Blocker’s article discusses the “whereabouts” of Ana Mendieta in art history and how it isn’t necessarily easy to locate her, nor possible, nor needed. This approach seems appropriate in dealing with performance art, although Mendieta cannot escape categorization just like nothing can, and speaks to ideas we have discussed in class about what constitutes performance and how it places itself in opposition to the commodity of art. Performance relies on the fact that it is fleeting and can exist in time and space at just one moment, only to live on in memory or documentation. In the way that Blocker discusses Mendieta, I get the sense that her Siluetas series was more about the performance seen in the exact place at the right time, meaning it was meant more for a present audience. When I look at the photographs though, they seem almost staged for the camera and not to be in environments that are easily accessed. I would like to know what Mendieta’s feelings were towards the presentation of these works since they rely so much on the presence or absence of a body, whether hers or an audience. On p. 332 Blocker addresses audience in relation to her work, specifically the Siluetas series, when she writes, “As earthworks that existed in remote sites for limited periods of time, whose creation may have been witnessed only by Mendieta or a small group of guests, their audience is limited…Few have seen her work ‘live,’ in the moment of its disappearance in time and space…yet that sense of loss is central to its meaning.” This hearkens back to our discussion of audience with William Pope L. yet it is a much different consideration. With Pope L., care was taken in order to have sufficient documentation of his performance for those who were not present, especially in his choice to utilize video. But his performance is similar to Mendieta’s in that they both rely so much on the space in which they are performed. Mendieta chose her Siluetas to have a limited present audience, only to continue life through a single photograph. Is it possible to reach the limits of a discussion of loss and absence when artifacts, and high quality ones at that, remain? I suggest that Mendieta is not attempting to address loss but to actually make it tangible within the space where her body and the earth connect. Her work seems not to be about absence, but is comprised of absence in a form that goes beyond her body but recalls it in shape. The depressions in the earth that she leaves with some of her photographs are not showing us where her body once was, but instead point us to a personified absence, and therefore the connection between earth and body. This is all stated for the most part in the two articles given, yet in reading the second article I don’t understand why the depressions in the earth that appear later in the series serve as a “trace” which is “preserved” through documentation. These ideas seem to contradict how I’ve come to view the work through reading the first article. Her body seems more present within the images in which it doesn’t “exist” and I think Mendieta is attempting to go beyond the physical limits of bodies in order to connect with the earth. Therefore, she is never just a trace of herself but a body that is made up of human and earth, and this is more apparent to me in the later images. I especially like the following photo not just because it’s beautiful as a photo but more because it encompasses or comes closer to some sort of goal Mendieta had in returning to nature. Her body is not a depression but as if something pushed out from the ground, already existing there. There is no separation between land and sky, human and earth. 

According to Berger, there is something different about Nikki Lee’s Yuppie Project that makes it stand out apart from her others, and he attributes this to whiteness. He says that this whiteness causes her to never “quite fit into the yuppie milieu” and that her face registers “the unmistakable signs of sorrow and even despair.” I don’t know about or have seen all of her photos before, but I know that I can recall an equal look of sorrow in some of her other images. The thing that confuses me is whether or not Berger is discussing whiteness because she seems uncomfortable and doesn’t blend in with her project as well as her others, or simply because of the fact that she is surrounded by mostly white people. I attempted to find a photo of her during the schoolgirls project wherein she may have a look of sorrow on her face, but failed. I also attempted to find one with the hip hop project, to try and counteract the idea that it was necessarily whiteness that caused her discomfort, but of the photos that are online, she seems comfortable and upbeat. Thinking back to then the images I remember of her looking sorrowful or dejected, they do involve projects that consist dominantly of white people. So maybe Berger made a good observation in saying that she is unable to hide her own sense of discomfort with whiteness, and therefore it seems to make her Yuppie Project more personal in a sense. It comes off a little bit though as an attempt to find the “real” Nikki Lee within her artwork, which is one of the topics we’ve discussed recently in the class. Is it really her own discomfort with being an Asian woman that is shining through remarkably enough to make it distinguishable? or is her body language carefully crafted so as to make a more obvious statement about whiteness? Both are most likely true, but it seems to me that a large force behind her work is the playfulness with the fact that no image of her reveals anything true or “real.” I am then more inclined to pursue my latter question, which is a better basis for the article, and probably the main one after all. I still find it curious though as to the inclusion of the idea of a “visceral discomfort” that is uncontrollable or planned. I also don’t feel that the photos of her schoolgirl project wherein she’s smiling and energized represent a visceral comfort. She picks projects for the reason that it’s a challenge for her to become a part of them, and I think she’s playing more into a cultural stereotype of different social groups than representing her own feelings towards them. The stereotype for a yuppie for me does involve a sense of sorrow and emptiness, regardless of race, so it makes sense to me that she would have a look of dejection, or even despair. As with this photo of the schoolgirl project, my stereotype includes smiling and bubbliness. I wish that I could understand what it’s like to be of a race other than white, and awareness of one’s own race might exist within every single person who is not white, so it is possible that it’s impossible for Nikki Lee to erase it from her face. 

