Showing posts with label Reference "Photographic gaze". Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reference "Photographic gaze". Show all posts
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Nakedness, exposure and vulnerability.
Judith Mackrell guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 May 2011 21.30
When Sally Marie was told she had to strip off in the name of contemporary dance, she was happy to oblige – in theory, anyway. The British dancer had been cast in Dear Body, a 2009 work by Luca Silvestrini that satirised the hard dieting, gym-bound madness of body beautiful obsessives. Marie approved of the work's politics, which she felt applied to her own profession, too. "I'd been arguing for ages that we needed a greater variety of bodies and ages in dance," says Marie, who readily admits to being a stone heavier and a decade older than most of the other dancers. "It felt like an important statement to be on stage showing my tits."
But in practice, when it came to getting naked, Marie was petrified. "When you're in a sauna, it feels completely natural. But on stage, you're really exposed." Ironically, by the time she came to perform Dear Body, she was much slimmer. "I'd been too frightened to eat."
Javier de Frutos, the Venezuelan-born choreo-grapher, understands her terror. In the 1990s, his own compact buttocks and bobbing penis became a familiar sight to audiences, in works such as the solo Gypsy and the trio Grass. Yet at first, De Frutos found crossing over into nudity traumatic. "When I was young, I was the guy at the gym who had to wait until the changing room was empty before I could take off my clothes." His mentor, the US dancer and choreo-grapher Sara Rudnor, persuaded him to change. "Sarah told me I needed to explore as many emotions as possible on stage. She told me to do what I feared most. For me, that was being naked."
De Frutos and Marie may feel some sympathy with the cast of Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!, which arrives in Britain this week. A Little Tenderness for Crying Out Loud!, in its English translation, was created by Canadian choreographer Dave St-Pierre. It's a work exploring the fears and fantasies of 22 characters as they search for love in a brutal world. But it's also a work in which the dancers have to perform naked for much of the time; in fact, even more exposingly, they have to bring their nakedness right down into the auditorium, clambering over the stalls and fighting in the aisles – with their breasts, genitals and buttocks in wobblingly close proximity to the audience.
What's the justification for such aggressive nudity? St-Pierre, who is fascinated by taboos and the breaking of them, is trying to create a raw physical intimacy between dancer and audience, and he wants to make us laugh, too. Michael Watts, one of his dancers, says most people find the naked scenes funny. But, he adds, "we're being very childlike – we're behaving like six-year-old boys, and we get a lot of taps on the bottom from old ladies". They do occasionally encounter angry resistance, though. "One woman just hid her face completely," recalls Watts. "She put her jacket over her face. Another man got up and tried to run away. And a few dancers have got hit or pushed."
Choreographers may have many serious motives for nudity – be they political, aesthetic or psychological – but what some people find beautiful and expressive, others will inevitably find titillating or arousing, and others embarrassing or disgusting. What is certain, though, is that the issue of how much flesh a dancer shows has always been controversial. In 1725, when ballerina Marie Camargo shortened her skirts to ankle length to gain extra freedom of movement, there were many who went to the Paris Opera not to applaud her virtuosity but to catch a flash of calf or thigh. Camargo was credited with inventing an early form of knickers to preserve some modesty as she danced.
For Isadora Duncan, the American who began performing her radiant, radical dance recitals around 1900, the body was sacred. When she abandoned corsets, danced barefoot and occasionally let a bare breast spill out of her loosely draped tunic, Duncan wasn't simply serving the cause of dance, she was celebrating the human spirit. And her inspiration, as well as her notoriety, led to more dancers stripping off in the name of high art. Canadian Maud Allan became a superstar of Edwardian Britain thanks her near-naked Salomé routine, and Josephine Baker was dubbed the Ebony Venus when she danced in Paris wearing nothing but a belt of pink feathers or a tiny skirt of fake bananas.
