Freud’s personality theory (1923) saw the psyche structured into three parts (i.e., tripartite), the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives. These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical.
According to Freud’s model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.
Although each part of the personality comprises unique features, they interact to form a whole, and each part makes a relative contribution to an individual’s behaviour.
The ego is ‘that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.’
The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable.
The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how to behave.
Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure (i.e., tension reduction) and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. The ego has no concept of right or wrong; something is good simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id.
Often the ego is weak relative to the headstrong id, and the best the ego can do is stay on, pointing the id in the right direction and claiming some credit at the end as if the action were its own.
If the ego fails in its attempt to use the reality principle, and anxiety is experienced, unconscious defense mechanisms are employed, to help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e., anxiety) or make good things feel better for the individual.
The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is rational, realistic, and orientated towards problem-solving. If a plan of action does not work, then it is thought through again until a solution is found. This is known as reality testing and enables the person to control their impulses and demonstrate self-control, via mastery of the ego.
An important feature of clinical and social work is to enhance ego functioning and help the client test reality through assisting the client to think through their options.
The goal of my film and instillation will be to shine a light on the fetishisation of women’s bodies through food, thus makes our bodies objects to be consumed. These transformations, however, are very plainly failures, and they don’t end looking like sexual body parts at all, inducing the sense that this is another unattainable standard for women.
The work I will have chosen to display will help morph my film of transforming my body into fetishised foods even further, inducing the grotesque nature of it. The projected film will be projected from numerous projectors on top of plinths and onto numerous MDF boards. My original plan was to have them all in different positions, as seen below;
However, during the build, I made the decision to have them all exactly the same, as to not distract the audience from what I want to show, which are my projections;
I hung the pieces around eye-level, so that people can directly watch the projections. This meant that the plinths were built to be around 4ft tall, and spaced correctly so that the hanging pieces are all projected onto like TV screens.
I originally planned to only show three pieces, however after research, I changed my mind and displayed four. This was for aesthetic and practical reasons, which were to be able to have more leeway to have breaks in the films to keep the audience engaged with 1/2 films playing at the same time, while two others showed flashbacks (such as images, very sudden videos, etc) and colour blocks of the foods.
The film itself is a series of performances I’ve documented, and are heavily inspired by ORLAN’s body modifications, Cindy Sherman’s “Grotesque Series” of food and photography, and Rachel Maclean’s “Make Me Up” film. They share a grisly theme to their work, which I believe I’ve captured by using mashed up food on my body in my performances. The idea of being a woman who fails at attaining expectations put onto her comes from Vanessa Beecroft’s work, who explores how women are mortal and simply aren’t made to be like dolls.
The curation of my piece has also come from numerous artists and exhibitions I have visited. I recently went to Paul Eastwood’s “Dyfodiaith” exhibition and performance, who used sound very effectively, by having the musicians, narrator, and singers all stood around the screening of the film. The semi-permanent exhibition of the film also had a similar effect, as the speakers were spread around the projection. My aim is to create a similar effect, as I’ve used narration and food sounds in my films. This will be done with speakers coming from all media players, creating an atmosphere of the sounds.
Other exhibitions I’ve researched, like Shin il Kim’s piece “Active Anesthesia”, shows how the artist seeks to shake viewers out of a passive, anesthetised state into one that inspires active engagement with their surroundings. These blocks of colours really inspired my decision to have projections onto the pieces of colour blocks to split up the films nicely, by not having too much playing at the same time. They will also be useful to give the audience a chance to took at the relief paintings closely.
Achim Hatzius’ piece, “Speculations on Anonymous Materials”, also lead me to change my mind about only displaying 3 projections. I was always taught to display things in three because of the aesthetic of it, and it would have also been a great link to femininity, as witches always “come in threes”. However, I really enjoy the four projections from Hatzius piece, and it would also give me more room to experiment with the projections themselves. I did not, however, think the projector holders would suit my work at all, as my theme revolves around the unattainable standards women face. Plinths have worked much better to put the projectors into, as plinths are often used to display figures of traditional ideal women in museums and exhibitions. They also link to my references to Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion in my film. I ensured that these plinths were built to a high standard, mimicking a gallery’s plinth used for this purpose.
It was all then left to sorting my films for each projector and finalising curation aspects of my piece, such as choosing which of the relief paintings I’ll be using. The six I had to choose from were a variation of different fruits – some resembles grotesque versions of the body more, and some looked more life-like, and one was a plain board I was considering using for flashbacks.