From what I’ve come to know of Althea Thauberger’s work through reading Vey Duke’s article and searching her on the internet, I can see similarities between her work and mine, maybe more with the specific ways Vey Duke defines and describes her work. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the photography project I discussed with you wherein I photographed memories that people wrote out for me. There is one statement made by Vey Duke that reminded me of my motivations in this project. She writes, “Thauberger’s work, likewise, is constructed specifically so that those who use it (both her subjects and her audience) can take from it what they want, according to their needs.” When I first read this, it seemed as if this were a statement that encompassed how people perceive all artwork. I know that I always interpret art in the way that I wish to see it, based on my current position in life, what is going on around me, and my mood at the time. This is why I connect differently with different art, and why I can think differently about the same art at different times in my life (so far). Vey Duke must be trying to iterate though that Thauberger’s art is presented foremost in the structure of being what it is perceived to be by the audience. Maybe it is cloudy as to the reason for her artistic choices, or the structure of her work is very fluid, but without seeing the three video pieces Vey Duke discusses it is hard for me to know. With my memory project, I presented it in a way that forced the viewer’s construction of it, as well as relied upon it. In choosing not to place the written memory with the photograph it correlates to, and the photograph I took of the memory. The audience was forced to make connections between the separate pieces themselves, as well as come to an understanding, of their own creation, as to what the “big picture” was, or the reasoning behind my work. I really enjoyed watching my photography class question the connections, and make connections between memories and photographs that weren’t the original connections. When you looked at it, you could make a connection between almost anything if you really wanted to. I wish that I had documentation of its presentation, as I only presented it the once, and couldn’t say what I did with it. I do have the digital photographs that I took, which were my interpretations of the written memories. Here is my favorite one, which is of my roommate Dan: 

You are now the first person to see this photo out of context, and I’m curious as to what you think the memory was. Maybe if I presented those photos I took as being from memories, without actually presenting the memories, it would push even further the idea of the audience taking from it what they want, according to their own needs.

            There was another statement by Vey Duke that reminded me of another one of my video works, which I think you must have seen as part of my application portfolio. She writes, in discussion of Thauberger’s characters that, “She doesn’t author them per se – she facilitates their self-authorship.” I felt that I was acting in the same sort of position when I was creating my documentary on a dance studio, Bobbidy Boo. I acted very non-invasive during my shooting process, occasionally pretending as though the camera wasn’t taping when it was, and when I was looking through the lens, I attempted to make it seem as though I were filming simply the room and not the dancers in it. I did this so as to try to make the children more comfortable with my presence there, as well as with the camera, so that there could be some moments where they didn’t become aware of it, or maybe forgot it was there. When going through my footage and editing, I noticed how much the camera became a separate eye from mine due to this process. There was one girl in particular whom I didn’t pay much attention to while I was there, or who didn’t stand out from the others to me, but when I looked at the footage through the camera’s eyes, she had become the main character within my film. It was as if her knowledge of the presence of the camera, whether or not she knew it was on at all times, transformed her into a performance of herself, though very subtly. In this way, I felt that I had indeed facilitated her own self-authorship. The process of creating that documentary was an amazing experience for me in that I was able to see firsthand the autonomy that those being filmed can have. I felt like I myself as Laura had become one with the camera, and that I was simply the medium through which this young girl, as well as the other dancers, portrayed themselves. They really were the makers of the work for me. All I did was present it. It still is so unreal to me how much the camera saw that I didn’t while I was there in the moment.

