Untitled (Televisions/Found Footage)

Link to video: Untitled (Televisions/Found Footage)

The installation for which this video piece was created changed drastically since I first envisioned it 4 months ago. The video was created specifically for the installation after it had been set up. The installation consisted of 4 large televisions, wrapped in amorphous plastic bags, placed amongst a patch of trees. On each television the 20-minute video was looped continuously. Due to the fact that the installation was outside, the daylight caused some difficulty, and the visibility changed throughout the day. The piece was most effective at night, but seeing the difference on the screens between day and night was quite dramatic as well.

While not originally intended as an environmentalist piece, the materials took on a life of their own. I guess it is inevitable, though, when placing televisions, wrapped in plastic, in the bushes around trees. In the daylight, without video, it ended up looking like piles of garbage in the bushes. While frustrated with it, I decided to make the video specific to that theme.

I have an enormous collection of found-footage 8mm and 16mm film on my harddrive, and have come across many odd things over the years. For the piece I decided to stick with images of nature and humans mistreating it. As the piece was by a walkway, I wanted the message to come across quickly, yet I did not want a short, monotonous loop of the same footage. I montaged a selection of choice camping, hunting, fishing, and hiking footage, with clips of children visiting zoos, traffic, mining operations and animal abuse. The combination of these images successfully made everyone quite uncomfortable. I also produced some sound to increase the uneasiness, but unfortunately the speakers only worked on one of the four televisions. The sound is available on the clip on the Internet, but not as effective as it would be if it had been playing on the televisions.

While the video as a stand-alone piece is not quite as effective, it still has some of the intended message. The juxtapositioning of grotesque imagery, with zoos, and other abuses of nature, successfully causes the viewer to question our relationship to nature, and how we have disturbed it so greatly over the years. It was much more effective when walking across campus at night, being confronted with piles of plastic with glowing screens. While I rarely attempt to make any political art, I feel like this piece was successful, and the images appropriate to the installation in which they were played.

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Link to video: Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman’s work has been some of the most influential in my development as an artist. As a conceptual artist, he has no specific style, and works in any medium. In the 60s he worked primarily in performance and video, combining the two through documentation of his performances, while working with attributes specific to the medium of film or video. His video explorations of three-dimensional space are exemplified in Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, in which he walks extremely slowly, with exaggerated hip motions, heel-to-toe around a square taped onto his studio floor. For long periods of time he is outside of the frame, forcing the viewer to think about video as a frame, and the world outside of that. He has placed a mirror against the wall at the back of his studio, so that you can see some of his motions when he is not in the shot himself. However, the mirror is very small, and you can only see a small portion of the performance in it.

For one of my classes this quarter we were required to re perform a piece. In addition to the performance, I decided to replicate Nauman’s video. As mentioned before, Nauman has created a great variety of work, and WWU’s campus happens to have one of his sculptures, Stadium Piece. I felt it would be appropriate to incorporate this piece in my tribute to his work. The piece also interacts with space in a similar way to his video. It takes something we see in daily life (stairs/walking) and distorts it, exaggerating the line and angles usually associated with it. By walking up and down the stairs, your view of the staircase is obscured, and in forcing the visitor to go up, then down, then up and down again to reach the other side, he forces an exaggerated walk and an extended length of time to experience the piece.

My performance was in combination with two other people, so we decided to walk on and around the piece. By walking on it, as already mentioned, the performer was obscured from the camera’s view, and their travel pointless. As for myself, I walked around the base, and through the larger of the openings in its side. I was only visible to the camera for half the time, because the rest I was either behind the sculpture, or underneath it. The camera was also set up at a slight angle, to obscure even more of our movements. The building in the background works similarly to Nauman’s mirror, in that, it allows the viewer to see glimpses of our movements that would otherwise be hidden from the camera.

Interview

About a month ago I interviewed Anne Hirsch, the video / performance artist who made the Caroline YouTube persona and went on Frank the Entertainer (Her blogs about the experience: http://www.bust.com/searchall.html?ordering=&searchphrase=all&searchword=shaming+famewhores)

I just got the tapes back, so i thought I'd post a transcribed version of it on here.

Enjoy!

Interview with Anne Hirsch

Me:

Could you describe Caroline and how you got interested in the “famewhore”

Anne:

I talk about the cam whore and the fame-whore as being distinct, different versions of the same thing. I first became interested in the cam-whore because that was a super easy way that any woman can gain an audience, any woman can go on the internet and broadcast herself and if she’s willing to do that she’ll have an audience, it doesn’t matter who she is. So I was interested in that phenomenon and how women were presenting their sexuality and for what ends. With youtube and the phenomena of the cam-whore, all of a sudden women’s desire for attention became much more visible in our society, whereas before it existed, but it was so much harder for women to cultivate an audience.

