(Like) A Virgin
Goody-B Wiseman
Alex McQuilkin
Undrea Norris
Michelle Kasprzak
Curated by: Andrea Cooper
Dates Showing: March 6th - April 8th, 2004
"Because we can be brilliant, graceful (as in full of grace and fury...), but still be hopelessly foul fuckups. Degradation and humiliation should not be seen as a cut-off, a reduction of potential. Ruin is not necessarily ruinous. We keep seeing the abject as complaint and pathos instead of a stumbling toward freedom."- Sarah Hollenberg.
In the work of the artists presented in (Like) A Virgin: Goody-B Wiseman, Alex McQuilkin, Undrea Norris and Michelle Kasprzak the abject is subtext. This work is compelling in its engagement with the paradox set out in Hollenberg's statement that fucking up has its own irreplaceable brilliance. I am proposing that there is redemption in abjection. The hybrid use of technology in the creation of the work in this exhibition takes this even further, embodying a material contamination that lends itself to a whole new kind of dirty.
The artists often use appropriated imagery, or popular stereotypes to achieve a greater insight into contemporary society. Inevitably, our desires, memories and habits are infiltrated by what we have seen and experienced in the realm of television and film. Viewed from the intersection of art and media culture, looking is revealed as a form of consumption. Pleasure is most familiar to us as a slick marketing device used to stimulate, spend, exhaust, and up our libidos. When I refer to 'dirty', I am proposing that the concept of 'dirty' can be more than the glib disapproval or titillation that is implied in commercial culture. I use this term as a nuance, or subversive disposition.
MADNESS:
In the video 'Beginner's Curse for Sluts and Psychopaths' Goody B-Wiseman spits at her own reflection in a mirror. Her fox fur hat and coat reference femininity, but her actions are of refusal, denial, a decisive urgent action that denotes a fuck-you to the better self in the mirror. Without speaking, she is trapped in the mirror, she has no one to heap her fury on but herself. The droning audio of a wicked witch's curse washes over her image, its lack of origin contributing the fracturing of the figure on the screen. As Wiseman states "'Beginner's Curse for Sluts and Psychopaths' is re-write of the fairy tale Snow White that boastily performs a dialogue of loathing, reproach, and posturing. The dialogue explores the awful site of clash between the perception of self and the self's construction." Goody B. Wiseman's work is infused with humor, irony, and raw discomfort.
"Marguerite Duras, one of Kristeva's contemporaries, spoke in a 1975 interview of Jules Michelet's 1862 text La sorciere, in which Michelet set forward the thesis that in the middle ages, women left alone by men gone off to war or on the Crusades were left in a position of such loneliness and isolation that they began to speak to anything available, to the fields and forest and animals around them. These women were seen to be in league with the devil, and Michelet implies that this is the origin of the western witch. Duras suggests that this has never really changed "They are as alone as before. And everywhere. Madness has found other expressions, but it is still there. It is still the same madness." In reference to works by Goody B-Wiseman's Hollenberg states "they suggest a descent into 'Duras madness' in their attempt to locate some truth other than that offered up by the constructions of language".
BOREDOM:
New York artist Alex McQuilkin's DVD 'Fucked' depicts the artist as she try's in vain to put on makeup as she appears to have sex from behind. In McQuilkin's work the notion of the feminist artist as paradox is explored because in the conflation she is both object and subject. Theorist  Rebecca Schneider's discussion of women as emblems of desire is of particular interest in relation to the work of McQuilkin, in the idea of woman as "commodity dreamgirls". "The dreamgirls are signifiers of sexual desire, forever promising, but never delivering sexual fulfillment". The dreamgirl promises sexual fulfillment, but as an icon or symbol, she cannot deliver; she is forever recreating the lust to buy again, in the hope of attaining fulfillment. Desire is the notion of missing, of absence and loss. Despite all the best efforts of social theorists and feminists, desire retains an elusive power. It is both hopeful and tragic. McQuilkin's 'Fucked' addresses excess, sexual agency and boredom, in a humorous and candid manner.
"The sexually active woman as both (low) object and (high) artist straddles and challenges a deeply ingrained gender divide in which active, or over, or "virile" female sexuality is conceived as inherently animalistic, primitive, and perverse"." Rebecca Schneider.
EXCESS:
Undrea Norris's video excerpt 'Redress' mimics the look of the 80's at its super model peak. The woman's body in the video is an outlaw. She explodes out of institutionalized perfection. Her movements are elegant, as she eats lipstick, rubs her crotch, and spreads the lipstick all over her face in an indulgent heated detonation. Self-pleasure remains poised between self-discovery and self-absorption, desire and excess, privacy and loneliness, innocence and guilt, as does no other sexuality in our era. The artist twists imperfection by devouring and destroying its symbols.
DESIRE:
'Scrub' is an interactive video installation by Michelle Kasprzak. Visitors to the gallery approach an area that looks like a kitchen. On the counter top is a sponge, and a video monitor in the cabinet above has been left open. The sponge is the visitor's interface to the piece. If you push the sponge on the countertop, the video on the monitor shows footage of the artist wearing gloves, when you scrub harder, in a particular direction or speed, the footage of the artist becomes interspersed with short segments from a pornographic movie, in which a housewife character wearing rubber gloves gets off in her kitchen.  The artist places herself between the public and the porn star. She is the medium between fantasy and reality. Sex is used to sell anything. Our memories and fantasies blend with manufactured images to create a reality that is neither fact nor fiction. Within media culture looking has become a form of consumption. There is more porn and more access to porn than ever before in the history of contemporary society, logging on is like turning on the tap. Yet despite its ubiquity it is rarely discussed. By placing the art in a domestic, banal context, Kasprzak reemphasizes how mundane pornography has become, yet paradoxically, how dirty sex is to the viewer when it is inserted within a familiar context.
There is so much wonder in the possibility of screwing up.(Like) A Virgin offers a complex exploration of sexual agency through irony, and self-awareness into the acceptance of being ruined. Neurotic. Excessive. Wickedly smart and impossibly dirty.
Andrea Cooper 2004
|