            I don’t have a screenshot that I have already made of the girl I am talking about, but I have a screenshot from one of the times when I had turned my camera on and pretended as if it weren’t recording. I think it’s a good example though of what I mean by the girls self-authoring themselves through their relationship with and knowledge of the camera: 

     While I was in high school, I had an online journal that I wrote in and I also used the AOL Instant Messenger almost everyday. My journal was a public one for the most part; I would occasionally make my entries “Friends Only” so that my friends who also had online journals and who were connected to mine were the only people who could read my entries. The link to my journal was in my profile for the instant messenger so that anyone who I conversed with online through the messenger had the opportunity to click and read what I wrote. Most of my friends had the same online activities, and most used them more than I did; I really only did it for the most part so that I could be included and feel closer to them. We would all write entries about our daily angst or either exaggerate something good that happened to us, or chronicle our super awesome fun activities. But we all knew that anyone could read what we wrote if we made it public, and I personally had a sense of excitement from it sometimes. I also liked the idea of being able to be more “talkative” through my journal in order to maybe account for a lack in my personality at school. I wanted whoever was reading my journal to know that I was a thoughtful, intelligent, and fun person who would be someone to hang out with. So I adjusted the structuring of my sentences and chose words accordingly. It wasn’t strange to those friends who knew me and who read my journal because it was accepted (and unacknowledged); everyone presented themselves as more fascinating than they actually were. That really was the only reason why I had an online journal when I think about it in retrospect. Merchant recognizes this fact when he states, “In writing online, how we conceive of and respond to audience, and how we imagine our readership, is clearly of central importance” (240). I wanted those readers who happened to stumble upon my online journal to be intrigued and want to get to know me, or want to keep reading my journal secretly. I desired that sense of power that is felt when someone is intrigued by you, and the desire for this confidence was why I wrote to that specific audience of those I didn’t know, or those who were friends of friends and may find my journal through theirs. And it worked. I had different people who wanted to know me, or who wanted to know my online self which they assumed was how I was in reality. This is how I came to know my first boyfriend. He went to high school with me and found my journal through a friend’s and knew who I was peripherally. Apparently, he watched me and read my journal for two months before I was even made aware of his existence.

            At first I felt flattered in that I had achieved what I had intended (although I never realized or recognized my true motivation then). Then, as I got to know him better, I felt like I had to fulfill an expectation that didn’t exist because I wasn’t in actuality the fun, outgoing, witty person I presented as myself online. Aside from this example, I also had strange people contacting me online or finding me through friends’ journals, and after I ended up dating another guy my freshman year in college who I met through MySpace, the whole idea of a totally public online self weirded me out so much that I deleted everything.