The final six
My final thoughts were that I even wanted the flashbacks to morph as they are projected onto these boards, and felt that the more 3D/relief fruits did this the best. The different positioning of the objects will be interesting to watch with different films, and I did bare this in mind while I was choosing my films, swapping USBs around and seeing what worked more effectively.
The final four
I find it much easier to know what’s going on with my work by writing everything down in simple diagrams. I did this by drawing quick sketches of the boards I have chosen with names of the films I plan on showing onto them below the diagram. I then made a time-frame of what would happen in all of the films, taking into consideration of what was happening on all projectors at the same time. I planned this out so that no two film with me speaking would clash, and the only sounds that did were sound effects, which would only emphasise the grotesque sounds. There are also periods of flashbacks, images, and colour blocks to help with this. They all last 10 minutes, which also helped me in keeping track with each USB and what was shown on them.
Diagram/plan
List of films
Diagram/plan
Diagram/plan
Diagram/plan
I then decided to label each USB and will also label each media player to help me figure things out much quickly when I’m setting up. Each 10 minute film is now on the USBs ready to try out on the projectors this afternoon.
When I set everything up, numerous problems came up; I found that only one film would play due to the media players not working, overheating projectors switching off, cable health and safety, and speakers playing louder than others. I fixed all of these with the help of our technician, Neil Pedder. I was able to cool down the projectors by drilling in six new holes, and was able to safe-proof my exhibition to a high standard. The speakers were due to the levels my films were edited on, therefore worked on them and tried them out again the next day, resolving all issues that came up.
For a recent gap crit, I made a small and quick set-up, using this piece below as the surface that the projection of one of my films was cast onto. I wanted to use this opportunity to experiment using all of my films, and see what worked best, especially to see if a film in particular looked interesting as a projected “body” onto the relief figure, or if it would look better if I didn’t try to fit the projection in that way.
I had a few practice runs before my gap crit, and came out with very interesting morphed projections that I was excited to see what people thought of. This was a huge turning point for me and my work, and established exactly how I wanted to project my films form now on during this project.
I also really liked how the sound effects I had used, mostly that of chewing, slurping, cutting, etc, almost made the piece feel more alive in some way. What it did make me want to change was, however, the size of the object I was displaying the films on. The projector projects films in more of a square form, so the ideal piece should also be more square to fit the film better, therefore I made one for the crit to compare the two.
The square worked better, but it still didn’t fit entirely, which I investigated and found the exact measurements for a 4:9 projection.
I then set up the gap crit how I’d like an audience to view my work, which ended up being fairly close to the projection. I wanted this because the video really morphed from the clay on the MDF, and created a more grotesque version of the film, linking to my initial research for these films of Cindy Sherman and ORLAN.
After researching into Cindy Sherman and ORLAN’s grotesque performance pieces and photography, I was intrigued by why they chose to portray women’s bodies in this way, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.
The grotesque, as art historian Frances S. Connelly writes in her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), is “a boundary creature” that “roams the borderland of all that is familiar and conventional.” It is desirous of transformation—an “open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds.” The grotesque, she writes, is inherently associated with the feminine—bodied, earthy, changeful. That thinking has long shaped depictions of the female body, including archetypes of sexual or environmental threat, like prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses. Even centuries before the term emerged, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle “advanced the influential argument that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, a deviation from that of the normative male”.
My initial playful experimentation looking into online relationships with our emoji use and sexualised foods took a new grotesque form. While it did still adopt a playful side to it, I began experimenting with this when I completed a short film called “Preparation For Sending My Boyfriend a Nude”, which includes myself creating new breasts for myself using clay in the cold, ready to admire in the mirror. They are meant to look like cherries, but end up looking bloodied. This is furthered by the use of a knife, cutting off bits of my new breasts for a more circular shape, then painting with a large wall roller brush, a stereotypical industrial and male item.
These emoji images and videos are meant to represent what one would send or create on a social media page. This is what I am meant to try and strive to look like. The clay aspect is for a very hands-on, gritty look, adding to the grotesque imagery. I also wanted to link it to being quite sculptural, perhaps narrating my film with Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion, thus creating a new outlook on the traditional ideal female form, as this one is made by a woman – but still for the male gaze.
After moulding and wetting the clay, I begin putting it on my breasts, almost sensually, but slightly chaotically. They do not look conventionally attractive, and certainly don’t look like cherries, which was my intention. I wanted it to look like I thought they looked attractive on me, even though I had transformed my breasts into something quite monstrous. I do this by looking at myself in the mirror, and remaining emotionless throughout the video, with no shock or disgust on my face; the judging will be made by the male gaze.
