https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E0vIYIWZ-mjxW9fsabaWAPg_bZFwFJvH/view?usp=sharing
Category: Artifact
Lady Beasts
In my attempts to try to create political beasts out of thin air, I got stuck in a rabbit hole. I kept looking between trump’s political insults and back at classic symbols out on armor. Unconsciously, the beasts that most closely aligned were with words that President Trump has used.
Looking at a variety of sites, I collected some of the worst ones:
A beginner’s guide to heraldry
Trump Insults
Trump insults for women
The way trump attacks the squad
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/17/trump-attacks-squad-scared-politics
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41617/41617-h/41617-h.htm#page218
Herladry:
https://www.heraldryandcrests.com/
More Heraldry
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41617/41617-h/41617-h.htm#page218
Guide to heraldry
Click to access cu31924029796608.pdf
Ant-strong labourer, wise and provident in all his affairs.
And as a result, I came up with these hybrids. Ultimately, I hope to create some sort of a guide/reactionary Instagram every time that Trump creates an insulting tweet.
In this last investigation of the Dacre Beasts, I wanted to counteract the fact that all of the beasts are male and display their genitals. Beast is a masculine term, so research lead to a political beast, Donald Trump and his offensive language towards women. I took some of his most iconic insults towards women and I hybridized them with classic heraldry to create mythological Nasty Women, as a reclamation and reflection of the insults into mythology.
Putting it All Together: Making a Book
When I talked to Cato on Monday, I had a lot of prints, but I didn’t know how they would do-exists. Each print, depending on the orientation of the beasts tells a completely different story and a completely different story according to each individual person. I didn’t want to narrow anyone’s understanding or interpretation of the prints, nor could I only use one print to tell one story.
So, the solution was the create a book. I decided to make it explicitly about the reader seeing what they want to see in it by pirating a term from psychology: Rorschach Tests. These are ink blot tests that are usually symmetrical. In them, the patient sees what they want to see based on a set of given choices. However, there are some abnormal answers which can indicate underlying psychological problems.
My goal is not to diagnose anyone, and I do not claim to have a degree in psychology. I am more interested in the beginning part and what discussions that kind of reflection would provoke. My book is pocket – sized, which makes it a great tool for an alternative political pamphlet. Or, it could also just be for re-examining one’s identity.
Rougarou
Expanding on the Idea of Beasts: Using beasts from European heraldry to describe American politics seemed like a juxtaposition of political legacy and history of democracy. Perhaps this is relevant because the current president is quite similar to a monarch in financial upbringing.
However, I wanted to see if I could expand upon this idea of mythology and mythologized terms in politics. I created a list of ‘terms’ that have an stereotypical icon associated with them. I want to see if I can distort that icon into mythological symbolism through exaggerated caricature. Originally I was toying with the idea that there’s no such thing as a moderate.
Hopefully of the chaotic images with all of the cross crossing prints would produce one with a convincing monster form, but all of them were a little too abstract for the purposes of creating a log of recognizable monsters. The ultimate hope would be to create some sort of field guide to put them all together. Perhaps the parody of them would point out how ridiculous name calling is. In addition to thinking of brand new beasts, I decided to add some more elements into the prints of the elephant and the donkey: swamp/fictional anatomy to add an element of magical realism to the hybrids that form.
This is directly playing off of Trump’s popular sound bite from the 2016 election “drain the swamp.” This phrase refers to the fact that he intended to get rid of all the old fashioned practices, thinking, and people in the government for a complete, revolutionary overhaul. When in reality, much of the practices and people of this proclaimed swamp have stayed in place.
Academic Tutorials with Cato and Jane Craddock Watson and Final Outcomes
On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with two visiting tutors for the Artifact project. By now, I have done some thinking, and I have three ideas for final outcomes.
I talked to Cato with these ideas in mind, and we discussed the possible lives of all of these outcomes, but it seemed wisest to pick one and push the development of that, rather than pursue all three.
