Hold the Space

Jun 142024
 

Alison J Carr, Paula Chambers, Marika Grasso, Elizabeth Orcutt, Ellen Sampson, Dawn Woolley, Zara Worth

Brown Street Project Space, 62 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS

Exhibition Private View Fri 7th June 6 – 8.30pm 

Open Sat and Sun 12 – 6pm 

Closes Sat 22nd June 6pm

By appointment at other times

Contact dawn.woolley@leeds-art.ac.uk

Hold the Space brings together artists whose feminist practice-based research examine space and embodiment in a variety of different ways. Ranging from drawing and photography to installation and archives, these practices centre bodies through gestural acts and material traces.

Zara Worth examines relationships between the digital and the divine to  propose a visual and metaphoric convergence between religious imagery and smartphones through the figure of the threshold. Created using imitation gold-leaf gilded onto polythene, Think of a door (temptation/redemption) (2022) considers the ethics of social media inspired aspirations. Cutting Together A/part (2024) literally cut-together the forms of Eastern Orthodox icons and smartphones, working on both sides of the paper. 

In Touchers (2024) Marika Grasso examines our daily encounters with touch-screen devices in order to explore our tactile relationships with technology. Her research considers how textiles and touchscreens become untouched and unworn, despite being an intimate component of daily life. 

Ellen Sampson considers the relationship between textiles and bodies in Archival affects: bodies, absence and trace (2024).Presenting clothing archives as repositories of labour, emotion, and bodily trace, the installation plays with the imagery and forms of archival storage and display; how we attended to, preserve and organise these intimate and bodily things. 

Paula Chambers’ crochet covered objects could be viewed as an archive of an ageing body. In Last Bus Home(2024) crochet topped paperweights stage femininity as if overcompensating for the processes of aging. Bad Faith (2024) features beauty products produced for menopausal and post-menopausal woman. Each crochet cover hides a product designed and marketed to alleviate the signs of female aging – such as oestrogen gel, collogen supplements, and anti-aging face cream – in order to bring the undisciplined female body under control. 

Archival material is also a source material for Alison J Carr who uses her own image archives to explore the complexities of feminine display. In Spirit of a Muse (2024- ) and Crown / Halo (2021- ) she creates drawings from photographs in which she embodies ambiguous poses, conveying complex emotional interiority while her body is posing and showing off. 

Also using methods of self-portrayal, Elizabeth Orcutt explores her sense of self using digital collage, frequently becoming entangled in genres such as family snapshots, paintings, and silhouettes. The Shadesadopt the proto-photographic silhouette that was popular from the end of the 18th Century until the mid-19th Century. In the images Orcutt expresses surprise, rage, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and contempt to explore how these emotions effect experiences of self-recognition.

Dawn Woolley uses gestures and poses in self- and other-portraiture to critique and subvert binary gender and beauty norms in selfies and portraiture. #Rebel Selves (2023-4) experiments with ideas of entanglement, camouflage and parade to create performative spaces in which visitors can create queered selfies. Glitchies(2024) are video portraits vignettes made in collaboration with Jay Yule a queer contemporary dancer. 

On Saturday 15th June (1.30-2.30pm) Woolley is running a gesture workshop in which participants can create their own selfies and co-create a queer gestural language. 

This exhibition is kindly supported by Leeds Arts University.

Night World & The Night

Sep 202022
 

I have a show open at Exchange Place Studios, Sheffield City Centre, Sheffield S2 5TR

Night World
10th September – 8th October 2022

Tuesday – Thursday: 10am – 4pm
Saturday: 12pm-5pm

Alison J Carr presents Night World, an exhibition of new works on paper. With an incisive precision and tight focus on showgirls, Carr reconsiders the potential of the night. Her collages and traced paintings indulge in the unruly and often-obscured spectacles of nocturnal entertainment, celebrating the fancy, audacious, and salacious.

During the show, I will be doing a book reading event, launching The Night. After the reading I will be in conversation with Katherine Angel. Event free but booking essential, details here.

Into the Spotlight, Bloc Projects

Aug 162019
 

Documentation from my exhibition at Bloc Projects as part of Platform 2019 exhibitions through Site.

Audio recording of performance Two Songs A Capella and gallery talk, on Bloc Project’s website.

Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister
Photo Jules Lister

Showgirl Manifesto Documentation

Jan 052019
 

Here are some photographs from the exhibition I recently put together, based around my book, Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl, How Do I Look? Thanks to the artists who took part: Sophie Lisa Beresford, Julie Cook, Nwando Ebizie as Lady Vendredi, Alice Finch, Laura Gonzalez, Lucy Halstead, Sharon Kivland, Britten Leigh, Chloe Nightingale, and Isabella Streffen. 

Abingdon Studios Exhibition Documentation

Sep 202018
 

I had so much fun showing my work at Abingdon Studios in Blackpool. Here’s the documentation. I am so grateful to show my new video work Felicity Means Happiness for the first time in Blackpool.

Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space
Photo Matt Wilkinson, Abingdon Studios Project Space

Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl, How Do I Look?

Jul 162018
 

My book has been published, Routledge. 

About the book: 

Drawing on interviews with a breadth of different showgirls, from shows in Paris, Las Vegas, Berlin, and Los Angeles, as well as her own artworks and those by other contemporary and historical artists, this book examines the experiences of showgirls and those who watch them, to challenge the narrowness of representations and discussions around what has been termed ‘sexualisation’ and ‘the gaze’. An account of the experience of being ‘looked at’, the book raises questions of how the showgirl is represented, the nature of the pleasure that she elicits and the suspicion that surrounds it, and what this means for feminism and the act of looking.

An embodied articulation of a new politics of looking, Viewing Pleasure and Being a Showgirl engages with the idea (reinforced by feminist critique) that images of women are linked to selling and that women’s bodies have been commodified in capitalist culture, raising the question of whether this enables particular bodies – those of glamorous women on display – to become scapegoats for our deeper anxieties about consumerism.

Space, Place, Action at Market Gallery/Temporary Contemporary, Huddersfield

Apr 052018
 
Left to right: Manifesto, 2017, Ascending A Staircase, Library Theatre, Sheffield, 2018, Ascending A Staircase, City Varieties, Leeds

Rowan Bailey put together the first show at the Market Gallery as part of the Temporary Contemporary collaboration between the University of Huddersfield and Kirklees Council and the Huddersfield covered market. Space, Place Action brought together the research staff at the university. I used the opportunity to test out my new series of theatre interior photographs, Ascending A Staircase.

For A Burning Love, The Old Lock Up Gallery, Cromford

Jan 202018
 

Sean Williams’s exhibition For A Burning Love has transferred to The Old Lock Up, Cromford. 

Contemporary British Painting featured the show in it’s newsletter: 

For a Burning Love

In January ‘For a Burning Love’ moves to the Old Lock Up Gallery in Cromford, a space that, fittingly some might say, used to be a jail. ‘For a Burning Love‘ celebrates and demonstrates the breadth of contemporary painting and includes works by Mandy Payne and Sean Williams. It encompasses highly-detailed realism and gestural abstraction, paintings that are almost sculptures and photographs interrupted by the introduction of paint. In this way ‘For a Burning Love’ questions what a painting might be and so, in turn, questions our fixed ideas about most things. ‘For a Burning Love’ may also offer a clue into why artists choose to use paint over other media to express their ideas and explore possibilities.

The Old Lock Up Gallery
19 The Hill, Swifts Hollow, Cromford, Derbyshire, DE4 3QHJ

Preview: Saturday January 20th, 1 – 4pm
Exhibition dates: 20 January – 25 February
Opening times: Thursday – Saturday 11am – 6pm, Sunday 11am -4.30pm

The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality

Jan 162018
 

A chapter I have written on the representation of strippers in the media and contemporary art has been published. It is in the Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood and Brian McNair.

In it, I write about pop videos, films, popular feminist critical perspectives, academic writing, and activism. I also write about artworks including the Girlie Show by Edward Hopper, Lucky 13 by Philip-Lorca Di Corca, The Politics of Rehearsal by Francis Alys, Abstraction Licking by Christina Lucas, Cosey Fanni Tutti’s collages, Strip by Jemima Stehli, performance pieces Strike a Pose by Kate Spence, and Sister by Rosana and Amy Cade.

