Exhibition Essay [text]
Mitchell Krewaz
Below is a diagram to help you navigate the sonic &
visual dream of beauty and absurdity imagined/created by Jacquie Meng and Genie
Stuart in Don’t Cry For Me I’m Brave. This is just a guide. Any number of
thoughts/feelings/emotions/realities can be placed by you on the axis of BRAVE
CUTE REAL IMAGINED
THERE IS A SUNSET EVERY DAY
‘every time an
artist dies god lets them paint the sky’
- tumblr
user maroon-moon 01/04/15
The blue sky that is observed every day is
the outcome of air molecules scattering the light emitted from the sun.
Scattering is the scientific term used to describe the reflection or
redirection of light by small particles. Selective scattering, also known as
Rayleigh scattering, is used to describe scattering that varies with the
wavelength of the light.
During sunsets and sunrises, when the Sun is
closer to the horizon, sunlight has to travel through a longer distance and
through more of the dense environment to reach an observer’s eye. Light of a
shorter wavelength is scattered more than light of a longer wavelength and
therefore, during sunset, red is the dominant colour as it possesses a
wavelength of approximately 740 nm.
Images of the setting Sun, often obscured
behind clouds and mountains, remain within the realm of the kitsch, a
‘skin-deep’ portrayal of something we see every day. This is their strength.
Within these images there is something that, despite their depreciated value
within visual culture, holds emotional weight. To a cliched level, sunsets
possess a universal appeal to notions of death and rebirth. The universality of
which can be questioned when recognising that a sunset is a matter of
perception. An observer of the sun in a different geographic position will view
the Sun’s creation of a blue sky. The first English painters to arrive in
Australia following its invasion were unable to perceive the light that
surrounded them. William Lister at the start of the 20th century
conceded that it was only after a long time that ‘we began to observe that the
colour and atmosphere of the landscape were brighter than we had previously
realised.’ The Sun is universal, but its perception is not.
Something
cold
is in the air,
an
aura of ice
and
phlegm.
All
day I've built
a
lifetime and now
the
sun sinks to
undo
it.
Anne Sexton,
excerpt The Fury of Sunsets
THE SOUND OF YOU AND ME
The invention of sound recording produced
the conditions for the emancipation of the voice from the body. This has
created what is referred to as ‘the disembodied voice.’ Recording technology
allowed human presence to be captured onto a concrete and tactile medium and
enabled the material object of the recording to then be bought, consumed and
privately owned. However, in distinguishing between the voice and the body,
listeners have sought to interject themselves within these recordings by
accessing emotional values placed into the recorded sound. Listeners could
embrace eternal and mythological dimensions through the projection of rootless
bodies who speak from some indefinable point in space and time. However, it is
apparent that there are continued attempts to reconnect the body to sound. It
is not always apparent that the body is the source of the sound. This idea
becomes more complex when the concept of the material object is added to the
equation. For example, the human body and the material object are bound up in
manifestations of the cult of celebrity in which an idealised body is presented
as the source of the sound that we own, and through owning the sound we strive
to own (at least partially) the body.
Conversely, we own our own bodies, and we
own its sounds. We are exposed to our own voice whenever we speak. Therefore,
one’s sound also constitutes a component of ‘self.’ But, we hate the sound of
our own voice. We embrace internal dimensions when we listen to the voice in
our head telling us not to embrace ourselves. What of bodily sound beyond
voices? Olga Goriunova directs us towards ‘Hiccups, stomach gurgling, coughing,
teeth grinding.’ Beyond the voice the body’s sound is viscera, gross, sucking
and rattling.
What is the sound of a broken heart?
‘Human body organs produce different kinds
of sounds (For example the heart produces the characteristic LUB-DUB sound) in
health and altered LUB-DUB in diseased states. Different organs produce
different kinds of sounds, which are unique to each organ. A doctor uses a
stethoscope to detect these sounds. Abnormal sounds produced by different body
organs indicate the presence of diseases in these organs. For example, a murmur
produced during the LUB-DUB event indicates abnormal cardiac valve movement.
Thus, from the presence of abnormal sounds and from analysis of certain
parameters like intensity, duration, etc. we can infer that the underlying
organs are diseased.’
- B. Hema
Kumar Biosensors and Bioelectronics 22 (2007) 1121–1125.
It is understood by Janet Donohoe that ‘body
and world are intertwined making place integral to body and vice versa.’ When
your world changes, so does your body and therefore so does your sound. You
lose the familiarity that manifests itself in shared spatial surroundings as
you alone are heartbroken. An uncanniness lies in the familiarity that the
post-apocalyptic world retains, however it is juxtaposed to the transformed
environment of the aftermath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTsHWzvJWDQ&ab_channel=T2official
CRAFT, HANDS, AND A NEW MATERIALISM
I sleep beneath a quilt made by my mother
that affords me a physical warmth that no artwork on any wall has ever given me
because it was created and held in her hands. Its warmth will exist longer than
I will.
