I clocked off from my research for two weeks, during which time, Samantha Brick-gate happens. I don’t want to add to the sheer volume of words generated by the incident, instead, I wanted to blog the final encounter with the showgirl in my second chapter. My research, to reiterate, investigates both my own feelings of loving showgirls and the experiences of showgirls themselves. It is my hope, wish, intention, that through opening up my feelings of sisterhood and respect for glamorous women, that I may potentially add to a rich, healthy discussion and how women relate to one another in positive, sisterly ways. I am completely fed-up with the trite worn-out trope of women’s competition amongst each other. It is not what I feel or experience.
In a tiny bar, Cellar Door, underneath the Aldwytch, London, I put cocktails I could not afford on my credit card. As it was a bar, a middle-aged man chatted to me, asking what I do. I told him. He began to tell me what he thought about burlesque, informing me how little affect it could have. I began speculate a politics of burlesque, perhaps, femininity and the potential for collectivising around specific issues, citing the Slut Walks as an example. He responded by telling that as he could not see what all the fuss was about with the Slut Walks. As he saw it, it was a good idea to avoiding dress like a slut and going to bad areas, in reference to the initial comments by the police representative, who addressing a group of students in Toronto, which hard sparked the initial protests. Hearing his prejudiced, short-sighted views, in which his sense of entitlement had blinded him of other peoples’ experiences, caused an internal incandescent rage. I did not want to have tell him how totally ignorant, misogynistic he was and his sense of entitlement to tell me about my research and experience as a woman in that specific context, so instead I died a little inside. I was gradually able to disassociate from him as the performers did their turns. Hannah Friedrick, sang jazz interpretations of pop songs including Material Girl, Wild Thing and songs from Jungle Book, to hilarious effect. I was singing along and I was able to relax and make a few notes in my notebook. I drank another cocktail and started to chat to Beatrix Von Bourbon, the burlesque dancer, before she performed. We had tweeted each earlier in the day. Then, as Beatrix started her second and final strip of the evening, I stopped writing and I closed my notebook, so that I could be present in the moment.
The strip was a perfect moment and the performer owned the room. She performed for the audience, as an act of generosity. She was experienced and educated enough to be aware of what she was doing. It did not feel sleazy or uncomfortable despite the number’s conclusion in which the performer’s nudity was in close proximity to the audience. She was prepared to be our object of desire for a moment, because she chose to be. And as I watched, still, not far from the middle-aged man, I thought, yeah fuck you, you have no idea what this means, what pleasure the performer is generating. You have no idea what this means!
Amongst the pleasure-experiences I have described, this was a very simple encounter: a tiny bar and a dancer with a fabulous heavily tattooed body in a great outfit. During the short act, my attention was focussed and nothing else existed. The formula was minimal, but completely accessible to me. I just felt happiness. I felt happy a woman could produce the moment. I felt sisterhood for the performer.
The pounding, relentless forward propulsion towards the end of the world in ‘Melancholia’ experienced through the emotional breakdown of Justine serves to illustrate just how little agency the individual has. Against impending disaster: economic, environmental, political we experience only our own our emotional response. That’s all we can feel. As the film shows, we have no manoeuvre room to change the direction of the hidden planet Melancholia. We can change nothing. Just feel the catastrophe.
The first time I watched the film, I enmeshed my own feelings I was experiencing of dislocation, estrangement and research-confusion into Justine’s pull downwards into depression. Maybe she was the only one who understood what the end of the world meant. Maybe she was the only one who intuited it. The unrelenting unravelling and unhinging of Justine drives the film. Her inverted charisma cyclones, collecting up the cinema-spectators with tear-stained faces. It can wrap you into the storm, if you let it. As I walked away from the cinema in November I could feel my own cyclone collecting all my failures, all my doubts, fears, flaws. Like a magnet, the affect of film searched my psyche and found all the negativity. I had no agency. I could feel the self-doubt rush to the surface. I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe, I was hyperventilating.