When stage censorship laws were relaxed during the 1960s, however, even a coy veil could be dispensed with. The cast of musicals such as Oh! Calcutta! paraded their bodies with joy, while avant-garde choreographers began to explore the gamut of what nudity could signify. Yvonne Rainer, in 1970s New York, danced naked in front of a US flag to protest against the Vietnam war. And veteran British dancer Diana Payne-Myers developed an entire second career when choreo-graphers such as Lloyd Newson started to explore the potential of putting a much older, naked dancer on stage.
Since the late 1990s, Payne-Myers's tiny, wrinkled, supple form has evoked images of survival, defenselessness and even the joy of supposedly inappropriate elderly behaviour.
For De Frutos, as he explored the feelings of vulnerability created by dancing naked, other issues arose. He became fascinated by his audiences' natural voyeurism and by the ways he could deflect it. "I wanted to take their attention away from my genitalia to all the small muscles in the body, and show how eloquent they are. There is something irreplaceable about the sensual reality of skin, and the beauty of light falling on skin. I was always thinking how that could best be achieved."
Visually, De Frutos was inspired by none other than Caravaggio and El Greco. But in real life, the human body can be an unruly beast: it gets rashes and bruises, it's subject to weight gain, hairiness and menstrual cycles – as well as other kinds of normally private activity. De Frutos swears he never worried about getting an erection on stage when performing with other nude dancers: "Dancing naked," he says, "is the least sexy thing I've ever done." And Sally Marie was convinced that all the men in Dear Body were "very anxious. During contact, everyone was trying to keep a distance between their pelvises. It was very funny. "
For Arthur Pita, the London-based choreographer of the pastoral comedy Camp, the issue was simply his own vanity. He hadn't expected to dance in Camp, but when he had to take over from an injured cast member he went straight into an intensive regime of "squats and press-ups" to prepare for his naked scene. "I really didn't want anything to be wobbling for the audience."
Pita envies the lack of self conscious-ness shown by Payne-Meyers, with whom he has worked. "She knows full well she is an 83-year-old woman, but she is completely committed to her art and completely unembarrassed. Her body is amazing to look at. It's only skin and bone and muscle, but it's very old skin and bone and muscle. I admire that healthy, honest approach; it's something all dancers should be inspired by."
Tendresse comes with a guidance rating of 18, and all its publicity contains warnings of "explicit adult material". What's more, Michael Watts is keen to point out that if anyone in the audience obviously hates what the dancers are doing, they won't get picked on. "We can usually tell how people are feeling," he says. "They won't actually have a hairy man in a wig clambering over them."
Fears and fantasies … Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!
Photograph: Dave St-Pierre
When Sally Marie was told she had to strip off in the name of contemporary dance, she was happy to oblige – in theory, anyway. The British dancer had been cast in Dear Body, a 2009 work by Luca Silvestrini that satirised the hard dieting, gym-bound madness of body beautiful obsessives. Marie approved of the work's politics, which she felt applied to her own profession, too. "I'd been arguing for ages that we needed a greater variety of bodies and ages in dance," says Marie, who readily admits to being a stone heavier and a decade older than most of the other dancers. "It felt like an important statement to be on stage showing my tits."
But in practice, when it came to getting naked, Marie was petrified. "When you're in a sauna, it feels completely natural. But on stage, you're really exposed." Ironically, by the time she came to perform Dear Body, she was much slimmer. "I'd been too frightened to eat."
Javier de Frutos, the Venezuelan-born choreo-grapher, understands her terror. In the 1990s, his own compact buttocks and bobbing penis became a familiar sight to audiences, in works such as the solo Gypsy and the trio Grass. Yet at first, De Frutos found crossing over into nudity traumatic. "When I was young, I was the guy at the gym who had to wait until the changing room was empty before I could take off my clothes." His mentor, the US dancer and choreo-grapher Sara Rudnor, persuaded him to change. "Sarah told me I needed to explore as many emotions as possible on stage. She told me to do what I feared most. For me, that was being naked."