            The thing that bothered me the most though about my experience was that everyone did the same thing as me and I knew they were doing it. I couldn’t understand how people could be so “fake,” but I realize now that those identities were a part of them and equally separated from them as much as was the case for me. I too found others’ journals through friends, stalking those occasionally who I was duped by and wanted to be friends with. I can remember one girl in particular who used to post short animations of pictures of herself on her journal, and talk about hanging out at the canal (I live right on the Erie Canal and the “cool” thing to do in high school was hang out on the trails by it and drink). She was friends with people I knew and went to my high school so I decided one day to leave a comment on her journal and say hi. We ended up becoming friends through instant messaging online but had never actually met in person, even though I bet we passed each other in the halls at least once a day. The situation is so strange to me now but that was normal to me then. I remember vividly meeting her in person for the first time after school once when she was hanging out with people we both knew. She wasn’t at all like how she presented herself online. She never smiled in her pictures and when she did in front of me, she had braces with a bad overbite, and she also had a really bad lazy eye, so that it distracted me when I looked at her.  Her hair looked different and her size wasn’t what I expected it to be. She wasn’t ugly by any means but she must’ve only posted pictures of herself that made her look more conventionally pretty than she actually was. I never posted pictures of myself publicly on my journal, but I did rely on how the overall look of my journal made me out to be. I wanted to be thought of as sophisticated and my journal was simplistic in design with a white background and gray type. I also had this picture on my main page, which was a Polaroid I took and manipulated the emulsion on: 

     The thought of having a public online self like that is so strange to me now, but I still do. I have a Facebook self but the only thing anyone who doesn’t know me can see is a small thumbnail of a picture of me. Even with that, I chose my picture considering how people would think of me when they saw it, and what conclusions they would draw in order to construct me.

            I was thinking of my history with online selves when Volkart was discussing the artists who participated in the double life exhibition. The idea of conversing with people who I’ve never met in person online is such a big part of how life was for me in high school, maybe because it was a time when it was just becoming popular, so the artists’ interactive online works are something that I can relate to. She writes, “Identification, and consequently a feeling of being moved and a sense of emotional intensity happen on the net primarily because of the fact that it is not possible to simply separate parts of bodily existence and transform them into a new identity, even if it seems that you can be someone entirely different there” (277 in reader). I presenting myself online as how I wanted to be, I then understood more about myself and was able to decided if whether or not I wanted to be the way I was presenting myself because people were reacting to the self firsthand. Those experiences I had were definitely emotional for me, and served as an outlet for the rollercoaster of emotions I was going through. The artists in the exhibition seem to really be speaking to the emotional intensity Volkart describes by locking into it and really making someone feel for someone who doesn’t actually exist physically in front of them. In particular the weblives that seem to fit this the best are the ones in which a single self is presented to the viewer: Milica Tomic, Linda Dement, Prema Murthy. I’m curious to know how someone who has never had a specific online identity (besides email) would react to these pieces. The artists must have had an audience in mind who had participated in online identification themselves.  

One of the things that I haven’t really understood about feminist art is exactly how female artists’ presentation of themselves as women does anything to go beyond the fact that they are women, which is what they seem to be attempting in the first place, but I may be being too general and I don’t mean to define feminist art in anyway. I can only think of it in terms of how I would go about making art that drew attention to myself as a woman, rather than as simply an artist. (I think another reason as to why I dislike photos of myself is because I look at them from a culturally conditioned perspective and therefore recognize myself first as a woman. If I had a better knowledge of life and feminist art I can see how female artists present themselves in photographs for this very reason though.) I consider myself to have feminist ideas I suppose in that I don’t feel any different intellectually from any man I’ve ever met, and in that I don’t generally see myself in opposition to men or necessarily as being defined as a woman. I feel as if I go about my life interacting with men and women in a similar way, I haven’t noticed that I treat either differently. This may be a result from the fact that I grew up sort of tomboy-ish in that I never felt interested in what I wore or how I acted, and I played equally with boys and girls. It wasn’t until middle school where I felt I was forced into considering myself as a woman and what that definition implied. I definitely still dress myself and act in a certain way based on how I molded myself to fit in to the ideal of a woman that my friends instilled in me in middle school, but I still feel like I have an underlying sense of approaching people, whether man or woman, in the same manner that I did as a child. So, in a way, that idea of not explicitly defining myself as a woman, and therefore separate, seems to me like what the idea of feminism should be. It feels more to me like man and woman are just two different kinds of human beings and not polar opposites. I’ve even felt that I’ve connected humanly more with some men than with women, maybe because I haven’t been thinking of myself first and foremost as a woman. (I’ve realized recently too that I identify more with male main characters in film and that this is reflected in my recent work where I’ve centered narratives around a male character as opposed to female. But this may be because I’m representing what I’ve been given in the media and learned of film so it’s too much to get into right now.)