 

 

London Life

Aug 072014
 

Last night the exhibition London Life opened at Art Bermondsey/LA Noble Gallery.  Two of my cigarette card recreations are in the show, and I was third prize winner for the work.  (Thanks to Katherine Angel and Kate Enters for the photos!).

10497267_10100976667183300_4755519609611880714_o 1602018_10100976667268130_1630926380117944065_o 10514685_10154504313445193_43716356950310770_n

Three Act Structure, S1 Artspace

Jul 182014
 

My work will be in Act II and Act III of S1 Member’s Show, Three Act Structure at S1 Artspace, Sheffield.  Act II is open 6th August–23rd August and Act III which is a re-mix of Acts I and II featuring all of the works is open 27th August–13th September.  The opening of the whole show was on 11th July, and now there is a programme of events that will take place during the subsequent Acts.

In particular there will be a publication and print portfolio launch on Friday 15th August and a screening and performance event on Saturday 6th September.  For the latter I am working on a new performance.

I’ll post more about the up-coming events–it’s a very exciting project to be involved in!

Hollywood Forever, SIA Gallery, 9th May 2014 – 25th May 2014

May 012014
 

I instigated a video show collaboratively curated with Megan Cotts, Alexis Hudgins, Ali Prosch & Brica Wilcox shown at SIA Gallery in May.  The show featured ten video works by Alison J Carr, Alexis Hudgins, Ivan Iannoli, Julie Orser & Jon Irving, Ali Prosch, Elleni Sclaventis, Matt Siegle, amy von harrington, Brica Wilcox, that respond to the provocation of Hollywood Forever: the dream, the film industry, the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard.  Each takes a different approach to Hollywood—from considering the myth, the geography, the surplus of images it gives us, the imperative to perform, the seduction and the make-believe.

More information about the project Hollywood Forever Bios.

image credit Julie Orser & Jon Irving, from The Viewer

Julie_Orser_Jon_Irving_005

You Me You Me You Me

Feb 182014
 

I’ve put together a selection of videos to be screened at S1 Artspace, Thu 20 Feb, 6 – 8pm:

Alison J Carr | Lindsay Foster | Alexis Hudgins | Stephanie Owens | Isabella Streffen | Katy Woods

S1 Artspace is pleased to present You Me You Me You Me, a screening of six short video works which will be followed by a discussion between artists Alison J Carr and Lindsay Foster.

In this screening, S1 Studio Holder, Alison J Carr, selected Lindsay Foster’s The Last Frontier as a starting point alongside which she presents four additional works: Notes on You and Me by Alexis Hudgins, The Pulse of Madame K by Isabella Streffen, Nadia by Katy Woods, and her own A Response to Unmastered by Katherine Angel; inviting Foster to select a final piece to sit alongside her own: Making A Past Present by Stephanie Owens.

The videos take different approaches to reflect on personal experiences and collective memories, on images and language and how we find ourselves formed through our encounters with culture. Across the selection are witty, playful observations as well as sincere enquiries. What is it to be a person?

 

Alexis Hudgins, Notes on You and Me, 2010
Alexis Hudgins, Notes on You & Me, 2010

Showgirl Art #10

Jun 172012
 

Andrea Fraser takes up the position of the stripping woman in her performance Official Welcome, in which she addresses an assembled art audience giving an introduction to ‘the artist Andrea Fraser’.  The scripted dialogue, in which she performs ‘artist’ and ‘supporter’ quotes a number of collectors’ and artists’ real introductions and acceptance speeches, all delivered whilst Frasers strips naked and then clothes herself again by the end of the performance:  

Artist: Yeah, the art world likes “bad girls.”  But if you tell the truth and people don’t want to hear the truth.  If you’re honest about how stupid and fucked over life is, you end up in the tabloids.  I don’t go looking for it.  It just comes in a big stinking tidal wave. Removing bra, then shoes, then thong. I’m used to it.  It’s boring. […]  

Supporter: Well, thank you.  Thank you for your dedication, for your vision, for your life.  I think we all must dare, as artists do, to break free of the past and to create a better future, rooted in the values that never change.  That’s the great lesson our artists teach us.

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005) Andrea Fraser ed. Alexander Alberro




Fraser’s work can be understood within the context ‘Institutional Critique’, as pioneered by the artists Hans Haacke and Michael Asher.  Within this positioning her work takes on an intellectually engaged examination of what we expect a contemporary artist to give us; she subverts what we think art is by conflating the site of the artwork, the museum, the collector, the critic and the performer.  Can we be sure where they all begin and end? 