De Frutos and Marie may feel some sympathy with the cast of Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!, which arrives in Britain this week. A Little Tenderness for Crying Out Loud!, in its English translation, was created by Canadian choreographer Dave St-Pierre. It's a work exploring the fears and fantasies of 22 characters as they search for love in a brutal world. But it's also a work in which the dancers have to perform naked for much of the time; in fact, even more exposingly, they have to bring their nakedness right down into the auditorium, clambering over the stalls and fighting in the aisles – with their breasts, genitals and buttocks in wobblingly close proximity to the audience.
What's the justification for such aggressive nudity? St-Pierre, who is fascinated by taboos and the breaking of them, is trying to create a raw physical intimacy between dancer and audience, and he wants to make us laugh, too. Michael Watts, one of his dancers, says most people find the naked scenes funny. But, he adds, "we're being very childlike – we're behaving like six-year-old boys, and we get a lot of taps on the bottom from old ladies". They do occasionally encounter angry resistance, though. "One woman just hid her face completely," recalls Watts. "She put her jacket over her face. Another man got up and tried to run away. And a few dancers have got hit or pushed."
Choreographers may have many serious motives for nudity – be they political, aesthetic or psychological – but what some people find beautiful and expressive, others will inevitably find titillating or arousing, and others embarrassing or disgusting. What is certain, though, is that the issue of how much flesh a dancer shows has always been controversial. In 1725, when ballerina Marie Camargo shortened her skirts to ankle length to gain extra freedom of movement, there were many who went to the Paris Opera not to applaud her virtuosity but to catch a flash of calf or thigh. Camargo was credited with inventing an early form of knickers to preserve some modesty as she danced.
For Isadora Duncan, the American who began performing her radiant, radical dance recitals around 1900, the body was sacred. When she abandoned corsets, danced barefoot and occasionally let a bare breast spill out of her loosely draped tunic, Duncan wasn't simply serving the cause of dance, she was celebrating the human spirit. And her inspiration, as well as her notoriety, led to more dancers stripping off in the name of high art. Canadian Maud Allan became a superstar of Edwardian Britain thanks her near-naked Salomé routine, and Josephine Baker was dubbed the Ebony Venus when she danced in Paris wearing nothing but a belt of pink feathers or a tiny skirt of fake bananas.
When stage censorship laws were relaxed during the 1960s, however, even a coy veil could be dispensed with. The cast of musicals such as Oh! Calcutta! paraded their bodies with joy, while avant-garde choreographers began to explore the gamut of what nudity could signify. Yvonne Rainer, in 1970s New York, danced naked in front of a US flag to protest against the Vietnam war. And veteran British dancer Diana Payne-Myers developed an entire second career when choreo-graphers such as Lloyd Newson started to explore the potential of putting a much older, naked dancer on stage.
Since the late 1990s, Payne-Myers's tiny, wrinkled, supple form has evoked images of survival, defenselessness and even the joy of supposedly inappropriate elderly behaviour.
For De Frutos, as he explored the feelings of vulnerability created by dancing naked, other issues arose. He became fascinated by his audiences' natural voyeurism and by the ways he could deflect it. "I wanted to take their attention away from my genitalia to all the small muscles in the body, and show how eloquent they are. There is something irreplaceable about the sensual reality of skin, and the beauty of light falling on skin. I was always thinking how that could best be achieved."
Visually, De Frutos was inspired by none other than Caravaggio and El Greco. But in real life, the human body can be an unruly beast: it gets rashes and bruises, it's subject to weight gain, hairiness and menstrual cycles – as well as other kinds of normally private activity. De Frutos swears he never worried about getting an erection on stage when performing with other nude dancers: "Dancing naked," he says, "is the least sexy thing I've ever done." And Sally Marie was convinced that all the men in Dear Body were "very anxious. During contact, everyone was trying to keep a distance between their pelvises. It was very funny. "
For Arthur Pita, the London-based choreographer of the pastoral comedy Camp, the issue was simply his own vanity. He hadn't expected to dance in Camp, but when he had to take over from an injured cast member he went straight into an intensive regime of "squats and press-ups" to prepare for his naked scene. "I really didn't want anything to be wobbling for the audience."