As I have previously touched upon, the sexual game we play with casual and/or long-term partners using emojis online is done to win a sexual “prize” at the end of it. At the end of this preparation, I ate a banana, a phallic food object that has certainly been sexualised, with the help of sexting and emojis. This was symbolic for what I hoped to gain from showing my new, morphed body.
I was also inspired by Jean Cocetau’s Orpheus (1950) and the mirror scene. I thought it was perfect for explaining my ideas around fetishisation, as women very often would pose in front of a mirror when taking photos of their bodies, thus linking with the theme of comparing women’s bodies to food. (Photos for reference are below)
The film itself is me putting on gloves that enables me to reach and get fruit from inside of the mirror. This is similar to the Orpheus film, where he uses gloves to travel inside the mirror, which is how I decided to end my film. This is meant to represent the consumption of my own body image in a humerous way.
From my research, I was also inspired by Rachel Maclean’s remake of the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez. I began by lying in the same position, looking directly at the camera through the mirror, eating the grapes on my relief piece slowly, and almost seductively. I then progress into eating a lot at the same time, filling my cheeks, and almost have to spit them out. The juice runs down my chin, as the food overfills my mouth. Consuming what’s meant to represent my body is a direct link to Make Me Up, as the women are all eating the woman who’s lost in a challenge without knowing. Consuming women as a woman myself could both be seen as empowering, as I’m taking that right away from men, but also self-destructive. My aim was to make it look destructive, and make it apparent that these food comparisons aren’t having positive impacts on women, just as the “we are eating each other” references in Make Me Up. However, Maclean uses it in a way that these gruelling tasks put upon women in society means that we end up fighting against each other, thus consume their worth.
The use of “You’re So Vain” is an ironic reference to art historians believing Venus is being vain, even if she isn’t actually looking at herself in the mirror, and amplifies the almost unsettling facial expression on my face. I also progressively slowed the sound right down numerous times for the “so vain” line, which definitely adds to the unsettling nature of the short film.
One of my later films is about eating what you want to look like, as I, the subject, consume myself, as a female who’s consumed by the male gaze. This was done by a performance of myself eating marzipan, and slowly adding more and more marzipan to my face, creating a patch-work of skin-like texture on my face. I keep looking at the camera in an admiring way, again to address how I’m happy with this grotesque outcome, posing as if I’m posing for a photoshoot. I add to the grotesque nature of it by adding the same red paint as I’ve been using throughout these performances, creating a bloodied-skin effect. The aim was to eat up the marzipan, as I’d previously used it to create new breasts and bum.
This reminds me heavily of the masks some murderers are known for creating out of skin in films, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, inspired by the hideous murders of women committed by Ed Gein.
“Going Bananas in A Kebab Shop” has now slowly transformed the fruits into more flesh-like objects, resembling the phallus and testicles, which are first made of a kebab consistency (made of marzipan) that are on my breasts. I decided to do this to go against the Biblical story of Eve coming from Adam’s rib, and thought that a male’s anatomy coming from a woman’s breasts would fit this idea perfectly. The Biblical connotations behind fruit are also too obvious to miss, which is why I’m finally delving into them.
The editing was especially fun making this, but quite difficult too, as it’s my longest film yet. It’s done with an ironic YouTube tutorial tone to the editing, with the mashing of the marzipan, the colour mixing, and the shape making. Making the grapes was especially good for this, as I did a voice-over “and then roll in a ball, in a ball, in a ball,..etc” quickly, almost sounding impatient and angry in the end. I also added many new sound effects I’ve recently made, such as slurping drink with moans, which went well with the heavy phallus connotation in the film while making the flesh coloured bananas.
Sarah Lucas has long experimented with her androgynous look with food. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana, 1990 to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited, 1998. Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas’s work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Banana changed Lucas’s perception of her ‘masculine’ appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. ‘I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it – the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I’ve used that’ (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs, made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity. Her use of food parallels mine, as she put them on the areas of her body where they resemble.