The project ‘Untitled’ is also really worth looking up.  Fraser’s work is always smart and fearless and I have incredible respect for her practice.  

Showgirl Art #9

Jun 172012
 

I feel I shall have to transition from photography and video and into live art and performance practices to really continue this list.  Before I do, I shall just list women photographers who in some way address the Showgirlian.

Elinor Carucci is a photographer by day, but a belly dancer by night.  She’s documented her dancing life in the book and series ‘Diary of a Dancer‘.  A well-observed project in which we see the types of venues, audiences, costumes, dance moves, preparations and the come down following performing.  Its documentary and a diary.  Just through pictures, a complex narrative is told.  With lots of sequins.

Katharina Bosse‘s book New Burlesque is a fabulous collection of portraits of New Burlesque dancers.  The dancers look fabulous in clothes the look like they could be performance costume, or in some cases, sassy day wear.  The pose and flirt with the camera knowingly, in domestic spaces, corners of cafes and deserts – nowhere you’d expect to find them.  They are there, at the beginning of this new movement, carving out a space for themselves. It is a joyous book.

Jo Ann Callis‘s practice spans decades.  I saw an exhibition of her work at the Getty Center, Los Angeles and I made loads of notes as I wanted to review the show for a magazine (I didn’t in the end).  But you know, I almost feel that to write about Callis’s work is a redundant gesture.  I don’t think they need much introduction.  I adore her photographs and I love looking at them.  Much of her work is concerned with femininity and the experience of being a woman.  Just take a browse round her website.  Look out for ‘Woman Twirling’ and ‘Performance’.  She taught me when I was at CalArts, and she was just had so much style, I would wear any of her outfits.

 
Katy Grannan makes portraits of people who respond to her newspaper adverts. Much of her work early photographs were of teenage girls, naked, who had responded to her requests.

Showgirl Art #8

Jun 172012
 

To reduce Sophie Calle‘s down to just the work she did stripping is a sin. However, this is what I shall do here and now.  Please go look up Calle’s wider practice if she’s new to you.

 

Sophie Calle’s practice is brave, transgressive, self-reflexive, uses herself. But it’s wider than that, its also about how we perform ourselves, how we connect to other people, how our emotions shape us.  How we look, and how we are looked at.  

Showgirl Art #7

Jun 172012
 

Viva, 2009, dir. Anna Biller

In feature film, Viva artist/filmmaker Anna Biller constructed a recreation of a Seventies sexploitation movie.[1]  The film is an uncomfortable mix of camp pastiche and truthful real-emotions storyline, which sees Barbie/Viva going on a journey of sexual emancipation.  The final scene, celebratory and sad, sees Barbie and her friend in a down-market recreation of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s number Two Little Girls from Little Rock from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.[2]  For Biller, the aim is to negotiate how female desire might be represented and provoked.  Most interesting to Biller are the responses she receives from female viewers in support of the film; women can read the resistance in the film, but she finds male viewers only see pastiche.[3]

[1] Anna Biller (2009) Viva  [film] Los Angeles, CA: Cult Epics.

[2] Howard Hawks, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Charles Coburn, Sol C. Siegel, Charles Lederer, Joseph A. Fields, and Anita Loos (1953) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [film] Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001.

[3] I talked to Anna Biller about the film in September 2010, LA.

Showgirl Art #6

Jun 172012
 

 

Jemima Stehli adopted the position of the stripper in her photographic series Strip, in which she questioned the designation of power in the art world within a voyeuristic framework.  She stands with her back to the camera in front of a seated male who is identified only by his job title, ‘Critic’, ‘Writer’, ‘Curator’ or ‘Dealer’.  A long cable-release is visible in his hand.  In each photograph Stehli is in a different state of undress caught in the act of stripping.  The precise moment the photograph was taken during this private strip is controlled by the seated male, his power doubled through the status of his job in the art world.  And yet, he is the pawn within Stehli’s game.  She has created the scenario; it is her concept, her intellect, her skill, and her body that she chooses to display.  She is active.  The seated male is unable to not look; he must play the stooge.  The photograph registers his level of satisfaction or discomfort: is that us, the viewer, looking at ourselves?