So then, working on the same ideas, I saw reality television as just an extension of that, and women going into that had bigger goals, they had much loftier than just an internet audience. It just seemed like a normal extension of the work I had been doing.

Was Caroline your first investigation into these issues?

Yeah, I think she was the first one

How did you start Caroline? Was it a personal exploration or an assignment? I was wondering if you could also talk about the feedback you get

I was making sort of You-Tubey confessional-type videos about trauma. Some were real trauma and some were made-up trauma. So for me, it was kind of like why am I making Youtube style videos but not putting them on Youtube? On instincts, I wanted to start creating a persona on YouTube, it just sort of happened on a whim as an area I wanted to explore and also as a method of self-exploration.

My initial idea that I began to see on YouTube was that there these sort of two genres of women, and pretty quickly I went away from the whole trauma thing and went more towards other things, there was sort of the naïve young vlogger types and then there was these tons of women shaking their butts in your face, and these two genres rarely, if ever, mixed. The booty-shakin girls just wanted to be objectified, and the talking heads girls couldn’t show her sexuality because she wouldn’t be taken seriously as a Vlogger.

So I was wondering why couldn’t those two women exist? Why did sexuality and intellect have to be two separate categories or things that a woman could own? Which seems like a very old idea, but on YouTube these things weren’t mixing. For myself and potentially others, I saw YouTube as a relative utopia of sorts for women to be able to express their sexuality in a relatively safe forum, kind of idealistic.

One of the most interesting aspects your videos for me was when you were in the Caroline persona and responding to the very real problems that people would send you. It seemed like whether or not those letters were real, you were trying to address serious issues but through this naïve persona which made for this interesting talk where you address heavy things in intellectual ways but trying to do it in a way that wouldn’t undermine the Caroline persona. Did you feel that you were perpetuating her persona too much and so trying to smarten her up? What was that like and why did you decide to do it?

That’s a really good question. The first wave of fans was all these guys, and the second wave were a younger group of fans which I was not prepared for. The horny guys, was like “ok, that seems typical,” but the female tween fan-base, that was very bizarre. When I first started getting messages from them girls saying “I wanna be just like you when I grow up” and they were making videos imitating me I was like “oh my god, what have I done?” I had a Miley-Cyrus moment, like do I really want to be a role model for these girls?

So I had a back and forth with some of them saying things like “stay in school” and I started thinking about the role of role models like Paris Hilton and all these girls getting their image tarnished by sex tapes and Miley Cyrus, and I began to ask why we were censoring sexuality for young girls. Sexuality is a part of us I think even when we are young, so the fact that we are admonishing women for engaging in sexual behavior is actually not doing justice to young girls; it’s actually hurting their future. So I began to see myself as actually a positive role model and saying “you know what, I’m going to express my sexuality in the way that I want, and it’s a positive thing” and encouraging girls to do the same in their own way.

That tender age of eleven, twelve, thirteen is really when it’s going on and when that struggle begins, and for girls to ever feel ashamed for wanting to be sexual or sexy, I think that’s a bad thing. So even though my big-sisterly inclination is to say “Don’t be like me!” really I think that sexuality shouldn’t be so off limits to girls at a young age. The idea with Caroline was that everything Caroline says is true; it’s just said an insincere manner.

Do you read the blog Hipster Runoff?

No why?

Because I think that he’s doing the same thing by saying things that he believes in, just in an incinsere tone. A lot of people read it as irony or satire, but it’s not really that. I still have yet to really figure out what it’s doing, it’s almost like a self-doubt, being critical of one’s own thought, it’s being truthful to these thoughts that are ingrained in you but saying in an incincere manner because you’re critical of those things you’re taught or believe in, or you’re critical to the antithesis of those things. So it’s more like catching yourself or being critical of one’s self. Because everything I say I believe, but don’t necessarily believe believe.

It seems like a way to embody a persona at first to critique it, but at the same time critique more how it’s seen and not so much what it is.

Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying.

That get’s to my next question. You have seventy or so videos of yourself dancing to Animal Collective, Dan Deacon, etc. Did you see that as more a way to create what you saw as a role model for girls, an investigation into the persona, or just an attempt to build this persona in a realistic sort of way?