            Judith Butler seems to get at an idea somewhat similar to how I feel with feminism. I agree with her when she says, “There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed” (164). When I see self-portrait photographs by women that draw attention to themselves within the frame foremost as women, I see an expression of their femaleness. I honestly don’t know though if I just haven’t reached a level of intelligence and understanding in order to interpret this sort of feminist art in the way it is intended by the artists.

            In Wark’s article, as she is discussing Martha Wilson’s photo Painted Lady , she writes, “Wilson’s stylized exaggerations can also be seen as key strategies for gaining visibility as an artist without becoming objectified as a woman” (149). I couldn’t find a picture of this photo online unfortunately, but through the description by Wark I am assuming that Wilson is wearing a substantial and exaggerated amount of makeup. At the same time that she is calling attention to the performativity of femaleness, she is separating it from herself as a woman; with its exaggeration, she is providing a distance between the role she plays as woman, and her simply being a woman. The idea that the makeup further blurs her actual sex doesn’t objectify her as a woman before that of her as an artist.  Wark’s take on this particular photograph of Wilson’s seems to be along the lines of what Butler felt feminist art should be. If women continue to present themselves only as society’s idea of women and as separate from men, they in turn help to create the very identity they wish to dispel. Wilson gets beyond this in her photograph by not presenting herself as a woman but as someone performing her gender.

            Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being work seems more along the lines of her attempting to objectify herself as a man, but in doing so, objectifies herself as a woman. With the fact that she is calling attention to herself as performing a man, she is equally calling attention to herself as being female, which may be what she intended. This work then doesn’t seem to go beyond that cycle of feminism that Butler wants women artists to pull themselves out of. This goes back to another point Butler was making when she discusses the difference between performing theatrically and performing conspicuously. Piper presented this specific work with the framework that is audience knew she was a woman playing the role of a man. It’s therefore more like theatre in that people know it’s just an act, hence distinguishing it from her reality as woman. This draws a distinction between the performance and life, as Butler was saying, but it does in the sense that it draws attention specifically to life; to Piper as female. This is in contrast to the Wilson photograph in that her femaleness was made more ambiguous by her theatrical exaggeration. I think Piper could achieve the same role as representing herself as an artist before a woman if she were to be more like the transvestite on the bus, making her womanhood still existent but leaving room for ambiguation.

            I was trying to think of an example wherein a man performing a woman was able to represent femaleness, and I thought immediately of a photo I saw yesterday of my friend in his Halloween costume. He dressed up in a leopard print dress and long, blond wig, as well as wearing a large amount of makeup. I was surprised at how different he looked in this getup, but still could see him, and his masculinity, underneath it. I clicked through the various photos of him dancing at a party on Facebook and when I came to one in particular, I was shocked by how well he seemed to embody female performativity; particularly with his posture. It made me think back to how Piper’s performance was essentially her performing as a man, and how I might easily see this performance as a woman, by my friend, as a woman performing a woman. Is there a connection then between my friend and Wilson’s Painted Lady photo? I think there is but, I’m really not sure what it entails. 

(Kraus’s article became much too jumbled in literary theory for me by the time I reached its end, so the rest of my post may have been answered or explained to some extent within the article but I didn’t understand it enough to catch it. Basically, I may just be totally confused and have missed the points of the article, but this is me trying to make sense of what I thought it was saying.)