Showgirl Art #5

Jun 172012
 

Leigh Ledare represents a transition into the frame, and a new way of approaching the showgirl.  Now, my examples will be about embodying or trying out the showgirl, and thus, the following examples are about what she symbolises, how she can be used, rather than, who is she?

Let’s start with two recent examples.  Liz Cohen and Nikki S Lee put themselves into their photographs and literally embody the woman-as-object, but through that embodiment, we have to deal with the concept of the woman-as-object having a brain.  These approaches bring intelligence into the body. 
 
Liz Cohen turns a Trabant into an El Camino, and herself from mechanic to bikini clad model posing on the car.  Two kinds of body transformation.
 
Nikki S Lee goes native in particular social groups.  The documented results show her passing as one of the gang.  Amongst the groups, she’s become part of where exotic dancers. 

It’s worth pointing out, that these practices would not exist without a number of female photographers, whose work engages less with a Showgirlian impulse, but women-in-representation.  So, look up, if you don’t already know:
Claude Cahun
Hannah Wilkie
Cindy Sherman
Renee Cox

Showgirl Art #4

Jun 172012
 

Time for something more contemporary!  Here are four male image-makers (they work in photo & video) who are using the figure of the stripper as a site of exploration.  They show a fascination with the stripper but also work to expand our understanding of who she is and what she does.

Philip Lorca DiCorcia creates portraits that reinvigorate the form.  He does more than portraits, actually, and his photographs always command my attention.  He created a series of photographs of pole-dancers in action.  I sense Lorca DiCorcia’s admiration and attempt to fathom the pole-dancer’s milieu in the photographs.

 

Tom Hunter‘s photographs tell stories of contemporary life.  Inspired by newspaper headlines, sensational reporting and more Pre-Raphaelite compositional tropes, among other things, Hunter’s photographs are complex, full of detail and place our contemporary context into a historical one.  And his photographs are (say it quietly) beautiful.

Mainly using video Francis Alys explores social constructions.  He’s used a stripper combined with audio from a singer’s practicing exercises, to explore where a (public) performance begins and ends.  Here, he employs the stripper’s performing, moving body, with it’s techniques and expertise, and yet this is not directly the subject of the work, rather, the stripper is used to construct something new in the artwork.

Ok, so now things are getting really interesting.  Leigh Ledare‘s work is just amazing and mind-blowing (and I’m jealous of his practice, not to mention the way he always finishes the work is such a sophisticated way).  I’ve blogged about his work before, here.  One day Leigh visited his Mom’s and she opened the door, naked, having just got up from sex with a younger man.  Thus, she announced her sexuality to her son.  Mom had been a ballet dancer, exotic dancer and placed ads looking for men to look after her.  She approached Leigh to document her sexuality.  Leigh does so, in an intelligent, sensitive and self-reflexive way.  Never leaving Mom to be the subject of a forensic, pathologised study.  His practice has included photographs of Mom in flagrante, her posing for him, sometimes he is in the frame, sometimes they are having innocent fun together, other times something more erotic is inferred.  Also, handwritten notes from Mom, from his younger self further contextualise their relationship.  Mom resolutely takes an active role in the images.  Her challenging unrepentant gaze frequently looks out at us.  And Leigh’s newer works trace Mom’s actions, but using himself, by placing his own ads in papers and soliciting women to make photographs that objectify him.  In Leigh’s work, subject-object politics is always complex.  

 

 

Showgirl Art #3

Jun 172012
 

Another approach taken has been for documentary photographers to observe the porn industry.  Their photographs serve to deconstruct the usual image-constructions of pornography and create quite mesmerising images.  However, as with all documentary images, we must remain alert to the fact that the documentarist positions himself outside of what he sees, as a neutral observing.  Its a position of privilege to suggest that the author-position is neutral and objective.