I. Political Beast Work in Progress
II. Field Guide Work in Progress
III. Comic Strip of Dacre Beasts Work in Progress
Notes from my conversation with Cato:
I definitely have the most work from the first outcome: the linocut prints of the elephant and the donkey. However, it is tricky to figure out where those could live. I had considered making stop motion animations with them or puppets, but I wasn’t quite sure I knew what they would say. Too, they ‘say’ a lot on their own as prints, and perhaps animating them would limit the scope of how they could be interpreted. The prints are messy, but here, that is a good thing.
As for the other two outcomes, the field guide and the comic seemed like good premises, but the remaining time probably wouldn’t allow for them to be fully completed, just represented as ideas.
Notes from my conversation with Jane:
We talked about the idea of my prints and implementing them into a recognizable painting composition, like Guernica. So I will experiment with that.
Documenting Work
On Monday, we had a workshop with Anna in the Capture Studio that was meant to re-emphasize the techniques and importance of documenting our work, which has an increasing importance for the portfolio module/professional development. I have always shied away from cameras because focusing my eyes/images in relation to the camera screen has been a problem for me in the past.
However, this time, all of the camera terms finally clicked, or maybe started to.
So, I decided to apply this on Tuesday evening by booking into the Capture Studio in order to retake photos of my installation for Navigators and one of my pieces for Manifesto, and taking good pictures gave an entirely new life to the pieces.
With Navigators, my final installation was exciting to experience in person, but the images of it that I had hastily taken on my phone did little to recreate the experience.
Using the capture studio allowed me to explore an entirely different dimension of the Navigators installation. One the installation couldn’t be the same as it was before–I couldn’t exactly remember where I put everything, and that was a component of the point. No matter how many times vendors set up and take down their market stalls in the market, slight variation is certain. Also, putting the installation up in a spot where I could play with lighting allowed me to visualize shadows that had not been apparent in the installation in my base room. I originally liked the idea of taking this place, Borough Market, rolling it up, and being able to install it anywhere, but it is most visually appealing when it is by itself. It creates its own space rather than adding to a preexisting one.
In addition, I decided to document the ‘installation’ of my screen protectors from my manifesto project.
This installation gave these pieces a new life as well. The screen protectors are meant to protect the user from their own screen–and when the object exists as just an image, it doesn’t have the same effect.
Subtraction Cutting Lecture
On Friday, Julian shared his subtraction cutting process with us. It was really inspiring to see his process and the way that he documents his work and shares it with people all over the world.
In addition to the process being really fascinating in terms of the way Julian plays with space, I found his means of presentation to be very dynamic. He used Elodie as a model and as a participant in the deconstruction of the garment that he showed, and her participation became a part of the garment, which reinforced the point that the garment is changed by the person who wears it.
When the garment was entirely laid out on the floor, its simple geometry could not have foreshadowed the three dimensional space it created when strung together or when it laid on the body.
In addition, Julian had music and a video playing in the background, which provided both a structure and a pace to the way he spoke as well as the way we listened. There was a clear aesthetic and a means of expectation for the performance we were to see.
I was very much inspired by this process and presentation. It made me think of space and transformation in an entirely different light–particularly about where you start verses where you end up with soft geometries. The surprise of the connections and new forms has a similar life cycle to my own making process.
Communications Group Critique
Last Thursday, the communications pathway had a group critique with Cato and Kyung Hwa. It was really exciting to see what other people were doing with their artifact works, and it certainly helped to re-emphasize the importance of the brief.
I have largely considered the objects in the V&A as a starting point for creating my works, but luckily my works are quite closely connected to the the objects, and that relationship between our works and our works is a critical part of the brief.
I showed my black and white prints of the multiple different orientations of my elephant and donkey stamps to the cohort, explaining that I wanted to use linocut because of its relationship to the carving of the beast, and the nature of a stamp lending itself to an icon, and Cato used an interesting word to describe them: ‘assets’. They can be used in so many different places.
Even though my prints were largely just experiments/playing around, the cohort seemed to respond to the story of them quite nicely: I want them to open up the discussion of the hyper polarization of the political system in the US, but also the echoes of hyper polarization of politics anywhere according to this moral weight that we have ascribed to demonize people who do not agree with us. I have many thoughts on the issue: The canonical, iconographic nature of one’s political identity makes it difficult to have any position in between parties, but we ascribe to these systems of belief and punish heretical deviants. The two parties in America are almost like two different species who cannot communicate with each other–they just overlap.
