An image to my research
Putting an image to my research. Looking into my archive of images. Figurative images of myself, scenes from performance, street photography, nature, previously made collages. I select an image of a still from a video, a film I made called Isotropic dreams where the camera captures the scene through the peephole of a door enclosing a dance studio. I am facing the mirror, the image does not show my face. My legs are together, not in a ballet pose, but more in a doll-like standing pose with legs straight, feet together, heels on the floor, arms down and palms touching the mirror. I take the image into photoshop. I’m looking to bring representation of a body into relation to a field or landscape with a certain order, but not too much clarity. I start outlining blocks of the architecture and manipulating the colors and saturation. Through this process, the circular image through the peephole starts to reveal the geometries within. Highlighting these areas, I defamiliarize myself with my own work. What else is here that was not here before? What has been her all along that I needed more time to understand?
I woke up today reading a newspaper article about an image Andy Warhols used of Prince for I think Interview Magazine. There is a new lawsuit at the supreme court in the United States brought by the photographer of the image of Prince (not Warhol), who is suing the Warhol foundation because the image was supposed to only be used for one magazine cover and in the end Warhol made fifteen different copies and distributed the image to other venues. Prince is dead. Warhol is Dead. The photographer is alive and deserves to be compensated in my opinion.
I reflect on another image I desire to bring in as a representation of my research. This one is a still of another video (I see this now as a procedure). This video is also taken through a portal, a children’s toy telescope that doubles the image. The video is a 1960s black and white recording of a Balanchine ballet, Raymonda Variations. I do not know the ballet dancers name, or which precise variation she was doing (the ballet is structured with over a dozen short solos that vary in length but generally are very fast and exciting to watch because the dancer is almost chasing the speed of the music. I have already some some manipulation to this photo, which is a double of the dancer in a short romantic tutu, with both arms overhead mid-curtsy.
I hesitate with this image on two fronts. They are both very clear red flags that tell me no, this does not represent YOUR work. One reason is that this is a historical ballet, a choreography by a widely celebrated white male choreographer and my project is not strictly about centering iconic, white dancers doing things with their bodies that are widely regarded as beautiful. The thought is “too classical” (even though Balanchine’s work is not always regarded as classical). The other red flag links up to the Supreme Court case. I’m actually not sure of the copyright laws, even though this is an analogue digital photograph taken of a video that is also blurred by the doubling technique through the kids telescope, and further colorized from black and white into a softly colored photo.
Leaving these concerns aside, there are clear overlaps in these images, there aesthetic, and why I gravitate to them as representations of my artistic research. There is a way of looking at things of the past with the desire to retrace lines, itself a process of slowing down the looking and drawing over. I do not think it is about underwriting. Am I interested in historicizing these images by changing them into a new, unseen/distributed image/process? I think it is the process that I am interested in people seeing. There is the fact that we see an image that is somehow familiar—a white body with a classical ballet aesthetic in see-through tights—and also that the figure is unfamiliar too. I sense I am interested in negotiate with this image of the past. What’s there that wasn’t there before? Why can’t I discard it? Why am I bringing it back if not to reify these classical ballet aesthetics? I have no answer at this moment but I want to acknowledge that I have some instincts and that I apply procedures to the selection of aspects, glimpses, perspectives on the past.
Procedure:
stylized filming>>obscured image
still image>>aesthetic transformation
new image>>thinking
consideration>>…
this is where I get stuck. I cannot justify the process because I do not know what my aim is. This is a problem I am trying to figure out and I’m glad the simple task to present an image that represents my research has triggered this dilemma in my whole work bringing movement into stillness as a temporary place that then deserves its own process of liberation back into movement.