_______Usher & Collection______

This week we carried out a task where we had to choose an exhibit within the museum and interpret a performance from the perspective of the art piece. I chose to portray ‘tide,’ the recycled chandelier that hangs from the ceiling of the Usher gallery, I expressed the objects viewpoint through a letter to the museum. The piece captured my attention as it’s not made of conventional artistic materials and fits with the idea that “Garbage could be Art.” (Edelsztein, 2007) We performed our creative pieces in the museum space, ours was spoken underneath the art piece and this gave us the opportunity to explore the potential of the site. It also helped us to recognise the issues that needed to be addressed such as where to position ourselves without blocking accessibility for museum visitors. This practical piece gave us a chance to observe the audience behaviour and their reactions to the performance and an insight into the potential of the site.

As we developed our ideas and interacted with art pieces within the Usher such as ‘I Am Woman’ by Liz Kay, we began to focus on the idea of the female artists postition within the art industry. This art piece also linked to a task that I carried out which was to count the number female artists work presented within the gallery, this task is similar to the ‘weenie count’a task carried out by the artistic group the Guerilla Girls. They counted the number of females and males that were naked within the art pieces and drew conclusions from the results of possible gender injustices within the art industry setting. Through undertaking a similar analysis we have created a resulting statistic and plan to present this finding within an installation of our final piece in an attempt of provoking a diverse interpretation and thought process of the museum setting.

The letter pictured above is a piece by the Guerrilla girls, they are abruptly addressing the art gallery in order to raise this idea of social injustice and much of their work has caused major controversy. The only insight you gain about the artists are that they are women, this is due to the guerrilla masks concealing their identities and therefore protecting them from possible stigma that raising such subject matters can cause. This concept of sharing opinions and viewpoints within a controlled environment is something that I’m considering incorporating into my performance as this portrays an array of perspectives on a subject matter but without proposing an ideal. The guerrilla girls although anonymous display the opposite of this attitude as they are blunt and straight talking about the inequality that they feel is within the artistic industry and society itself. The views and the beliefs that they withhold have however been accepted into the institutes that they have attacked, this is a subject matter that they mentioned during ‘Estrogen bomb’ at Yoko Ono’s meltdown festival. They are activists and are seeking to project and influence others with their radical viewpoints, this altering of perceptions is a concept we are focussing on achieving within our own piece in a more aesthetically presented artistic manner.

Work Cited

S Eldelsztein, (online) accessed 2/03/14 http://performancelogia.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/about-action-art-museum-and-object.html?m=1