FILM BLOG bits & bobs, & bob's bits
Jason Isolini parallels comedic performances within spaces of employment, through occupation of physical and virtual space. The idea seems to be modes of escape, and questioning whether art can escape the webs and clutches of late capitalism in terms of surveillance. The work echoes cartoon versions of chase and escape and the image finds its way back into the apparatus, offering itself as a glitch aesthetic and performance raising questions of authoritarian gaze, employment practices of surveillance and where in these webs one can experience practices of freedom. Interesting to me is how testing this conflation of public and private environments puts a previously unregulated, 'unprivatsied' environment within the purview of Google street view.
Donald Rodney
Illness as Metaphor
Discrimination, marginalisation, depression and endless pressure of women - our wombs and breasts, vulvas and buttocks have bequeathed us a wretched birthright of terrible societal injustices
Women are hysterical
Women feel less pain
Women are emotional
Women are less rational about they pain
How to mediate divergent ways of imagining solidarity across official boundaries of boers and languages, technologies and ways of seeing the sick and pained body.
Diaspora offers pathways that retrace layerings of difference in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery, as well as the effects of other forms of migration and displace- ment. Thus, diaspora enables the desedimentation of the nation from the “interior” by taking into ac- count the groups that fail to comply with the reign- ing definition of the people as a cohesive political subject that shares one culture, one race, one lan- guage, one religion, and so on, and from the “ex- terior” by drawing attention to movements that cannot be contained by the nation’s administrative and ideological borders.
How might the legacy of artists working with illness create visibilities for others who live with a life-limiting illness without a voice? In other words, how can Rodney’s work do what Gayatri Spivak describes as the ethical stance of making discursive room for the Other to exist so that “ethics are not just a problem of knowledge but a call to a relationship,” the ideal relationship that is individual and intimate.5
How does my work - explore the care or lack of given to sick pained bodies of woman and people who are marginalised
Cabinets of curiosities
As predecessors of freak shows, these categorizations contributed to a spectacularization of nonnorma- tive bodies, including black and disabled bodies as “other/abnormal,” in order to establish notions that have informed healthy, heteronormative, and “nor- mal” bodies.8
The pure (white) milk becomes murky brown and green, and the coins descend—a metaphor for decay and, more specific to Rodney, how illnesses inhabit the body from within, without immediately visible makers.
Mri scan as a metaphor the the disease of society/biomedical complex/sexism/ cultural views on mind pain and body pain
The sick body—its categorization, representation, and articulation—then, provides an entry point to consider attitudes about how black bodies are per- ceived, cared for, and framed when viewed through
Das Nka•95
the lens of medicine. The history of clinical medi- cine came into being around the same time as im- perialism, both of which changed the ways in which the body was discussed and categorized.
“One cannot conceive of a history of medicine in the Western world without examining the wide- spread exploitation and misuse of black bodies.”1
Oreet Ashery
OREET ASHERT
Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis connects the personal and the political through film, myth and the themes of dying by considering how the commodification of death is imminent if not already functioning within wider discourses. Death is a lonely event, and yet the collectivisation of it occurs on different levels. Firstly, it is a very collective event involving loss and grief of those surrounding. The politics of dead body and the politics of the living body are functioning in close connection, and as death becomes commodified it is vital to consider what euthanasia might mean, as it could be construed as as a practice of freedom or another bodily event to capitalise on, to exploit, manipulate and produce. The dead body becomes a productive object, the experience becomes a, exploitable event. She uses myth and even moments of comedy to approach this difficult subject, but offers a highly plausible scenario of actor/agents who approach people at their end of their life to create a product for memorialisation. I think this broaches the topic of the differences between memorialisation and immortalisation whereby an avatar can produce new memories and trouble the sense of agency of the avatar itself post-death.
Illona Sagar
Conducted like an autopsy- severing the screen in two
Losing your symmetry
Constructed like a medical examination- dogmatic instructions becoming the syncopations within the overall rhythm of the film
Status of the narrator — modulating between authority and vulnerability
Radiology acts as an optical device
.’ In his book ‘The Birth of the Clinic’, Michel Foucault delineates the idea of the ‘medical gaze’ to denote the dehumanising effect of intense medical observation which separates a patient’s body from a patient’s identity. In entering this field of knowledge and observation, the body also becomes malleable for manipulation. The body then, became an objectified asset, an optimised ‘living currency’.
– anyone can jump the fence. Instead they offer a sense of order when the world outside becomes increasingly chaotic.
We do the same when looking and recording our bodies in massive amounts of numerical detail. Using apps we track our sleep patterns, heart rate throughout the day, number of steps taken and when we are not looking at phones, we think about germs along with good and bad bacteria. An unacknowledged fear of what’s going on outside our bodies manifests itself as paranoia of our bodies’ insides, that will only worsen as the NHS becomes privatised and health becomes ever more egocentric.
A person undergoes an MRI scan and there is a 3D scan of the health centre itself, which is also, like a 3D MRI scan, cut into axial bodily planes. Setting up a symbiosis between the objective and constructed nature of the building and the similar artifice of the body.
We similarly scan ourselves using our personal hand-held devices in place of specialised medical machinery. This is exacerbated further by our need to reconnect with our physical selves when all our actions become increasingly immaterial. But in doing so we reduce ourselves to numbers, to poor collages of discrete capital data blocks, and this, easily accessible, makes us susceptible to manipulation. We control ourselves; just how those in gated communities isolate themselves to keep their own anxieties in instead of keeping others out. The medical gaze once looked out on to the population, but now, we use it on ourselves, and transform ourselves into micro gated communities.
Ilona Sagar's work functions between surface and materiality of building, body and institution. She uses various processes such as that of repetition, or reciting verbatim through performance to explore health, well being in late capitalism as surveillance goes under the skin.
Illona sagar’s work has a dark sensuality with ominous sound tracks, as they seek to embody past historical experiments which relate symbolic buildings, well-being, bodies and technology. Waht makes a good body? She uses processes of verbatim, speech to text, or contemporaneous speech and works through film to explore surface, language and body. She explores architectural and human physicality and connects it to historical, medical research/archival material. The nature of the work embodies the characteristics of the symbolic buildings, so if the previous buildings where produced through collaboration with residents, then the process will reflect that.
Sagar works with performers, medical professionals, architects and technologists to stage encounters between these different domains which traverse public and private spaces to ask questions about what makes a good body? Is it also about witnessing the contemporary effects of historical events as they explode into experiential significance but are mired, hidden and erased under layers of bureaucratic and legalistic red tape.