Lucas appears in the macho pose she has claimed as her own. Clad in old jeans and heavy footwear, she sits with her legs wide apart and her feet planted firmly on the ground. Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the images. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. Food representing or standing in for sexual body parts is a common theme in Lucas’s work, mainly employed to reveal and subvert degrading objectification of the body in vernacular language. Fried eggs feature as breasts in sculptural installations and cover Lucas’s own breasts in her Self Portraitwith Fried Eggs. In Got a Salmon On #3 1997, Lucas stands outside a public toilet, a huge salmon resting from her shoulder to below her waist, a pun on the idea of a female erection. Summer 1998 portrays Lucas grimacing as she is sprayed with frothing beer. Like Eating a Banana and Lucas’s film, Sausage Film 1990, it satirises traditional female roles in pornography. These images present a female artist of masculine appearance as an object for male desire.
Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996
Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber 84 x 168 x 145 cm
Chicken Knickers 2000 C-print 273.2 x 196.3 cm
Eating a Banana, 1990
I really enjoy how Lucas has used the foods specifically to display sexual, and mostly feminine, body parts – I only wished I had seen these months ago. They capture what makes her feminine in the photographs, proving the foods sexual themes, as her appearance and manner capture the masculine aspect of the photograph. It begs the question of, why does masculinity get the mannerisms and aesthetic to represent it, while the femininity gets the objects to be consumed?
My final gap crit lead me to research Bedwyr Williams’s performance at Frieze, which was based around food. He dissected a life-size curator made out of cake during a performance piece, complete with internal organs and covered in marzipan skin. This lead me to think about what materials I could be using in my performances, instead of sticking to clay. I think marzipan was excellent to use, as the appearance of it can look very flesh-like, as you can clearly see in the image above, and also has a very light-skinned look, correlating with the myth of Pygmalion perfectly.
In her performance “Semiotics of The Kitchen”, Martha Rosler takes on the role of an apron-clad housewife and parodies the television cooking demonstrations popularised by Julia Child in the 1960s. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by refrigerator, table, and stove, she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Wielding knives, a nutcracker, and a rolling pin, she warms to her task, her gestures sharply punctuating the rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”
Martha Rosler in her performance
Rosler remarked about this work that “when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.” The symbolic terminology of the kitchen, she hypothesized, transforms the woman into a sign of the system of food production and harnessed subjectivity. The video subject is an “anti-Julia Child,” Rosler explains; she “replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.” It is not the production of food in and of itself that is Rosler’s target but the taken-for-granted role of happy housewife and selfless producer that the tape intends to spotlight. Her gestures demonstrate frustration with the language of domesticity, as she uses the domestic space of the kitchen as a backdrop for resistance and change.
Julia Child on her program
I’ve come to realise how similar my performances are to the tone of Martha Rosler’s piece, as she ironically uses a popular cooking show to show prejudices against women as domesticated goddesses. My tone is also very similar, as I use a mixture of irony and a bluntness to my commentaries, which have both the humour and sinister feel that Rosler’s performance has.
The Grotesque Female has become the main topic for many female artists, as it explores everything taboo and inherently sexist; exaggeration, hyperbole, and expressiveness are all key elements of the grotesque style. Certain aspects of the body are referenced when talking about the grotesque. These things include elements of the body that either protrude from the body or a part of the body that can be entered, which is a direct link to women’s bodies in particular. This is because the body in many cases is seen as pure where as the outside world is not. Therefore, parts of the body that allow the outside world in or allow elements inside the body out, are seen and used as an exaggeration of the grotesque.
Bakhtin explained how the grotesque body is a celebration of the cycle of life: the grotesque body is a comic figure of profound ambivalence: its positive meaning is linked to birth and renewal and its negative meaning is linked to death and decay.Frances Connelly, a well known art historian, describes the grotesque as “a boundary creature”, which is what I’ve hopefully achieved in my projections.
In the Medieval Grotesque Carnival, emphasis is put on the nether regions of the body as the centre and creation of meaning. The spirit rather than coming from above comes from the belly, buttocks, and genitals, which is what I’ve tried to re-create in my art by using representations of these exact body parts through food.
In her influential 1982 essay “Powers of Horror”, Julia Kristeva developed the term ‘abject’ to explore the human reaction to the fragmented, decayed or impure human body. The abject refers to the horror felt in response to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the boundaries between self and other, the loss of a sense of self.
ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. Similar to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, ORLAN uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. “I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context—not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty,” she explained.
I’m hugely interested in the monstrous aspect of her performance work, as well as her portrayal as famous figures of women, such as Venus in her Incidental Striptease series. This links to my monstrous women chapter in my dissertation, where I look into characters such as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl and Villanelle in Killing Eve, who are both monstrous women who are both empowering and valid feminist characters of women. My aim has been to translate this inspiration onto my work, and delved into how I can transform my body into the fetishised foods that often visually describe our body parts.
