GROUP CRITS
- Michelle said she liked the suggestion of clothing. I actually want to minimise the visual effect of clothing because it’s not needed but it’s also not necessary to be naked, which is why I used a nude body suit.
- Michelle mentioned how it would be like if it’s a performance where viewers could hear the sound of breathing. Yunqiu also said if it’s a performance, it would be like a punishment/challenge for humans. As it’s just still, I think performance is only needed if I want to emphasis the effect of duration, which is the effort of being together with the objects in this case. But I want to show the result of disfunction more so I think still images are enough if not better.
- Craig said not using my own body made it less about self-statement but a general statement. I actually don’t care whose body it is. I use my body sometimes only because it’s more convenient sometimes.
- Craig and Michelle mentioned it’s also related to sexual/submissive poses with physical restriction. I never thought this way but I think it also relates on an emotional level where the self is the weak/manipulated part in a “relationship” compared to other. And now I think maybe it’s good that the body is not naked so that it’s not so sexual.
- Craig also said it’s related to consumerist and how our identity was defined by products. Never thought this way but again I think it relates to the relationship between self and other, although other Craig thought was more about consumerism while other I suggested was supportive objects/people.
- Michelle mentioned I could try tin foil. But I want to show the contained body and objects.
SHOOTING PLAN
Still thinking about how I couldn’t accept the disconnection from other, I’ve been looking at Rebecca Horn’s body extension work especially the gloves:
It makes me think about the need of getting in touch with the space all the time. I got the idea of using yarn to connect all the area in the domestic space my body once touched through my daily movement, so that my body would not be disconnected from the space in any time/experience. Yarn is used for weaving, which relates to connecting well. The use of yarn is also influenced by my reading about Lacan’s theory that’s related to Freud’s idea:
In a case study which appears in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud talks about his nephew, aged about 18 months, who is playing a game with a spool tied with yarn. The kid throws the spool away, and says “Fort,” which is German for “gone.” He pulls the spool back in, and says “Da,” which is German for “here.” Freud says that this game was symbolic for the kid, a way of working out his anxiety about his mother’s absence.
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesLacan.html
The visualisation of the trace of my movement is also influenced by The Fold:
To have or to possess is to fold, in other words, to convey what one contains ‘with a certain power.’
Deleuze
I feel the movement is similar to folding, which consists of one’s experience/existence physically. Domestic space is a container to body. I think the sense of unity/non-separation is also a sense of being contained. The attachment between the movement to the space shows the desire of being united with the container. However, the more attached one’s existence is to the container through time, the less functional the container becomes. It reminds me of Valie Export’s “We are prisoners of our own making”:
I won’t be able to go out with the yarn because it won’t survive outside the container. This attachment makes me unable to enter the society. At the end, as the yarn gets used up, the body cannot move forward without letting go of the connection, or go backward because it’s to unfold the trace, which is to erase one’s experience/existence and break past connections eventually. The body becomes functionless holding on to the unity.
‘The true opposite of the self is not the non-self, it is the mine; the true opposite of being, that is, the having, is not the non-being, but the had.’
The Fold
The inability to accept the loss makes me unable to become a being.
I bought a 150m yarn. I plan to carry it with a tape and scissors wherever I move around the flat. I can only tape it to areas or objects that don’t really move. When the yarn is used up, I’ll ask my flatmate to be at the position where the yarn is used up and hold the end of the yarn, and I’ll photograph the yarn in different space including the body of my flatmate. I’m worried how the visual effect would be because it’s both staged and natural. I’m afraid there’re too many unrelated elements in the space but it also should be the place where I live otherwise it would just be random attaching.
Eva Wang 