This week, I was very inspired by the various
discussions of feminist cinema that took place in class and in our readings.
This piece was especially influenced by Second Sex (Drew Duncan) and by Vital
Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained. My main inspiration for working in this theme was a quote from Martha Rosler, which says “How one learns to see oneself as a being in a state of culture as opposed to a being in a state of nature. How to measure oneself by the degree of artifice… This is a work about how to think about yourself. It is a work about how she is supposed to think about herself. How she learns to scrutinize herself, to see herself as a map, a terrain, a product constantly recreating itself inch by inch. Groomed, manufactured, programmed, re-programmed, controlled; a servile mechanism in which one learns to utilize every mechanism of feedback” (Fox, 38). My goal with this piece was to create
a feminist argument that would not be preachy or too heavy handed. From what I
have read and seen of Vital Statistics, one of the main critiques is that it is
too preachy for the feminist cause. People who watch it tend to get freaked out by the heavy handedness of the argument that is being made. I wanted to create a piece that
acknowledges the expectations of women to look, act, and be a certain way
without being too hard for people to relate to. My goal was to make
the feminist argument that is made in Vital Statistics accessible to the
everyday person through the act of something that many women do everyday,
taking off make-up. In doing this, I especially wanted to point to the fact that what is being presented to the world is more often than not artificial, and is not an accurate representation of true being.
For this documentary mode activity, I decided to work in the performative mode. I think that there were many ways that I could have explored this theme, but the choice to explore the performative mode was very deliberate. "Performative documentary restores a sense of magnitude to the local, specific, and embodied. It animates the personal so that it may become our port of entry to the political" (Nichols, 209). I wanted to demonstrate how my experience as an individual can be extrapolated to other people, and eventually to society at large. Through this, I "set out to demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in society" (Nichols, 201). Women everyday put on and take off makeup. This was not just my experience, but the experience of millions of women everyday. This is truly not an individual experience, but a collective experience of expectation. "The free combination of the actual and the imagined is a common feature of the performative documentary" (Nichols, 202). With lighting, a studio set up, and heavier than average makeup, my goal was to create performance art through a heightened version of the real. I don't normally wear fake eyelashes, but that was an aspect of this that was imagined to demonstrate my point.
For
this project, I was definitely concerned with making something that was not
specific my experience, but was generalizable to the experience of many people.
I was concerned that this piece could become autobiographical if I specifically
talked about my experiences with gender expectations. This is the reason that I
did not talk throughout the duration of the piece. I wanted to create a
generalized version of myself, using myself as a conduit of what women experience
everyday. In this piece, I am not only representing myself, but also the experiences of millions of other people.
No comments:
Post a Comment