The second time I saw the film, the cyclone didn’t pick me up. I watched the film dispassionately. I saw only the metaphor of the film. And the hand-held camera work and lens flare. Holding myself outside the film, I could see the mannered personas with their limitations. If I say they were one dimensional, that is not to suggest a weakness in script or acting, rather, the characters were roles, functions, once that function was completed, the character was over. The script, a product of a misanthrope’s mind, no-one comes off well, but oh! they look good. I love the running through wool, the naked moonbathing, sex under dress. All these sensuous pleasures: they return the depressed subject back into her body. She can feel.
I don’t cry the second time I see the film. I watch, distanced. I choose not to descend into the film.
It’s like I told you honey, don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry.
Lana del Rey saved me from ‘Melancholia’ that second time. Her song ‘Born to Die’ takes control of the descent. She describes mental tumbling downward, in this song, through a destructive compulsion toward the archetypal bad boy – is it even him she loves, or just how he looks?
Come and take a walk on the wild side. Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain, like your girls insane.
The song is an ode to the pleasure of the descent. Lana chooses to pursue the pleasure of failing, for the wrong boy, the wrong life choice, the wrong drug. But this is the song of the sober person. Remembering the feelings of disembodiment, disenchantment, wanting to feel, feel something. Even if those feelings are the most negative and masochistic. An ode to the masochistic pull of falling down, into hyperventilated tears. The fond rememberings of someone back on terra firma. Choosing not descend again.
Choose your last words, this is the last time cause you and I we were born to die.
Moving back and forth between the so cool it hurts car-bonnet sex in jeans-shorts and Converse and sitting, queen of her dominion with a her tigers, in white femme-fatale dress, blue rose-crown and red lips, there is no sexier way to tell the story of the love-affair that nearly killed you. The affair, here, a love affair, but also we could insert any death-drive behaviour that we will upon ourselves, bringing us back into our own body. I guess my drug of choice is my quiet victim-moments in which I force myself to envisage and feel the catastrophic failure of my research and career. But I have a choice, I can choose that choice. Own that choice, own my feelings. The individual, with her agency.
Here’s the performance paper I delivered at ‘Who Do We Think We Are: Representing the Human’, in March 2011 at the Royal Holloway The Showgirl Speaks! Paper
I also visited Paradis Latin, and here are my notes from that show. At the end of the evening I rode a ‘velib’ – a bike you can rent in the street, to my friend’s flat to say goodbye to her before she travelled back to Berlin. Just some context for you!
Sometimes I plan blogs, and I plan them so much with ideas in my head and notes in my notebook that basically they never happen. Over thinking. And other times, I just think of something and want to get it out there so it manifests somehow. That’s what I’m doing now. As an artist, I am meant to be thinking about making art. In a studio. But I find myself thinking all kinds of things I’d like to do, usually nowhere near a studio. It’s nice to spend time alone – like this summer – in Berlin, Paris and London, away from normal life, to let those ideas of all kinds rush to me, through me and wash over me. Like waves. Some of the water will stick though, and I’ll take the idea forward and it will manifest in art. For now, though, maybe its fun to treat the ideas as the end product, the thing. So, one idea I had whilst watching Basic Instinct with Camille Paglia’s commentary was that I’d like to do commentaries on films too. It would be like writing but better. I like writing because you have to give your ideas form on a page, but I like thoughts in themselves, and writing is just a carrier for your thoughts. Talking is my favourite thought carrier. But that’s tricky. I mean, how do I get my talked thoughts ‘out there’, so they exist as a professional output? Why, is that important, you might ask. Well, the more thoughts I get out there ‘in the world’, and the more that people receive those thoughts (maybe like them? I can but hope) then the more freedom and potential for getting a wage I have. I am not after millions, just something to live on. I’m saying this because I have one more year of stipend at Sheffield Hallam University, so I can feel pennilessness rush towards me to steal my style. But freedom and a wage. That’s what its about isn’t it? It is for me. No outward signifiers necessary. The wage I blow on DVDs, audiobooks, books, second-hand dresses, make-up and haircuts (if I could have a bit more money I could have more frequent haircuts then I’d really have style).
None of this is the point. This is all off the point. These are idea waves.
