A Grey Area has many meanings:
it is the space you enter when you convince yourself (for whatever reason, mine being the ghetto i am currently residing in) that you can pull an all nighter. Only around 4am you enter a somnambulistic state where, even without drugs everything is that little bit more intense.
it is the anti-climax of graduating, feeling like although you have achieved something, you actually haven't acheived anything. It is feeling like you should be there in body, not just in spirit, or whatever the little booklet decrees. It is the worry that all the unique, talented, crazy people you met their you might never see again. The friendship will drown out into the grey area that is FACEBOOK.
And, it is the realisation that for all their faults, the class of 2010 were anything but grey.
it is trying to understand a series of events that strangely link, and keep reoccurring only you feel like you are without the verbal dexterity to convey.
Shit, that is a lot of grey, and this blog may not make much sense, (but i beg you, keep reading!)
the following areas are grey and exist separately, but before this entry is over, I will attempt to unite them under one celestial (grey) veil.
Peter Berlin
Haunted exhibition
World trade centre memorial museum
Process, documentation and reiteration.
To begin with then: THAT MAN, PETER BERLIN
As part of the Hot festival, we are showing a series of documantry films. Last week it was the turn of Jim Tushinski and That Man: Peter Berlin.
Simply, Berlin was the face for the sex-liberated 70's. He was a model, but above and beyond that he was an icon for process, documentation and reiteration, allbeit not a very obvious one.
Mostly, he was not Peter Berlin.
he was the artist, the model, the camera man and the producer. watching the documentary, there was no irony, like his image suggests, he was self creation of self identity. However, what took him away from the label and brand of typical pornography? Look at his image, it is more like a painting because his character is so embellished, HE fetishises his own image, he sewed the clothes, staged the set and took the photos.
but, if we build a persona like this, how do we make peace with it? Maybe this artist doesn't, and you see that he doesn't when he says things like 'only men over 40 should go to war, they are finished.' It is a terribly vain statement, but somehow it is very human in its vanity.
When asked if he set out to be famous, he responded
'No, no, you are setting out to be loved, and wanted, that is what we all want.'
now, here is where it becomes ironic he then claims that there is no human contact beyond the visual, instead it is we, the viewers, who invent his personality, and it is one that is rather compelling.
Photography, image, appropriation.
Marilyn Monroe was one thing, but Norma Jean was a whole different story....
Haunted: Contemporary photography, video and performance
Okay, so there was no Peter Berlin here, but I am going to find a space for him somehow.
This is where the grey turns pale.
This exhibition at the Guggenheim suggested that all contemporary photography and performance is somehow haunted by the past. What struck out to me though, as with Peter Berlin's one man show, was the power and importance of re appropriation and documentation, inso much that media, for many of the artists included, such as: Gina pane, Marina Abramovich, Joan Jonas and Christian Boltanski, is innumerable for art.
Clearly, photography and film are the bastions that compliment the art of live performance, but in specific work like that of Gina Pane they don't just compliment. photography and film can be mapped onto documentation and process, and it is this which IS the art, or the performance. it is the brain behind the final image.
If then, the process is the brain, and the final thing is the body or performance, then surely the art is in the process? (I understand i am being confusing, I am confused myself).
Simply, if art is art then it cannot be brainless, right?
Daniel C. Dennett, reckons that real meaning is meaningless, because it comes through words and ideas which are emergent from us, who are somewhat meaningless processes. So if this is true, as well as really fucking frustrating, for these artists (PB included!) meaning can be arrived at from seemingly meaningless ideas... OR the simplicity in complexity....
Peter Berlin, brought NEW meanings to an otherwise defined canvas of the human body. He changed sex, from sexy to mysterious and transformed pornography into a somehow depth ridden genre.
You define the meaning, you set the tone.
And a trace is left.... because it is temporal, the process is the performance. Now, Peter Berlin cannot slide into Haunted's frame, but why not? If contemporary performance has become obsessed with ripping down the romantic figure, and attacking it's glorification, then process, documentation have become the catalyst for this obsession. Both Pb and Haunted recode objects and bodies normal functions into vessels of communication, with personal purpose.
Equally however, this work may also be seen to convey identity in crisis, identity in the grey area. For example, artists like Orlan, who has repeatedly manipulated her facial features through plastic surgery, so that she may 'become'.
But it really so different a manipulation.....graduation....with gowns and performative acts, is definitely 'becoming something', which lets face it, wants to be loved, and wanted.
I saw myself turn grey when I entered the piece entitled 'stillness' by Tactia Dean.
By entering the space the performance was an installation of 6 films, all playing at different angles from film reels. Moving around the space (which was necessary to get through the exhibition) you become part of the performance. Your ordinary self becomes enmeshed in the work of art. You incorparate it, turning into a grey faceless area, a shadow attacks the playing scene.
Alternate that reality, and then you become incorparated into it in a whole different way. Me and Chris were....
World Trade Centre Memorial Museum
This was history, documentation, and reiteration, on a global scale. Manipulation has many forms, just like the grey area. Here the meaning of the image, sound bite and object is autonomous and not open to interpretation. It is soley subjective, with one meaning: to traumatise us. There is no room for an active imagining spectator, we are meant to just greive I guess.
All pretentiousness aside, it was truly sad, and very moving.
But when images are given centre stage, to reiterate the process, the media swell that surrounds diasters such as the 9/11 attacks become globally significant.
When does it cease being 'theirs' and begin to be 'ours'?
is it when the 3000 or so photographs of victims faces line a wall so that we can take our own photo of the photo?
people did this, I couldnt understand it?
Propagation is furthered, as is process and reiteration in the grey haze that is a large TV screen.
It silently plays out the names of all the victims of 9/11, running at 4 1/2 hours in length.
before it stops.
and then starts again.
Reiterating the cultural condition.
So that is my grey area as it stand currently. I am sorry if there has been confusion, I myself am confused! but wanted to try and get some of it down.
Now for the fun!
I squared my ass with the law, I am paying installments (so they assume) but I shall be boarding my flight without handing them a wooden nickel.
Chris came, and then she went, which was a bummer, we had a right laugh, in various locations. (Everyone tel her to buy raybans please, they clearer suit her)
The SOPRANOS tour we ventured out on was BRILLIANT.
I was asked to stop answering the trivia Q's because I was getting them all right, we went to the BADA BING, Holster's where the final scene was filmed, and other hot spots of the show.
I met Vito, he is huge, and has had a ridiculous amount of plastic surgery. C'mon son.
Then, I was incepted.
tip-top-di-caprio.
A lighter end, to a crazy few days intense speculation.
The energy is here,
and in the frozen Earth time,
my immobalised mind and body keep going..
so I can take to my craft,
for further investigation.
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