J: Yes, well we’re always told to use newer sources, but I
think that for this, especially, opinions have changed so much that it seems
quite important to point that out.
R: And I think you’ve done that really successfully here as
well, to bring through the different notions that are discussed. So, like a
reassessment of these older texts. And I thought actually there’s still a
relevancy in doing that because we do this have these things like ‘The Nude’ in
art, we do still have, maybe in society as well, a weird set of ideas or ways
that we interact with the body, you know, as object, or as subject, or this
kind of confusion that happens between the two, we do see there being
differences between nakedness and nudity. These levels of transgression are
quite an interesting point. Like over the last ten years, in this country
definitely, we have so much more ready access to graphic imagery of naked people
than we’ve ever had. Do you know what I mean? In some ways.
J: But it hasn’t really broken down that taboo.
R: It’s still there, isn’t it? And we might see that since
the 1960s or 1970s, the way that artists use their bodies, or bodies in general
in art, the things that would have been shocking 30, 40, 50 years ago, are
relatively commonplace. But that notion of transgression is still there. So
that really made sense to be looking at how those perceptions have changed, or
how those descriptions... part of it is about the linguistics. So when you’re
talking about Clark (The Nude, ‘56), and also Chipp (Art and the Personal Life,
‘28), these are kind of, they have a pull in terms of the words that we use to
describe things. So I’ve just put these little ticks in lots of places
throughout as well, because I think there are a lot of really strong points in
there. What I’m interested in now as well is where this is going. Whose
practices you’re interested in looking at. Because this is a great grounding,
but then there’s that thing of who are you intrigued by? Who do you want to
examine?
J: Well there are a few... one was John Coplans. It’s quite
hard to find any information about him, but I’ve ordered one of his books. I
think he’s in his 70s now, and he used to work as a curator or an editor or
something but now just exclusively takes photographs of his body... but he’s
old and hairy and fat, and it’s almost challenging, I guess, what we want or
expect to see; Talking about decay, and these things that we don’t really want
to engage with. Francesca Woodman is another nice one. Specifically artists who
use their bodies to communicate identity... obviously not all artists who use
their own body are talking about themselves, or their own state. I think the
effectiveness of that, and using gesture as opposed to other methods of
communication. Like that one piece, Autobiography, talks about using art or
using other mediums than text to communicate.
R: Yes, I thought that was a really nice distinction as
well, that idea that rather than using description or narrative, words, text,
writing, what could... It’s a little bit like the conversation you might have
around a scar... that conversation, in looking at the scarred body, is entirely
different than that which you would have when looking at a diary.
J: I think it’s the empathy thing as well, which a lot of them
did touch upon. I think The Informe Body was the best one, because it was saying
that you can’t view another body without doing it through your own, because it’s
this thing that we all have in common. I think that’s why it’s such a good way
to communicate, using a body or your body.
R: This idea of having a reference point that, as human
beings we all have. And then do you think that that notion of the common
reference point... so in someone’s work like john Coplans, just saying that it’s
an old body, it’s a hairy body, there are these descriptions, and these notions
that those things are not common, or that those things are... where does that
idea come from? That those things are uncommon, that those things are un-experienced
by other people in their own bodies?
J: Well I guess ... everything that we see – and I don’t want
to really go into the media, and ‘the perfect body’, but as you say we have all
of this access to images of bodies and nudity, but it’s not direct and truthful,
is it? And I think that’s where these notions come from... There are some
really nice quotes about Coplans; ‘Unlike a younger generation who are using
the body as site and subject, Coplans is not really interested in parading the
assaults and dislocations of late twentieth century humanity, be they psychological,
sexual, social or political. Coplans’ ambitions transcend the fractured body
politic. Instead, his purview is the individual as embodied time and
experience, both in its own right and as just one in a vast human continuum.
His is a nakedness we all share.’ So about empathy I think, really. He talks
about it being sort of primordial as well, you know?
R: And it’s this thing also of like, literally as well, but ‘stripped
bare; The notion that when we have just our bodies, when we don’t have any of
these other semiotic signifiers, so anything else that we dress ourselves with
for example, or make up, any of these other things, they all carry a political
meaning, genderal, societal, and once there’s a kind of stripping bare, whether
we are actually down to being common, being in
common with each other, or whether our bodies still carry those societal thins.
They probably do, don’t they? They carry gender, they carry...