What I was trying to say was, I would like to do an audio commentary for the films that I’ll look at in my PhD research like Showgirls; Gilda; Dance, Girl, Dance; On Tour; Dancing Lady and Stage Door. The question is, and its the same question for everything I do at present, is it ‘art’ or ‘writing’. A hybrid? How would it be disseminated? Could it be a DVD or something online, or an mp3 you have to play whilst you watch?
I have ideas in the moment, in the experience. The thereness. The in the moment. Like when I was watching spectacles this summer: Yma at FriedrichstadtPalast in Berlin and Moulin Rouge, Nouvelle Eve, Paradis Latin in Paris. I thought some really big thoughts. About what I was watching, about how to penetrate the spectacle, about visual pleasure, about how spectacle can be queered, or not, how it might evolve. My (dream) future life as a Professor of Showgirls, Desire and Art in which I am paid as a consultant to develop new shows that are both progressive and traditional. A life in which I do not have to pay to see shows, at least. And theatres give me access to photograph their auditoriums (unlike FriedrichstadtPalast, by the way. They said I could get access if I was to get the photographs published – going on a gallery wall is not enough, apparently. So if you could enable me to get a magazine commission for the interior of the FriedrichstadtPalast, then, let’s talk).
If I could create an audio commentary for seeing spectacle, now that would be cool. Like an audio guide for galleries and museums. Only for spectacle. Maybe it would be for all shows, including burlesque. Huh, I really should do that shouldn’t I.
Argh! A couple of years ago, I felt called upon to really investigate problems my practice threw up (and I mean that phrase). So I started to write; to articulate my thoughts in written form. Now, as I undertake this PhD, I read and write regularly. And the more I know and learn, the more I am embarrassed about anything I have ever written! Can I believe my own front?! I’ve found some lovely articulations of the problems and thoughts I wish to work through, so I shall quote them here. With great thanks to their author, Craig Owens, whose words here could be re-interpreted into a manifesto. Perhaps I can get into dialogue with them later. Or, I need to confront the problem and take up the challenge of the last sentence.
Among those prohibited from Western representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women. Excluded from representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for—a representation of—the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime etc). This prohibition bears primarily on woman as the subject, and rarely as the object of representation, for there is certainly no shortage of images of women. [ … ] In order to speak, to represent herself, a woman assumes a masculine position; perhaps this is why femininity is frequently associated with masquerade, with false representation, with simulation and seduction.1
What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses? Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege—as their histories indeed prove them to be—a means perhaps, of mastering through representation the “threat” posed by the female? In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality. [ … ] [W]omen have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity. Few have produced new, “positive” images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus.2
1. Craig Owens (1992) Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press pp 166-190, p.170. 2. Ibid p.180.
The word glamour (magic charm, alluring beauty or charm, a spell affecting the eye, a kind of haze in the air) comes from the Scottish term gramarye (magic, enchantment, spell), an alteration of the English word grammar (any sort of scholarship)
http://ewonago.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/etymology-of-glamour/
Today I wore white cotton gloves and handled photographs in the research room at the National Media Museum in Bradford. I am looking at two kinds of glamour, a very perfect one, with dreamy colours, courtesy of Walter Bird, and a slightly more real one, from the Daily Herald archive. The reportage of dancing lines, rehearsal stretches, promotional poses on beaches/airports/streets outside venues. Something real slips into the photos unnoticed, working against the artifice, tearing a whole in the glamour. For example a plaster on a bare foot on a girl in a line standing on some driftwood on a beach and a hole in some fishnets, close to the camera. In a 1956 photo of Tiller girls resting during a ‘Royal Command Show’ rehearsal, rest their legs (neatly) on the chairs in front. Underneath one pair of fishnets are white ankle socks.
Walter Bird’s photographs however, construct a perfect glamour, the glamour of day-dreams. Working before the WW2 he used an expensive colour process, Vivex, which I believe is one contributing factor to their loveliness.
There does seem to be a glamour peak in the 1930s. By the 1950s, something, ‘common’ appears to have been invented, is it the film, cameras, lighting, hairstyles, costumes or make up? Obviously technological changes in one or all of the above contribute to an erosion of the glamour aesthetic. Which leads me to wonder, what and who makes glamour?
