Radical Home: Container as Social Construct, Seducing the Ghost Through the Lens of Performance and Video
Photo from dominiquezeltzman.com
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- Radical Home: Container as Social Construct, Seducing the Ghost Through the Lens of Performance and Video
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Radical Home is a video installation in which the viewer is surrounded by life-size images of a female figure, alone and in armies of herself, creeping, crawling, crouching, scurrying, and sliding along the room’s perimeter. She is set against a layered background of banal domestic scenes and landscapes taken from small segments of New York Times front-page color disaster scene photographs. The piece is inspired by examples of containment in our personal and public lives.
As a little girl, I had recurring dreams in which I would seduce a ghost/sexual predator to disarm it. I knew that through objectification I could minimize another’s power and maximize my own. By proactively objectifying myself, I could beat the perpetrator to it and reclaim control. The container has the paradoxical capacity to limit and liberate. Within my analysis of containment, be it an illustration of taxonomies of gender, class, race, religion, sexual orientation, dis/ability, education, political affiliation, and citizenship; or practices of border control and punishment, I am using the concept of aura – both Walter Banjamin’s original theory of aura, and Michael Betancourt’s digital aura – to research the legitimacy of live performance vs. that made for video.
Betancourt argues that apart from the device that delivers it, each video—a “digital object,”— is made of the same binary code, does not inhabit material space, and thus does not require a gallery. Video “demands that the spectator ignore the presentation… in considering the ‘context’ of the work.” I disagree, as I am unable to separate the content of the video from the distracting glare of the Sony® flat screen mounted to the gallery wall. The TV itself has a story. Perhaps it was bought from Best Buy or Walmart with the intention of returning it at the close of the exhibition. The object provides a context whether we want it to or not, and so the art is not “divorced from physicality.” Additionally, and this is where Radical Home comes in, when video is used to create a space in an installation, instead of eliding the specifics of location, the video becomes the location, the container that holds the viewer. Thus the video is endowed with both informational aura, and what I would call “place aura.” Video becomes an architectural intervention. Together, the walls and the video form an alchemical relationship, a dynamic and mutually transformative artistic collaboration.
Citations:
Michael Betancourt, “The Aura of the Digital.”
Walter Benjamin, “Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