Mid-century English theorist David Pye places
the cultural object within the dichotomy of ‘workmanship of certainty’ and
‘workmanship of risk.’ Within this comparison those objects which are deemed to
be born of risk can be considered art because they will inherently drive into
new realms of imaginative creation. The craft object is instead deemed to be
the workmanship of certainty. Craft’s certainty and domesticity is what flares
anxieties surrounding concepts of craft, and its labour, as art. Art is not
considered to be created through the ordinary manufacture of the many things
that exist within our everyday lives. Craft is inferior as the domestic is
inferior. This inferiority arises from characteristics of a sexist, classist,
racist stereotyping which then creates the environment in which craft is
essentialised as purely feminine and/or ethnic. The purely feminine and/or
ethnic, the laboriously constructed, are all the antithesis of the contemporary
art object epitomised by the Duchampian readymade with its exultation of
individual ‘cleverness’ within Eurocentric theoretical frameworks. The
readymade has been offered its place in the pantheon through the purposeful
amnesia of the collective labour that led to the creation of the original
object. What is not considered in the creation of the readymade is the globally
enmeshed journey of collective enterprise that allowed Duchamp to purchase and
declare as the complete art object, a domestic item made from a native
material, formed by hands in China centuries before.
Glenn Adamson considered that craft is an
idea formed by ‘a constellation of stars.’ Craft is pervasive. Craft does not
exist within a singular notion of time and place, but instead, has been built
up and added to over the multitudinous course of global history. However, craft
tangibly exists within the pair of hands possessed by those who make it. Craft
is haptic. Craft historically returns to the role of the hand in its creation.
Hands are how we interact and sculpt the three-dimensional materials provided
in the world around us. The hand helps us adjudicate the physical materiality
of an object and to connect with it. Craft, and the hands that create it, can
therefore be considered to exist within both the past and present. Questions
then arise regarding how suited craft is for the future.
Presently, art is experiencing a rapid
dematerialisation in which the haptic is not required. New approaches as varied
as the remixed, the digital, the appropriated, arise within an apocalyptic
sensibility as understood by Deborah Hynes as both technologized cultures and
the visual arts collapsing in on themselves. While traditional notions of art
have suffered within this evolving space, craft remains due to its
non-hierarchical nature. It is not the individual, but the network that has
crafted the object. There is a flattening of the ontologies surrounding who is
the creator and what has been created. From this a multiplicity and diversity
of knowledge and philosophies can be attained. If the networks of craft can
branch so widely that it reaches into the past, the networks of craft can
extend into the future, outside of bodies and into environments and worlds
ADORABLE, LOVEABLE, UNDENIABLE
Across a number
of major language groups, there are words for cute and cuteness, but no words
for the human emotion experienced on perceiving cuteness. Terms such as kawaii in
Japanese, or mignon in French, are sufficiently well-known
to be adopted globally. Furthermore, concept of cuteness extends deeper than
first glance as kawaii includes an entire lexicon of
associated sub terms such as mori, kei and decora,
which all describe differing styles, fashions and personalities under the
banner of ‘cuteness.’ There are terms for cute across most language groups of
the world; moni in Spanish, sudara in
Punjabi, ke ai in Chinese.
While the use of the term is widespread, its
quantification is not readily available. The most famous endeavour to quantify
cuteness is the Kindchenschema, or baby schema. The Kindchenschema describes a
set of features possessed by human infants that is proposed to create an
evolutionary derived care taking response in adults. These features include: a
large head size compared to the body; large eyes; protruding forehead and
cheeks; rounded body features; clumsy movements. Sianne Ngai, the leading
scholar in the field of cuteness lists qualities such as small size, soft
edges, simplicity, and malleability; cuteness may also be squishy, silky,
smooth, and resilient to being crushed. Ngai suggests that the appeal of
cuteness lies in its vulnerability, however it is most powerfully powerless.
Cuteness gains its power through requiring
distinct conduct and actions from those that view it. By doing so, it is
definitively disciplining the viewer. By suggest that it has no power it gains
power. When cute occupies an area not conclusively identified as sweet, it
nonchalantly expresses an inability to be defined. This is the current age of a
lack of definition, where much exists in liminal spaces and the intersection of
varying fields. Dichotomies that have been standard for eons, such as masculine
and feminine, human and non-human have come to be questioned. Cute sits between
the soft edges of social constructs resilient to being crushed.
Cute is not about lacking power and a
gullible purity and innocence, it mocks the value we attach to power. Cute
obfuscates and questions inherent conventions regarding where power is and is
not.