I was trying to do a few of those things. I was trying to build a persona in a realistic way. If I kept producing, then I would maintain the fanbase and also have it keep going. Each video had the potential to be more viral than the last. I was also kind of like a VJ in a way in appropriating different kinds of music, with each video hitting different niche markets. And also I enjoyed it, I liked doing it, I had a lot of fun.

I could definitely tell you were having fun, especially with things like the My Butt music video.

That one was the most painful. [laughs] No that one was a lot of fun, much more work, but a lot of fun.

To go back to the pre-caroline, when you describe your friend committing suicide and these very intense things where you’re crying, it’s like you’re in a confessional booth. What did you see yourself investigating with those videos?

With the one with my friend committing suicide, that was part of the original trauma videos. My original idea was to combine those trauma videos with this girl who’s dancing. She would be dancing and expressing her sexuality as a way to ease the trauma. So we’ve got this weird juxtaposition of a girl who’s gone through a lot, with this other crazy nymph.

I had three other videos up that I’ve since taken down. One was a story of rape that I told that happened to my friend, another was an elaborate lie about being anorexic. That was really the very beginning stages of the project. Then after a month I started going away from that. The newer videos that I think you’re talking about are the one’s where I’m talking about how I hate boys?

Yeah

To me that video’s hilarious. In between the dancing and whatnot, I wanted to have these interludes about “who is Caroline” because I get all these messages saying “we want to know more about you!” so occasionally I’d throw in a confessional for sort of the “true fans”. It was a lot of performance. At first it was just me putting stuff out there and it was just out there. Then over a period of time I was getting a lot of feedback, so then the performance became about this constant back and forth between how my performance was changing based on the feedback I was getting. And so I had been getting a lot of horny requests and stuff like that, so I just thought I would address them in this way.

Did you anticipate any of those lude requests? Was that part of the reason why you did it? So you could find some of those trollers? Or was it just kind of a surprise that you didn’t feel that surprised about?

That was a surprise that I didn’t feel that surprised about. I didn’t think I would elicit any attention because I didn’t think I was particularly good looking or interesting. Obviously that doesn’t matter. Anyone can get attention from anyone, there’s someone out there to give everyone attention. But it made sense when it happened.

With the videos though, I wanted to present a woman who was contradictory. She’s expressing her sexuality but at the same time she’s having doubt and having shame about it.

It brings up how when you’re talking about being a role model for all these girls, and that it’s healthy to have people expressing their sexuality at young ages and have that not be repressed, do you think YouTube is a good place for it or more of a dangerous place because of the amount of goons trolling it?

Like any other place, there are good things about it and there are bad things about it. It is a reality, instead of banning it or trying to get kids not to go on it, the problem isn’t with YouTube, the problem is with how we view sexuality—how it’s taught in schools, on a familial level, on a societal, cultural level. If that became a better dialogue, I don’t think YouTube would present a problem. However that’s not a reality, it’s very unlikely.

As is, I think now today, kids are finding out much earlier about sex and seeing sex much earlier because of the internet. I know it’s true with me, everything I know about sex I know from the internet. There was no other way for me to get that information. And now it’s been taken a step further.

When I was young, about twelve, I was going around on the internet and talking to random people and having cyber sex and stuff even though I didn’t know what the fuck any of it meant. And that was very formative for me; I had internet relationships with older men who I didn’t know. Did any of them come kill me or stalk me? No. Were they fairly innocent relationships? Yes.

Yeah there is a very parental fear of internet people coming to stalk and kill you, while most of it is a lot more innocent than spooked out parents would think. I was wondering if we could switch to Frank the Entertainer. How did you get this opportunity? Did you have it in mind as a thesis project? How did this happen?

Well I’ve always loved reality TV and I’ve always fantasized about being on it. I was always wondering what it was like to be on it—I wonder what it’s like to be on that, I want to be on that—but I had a boyfriend for a really long time so it was never really an option—to go on a dating show when you were seriously dating someone. Then I took a reality TV class here and my theoretical interest in reality TV was renewed, I was obsessed with it now. It fits in perfectly with so much of my other work—there were so many crossovers of themes.

Then I was at a residency in Florida, and I had signed up for the casting for Tough Love on a whim, and through that casting list I saw the casting call for Frank the Entertainer and was talking to another artist at the residency who was also obsessed with reality TV and she said “this is the show for you” so I sent in an application with a video. They called me the next day so I drove out there and did an in person interview and then a month later they called me and wanted me to come out to NYC. I had no idea if I was going to get onto the show, so I didn’t know for sure if that would be my masters thesis, it just happened to work out that way.