Back in August 2016, I saw Louise Bourgeois‘ work at the Tate Modern, who often deals with the grotesque. Highlighting her late work, the exhibition included an outstanding group of works including Couple I 1996, Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000, and Eyes 2001-5. This lead me to look at her for this year’s project, and use her drawings especially to influence my new works. This drawing and sculpture in particular intrigued me;
Topiary, 2005
Topiary, 2005-2009
The pieces appears to be a half pineapple, half woman, which actually sparked a few ideas relating to my work based on the fetishisation of food and women. The “forms” of much of Bourgeois’ work have this formless quality in two ways: in some cases, what we see appears to be something which doesn’t exist, such as the house-woman. In some cases, the biomorphic resemblances are made to male and female organs united in a single form (this has been described as “organ-logic”), or to a mixture of interior and exterior spaces united in a way that makes the interior seem to be outside and the exterior seem to be inside. Other qualities which are usually distinct and separate appear united or fused so that Bourgeois’ work has no location or position in terms of standard categories or in terms of art.
Le Regard (The Gaze), 1966 (latex over burlap)
These pieces sparked looking into textured/relief paintings again, particularly looking into making women into the forms of the food they are sexualised to look like – such as the emojis we use during sexting.
Cindy Sherman is an artist I have been greatly interested since the beginning of second year, however this year has been the first time I’ve taken the time to look at her work properly and understand her stance in the feminist community. This has then lead to her influence in my own films leading up to the degree show.
I personally really enjoy the Grotesque series, as it links to the food aspect of my work, but instead of sexualising it, Sherman makes it look like flesh. She’s also questioned femininity, and how women are constantly in a performance piece of how they desire to be identified as, which is usually a more conventionally desirable and attractive them. Her photograph below of her peering into the mirror is one of my favourites; she appears to be making herself seem as desirable as she could, almost seducing herself in the mirror until she is satisfied. I’ve used this effect many times in my pieces leading up to the show, using mirrors as an ongoing statement in my performances. This parallels to the idea that women’s sense of self is always contingent on something else, as she always looks away from the camera. She also chooses ultra-feminine roles who seem to always be reacting, therefore seen as slightly fragile. I think this is from how she’s taken ideas from films that often depict women in a misogynistic way, where there’s always a blonde victim type character who must be saved from the threat and are under the gaze. This thus plays on both sides of empowerment.
I wrote about Sherman in my dissertation, dissecting the Mother Embracing Children photograph collage, where she appears to depict a monstrous mother. I directly used Freudian theory to describe her possible meaning behind her piece, and I think her pieces here also challenge his theories; such as the Ego Ideal.
Untitled Film Still #2 1977
Untitled Film Still #25 1978
After Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s work took an arguably darker turn and she started to utilise props and mannequins more heavily. The monstrous feminine began to take form in both her Sex Pictures series and Fairy Tales. Grotesque images of dismembered bodies, pubic hair and traumatised genitalia were just some of the themes that the artist touched on. Exemplified by her 1985 image “Untitled #140”, which features her lying on the ground with a pig snout covered in blood, Sherman articulates the uncanny and carnivalesque qualities that are conveyed through fairy tales.
I’ve been interested in joining all of these aspects in my films, especially how she’s built her characters of females and how they’re portrayed.
As said by Rachel Maclean herself, “Make Me Up is an exploration of both the achievements and complications of contemporary feminism. It sets out a discussion of how women’s bodies, voices and minds contend with a world that often prefers you to be slim, silent and subservient”.
I’ve had a huge fascination and passion for Rachel Maclean’s work, ever since I saw her film “Spite Your Face” in the Scotland and Venice show in 2017. Make Me Up takes place in a seductive and dangerous place where surveillance, violence and submission are a normalised part of daily life, where we see her using robotic single eyes scanning their expressions and watching what they’re doing, suggestive abuse with facial bruising and screaming, and the voice of Kenneth Clarke narrating almost everything through a woman’s body. The film explores how the media, on one hand, can be a great way to express and explore identity through the use of pages like YouTube. On the other hand, social media can be seen as a gilded prison that encourages women to conform to strict beauty ideals by perhaps those exact platforms. I’ve also chosen to use social media in my work because of these reasons, using sexualised emojis as one of my main topics.
