Topic Four: Landscape - Performance

Topic Four: Landscape - Ambitious, In-Depth Assignment, Performance

Well. This project was...interesting, is the kindest way I can put it. I won't lie and pretend that I particularly enjoyed it. It caused me anxiety and unhappiness in no small amount, and I'm not sad at all it's over. 

Like others, I was fairly confused about what 'wearable art' really constituted of, and none of the explanations in class shed light on the matter. Thus, I grudgingly went with a performance instead, not that that choice made me feel any better (in fact it was the opposite). But I decided that if I was going to do something I detested (performing), it was going to be on something I feel strongly about, so that at least the concept would be strong and keep me engaged. So I chose to depict the body as the landscape, the site, and an important aspect of my own body is my asexuality.

Every detail tied into that, from the overall colors (as noted in class), to the species of flowers (one of the many things I didn't get to explain in class due to a mix of panic and overall confusion of whether it was better or worse that I had to break it all down). The 'cape' was created out of tissue paper, white and gray to be exact. Tied together with my black clothes and the color of the flowers, they were intended to represent the asexual flag. Tissue paper was chosen because it was thin enough for the flowers to be poked through, and I could bind the sheets together in a way that would still allow my arms to move around freely. It also carried the significance of a 'gift', of covering up something that is thought to be valuable and presented in confidence to another.

Next, something of an attempted 'wearable' that would go along with the performance, that I would wear over my abdomen. The flowers, and the way they were presented, was tied to the fact that flowers are a rather common symbol of fertility and femininity (I was surprised, and maybe a little disappointed, that this in particular wasn't noticed by anyone). Those two factors are often a big part of a woman's worth in the eyes of society, as well as what is done with them, since we are usually expected to want and have kids at some point in our lives. The pot that held these flowers was white, to go with the overall color scheme, and also to allow the cracks and fractures I drew on it to be seen. The reason the pot was to be fractured is because of a stigma that is still persistent in most people when regarding asexual people; that they are somehow 'broken' because of the way they feel about sex, and that it is something that needs to be 'fixed.'

The flowers I chose were bougainvillea. Like many flowers, they have a meaning in what is referred to as the 'flower language', those meanings of which can change from place to place. The one I had in mind when planning this out was 'vital protection'.

Originally, the performance was going to take place outside, and it was going to be filmed (the video was going to be a last resort, because even just having still images of myself projected was distressing). But things didn't pan out. The camera isn't mine but my aunt's, and it was given to me without the SD card in it by accident. I was forced to use the SD from my 3DS of all things, which had incredibly little memory on it even when I moved the pictures on it elsewhere. The camera would start to record, but stop the recording on its own about 30 seconds or so in because the memory would fill up. The sun had gone down while I kept fighting with it, and finally desperate to just finish and get it over with, I went with photos.

Which I still needed help taking. My mom was going to do it originally, but she's a notoriously terrible photographer and I was dreading the result, when surprisingly (to me at least), my brother offered to help. It's incredibly rare he'd willingly help me with anything art related, much less without complaint, so I jumped on the opportunity. About halfway into the shoot, he did make a remark about how I had promised him that it'd only be 'for 3 minutes', but since he was right I allowed it and just tried to hurry through it. The original plan had been to pin the flowers through the paper, but they kept falling out when I moved when I tried it on my own, which they were supposed to be doing. So for this final take I had a bunch of small pieces of tape on the back of my shirt to use to pin the flowers on securely. 

The performance and what it meant was supposed to be like this; I would pick the flowers one by one and pin them all over the cape, over my body, as far as I could reach. Flowers are also an overall symbol of beauty and wealth, and so the significance would be that ones worth, my worth, doesn't solely lie in what we do or don't do with our bodies. There is worth in the entirety of oneself, even if other people cannot or will not acknowledge it. In a sense, taking the flowers, the worth seen in only one part of the body, and spreading it to other places, to the whole being, would be a way of reclaiming my identity, my self. The main plant in the pot would still have flowers in it in the end, because even though the pot looks broken, the fractures are only cosmetic. It works fine just the same as any other. The picked flowers may carry the note that they will wilt faster now that they've been picked, but they would wilt just the same in the pot, when their time came. Just like people's interests wane when they can't get what they want from someone. Even the tissue paper from a gift gets discarded in the end. That doesn't mean the flowers, the paper, the sentiment, never existed. But just for that moment, I would be taking the initiative to try to get people to look at me in whole.

In the end, I had mixed feelings about the piece, both it and the way it was received. The focus on my hands (and more embarrassingly, my expressions), were interesting to hear about, offered some things I hadn't thought about during the performance. But there were also things inferred that confused me. I know that one of the points in the critique was about wanting to see the flowers that had fallen off on the floor, about showing the 'futility' of trying to pin them on, but that wasn't at all what I was going for. Nor was I trying to blot out the colors of the cape with them by covering them up completely (though I do agree I could've pinned more flowers on, but again, was working under some stress and timing there). 

All in all, it was, an interesting assignment. And I enjoyed coming up with the concept. But quite honestly, I never want to do performance art again. This just isn't the way I want to execute my art.