it

SPW; Hand held--constructing video. Moving like drawing+ objects.

Me: Thanks, that's great because I think about basically everything I do in relation to drawing

SF: What do you want documentation to do? Photos have greater sense of space than video.

Me: Photos are kind of all that's left of what it was

SPW: conducive to archive. Each form does a different thing--how do they operate in relation to each other?

JW: Photo process provides idea of elegance of process--photos point out what was lacking from the installation--think of as a stage, draw from photos. Think about what works and what doesn't. Miss the juxtaposition in the installation. The installation was like a large still life. Need to figure out what it is.

SD: You ask about stance in work--where is the work coming from; how do you push forward. What is your stance on the work--how do you position yourself in the work?

Me: Working with shapes that come from everywhere--manifest into their own thing. Think about energy I want--talk about horror--made this piece darker--looked at how others reacted--people felt afraid.

SD: Watch the Five Obstructions--think about the principle of the film--which things are variable vs constant. Find them and work from--start to inform material choices

SPW: How do you see parallel

SD: sensibility/ taste vs. material. Haven't made it your own. Hasn't allowed it in. Vague--the work is vague

GC: Doesn't like photos/ documentation. Power of the installation was being able to get inside--got inside of what had previously been a planar relationship--photos take it back to 2. Need the interior-ness. Ambitious notion to get inside those shapes--a challenge to explore how to be inside 2D. Danger of documentation is that it returns so rapidly to flatness--lose interior needs of form. Delicacy of big drawing not brought to the installation--rough construction of forms. Crudity--push this notion. How do you get to the interior of the 2D world? Big challenge. Worth exploring

SD: But the photos bring up ideas of light, value not in the 2D constructions. Very useful.

SPW: very specific to photo--having the permission to stare. in imaginary environment

GC: viewpoint so frontal though. In the installation, you are surrounded and that is lost in photos--greater ambition to see what you are proposing. Think about how to explore this--sculpture?

RT: More sculpture--get off the wall. Allan Sarat (sp?). Fine wire mesh--holding own weight--changed the air. John Chamberlain--Dia Beacon. Form of sculptures can inform. Maybe paper too weak, material poor, but wire is good for tape/paper. Move to center of room.

AG: So familiar to how to draw--when scaled up in the big drawing--how do you translate in scale? Don't see beautiful drawing qualities in flatter drawings. What is the right form for this experience. Plaster? Heaviness of form. Love tension. Confrontational vs. fragile. Theme has been in your drawing before. Graceful vs. heavy could be an extension in sculpture. Materials give themselves up as construction. Natural formations--ice/ snow. Gravity. 3D

SD: Photo=different material to think about. Silver-ness--you can't tell it's duct tape--how do you transform materials in the room? How could you? Black takes on strange quality. Get into your work--test material

SPW: material is evident in work. Photo is another material to think about. Ink + paper--how can you explore this material. Broken printer?

RG: Hold onto the intensity/ energy of the room/ in your personality. RT is right--bring into center of the room/space

GC: you move through shapes. 2D can be experience when back is turned to it--can have a presence without seeing it--change the nature of the room. Take 2D and see what it looks like inside of itself. The roughness of paper is right. Look at Keith Hilton. Reduction of color/ world are good way to proceed

AG: Leonardo--good at drawing--seeing body cut open, realizes how inadequate he is, but taught himself how anyway. You did too! Camera is too quick, but way to re-invent yourself--go back and experience slow process of re-invention and discovery--build it again--teach yourself how to see.

SPW: Photo is another way of seeing--not the same as drawing

GC: need different camera--allow to capture the meandering/ surrounded-ness. Photo goes against original notion of expanding 2D--returns to flatness--counter-intuitive

AG: Bloom made drawings of outside/ forest--you are in it.

Obstructions

I'm having a bit of a studio crisis, in that I no longer know what the hell to make. I've submitted all of my grad school applications, and now the thought of making something with the materials in my studio feels regressive. I need to do something entirely new, but I have no idea what. I also don't know how I feel about making objects anymore. Everything feels dumb and insignificant and hackneyed and I know that it feels that way because it is. Worse, I can't figure out anything that wouldn't be. Maybe that's the problem--trying to make something new. Maybe I should just make the dumbest, most hackneyed thing I can think of and go from there. Even that's been done...

Sooooo I've taken to reading. I still haven't finished Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century. Luckily, it's still good.