The artist chose Kenneth Clark’s voice because of its evident associations with class and patriarchy. Rachel’s interests in found audio originate from ideas surrounding what senses form our identity, her use of different voices form a collage that changes the audience’s perception of the film’s tone. This is seen in Kenneth Clark’s pedantic and over-pronounced accent coming through the body of a woman stirring up themes of power and control. Make Me Up’s vivid compositions are informed by Rachel’s interest in “making a feminist film which looks at the female representation in art history”. The predominantly pink aesthetic is a comment on the “canonised view of art history which is very masculine”, subverting the male gaze into a doll-house aesthetic, looking like a naughties Barbie film. I loved how she joined so many examples of sexism, empowering connotations and Easter eggs in her film to convey our problematic patriarchal system.
I especially enjoyed the “temptation” scene, where the women compete against each other with the temptation of eating a sausage from a tree. This is also the scene that we see the woman with the bruised face, making it simultaneously carry the metaphors of domestic abuse, Eve tempting Adam, eating disorders, and aggressive control over women’s bodies. I think this scene alone greatly impacted my work, which is to do with the sexualisation of foods, especially considering the food Maclean chose was of a phallic shape.
A scene from Maclean’s film “Make Me Up” in a screening at Chapter
More than 90% of social networking users communicate through these symbols and more than 6 billion emojis are exchanged every day. On November 17, 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries announced the emoji , commonly known as ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, as its “Word” of the Year for 2015.
Students are doing PhDs in emoji studies. There is a serious debate about whether or not emoji is a universal language, or if it is in fact, destroying language. This image is the famous first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, translated into emoji. Emoji Dick is a crowd-sourced and Kickstarter-funded translation created by Fred Beneson. Approximately 10,000 sentences were translated at least three times before the “best” were chosen for the book.
Vyvyan Evans, an expert in communication and cognitive linguistics and author of The Emoji Code, explains that these icons help to reproduce in the digital environment almost all the characteristics of human communication in the real world. The symbols work in a manner similar to non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions (body language, intonation, and facial expressions) and communicate the nuances of mood and emotion between people who cannot see the gestures of their interlocutor. “70% of the meaning of an oral conversation comes from non-verbal cues. Emojis add personality to the text and generate empathy among users, an essential thing for effective communication,” says Evans.
Graphic symbols are so globally recognized as a new communication code that there have already been cases of people being arrested for using icons considered threatening. In 2015, US teenager Osiris Aristy, then 17, was charged with terrorism for a Facebook post with gun emojis aimed at a police officer. The young man claimed that it was a protest against police violence towards the black community and the jury acquitted him.
In 2016, a 23-year-old French man was sentenced to three months in jail for sending his ex-girlfriend messages with gun icons. After cases like that, Apple replaced the revolver icon with a water gun. “Although not a language, emojis do have meanings under the same censorship rules as other codes,” Evans says. “They can and will be used in a court of law.”
When I was researching into Louise Bourgeois a few months ago, I found this drawing she made that sparked my entire series of short films where I morbidly transform myself into the fruits and vegetables women’s bodies are often compared as.
Topiary, 2005 Machamux. Drypoint on paper 15 1/2 × 8 in; 39.4 × 20.3 cm
The drawing appears to be a half pineapple, half woman. The “forms” of much of Bourgeois’ work have this formless quality in two ways: in some cases, what we see appears to be something which doesn’t exist, such as the house-woman. In some cases, the biomorphic resemblances are made to male and female organs united in a single form (this has been described as “organ-logic”), or to a mixture of interior and exterior spaces united in a way that makes the interior seem to be outside and the exterior seem to be inside.
Organ-logic is a term used by the art historian Rosalind Krauss), which refers to the representation of an organ which stands for the person who is significant in some way to another person; this other person is also represented by a body organ and the two organs are united to make something which signifies both people. I’ve been thinking about the significance of this term a lot recently, and how my work perhaps joins foods, and creates food-logic forms/bodies, and perhaps could be a way I can label my practice. My body and form, which represents all women’s bodies in my short films and performances, join morbidly and grossly with foods, such as marzipan and fruits, to create a “new” me that has tried (and grotesquely failed) to attain the emoji “beauty” standard.
I didn’t get as much done today as I’d hoped to, as I couldn’t get my hands on a drill over the weekend, therefore I’ll have to wait until Tuesday when the campus is open again. However, I did sort out where exactly my pieces will be on the wall by measuring exactly where the plinths would be positioned (68cm gap between all). I marked all areas with masking tape, which will offer a guide in case anything is moved. I also made sure that all projections on the walls measured the same as the boards, so that they fit perfectly on top and make the pieces look like screens rather than obviously look projected onto.
commonly known as ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, as its “Word” of the Year for 2015.
saratrouble 