Pita envies the lack of self conscious-ness shown by Payne-Meyers, with whom he has worked. "She knows full well she is an 83-year-old woman, but she is completely committed to her art and completely unembarrassed. Her body is amazing to look at. It's only skin and bone and muscle, but it's very old skin and bone and muscle. I admire that healthy, honest approach; it's something all dancers should be inspired by."
Tendresse comes with a guidance rating of 18, and all its publicity contains warnings of "explicit adult material". What's more, Michael Watts is keen to point out that if anyone in the audience obviously hates what the dancers are doing, they won't get picked on. "We can usually tell how people are feeling," he says. "They won't actually have a hairy man in a wig clambering over them."
Saturday, 30 April 2011
the process of seeing ....
I am interested in machines that tell you what it is to look, that make you aware of the process of seeing, make you aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking at it; but more as looking and seeing being a metaphor of how you understand the world.
William Kentridge in "Anything is possible" - documentary.
William Kentridge in "Anything is possible" - documentary.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Jemime Stehli - Strip series
Strip No1 Writer
Strip No3 Critic
Strip No4 Curator
Strip No5 Dealer
Strip No6 Critic
Strip No7 Writer
Saturday, 13 February 2010
Friday, 19 June 2009
Barbara Probst
Click here to see more + read interview : http://celinesianidjiakoua.blogspot.com/2009/06/barbara-probst-work-and-interview.html
Mehraneh Atashi - "Bodiless, I"
Mehraneh Atashi's amazing "self-portraits"... I just love them ... ever so inspiring ...
Mehraneh Atashi's Statement :
"The breath of women is religiously prohobited in the Zourkhaneh.Zourkhaneh, a traditional centre of male sport where religion ,tradition,virility and symbol of the persian hero are all mixed.The first day I entered the zourkhaneh with mirrors reflecting the sence all over,I suddenly found myself standing in front of some big and strong men .It was so hard to gain the trust of these extremly religious moslems and their agreement to pose half naked in front of me and the mirror, but magic of photography helped me ,I made sure to be peresent in each photos as a subject among the heroes. "
http://www.mehranehatashi.com/tabid/57/Default.aspx
Mehraneh Atashi's Statement :
"The breath of women is religiously prohobited in the Zourkhaneh.Zourkhaneh, a traditional centre of male sport where religion ,tradition,virility and symbol of the persian hero are all mixed.The first day I entered the zourkhaneh with mirrors reflecting the sence all over,I suddenly found myself standing in front of some big and strong men .It was so hard to gain the trust of these extremly religious moslems and their agreement to pose half naked in front of me and the mirror, but magic of photography helped me ,I made sure to be peresent in each photos as a subject among the heroes. "
http://www.mehranehatashi.com/tabid/57/Default.aspx
Wednesday, 15 April 2009
"Filles d'Amsterdam" - photographic series - Jean-Luc Moulène
Jean-Luc Moulene: travail de sape.(Critical essay)
Publication: Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine
Publication Date: 01-APR-06Author: Delbard, Nathalie
Publication: Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine
Publication Date: 01-APR-06Author: Delbard, Nathalie
JEAN-LUC MOULÈNE WORKING TO UNDERMINE
" Naturally, Moulène has, once again, taken on an out-of-the-ordinary sort of work, one that gives rise to lively debate; moreover, although we are dealing here with people (Dutch prostitutes) (....)the body is now a body-merchandise, a kind of ultimate consumer object.