J: But is that again because of all of the information we
receive... how we’re supposed to perceive the body after all of this imagery
that’s forced upon us all the time?
R: It’s a big question, isn’t it? Do you feel like working
your way through these different sources is helping to make sense of how these
things fit together?
J: Without a doubt, so helpful. I have been reading quite a
lot anyway, but studying the sources in this way, and breaking them down...
Because I do have a ‘question’ in mind, about the efficiency of using the body
as a tool of communication, but especially doing this, what interested me is
the influences... what can influence that; empathy, association, all of the
things that can break this down. So it’s not just a simple case of whether this
is effective or not, it’s all of the other things which interfere with that.
R: Is there a different also between being in the same
place, the audience and the artist being in the same physical site as each
other. Because this work (Coplans) looks to me as though it’s shown in
photographs, and it’s to be shown in
photographs, so we’re never going to be sitting in the room with this body, we’re
viewing mediated, framed, edited, black and white images of this body. What
would be the inferences of... have you seen any documentation of the Marina Abromovic
Artist is Present piece? She made a piece about 2 years ago at MoMA to go
alongside a retrospective of her work. And in her work, one of the most
important things is that the artist is present, that the artist is there. You are
often invited to engage with the artist, with their body in some way.
J: is this the one where she just sat there for two months?
R: Yeah, so for this massive retrospective that was dealt
with partly by almost making re-enactments of some of her early works, using
actors to do that, and she trained them all in a weird kind of bootcamp so they
would take on what she needed them to take on in their bodies to be able to do
that, and the other piece of work was... she’s sitting there like this... and
you can sit in the seat opposite her and be there. But, because this is
happening in MoMA, happening in New York, because she’s become a weird
superstar, a little bit, this was all photographed, intensely documented, and
you may be recorded in a number of ways, being on show as an audience member. And
you could queue up just to watch as well, to watch this kind of staged, being
of bodies. And I wonder whether.... I don’t know if its place is in this
project, but the difference between... There’s also somebody who takes a completely
different approach; Kira o’Reilly, have you come across her work before? This
is probably relatively representative of the types of performance situations
that she’ll often set up. So this is for a one-to-one performance where you
make an appointment to book in, you come into this space, which is a domestic
sized room, she’s sitting there, and on her back you can see these little
scars, little marks, and some of them are fresh, some of them are wounds and
she hands you this razorblade and invites you to add another wound to her back,
so to cut her back. There’s nobody else there, just the two of you, a human and
another human. This empathy that you talk about must be there. I mean, I haven’t
experienced this work, but this is the description of it. And do we start to
consider and have empathy for a body in a different way than we do for like John
Coplans’ photographs.
J: I think I really need to look at somebody like that, because
all of the artists that I’ve seriously looked at haven’t been live artists, or
have been performance artists, but in a way that isn’t live art.
R: I wonder if it’s a dynamic that... because it seems that
there would be a difference, and I wonder whether also going to experience some
work like this as well might be an important things to do. Was I telling you
about In-between Time Festival that’s in Bristol? Put it in your diary. It’s a
festival that’s called In-between Time., and it’s probably the next of the big
performance festivals that’s happening, it’s like a long weekend, it’s worth
having a look at the website. There’ll be a range of different things, but
there will be one-to-one encounter work as a part of it. So it may be worth
going to actually get access to that.
J: The only piece I’ve ever been to like that it’s Fran’s (Francesca
Steele)
R: And that would be a really good example as well. Straight
away, that’s got that one-to-one encounter, those notions of... the thing to do
with empathy that is also to do with comparing yourself to others. So it’s
like, you’ve got two hands, I’ve got two hands.
J: There’s a voyeurism to it as well, isn’t there.
R: Fran’s piece there would be a really great example
of a piece that deals with that very skilfully; deals with those nuanced
things, that mediation, of there you look at yourself in the mirror, you know?
These parts that reference our access to naked bodies, but our alienation from
them. Those kinds of things. As a counterpoint to... because you could say that
actually although we feel that empathy with these pieces of work (Non-live), is
that there is that recognition, there is that stuff, but there’s also something
that’s pushing me away from this. That idea that any time we have to filter, or
mediate, we actually become a little bit alienated from it. And that festival
should be quite a good thing, so see a range of live pieces in a very condense
period of time could be quite useful.