Day 2/5 Thoughts on Reflexivity: the Hands Today I want to share a letter to the editor I recently wrote for Annes West class: Mapping the Intelligence of your work in addition to 3 images relevant to the idea of reflexivity within my work. The writing is a response to an article I read in a class taught by Elisa and Masu (D+M department) called From Avant-Garde to Youtube. The Article is Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism by ROSALIND KRAUSS. Summary: The article provides a model to view video as psychological medium. It argues that the process of making video art with the use of a self image is a narcissistic act, in the sense that it involves the deconstruction of the self to recreate a new image. It is capable of splitting the self as double at the same time analyzing the image as a image object dissociated from the self. In video art, the human psyche becomes the channel between the constant and immediate projection and reception of the self. The article illuminates the difference between reflection and reflexivity. Reflection is a mirror effect of the self where the perceived image is connected to one’s identity because of total external symmetry. The division between the external self is seamlessly fused with one’s consciousness. A reflexive process is rather an inherent radical asymmetry that divide the outside image as an “other” which as long as their distance is maintained, one can converse and inform the other object image. There is a fundamental sense of self-alienation that encompasses this mode of seeing. Video art has the potential to partake in both modes within the process of making it but what makes it fit with the narcissistic definition is the energy that is directed towards the self. An artist, who is making a video utilizing his/her self-image, consciously sees his/herself as a projected object just like a narcissistic person does. Letter to the Editor: I read Rosalind Krauss’s Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism with great interest. The article clearly delineates the use of video art as a medium to cognitively dissociate oneself from one’s body to reconstruct one’s image. In the case of video art, it is lucid how due to the immediacy in between the projection and feedback, the psyche becomes the conduit and process the reflexivity within one’s language through such fascinating distance. The distance created by the delayed perception, a reflexiveness that is invoked instead of a mirror-reflection is not dissimilar to one’s experience of conveying oneself by writing with one’s non-dominant hand. In both cases, the process is accompanied by a state of hyperawareness of the process and the act of expression. I observed the same linguistic pattern in my visual vocabulary where the imagery of a hand is served both to reference to the act of making and the successive hands made were serve to be perceived in conjunction with the previous hands. Such visual patterning utilizing the reflexivity within the cognitive and linguistic, creates the association of meanings for me to express my subjectivity with a full sense of self-awareness. I am aware of the distance between my object self, the fabricated hands and their actions, and my subject hands creating and manipulating the gesture and meaning of my object hands. The materiality of clay and my own hands with flesh and bones create a radical separateness that elucidate each other throughout my process of making. The article informs me that perhaps my making process is to amend and reconcile my own alienation from myself. The hands conceivably becomes a reflexive pronouns that is distantly referring back to the self and systematically drawing attention to its status as a communicative artifact. Today, I want to nominate (if she chooses to participate in the challenge) my video art professor from Albion College, Anne Hennen Barber, who inspires me to keep experimenting with the medium.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 08:21:02 +0000
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