After many different ideas that have been circling amongst my group we have finally came up with an idea for our final performance which has come to light through the individual tasks we have taken part in over the process in the last few weeks.
One of our tasks was to find an artwork that we liked then once we had found a particular piece we had to consider the ‘performance’ of the characters inside the image. We were able to do a rant a manifesto to the contemporary, or a letter to ‘art’. Myself, Morgan and Kirsty all found pictures that were about women, in particular, our group made textual responses to Henry Matisse’s artwork of the naked woman, also Austin Garland’s – The woman in a Kimono and Liz Kay’s – I am a woman.
I particularly came up with a poem.
We each then brought this together and presented our short performance in gallery 4 – the room where there were a large number of naked women on display. It suited what we were doing very well and enabled the audience to not only pay attention to the dialogue but also to focus on the figures in these pictures. “Performing the museum is a dialogic process, a play between the public narratives of the museum and the private narratives of viewers. To achieve this dynamic relationship requires an open, risk taking pedagogy on the part of the museum, one that enables viewers to turn history onto itself and to interrogate its ideological terrain“(Garoian,2001 p.239). The artist who created these pieces of art may not of the same intention or narrative behind their work, however people can interpret things in different ways and in this instance we each saw the female body portrayed in a negative way. Such as mine was the Liz Kay work, it showed women’s everyday life as being that of a circus performer, it wasn’t portraying the positive connotations you associate with being a mother and a wife, and the lexis used on the poster demonstrated the negative aspect of being a woman. Such as doing the chores, feeding ‘the’ baby, starting all over again, it feels as if the woman is detached from her own home and family, and just doing it to keep things running – like a circus performer.
For our piece however we did not just want to create spontaneous fictional stories using our imaginations. We are going to research the artist and the context around the time the picture was created and then construct our textual response from there, which will then produce our dialogue for our performance. “Viewers’ personal narratives represent speaking in the first person, acting out one’s subjective knowledge, which is contrary to the third person narratives that are constructed by the museum that speak for the viewer“(Garoian 2001 p.241).
To develop our piece more we have decided to introduce works of other feminist writers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helene Cixcous. This will enable us to view how other writers talk about women in their work but also some of their writing may be able to be incorporated into ours which will also be part of our dialogue on the day.
I looked into Helene Cixous’ work; she is a French feminist writer, a poet, playwright, philosopher and literary critic. “Books of Helene Cixous are an engagement with intimacy which sometimes explicitly, at others implicitly raises questions about the status of the subject: place and significance of literature and dreams in our lives “(Cooke 2011 p.3). Cixous uses her own life and its events as raw material and that is how her work is shaped. This creates intimacy for the reader and allows them to understand her as an author more as she uses first person in a lot of her work. For our piece we will not be using our own life events, however I believe we will still be able to create intimacy as we are giving a voice to the women inside these images and also with incorporating real life events from writers such as Cixous, it will hopefully engage the audience more and make them listen – to question what we are talking about and the importance behind it. “In many respects intimacy is about knowledge: knowledge of another or others gained through shared experience, events and memories, revelations and confessions…” (Cooke 2011 p.3). The room that we are hoping to perform in (Gallery 4) is already a dark, intimate space. This alone will allow the audience to be quite close to us when we are speaking and therefore feel like they are able to connect more and maybe even relate to what we are saying. However one problem that we face is some of the artwork we will be writing about will not be in the room when we are actually performing which may result in the confusion of our audience and they may not understand where the narratives are from. On the other hand this is also an interesting point that we are talking about women and how they are used as objects in these pictures, and giving them a voice yet they will not actually be there – making the point that they are insignificant.
Another idea which helped us develop towards our final performance is Antony Gormley’s – One and Other (2004) piece which involved the ‘Fourth Plinth’ in Trafalgar Square. The installation invited people from all over Britain to stand on the Plinth for an hour to do whatever they wanted to represent the nation. For our final performance when we are reading out our dialogue we will be situated on separate plinths which will be placed somewhere in Gallery 4 – this will create a different dynamic in the room and create a level of importance to what we are saying. It will also seem as though we are on display, like the rest of the pieces in the gallery. We particularly liked the idea that people were able to express themselves as they wish, so in a sense we are expressing ourselves on behalf of the figures we see in the artworks. “Gormley intended to contrast the participants with the figures on the other three plinths: ‘We are celebrating the living, and not the dead, the living who make up Britain in all its magnificence. We are creating a picture of Britain, and we don’t yet know what the picture in composite will be” (Sumartojo, 2013 pp.73). For our piece, we are not celebrating the dead, but in a sense we are celebrating the voices of the women that are not there. They are just outlines of a woman. We have no knowledge of her life we only know what we see in the image.
Works Cited:
Cooke, J. (2011). The risks of intimate writing: Loving and dreaming with Hélène Cixous. 16 (2), p3-18.
Garoian,C. (2001). Performing the Museum. Studies in Art Education. 42 (3), p234-248
Sumartojo, S. (2013). The Fourth Plinth: creating and contesting national identity in Trafalgar Square, 2005–2010.. . 20 (1), p67-81.