The Monstrous Woman: The Apotropaic in Women’s Body-­Art

Abstract

Video works in order of appearance: 'Plastic Orgasmic (soft lights, soft bodies, Vaseline)' Duration: 1.50 min 'Interview (I want to get out of here)' Duration: 1.53 min 'Angel (fertility sacrifices)' Duration: 1.36 min. My video work combines performance, audio work, and cinematic portraiture made within a feminist framework. However, it deals more specifically with the bodily manifestations of fear, horror and the terror of the real. How do we create fear? How does fear affect the mind? One of the forms of ungovernable fear that interests me is that of 'the monstrous woman'. The monstrous woman is aging female flesh, secreting blood and mucous, old, fat and laughing too loudly. She is too bright, too brash; she is too obvious, she is not subtle enough. My audio pieces are central to my work. I focus specifically on voice, and manipulation of voice, to create sounds that are used as instruments. I use manipulated field recordings, domestic objects, and the guitar to create an aural field. My video performances explore my own body, hysteria, and various forms of constructed reality including anti-­reality and reality television. A central thematic in this unstable reality theatre is the apotropaic - actions, rituals and everyday magics practised to ward off harm. The apotropaic charm (laughter, demon masks, words) is always presented through the hysteric. The private performance to the lens allows me to focus on specific parts of my body, allows me to perform small subtle movements, and provides me with a sense of bodily safety that is absent during live performance. Influences on video syntax include: pornographic films; the split screens and screen layers of Ryan Trecartin; video applications such as Skype, where the user observes their own image in a small square; and a newfound enjoyment in uncomfortable (dumb) screen placement compositions. Influences on video performance are: Ryan Trecartin's makeup and hilarious scripts reflecting banal passions; Lara Kosloff's performances with geometric shapes; and John Bock's performances with his own sculptures. I use bodily poses drawn from classic 20th century feminist performance art, for example Carolee Schneeman's interior scroll (1975). Influences on my audio work include: the work of Meredith Monk (her use of voice to create instruments); Jacki Apple (her use of voice to narrate a kind of audio cinema); Yoko Ono (her groundbreaking voice-­work derived from screaming therapy) Daphne Oram (pioneering electronic musician who manipulated simple recorded sounds) and Pauline Oliveros (simple and elegant use of voice and piano accordion).