In Charles Renfro's Essay "Undesigning the New Art School," the following quote stood out to me:

"Creativity is a form of reaction. Artists are more likely to find creative expression and programmatic accommodation by reacting to fixed space that contains provocative or insurmountable obstructions"

He's talking about architecture, but this is a concept that applies more broadly to art-making, and hit a nerve for me in particular. I've been told on more than a few occasions to consider the limits in my work--where things come from; why certain things are allowed into the process, but not others; how things are tested. Because I don't generally have a concrete answer for these questions beyond, "It's mostly intuitive," it's been suggested that I start applying obstructions or limits--rules to the way I work. I haven't really been able to think about that proposition up until now, but reading this passage today made me consider it from a different perspective than I had been (which essentially boiled down to a nose-wrinkling dislike of the notion of rules in general--why should there be limits?! Fuck rules! Down with the bureaucratic agenda! Etc...).

I think a lot about imposed limits; specifically, socially imposed limits as they relate to the construction of our performed identities. My train of thought is complicated, because the idea of imposed limits/ boundaries generally conjures oppressive connotations, which tends to trigger the angry sound that dwells in the recesses of my brain. Beyond that, there is a sneaky security involved in rules--they provide a cozy framework that can easily lead to complacency/ repression. I'm embracing the notion now though that limits can also provide a foundation from which to build. Fixed spaces containing insurmountable obstructions can indeed provoke creative reaction (and frequently do).

This fact was driven home when I finally yielded to a related suggestion that I watch The Five Obstructions. It.Was.Amazing!

The premise is this: Lars von Trier has his personal idol, Jørgen Leth, remake his film "The Perfect Human" five times, according to his instructions. He gives him limitations to work with. Cruel ones, designed to challenge him, to make him suffer through the process in order to break through his distanced stance, in order to close the gap between 'perfect' and 'human'. It's incredible to watch. At one point, Leth doesn't follow von Trier's rules to his liking, so he "punishes" him by having him do a version with no constraints whatsoever. Leth considers this "diabolical," and says, "I'd rather have something to hang onto." It's a really sharp illustration of Renfro's point--that artists are more likely to find creative expression through the struggle against seemingly insurmountable obstructions. Leth manages to create something gorgeous every time, not in spite of, but rather, because of, the obstructions set by von Trier.

In short, I get it now. But the question remains, how the hell am I supposed to set limits for myself? That seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it? It's more natural to react against limits set by someone else--an external entity that knows your weaknesses. I can't look at myself and analyze the weak points in my work with the clarity Lars von Trier applies to Jørgen Leth's. Although, interestingly, the final obstruction, in which von Trier himself takes over the production, results in von Trier revealing more about his own vulnerability as the aggressor--the entire project was ultimately more about his need to expose/ identify with/ humanize his idol than it was about Leth's inability to access his own humanity. So what would it mean to be both obstructor and obstructed? Is it possible to be both?

Grad School Portfolio...

These are the official 16 for Yale...

Layered Terrain (Yellow) oil on cut paper and tissue paper on cardboard, 8"x12"

Orange and Purple Growth cut paper, dimensions variable (roughly 7"x13"x3")

Red and Blue Growth cut paper, dimensions variable (roughly 10"x13"x1.5")

White on White Outcropping cut paper and wire, dimensions variable (roughly 7"x15"x6")

Spectral Bloom paper and gel medium on panel, 12"x16"

Sectral Bloom 2 paper and gel medium on panel, 12"x16"

Spectral Bloom 3 paper and gel medium on panel, 12"x16"

Festering Mass (Black) paper and gel medium on panel, 12"x16"x3"

Surface Fracture (Micro) paper and gel medium, 9"x12"

Surface Fracture (Macro) paper on canvas, 8'x5.5'

Installation View: Come Around, Come Closer

Come Closer, paper and wire, 8'x10'x13"

Detail: Come Closer

Come Around paper and wire, 4.5'x6'x15"

Creep Along, installation with enamel, paper, chicken wire, duct tape, dimensions variable (10.5'x18'x8' room)

Creep Along

Festival of the Arts Grant Proposal

I've made a proposal for a Festival of the Arts grant, which may result in me having money to do a large-scale public sculpture this spring. These are images of smaller-scale ideas that I've been carving out, which will hopefully give the committee some sense of what I have in mind, formally:

I've been carving out of scraps of foam core that I've found around the studio

These are the sorts of forms that I'm interested in (imagine them standing vertically, and larger than life-size so that you could look through and walk around them--there will probably only be one, but it will look similar to this kind of biomorphic form)

A larger one I'm working on

Imagine the kind of depth I could get from 30 sheets of this stuff!

I've also been working on an installation, which is done--I'm taking tons of images yesterday and today because I have to tear it down and repaint the room tomorrow. I'll be sure to post a worthy selection soon...