This particular piece was an endurance-based work. When I think of performance art I think of a few artists one Artist being Sandra Johnston, whom uses bare/minimal materials and her own body as the activating role within her work, her body is a material. In the untitled, work the body becomes naked from the removal of white paint. The water was very cold but the feeling lost its sensation over time. The objective slips into intuitive actions, I felt myself push past the coldness an inhuman encounter arose no longer feeling ‘naked’ in the conventional sense. There was no sense of self in this manner, but gained a deeper sense of nakedness. The material-immaterial being attempts to clean itself, the movements seem sincere like a swan- like, hands feeding through the volume of water. The washing removes a physical layer and taps into the internal layer as the body attempts to get clean.
The clown paint is the closest idea of whiteness that I identify with. Not so much the striking white but the striking white of the clown , it’s whiteness is absurd, its fakery is crude and laughable. As a child, I never felt clean, I went to a Christian school in dirty non-uniform maybe a jumper sometimes a floral dress underneath, whatever was clean enough I was dressed in. The clothes weren’t unified to what other school children wore. Which meant I was alienated. I don’t identify with ‘White’ or white. White supposedly symolises purity , holiness in the European sense of the word. And yet when I think of white its unattainable and impure in many ways. Which is what I’ve started to realise from the impurity of paint/ blood shed .
As I apply the paint its oily, and claggy, it leaves traces, it never dries. Its impermanent, my identity is removed from the body and through the performance ‘I am’ temporally displaced. The female form seems absurd in this way. ‘It’ appears otherly (but not Godly). The unknown male voyeur looks at the female white form until she reveals herself hairy and naked. He then walks away. The unknown man ruptures the act, I am temporally brought forward, all at once I become aware. It takes a sufficient amount of time till I become absent to myself again, but this does occur until the paint becomes more and more absent. Then I started to feel the cold. This might be due to the materially of the paint thining – the oil works as a barrier – the thinning conducted an emotive change that I became conscious of, therefore my actions became more conscious. I prefer my performance/ action led work to have no foreseeable end, allowing the body/mind to surrender to the acts completely, changed consciousness as if I am the viewer, surprised by my own actions only able to verbalise in the aftermath. I’m not sure what happens here, as the white woman is in fleeting states, and so am I but we are never together.