It is a mess, but I want to convey that sentiment while allowing people to draw their own conclusions. Perhaps people who are not familiar with the political system in America/who are not invested in it will have little stake in it as a political message, but for them, I hope that it can have a similar life as something like Alice in Wonderland, an interesting narrative in its own right with another layer for those who have the capacity/drive to read it with a political lens.
The cohort responded the most strongly to images that were utter chaos, which looked like a war, which reminded some people of Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, which was his reaction to a bombing orchestrated by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War.
The two certainly have similar chaotic elements as well as symbols of beasts, and a black and white film nature. However, in Picasso’s painting, the figures and the beasts are all representative of victims rather than a political ideology. Guernica displays carnage and destruction of blended bodies, whereas I am perhaps trying to get at something slightly different. Creating that link between this event in the Spanish Civil war and this particular moment in American Politics certainly poses some interesting implications. However, it might suggest more violence than I originally wanted it to. It is certainly an area for exploration, but I am not sure horror is the message I want to convey.
Other artists that came up in the discussion of these printed works were Jan Svankmajer and William Kentridge. Jan Svankmajer uses a similar aesthetic to my stamps in his 1966 animation Et Cetera.
The Svankmajer piece is more similar to my work in aesthetic than in content. However William Kentridge’s whole body of work aligns in both aesthetic and content to the prints that I have created for this project. Kentridge is an artist who also works a lot with politics, but he creates work based around social and political issues in South Africa. He incidentally also largely works in black and white.
Both of these artists who came up in discussion are largely motion artihe sts. They tell stories with moving image, but the black and white graphic aesthetic adds something to the story–where the evidence of the hand is quite apparent. Even with the Kentridge piece pictured above, it is a still, but the arc of motion is quite apparent, which reminds me a bit of Kara Walker, another artist from whom I draw a lot of inspiration.
As a result of this discussion, the cohort was interested how I could apply these assets to different places. Could I make a video? Could I make puppets with them? What could movement do for the story that a still image could not.
The question that remains now is what to do with these assets and where to let them live to communicate the most. Perhaps this will lead to some experiments in motion, but perhaps I will explore movement and story in other means, like in a story arc.
Linocutting and Printing
After creating my initial linocut stamp of the elephant inspired by the Dacre Beasts, I decided that I couldn’t represent one political party in the US without representing the other. A dialogue between the two political beasts was bound to be more interesting than one by itself.
I created the donkey stamp in much the same fashion that I created the elephant. I decided they had to be about the same size and scale because they were functioning as icons as opposed to just symbols.
Upon printing it, I realized that in my attempt to give the donkey texture I made it look much more like it had zebra stripes, which was perhaps interesting considering that the elephant is of an equal relative exoticism for the symbolism for the American government parties.
The really interesting things happened when I started to play around with printing multiples and hybridizing the animals on paper, to create clouds of the beasts.
My favorite results were the last couple of experiments, in which the animals became a cloud. It looks like a war, but it is also unclear where the figures start and begin. What is clear/apparent is the chaos, and I am excited to move forward with these two stamps and the possibilities of arranging them.
Printmaking Workshop
On Wednesday, we had a workshop with Annie to give us a taste of paper silk screening. I have done silk screen with the exposure/vacuum mechanism before, but I have never done it this way. However, with the laser cutter, it seems quite plausible.
What I love about silk-screening like this in addition to printing from a regular printer is that the silk screen can go anywhere you put it–up on a wall, on a fishtank, etc, and that you can use it so many times.
I also love the accidents and the physicality of the process. The layering can produce some really interesting, unexpected results.
For the purposes of this session, we played with the likeness of R2D2, which works quite well as he is quite 2 toned. Getting more subtle grays with one print seems to be a bit more of a difficult task that would involve a fair amount of thinking and planning according to how you make a stencil.
I am excited to explore different experiments when registration isn’t perfect between print layers. Too, I am excited about the moving image possibilities of making multiples.
RCA Graduate Diploma 