Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Text in The Hall














I like cutting out big letters and writing things on the wall of my house. With that said, here is a project that exhibits my need to write meaningless things in big visual ways. Soon I will have some old projects up that exhibit this, um, tendency. The words in this project are a bit difficult to read from the pictures. They are meant to be read while going up and down the stairs. Some viewers can spot it immediately and for others it is more of a meditative process to figure out what the words spell. For those of us in the second category, I will tell you that they say: "up up up we are all going up always" and "down down down we are all going down always". I wonder if there is a difference in the brains of the people that can read it quickly versus the brains of the folks that need a bit longer??? In either case the text is meant to correlate directly to the simple motions of going up and down the stairs. In this interpretation I am intending to simply draw awareness to our daily movements. In a larger sense the text also relates to the movements of our minds and the relativity of points of view. I may conceive of myself as going down or going up (in life) but perhaps these are not real differences in my life situations. Rather, they are labels I somewhat arbitrarily attach to give a false sense of meaning and direction to my life situation.

2 Comments:

Blogger Sonya said...

You are making dope shit.

I'm am excited for you!
Glad to see you blogging too!

xo
S

5:11 PM  
Blogger Rebecca said...

Stamos-

Yes, font is extremely important! It all goes back to Barbara Kruger and the feminst artists of the 70's and 80's. Barbara Kruger made signs and collages overlaying faces, bodies, and text. I've posted some images for you to see. One piece that I love, which reads "Your gaze hits the side of my face" is an extraordinary (very famous) piece of hers that deals a blow to the historically masculine-dominated world of art history. It features a statue face, very greco-roman looking, with the text overlayed on top of it. It makes us very aware of the subject/object dynamic as well as the politics of a sexualized "gaze". This topic lies at the heart of feminist art history debates and so I won't go too much into it now.

In any case, Kruger consistently uses Futura Bold Italic as her font, and oftentimes uses lower case letters. This font has now been coined "The Barbara Kruger Font" by some. In my piece I used Helvetica Bold font which is almost indistinguishable from Futura Bold. (I'm not always consistent and have used Futura Bold as well in other pieces). Although I do not consider myself a feminist artist in content, it is quite certain that I am emotionally posited within that history and framework whether I like it or not. I like thinking that when Barbara Kruger co-opted this font it was an act of rebellion in a very small but important way. To me it's very subversive...more so than the actual content of her work. It's like she's saying, let's look at the very building blocks of vision and language and let's expose the power that inherently lies with the people (men) that have done all the construction. On this fundamental level my work is very similar to hers. I like to question why we speak and look as we do. Where did this come from? Who has the power? Can the power be redistributed? Although I may not come to the same conclusions about gender and politics that she does, I am tied to her nonetheless. By using her font, and fonts similar to hers, I am quoting her, paying homage to a discourse that has helped bring me to where I am in my life.

Also, stayed tuned for a pastel embroidered pillow replicating "Your gaze hits the side of my face", a work in progress...

Thanks for your comment!

11:40 AM  

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