Larry Sultan’s project ‘The Valley’ is an exploration of the porn industry
https://vimeo.com/24829188
http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2007/01/larry_sultan.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/17/larry-sultan-obituary
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders porn portraits
http://www.greenfield-sanders.com/bibliography/famed-lensman-tackles-porn
http://www.paolocurti.com/greenfield/greenfield.htm

Showgirl Art #2

Jun 172012
 

Edward Hopper’s haunting paintings recreate Modern city life in the sparest terms.  He empties out all details that do not create the narrative he is after and what’s left in his composition have become archetypes.  The film ‘Pennies from Heaven’ consciously quotes his painting scenes to mesmerising effect.  
However, a little known photo ‘Girlie Show’ is why I’m listing Hopper.  He created the painting after visiting a burlesque show, and restaged the entrance of the dancer with his wife.  Thus, the painting is a composite of the memory of a theatrical encounter, and an homage to his wife with whom he had a complicated sexual relation. 

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=9763
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/apr/25/art1

Showgirl Art #1

Jun 172012
 
How does art respond to and extend our understanding of the showgirl?  I have put together some examples that explore woman-as-object (my interest is in showgirls, but this list is broader than that).  The idea for putting this together came to me whilst reading Katy Pilcher’s article ‘Performing in a Night-Time Leisure Venue: A Visual Analysis of Erotic Dance’.  In the paper, Pilcher uses photographs to elicit attitudes and opinions from the subjects of the photographs.  It reminded me of the approaches taken by artists: sometimes their works suggest a co-authoring between the subject and object, sometimes the subject in the work is further objectified, sometimes the role of the subject is embodied.  I have put this list together to try to show this breadth of approach.  The time period in which the works are created plays a role and I also noticed gender was a significant factor in the type of approach taken.  I shall start by presenting male artists.  I’m using the term ‘artists’ somewhat loosely, as there are practices here that belong to a photographic tradition rather than something more conceptually and critically engaged (that also reflects conversations in image-making, as the time-period of production also bears on the work made).
 
 
I love Walter Bird and I went to see his photographs at the archive in the National Media Museum in Bradford.  His photographs create an undisputable, enchanting glamour.  Sometimes I find myself wanting to reject all objectifying images made by men of women, but then, I see Walter Bird’s photographs, that are so powerful, respectful and glamorous and I cannot maintain that critical position.  Something complex more complex is going on.  Of course, in Bird’s photographs, Hollywood films of the 1930s and the associated film star portraits, women are constructed as glamorous goddesses in lieu of power either in the narrative or in society (see ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey).  However, this construction of woman-as-image now is a very different thing – can we create a new context for the images and reject the related powerlessness women represented at the time?
 
I’m not going to add them to the list, but the other image-makers that fit into this Walter Bird category of, shall we say, glamorously subjectifying women are: Guy Bourdain, Helmet Newton and Howard Hawks.  All worth looking at.

Love Letter to LA

Apr 032011
 
I am gently encouraging myself to write an introduction to next Saturday’s symposium ‘How Do We Look?’.  I have just typed the following.  I am not going to use it.  So, I am pasting it here.  It makes no sense other than as a visual to help me think.
Imagine I find a hand-written love letter on the street in LA.  I pick it up, and wilfully, misinterpret the letter as a love letter to the city itself.  Not wishing to remove this letter from its original location (perhaps its author will return), I quickly write the contents of the letter.  My new version is to no-one and from no-one.  It is in my rushed handwriting and I do not know how much it bares resemblance to the original text.

New Work

Dec 172010
 
Theatre Interiors with Text, 2010
S1 Artspace

I tested out some new, large work on the walls of the old S1 Artspace before we moved.  My supervisors and I discussed the work and I stepped in and showed the work to my students in my crit group when the student showing texted me concussed in hospital.  The work is an ongoing pairing of theatre interior and text bios.  The bios are sourced from 1930s cigarette cards or online web presences.  The work represents the public viewing spaces of the showgirl and theorists connected to my research.  

Après-coup

Dec 292009
 

As a Germaine Greer feminist since my early teens, I understood problems of the patriarchal construction of societal norms. Post-feminism via the Spice Girls interrupted my teens and I claimed my body by wearing the shortest of mini skirts and the smallest of triangle tops only marginally more modest than the smallest string bikini and danced all night in clubs, catching the first bus home in the morning. It came as a total shock that my nights of fun could be misinterpreted as a display for men, when someone put their hand up my skirt. Some kind of bubble burst. I had been sold some dodgy rhetoric.