(...) in the face of these nude women with their legs spread, with their bodies marked by scars or accessories, and especially with their faces looking straight out at us in alignment with their hairless genitalia, there is no place for the beholder's gaze to seek refuge, no diagonal or intermediary space in which to withdraw. Our gaze constantly wavers between the head and the genitals; it cannot settle on one at the other's expense; it is divided without ever coming to rest. (...)Moulène refuses to separate the head and the sex. This is the major accomplishment of "Filles d'Amsterdam." One might nevertheless object, and rightly so, that this kind of representation is already largely present in our culture's field of images, especially in the pornography industry. And while "Filles d'Amsterdam" is shown in the museum space in such a way as to produce the opposite effect of a private and solitary viewing, (11) because the museum generates an important form of distanciation and forces viewers to confront their responsibility as viewing subjects, we know also that the slightest reproduction in the media (which the artist has, for the moment, authorized infrequently and under strict conditions) tends quickly to "pornify" the images. More certainly, what clearly distinguishes Moulène's photographs has to do with the very nature of the artistic process and, indirectly, with the unusual mode in which these women appear, for these are portraits, or what Moulène defines as depictions "of someone in his or her social relations by means of social signs and their social status." (12) In other words, in the case of the commercialization of bodies, the face--if it appears--must make itself forgotten as a unique object in order to facilitate the selling of the product (by using clearly stereotyped expressions). What is being asked of these "workers," however, is that they address the camera in the light of a social reality that is fully identified as such; they are far from simply putting their heads in the service of their bodies in order to maintain the illusion of the role that is usually assigned to them. It is thus from this site that the "girls of Amsterdam" gaze at us, and this is why their faces impose a persistent presence that is at least equal to the presence of their genitalia--a presence which, in the end, interferes with viewing them as prostitutes."
(11.) Note in this regard the effectiveness of the singular panoptical system Moulène created for his exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, where the thirteen photographs in the series, displayed in the central gallery upstairs, encircled viewers and constantly reminded them of their own gaze through their reflection in the images and the presence of other visitors.
(12.) Moulène, interview with Delbard, op. cit.
" Naturally, Moulène has, once again, taken on an out-of-the-ordinary sort of work, one that gives rise to lively debate; moreover, although we are dealing here with people (Dutch prostitutes) (....)the body is now a body-merchandise, a kind of ultimate consumer object.
(...) in the face of these nude women with their legs spread, with their bodies marked by scars or accessories, and especially with their faces looking straight out at us in alignment with their hairless genitalia, there is no place for the beholder's gaze to seek refuge, no diagonal or intermediary space in which to withdraw. Our gaze constantly wavers between the head and the genitals; it cannot settle on one at the other's expense; it is divided without ever coming to rest. (...)Moulène refuses to separate the head and the sex. This is the major accomplishment of "Filles d'Amsterdam." One might nevertheless object, and rightly so, that this kind of representation is already largely present in our culture's field of images, especially in the pornography industry. And while "Filles d'Amsterdam" is shown in the museum space in such a way as to produce the opposite effect of a private and solitary viewing, (11) because the museum generates an important form of distanciation and forces viewers to confront their responsibility as viewing subjects, we know also that the slightest reproduction in the media (which the artist has, for the moment, authorized infrequently and under strict conditions) tends quickly to "pornify" the images. More certainly, what clearly distinguishes Moulène's photographs has to do with the very nature of the artistic process and, indirectly, with the unusual mode in which these women appear, for these are portraits, or what Moulène defines as depictions "of someone in his or her social relations by means of social signs and their social status." (12) In other words, in the case of the commercialization of bodies, the face--if it appears--must make itself forgotten as a unique object in order to facilitate the selling of the product (by using clearly stereotyped expressions). What is being asked of these "workers," however, is that they address the camera in the light of a social reality that is fully identified as such; they are far from simply putting their heads in the service of their bodies in order to maintain the illusion of the role that is usually assigned to them. It is thus from this site that the "girls of Amsterdam" gaze at us, and this is why their faces impose a persistent presence that is at least equal to the presence of their genitalia--a presence which, in the end, interferes with viewing them as prostitutes."
(11.) Note in this regard the effectiveness of the singular panoptical system Moulène created for his exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, where the thirteen photographs in the series, displayed in the central gallery upstairs, encircled viewers and constantly reminded them of their own gaze through their reflection in the images and the presence of other visitors.
(12.) Moulène, interview with Delbard, op. cit.
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