Members of the public attending George VI and Queen Elizabeths’ coronation in 1937 improvised devices to be able to see the monarchs.
Looking at lenses of history through the lens of history.
Research questions (from my Research Proposal Summer 2012)
– Can a reclining female (nude) simply be a ‘form’?
– What is female beauty? Slim, sylph-like, graceful? Or totemic, maternal, energetic? What are the ideas and images that inform and condition our notions of the female body, of feminine movement?
– What impact does the staging of an artwork as a performance installation or as a piece of video art have on the legacy of the form of the nude in art? Am I able to articulate something about how the screen, the canvas or the plinth influences our experience of what is in front of us by juxtaposing live material with filmed material?
Image by Jennie Howell
Jennie Howell and I performed a version of the improvised piece I am researching, Figure (s), for an invited audience.
Some of the useful thoughts that arose in the discussion afterwards included:
– The delicate and precarious movement between my body and the plinth – am I going to take the weight/is it going to take me – gives rise to lots of metaphors and connotations.
– The choice of sound-making materials are reminiscent of the art of foley and create a visible relationship between the body/the movement and the sound.
– What can we do to warm up, to prepare for this act of improvising together? For something which has elements which remain, but which is always new?
Framing the body and composing with it,
Framing devices,
The human subject as dancer (everybody is a dancer),
and the humanity of the ‘dancer’.
The juxtaposition of the everyday with the choreographed,
Improvisation in performance.
– How adept I am with technology (even in performance mode).
– How much technology I use in the performance.
– The delay in the projected image causes the viewer to question whether it really is a representation of me. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that through the camera lens, “The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the hands of technology”, and of Rene Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (1933)
As Magritte wrote:
In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. This simultaneous existence in two different spaces is like living simultaneously in the past and in the present, as in cases of deja vu. (My italics)
Quoted in Torczyner, Harry, Magritte: Ideas and Images. New York, 1977.
This simultaneity of past and present interests me… and leads me to Bergson and Deleuze’s notions of simultaneous, but differing durations.
The body in the ‘landscape’. The body in a tactile ‘natural’ sonorous material. There is something about the fragile, decaying quality of the dry leaves and the vulnerable body beneath that draws attention to the body’s fragility, its mortality.
I particularly like the exclamations of the audience as the leaves are blown away from Yeh Tzu-chi’s body.
In relation to discussions with Jennie Howell about what improvisation and intuition in creativity might be… and to thoughts about how I might use improvisation in Two Forms. (Is improvisation the right term?)
A couple of interesting articles:
I find the description of Butoh particularly useful.
What is ‘Indeterminacy’? by Marguerite Caruana Galizia
Marguerite Caruana Galizia’s exploration of the differences between improvisation and indeterminacy, and where in the composition of a work they might occur, is also informative.
New to the world of blogging I have written a list of words that appear frequently on the first two pages I have created for my blog.
They are (in no particular order):
framing, juxtaposition, movement, performance, installation, film, extraordinary (and by implication its opposite, ordinary), functional, everyday, choreography, video, landscape
Might these be my keywords? My categories and tags?
KATY PENDLEBURY 
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