This is the artist’s statement that went along with the work for degree assessment.
When a text is orated it changes both the performer and the text; each is part transformed into the other.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech of the same name and places them into the mouths of a number of young, female Americans currently living in London. The small pool of people that the speakers are drawn from has no pretensions to be representative, they are each individuals with a specific encounter with their national culture. The distance between the original and re-enactment is clear, but the distance between our foreign exposure to American culture and a first hand experience is far greater. The interviews that accompany the readings of the speech are not an attempt to close this gap, they in fact only serve to reinforce it. Young Americans, speaking from behind TV screens, are inevitably viewed through the prejudice towards American culture.
In my work, words that are political, that in one voice have political intention, loose their meaning when spoken in another. The mediation of a performer depoliticises what is performed but, at the same time, their activity is itself political. The performer is activated politically through their enactment of political activity.
This is as true of visual enactment as it is of spoken performance. The relation of a text to its visual presentation, its presentation as art at all, will transform it as it transforms its presentational form. Elements of appropriation can never be completely removed from their social origin, but still they are removed. This displacement is the ‘destruction’ that Adorno sees as the key to a work’s effectiveness.
The works in the series Treaty Establishing…/Playmobil catalogue… enact the text from the Treaty of Lisbon with the images from toy catalogues. The work is presented in two forms, as framed, mounted collages and free to take prints. The first draws on the aesthetic of domestic or corporate decoration, the second from political pamphleteering, or rather its appropriation by advertising and popular culture. The same piece of work is commodified in two different ways, one that costs money and one that is free. Although the intention would appear to be for them to circulate in different economies, they in fact require each other. One sells the other.
It is with its circulation within, and interaction with, its economies that I hope for my work to find its effectiveness.