I don’t have a good sense of what is right and what is wrong, and I want to know what fits into these categories yet at the same time they are problematic to me. “Cindy Sherman is an artist and artists imitate reality (Universal Truth No.1), doing so through their own sensibilities, and thus adding something of themselves to it (Universal Truth No. 2)” (185). This statement, although I understand its context within the article, seems right to me. And by right, I mean it makes sense if you take out the references to universal truths and accept it as a statement for what it is, not for an example of something considered ‘not right.’ I have read the literary theorists Kraus refers to in her article and know the gist of their ideas, so I understand them, but maybe her usage of them is unclear to me. I understand the concept of the historical vs. natural that she discusses as this is an underlying facet and catalyst for theory, and I can see this quotations ‘truth’ within the example Kraus gives of the art critic buying into the myth. The confusion I have with it is its wording and what exactly is encompassed with each universal truth so I’ll break it down into its two parts and start from there.

            To me, Universal Truth No.1 refers to a non-existence of anything that can be defined as ‘reality’ so therefore no artist can imitate it. ‘Reality’ is socially constructed and therefore constitutes a history of this construct as opposed to something natural that pre-existed humankind. I agree with this, but at the same time, I would like to give the word ‘reality’ more credit than this, as its existence as a word, no matter what it may actually refer to, is a huge chunk of human consciousness. Even though ‘reality’ may not refer to anything specific because it is so subjective, I still think it can be used to represent an individual’s own set of ideas about the world in which they exist and share with others. Therefore, I find truth in the idea that artists imitate reality, mainly their own notion of reality. To go with this idea of historical vs. natural, if we are a construct of social history than what can we do but imitate it, as it has created us? If Kraus wants to get all linguistic about Cindy Sherman’s work, I find it odd that she didn’t directly clarify her statement, being understanding of the absence and deferment of the signified within language. Anyways, it seems to me as if artists can do nothing but imitate and reinterpret their own notion of reality. This is what I do. I attempt to make my ideas on my reality translatable to my audience in my own artistic work. 

            This goes into the second half of the quotation. I understand Universal Truth No. 2 to be that no artist can add something of themselves to their artwork because their artwork is essentially a product of their socially constructed lives and therefore never something individual but always a product of construct. Although I can agree with this, I still have a sense that I have some sliver of individuality in my artwork that I add to it, and this is also due to my reinterpretation and chosen representation. It’s hard for me to undermine my singular being through these ideas, which is human and constructed in itself. I’ve learned to take literary theory with a grain of salt because after all, the famous theorists must feel that they are individual in their ideas and writing even though they preach their own human construction. Kraus seems to define this truth though as relating to the myth that Sherman created her images in response to “original” film stills so that her images are a copy of their original, but done in her own interpretation. I can see this idea though as plausible and that yeah, maybe there is a ton of other stuff under the hood, but does all that hidden stuff completely disavow that she might actually be making images in a response to similar or “original” ones? I think the function of most artists is to create something out of their own interpretations of their reality that they assume has some aspect that is different or separate from what they’ve known, and consequently is in opposition and response to an original.

            So, I get a sense that Kraus is trying to explain the interpretation of Sherman’s work as separate from her but at the same time refers to her wit and intelligence in her decisions and creative choices. With this, I then want to know if we do or don’t see the “real” her within her photographs. Williamson states in her article, “…I think that this false search for the “real” her is exactly what the work is about…The attempt to find the “real” Cindy Sherman is unfulfillable, just as it is for anyone…” (173). Same as with Kraus, I want to know what Williamson evens mean by “real.” She puts it in quotations as if it isn’t necessarily referring to its socially constructed idea, but still, I want her opinion on what she considers “real” or if not, what she considers exists in place of realness. If I go along with my idea of “real” for Cindy Sherman as what she constitutes it is, then I think her realness definitely does exist within her photographs simply in the fact that she has made them. I do get though that Williamson is arguing against the idea that viewers feel like they can see the “real” her through her masquerade, meaning everything that constitutes her being as if they are her and can clarify and define it. But I mean, there’s gotta be something real within everything right? An attempt to find the real Cindy Sherman in her photographs must yield at least some ideas of her being and why not consider those real? There must exist a part of her in her images as well as examples of imitation of her reality. Right?

            Is there a difference then between her own photographs and this snapshot of her, as her?