Who was the artist you were interning with?

Well the artist that I was referring to was Kristina Long, she is mainly a performance based artist based in LA, and we were both there studying under our “master artist”

Heather Woodbury who is in between art and theatre and performance in a pretty interesting way.

That brings up how people like Maya Stirken and Vito Acconci write a lot about the difference between video as performance, installation, etc. I always saw you as performance that needed to be on video and in very specific settings. So it was kind of performance, but the medium of YouTube was definitely necessary because they wouldn’t have had the same impact if you were watching them in the museum or something.

Yeah

To come back to Frank though, in the last Bust article, you write about how the producers have some role in perpetuating stereotypes—how by the fourth episode, the four minority characters were cast off for example. I was wondering how much of a role the producers actually have in the show, or if it just kind of ends up like it does and the editors just chop it up to make people look stupid?

Well first of all, I don’t really know what the hell is going on in terms of production. You’re kept so in the dark that everything is kind of a mystery. But what I’ve gleaned from looking back and talking to some of the other people, is they have an agenda in terms of how everything should go, in terms of elimination. It’s not like production is saying to anyone “you do this, we want this, etc.” It’s more of a cajoling, because as soon as they tell someone directly to do something, that person can say “this isn’t real!”

They’re incredibly nice people on the outside; they appear to be very, very nice. But they’re incredibly manipulative and they manipulate through their niceness and make you think they’re on your side “we’re trying to help you, we want you to not only find love, but get famous!” And maybe at some times that cajoling became more forceful than other times depending. Also, most of the people they’re dealing with on these shows aren’t terribly bright, typically because they haven’t been educated so they’re easy to control. They’re also people who are willing to play along because they want to get famous, so they’re at the mercy of production in hopes that it will further their career goals.

Didn’t one of the girls actually have a video blog similar to yours where she sang in the bathroom and stuff?

That’s Carey, that shit cracks me up. I’ve been realizing that everything I’ve been doing in terms of my web presence for the show, even my Caroline persona, all these girls are doing legitimately, and I’m doing an imitation of that.

How was it living with all these girls who you were simultaneously critiquing, did that have a role in your decision to drop your persona after the first few days?

Well first of all, I dropped the persona as soon as I got in the house. I never had a persona on the show. We had an interview before we got in the house, and that interview they told me was an audition, even though I was on the show. So in that interview I was really hamming it up, but it carried through the first few episodes. In the house settings though, I was never in character, I really wanted to be real.

How was living with the girls that you were kind of critiquing in a way? Did you feel guilty at all, or did you feel you were building more empathy in a more investigative, anthropological kind of way?

I went on that show thinking I was going to get beat up. But the best thing about that experience was meeting these girls and being like “these are real, normal, nice, smart, pretty women” and then seeing them be completely butchered on television. It just made me completely rethink the way I’ve been watching these shows, thinking “oh my god these girls are such trash”, they’re not. It may appear that way, maybe they’re a little bit superficial in the way they present themselves, but if they weren’t that way they would never get on TV.

How much of a roll did Frank have in deciding who would be kicked off?

He had a role, but he did not have a presidential veto by any means. The girl who he picked in the end, he really did have feelings for in some capacity. In terms of the other girls, he could care less who would be kicked off. So it just became a show game, about what would be best for the show. It’s interesting though because the producers can also put things in Frank’s head because they want him to have real emotions. I knew who was going home every night, that’s how I knew I was going home.

What were you trying to do on the show? Were you trying to research reality TV, more of a performance, both?

It was both. I went in knowing I had no idea what it was going to be like, and it’ll be what it’ll be, but at the same time have it be a performance. I knew it would be an organic process, because I can’t plan because I have no fucking clue what it’s gonna be like and I was right that I had no idea.

What do you think was the most valuable part of what you got from your experience on the show?

Seeing just how little we’re aware of the construction. Because we think we’re so smart “oh I know it’s fake, it’s all fake”, but really we have no clue how much we as the consumer completely buy into what they’re setting up. And the majority of that is in thinking that the people on the show are trashy and stupid, and the way they’re caricatured we generally do believe that about them and it’s completely wrong. Also, in how complicated the fabrication is. It’s not this real-or-fake binary. Now when I watch reality shows it’s a pretty different experience.

What do you see yourself doing in the future? More internet videos? Or are you done researching art in relation to the internet? What do you see yourself perusing?

If I were ever to be in a situation where I had more resources, I’d like to produce my own reality show

I would definitely watch it. Thanks so much Anne. Bye

Bye