Secrets of The Boudoir Burlesque: An Audience Dresses

Nov 222009
 

Winkle pickers, black shirt white waistcoat. Silver ballet flats, hookeresque platforms, red patent t-bar, 2 flapper head bands, 3 feather hair clips, fishnets, patterned tights, lots of black, feather boa, 1 scruffy couple, top hat, red stilettos, puff ball skirt, patterned dress with leggings with pixie / cowboy boots, stiletto platform oxfords, jarvis cocker with longer straggly hair, plaid shirt, jeans and doccers, purple chiffon wrap dress with boach, mini top hat, blonde dreadlocks (girl) with duffel coat, black trousers, Eastpak and trainers.  Fishnet stockings with visible suspenders, sparkly puff sleeves, man with dreadlocks, red and black corset with puff ball skirt, gatenet tights with patent black shoes, black dress with silver sparkles, red lippy with hair band, pin strip suit with waistcoat, shiny suit, grey suit, black shirt, purple tie and bald head, red tennis shoes, slacks and stripped shirt. Green strapless dress matching shoes and black jacket, 15 denier black tights. Sloochy top, mini skirt, leggings, big biker boots, addidas trainers, brown leather jacket and jeans, tartan skirt and black corset. High necked slinky dress with red and white corset, pink beanie hat, black layered frilled skirt, gothic flouncy coat, curler-ed hair. Flat shoes, vest top, satchel, curly mop over one side with stripe shirt, black waistcoat, converse with suit, glitter beanie, white thin cardie over dress, red corset with black lace, pencil skirt exposing hip bones.

The Day Everything Changed

Nov 022009
 

One afternoon in 2005, I came across a tin full of cigarette cards at a flea market. I leafed through to look more closely at the miniature pin-ups. I noticed the backs of the cards with the clipped-1940s-BBC-announcer biographies of the girls on the cards. I selected all the dancers from the tin (there were models, swimmers and tennis players I rejected, no one I had heard of before) and bought all of them. As I walked home, I decided to recreate all the photographs using myself as the model. My desire to explore another identity merged into a kind of wish, ‘What if I were this person in the photograph?’ The photograph represented such a desirable location that I wanted to be there. The details of the location, although totally unknowable to me, were here presented, as though the top layer of that location were lifted off and frozen. How could I thaw it out and get there?

The Tallulah Moment

Sep 062009
 
I walk out into the floorshow.  The audience surrounds me.  I strike a pose in the spotlight.  I am wearing a strapless, floor length black satin dress slit up the side.  The music starts.  I wait for my cue.  I start to sing…[1]
 
I propose the scenario I describe above be called the ‘Tallulah Moment’; the moment when the female performer enthrals an audience, projecting her personality, skill and physical presence using the accoutrements of her profession—lighting and costume.  This moment is important to me and by using my personal identification with it as part of my investigation, I shall illuminate how a close read of its use in classic Hollywood films can be re-read as a celebration of women within a feminist discourse.
 
Why Tallulah?  The name calls to mind the eponymous ‘Bugsy Malone’ (1976) star and the actress, Tallulah Bankhead and through them, it represents excess, opulence, sexuality and joie de vivre—all highly appropriate for my purposes.  The word ‘moment’ relates to the photograph, the symbol, the emblem but not exclusively to the static.  The Tallulah Moment is a moment because I am referring both to the moving image and the frozen symbol.  In the classic Hollywood film, narrative flow is interrupted by such ‘moments’ bringing the unfolding of the story to a temporary halt.  In this interruption, I find potency—it is credit to the Tallulah Moment that it can be extracted from the film story and stand on its own.
 
Hollywood has used the Tallulah Moment as a device for generating pleasure in its audience. It functions by giving the female character, who, in the course of the conventional narrative is strait-jacketed into stereotypes and simplistic desires, a platform for the display of her power.  Ultimately, the storyline chastises her for that display, but within the Tallulah Moment, the woman is not punished; she is celebrated.  Hollywood developed its celebratory spectacle of the female form through studying the Ziegfeld theatrical tradition of opulence.  Indeed, Ziegfeld’s Follies provided both a ready supply of attractive young women for the Hollywood talent scouts in the 1920s and storyline fuel that was light on story and heavy on opportunities to theatricalise.  Therefore, Hollywood has used the setting of the theatre and the chorus girl, the showgirl, the dancer and the singer frequently since it started to produce films—‘All singing! All dancing!’[2].
 