How to present the ‘Take Out’ project is not a question of how to present the photographs, but how to present my intentions. The ‘hanging’ of the piece has become more crucial and more integral to the work. How the practicalities are negotiated reflects on the work.
I must not aim for perfect or bombastic just because its a “show” (ditch the tap dancers then) but must think of how the idea is best translated into 3D space.
Sometimes I get so confused. I don’t know where to start and start in the place I know: the middle. I know for certain that I was trying to piece an idea from out of the tangle, I had to get hold of the thread and follow it, pull it apart from the others. I knew it involved photographing; portraits.
I don’t know, I can’t explain, I don’t have answers. I found a new ballet class, with a good pointe class after it, and I did it again. I wore my Gaynor Mindens and they were too tight. So I bought a new pair. Half a size larger, and with a wider box. I am 31 and I bought another pair of pointe shoes. Part of me thinks it is practice; dancing ballet and pointe. And another part of me despairs. Oh but then they first part of me thinks – ha! I can dance en pointe in unexpected places, like giving a conference paper?
When I think back to life between 17-23 years, I think about how I managed to maintain being size 12, and also, certainly up to the age of 21, how much flesh I used to bare. I also remember talk of images of young models, how inappropriate they were. You see, I could not imagine an identity beyond being a young woman as so the constant images of young women I was surrounded by did not register; I saw my own identity amongst them. And I also misread them, I thought they were saying, this IS you, this IS how you should be and look. I saw the pictures in Vogue, Marie Claire or even dare I confess it, More, and saw them as blueprints to re-create. It did not occur to me that these were outfits designed to opperate in the context of a photoshoot, not streetwear.
And now I as I see girls in stripper heels braving the cold with very little on, I smile to myself. One day, they will realise the benefits of long-sleeved thermal vests from M & S.
I wondered this as I looked into a shop window, in Santa Paula, a small town in California that was my home for 10 months, with an 80% Mexican population. The window display was filled with Catholic figurines, like the Pope, Saint John Paul II with Mother Theresa. There were also a variety of Jesus on the cross figures, heavily decorated. I noticed that the Jesus figures were androgynous in both their facial features and the shape of their bodies. Utterly attractive, they seemed to embody both a masculine and a feminine perfection. It was as though the sexual availability of the naked flesh, and his tragic skin lacerations made the Jesus figure a fantasy space for everyone. It was then that I wondered if offering oneself up for objectification could ever be considered as a generous act.
Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ became some kind of remedial text applied with frequency to my impasse at CalArts. This well written and convincing text served to make me feel guilty about what I wanted to do in practice. It also became a gateway to Kaplan, Doanne, de Lauritis and Modeleski. I needed to make work and I had to read a lot of material in a short space of time. The voices merged into one and I became alienated and overwhelmed by their high minded approach. However, I was attracted to their certainties, the tone of voice so authoritative and sure. The tone and their attachment of the spectacle and pleasure in film which they actively disavow becomes something ripe for parody. The question is whether or not this is something I want to explore in my work.
Dancing has been my hobby for some 25 years. Over the last ten years I have considered my role in dance as a participant outside the normal trajectory. I am not professional-dancer material and so a career within it could not open up for me. Having performed on the Sheffield City Hall stage in the biannual dancing school shows, and then to collect my BA (Hons) degree, I perceived my interests converging in a rather interesting location.
With a chance encounter with some photographs, my art practice shifted to investigate some of the interesting problems I observed through my dancing. With my experience of wearing the most day-glo kitsch outfits as part of a line of dancers my perspective on spectacle is one of first hand experience as well as that of the well-informed spectator. I imagine myself performing as I watch dancers because I have performed.
When I went to CalArts to study, my regular dance classes ceased. For the first time in many years I did not have a regular dance practice. The pressures of the environment meant I lived in my brain, and I began to really investigate my stake in thoughts on the body, from an outsider position.
I am very happy to report I have now found some very challenging classes and I am confronting the reoccurring preoccupations in my art practice along side a regular dance practice.
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.
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.
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?