The 1930s-1950s represent a heyday for both the Musical, and other genres, like Film Noir that employ the Tallulah Moment.  Therefore, it is this time period I want to address.  A musical ‘interruption’ in these films may take on a number of different forms, and a film may include a variety of them.  The Tallulah Moment proper features a single female singing and/or dancing, alone.  A variation on this is a partnered dance where the woman has a male counterpart.  The dance nevertheless allows the woman to shine, supported by the man.  Fred Astaire does not outshine Ginger Rogers when they dance together.
 
The naughty Ziegfeld flapper/dancer of the Twenties became good-girl virginal figure[3] during the Hayes Code era (from 1930 to 1968), where inference was everything.  The partnered musical number within a Musical film[4] functioned as a metaphor, representing the complexity of sexual relationships.  Through gesture and dance moves, the back and forth of a love affair is embodied.  During the dance sequence it is as though the two dancers go on date, have their first kiss, have an argument, reconcile and have sex.  The dance stands in for the work of the relationship and through it we can understand their affection to one another that is not shown explicitly during the film.  It is through reading the dance as more than a dance that we can understand why the characters become so attached, having seemingly only just met. 
 
There is a complex craft in constructing the Tallulah Moment.  It is created through a song (usually with lyrics but not necessarily), elaborate set, direction, camera angles and cuts.  For example, in the titular dance of the film ‘Cover Girl’ (1944) the Tallulah Moment is introduced with a montage of magazine covers before Rita Hayworth descends down an elaborate smoke-filled set and removes a long gold coat to present herself in a gold flowing gown. She continues running down to meet a troop of men dressed alike as photographers who dance with her in turn, lift her up and support her swoons.  The scene concludes as Hayworth runs up the path she descended on with the men running after her and glitter falling from the sky.  All of these effects are deployed within the overall construct of the film as well as the studio system’s crafting of the actress as a personality in publicity campaigns and advertising.  However, the story lines of these films repress strong female voices or personalities—something I perceive as I look back on films that reflect a different ideology of femininity.  Indeed I have to suspend my pangs of sadness as I indulge my black and white film habit.  It is so apparent how constrained the women are, which reflects the societal attitudes and limits that women where subject to pre-Second Wave feminism.
 
But there is release in the Tallulah Moment when the woman explodes with charisma and unapologetically revels in her objectification.  The woman owns her body and the gaze within that moment.  I recognise within this moment something quite absent in my life and I want that moment.  Whilst the Hollywood machinery constructs a moment so pure in its pleasure, overlaying heavy-handed devices to ensure how my gaze is taking in that woman, it is credit to the women who thrive in this moment that they are not a zero point at the centre, but a charismatic being.  Whilst I watch these moments, I imagine the performance in its barest incarnation—a woman, in a dress, in a spotlight.  I imagine my gaze undirected by lingering pans and insinuating cuts.  
 
During the 1930s-1950s time period the Hayes Code opened up possibilities in representing the female body that have effectively been closed down since then.  I am identifying the Tallulah Moment as one of these possibilities.  What I see happening was actresses with a high standard of technical dance training (and with that a working methodology of how to handle the gaze) were employed to display sexuality.  The freedom and fantasy of their use of their body is being used as a way of being sexually provocative without being overt.  My insider knowledge of dance training enables me to see that work being done and to feel its effect.  It takes skill to project your body as a fantasy space and this is what I am interested in suggesting.  When Rita Hayworth performs ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ in ‘Gilda’ she owns her body as a fantasy space, and credit to her for that.

 

[1] Imagery taken from ‘Gilda’ (1946) Columbia Pictures, directed by Charles Vidor starring Rita Hayworth.
[2] Taken from the promotional advertising posters for the 1929 film ‘Broadway Melody’, the first musical film featuring sound; ‘All talking All singing All dancing’.
[3] See Ruby Keeler in ‘42nd Street’ (1933), ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’ (1933) and ‘Dames’ (1934).
[4] For example the Fred Astaire films; ‘Swing Time’ (1936), ‘Shall We Dance’ (1937), ‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ (1941), ‘You Were Never Lovelier’ (1942).