My Old Fat PC, 2010

My Old Fat PC is  a ten year old desktop computer with a belly shaped screen facing a three-drawer wooden toilette mirror with various antique cosmetic products on it. On the computer screen there is an image of my belly in different shades of red. My Old Fat PC is related to my experience with fatness. The computer screen exhibited is my old desktop PC I was using ten years ago. Since that time, there have been significant visual changes both on my body and the technology surrounding me. I was constantly losing weight in that period and the technological devices I have been using were getting slimmer and slimmer as well. My old fat PC watching itself in front of an old mirror is a reckoning with my self image through the significant visual changes surrounding me.

Maya Deren

Influenced by the Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, I started to question the distinction between perception and conception. Perception is defined as the act of apprehending material objects or qualities through the senses, or the process of acquiring sensory information on wikipedia. This process materializes itself at the moment when the viewer encounters a work of art that is actually the product of the artist’s conception. The relationship between the product and the moment of encounter gives an ex-ante condition to conception and an ex-post condition to perception, as Sol LeWitt puts it more simple " The work of art can be perceived only after it is completed." This claim usually holds for both the viewer and the artist because the creation process does not allow the artist to have the full knowledge of the outcome as well. On the other hand, conception does not seem to have a two-party understanding, it is the initial concern of the artist, that is why it will be more appropriate for me to explain how I perceive Maya Deren's work.

The first thing that arouses my admiration in Deren’s works is that she is the first widely known woman auteur director in the United States meaning that she is also the writer, cinematographer, performer, editor of her eight films and pioneer in avant-garde film-making as Haslem also writes in her article Senses of Cinema: Maya Deren (2002). It is also as important for me that her most active years coincide with the period of 1940’s, which is known to be the most conservative time of America with strict limitations on the cinema sector. It is strange enough that she was able to survive with her irritating and extra-ordinary surrealist films and hard to recall such talented women in the field of cinema else than actresses for that period.  Before going into detail with Deren’s work, it is important to note that she had a big influence on conceptual art in means of experimental cinema. Her first trial in film-making, Witch’s Cradle (1943) was with Marcel Duchamp, who paved the way for conceptualists, but the film remained incomplete. Additionally, her short films anticipated the works of conceptual artists like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas in experimental cinema and later on directors like David Lynch in means of surrealism.

Her first and the most famous film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is also the forerunner in surrealist film with all the new techniques in camera usage and its dreamlike atmosphere. The film opens with the scene in which Deren is picking up a flower that she dropped on the ground. From the first scene the viewer gets the impression that it is not an ordinary movie in the sense that it will take the viewer to an inner journey. She then follows a stranger who she cannot reach. She goes back to her house, opens the door and gets in. It is possible to say that all her movements are full of emotions, most notably fear and paranoia. She goes upstairs to the bedroom and comes back downstairs and falls asleep. After that the film replicates those sequences. There are objects like the flower, the knife and the key, used repeatedly to express some kind of an obsession with fear, death, trust and loneliness. The woman is obviously not feeling secure, we see that later when her lover comes to wake her up. She kills her lover in her dream, my reading of that scene is that she kills herself again and again because she sees herself in every person she looks at. There is alienation in the movie to some extent in every scene. This alienation finds its form in the character with the mirror face.  At the end of the film we realize that she killed herself with the same knife that we see repetitiously in her dream, but again we cannot be sure if this is her dream or the reality. This loss of the sense of reality is present in all her films so as to say her characters are driven by an internal force to their ends without having a conscious control over their actions. I used the term auteur for her cinema because what she does in her films is that she expresses her own alienation from the reality. For her, the artist behind the camera and the story that has been told cannot be perceived separately. Deren writes in her article “Some Metaphors for the Creative Process” quoted from Neiman’s An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren:

“There is another metaphor for this process of creating a structure which conveys, perhaps, something of the situation of the artist. He is very much like that classic figure of animated cartoons who… is running along and, in complete concentration on his purpose – carried along, as it were, by the momentum of the act- runs right off the edge of a cliff without noticing it and continues running in mid-air until, looking down, he becomes aware of his unnatural situation, and in that moment, and because he perceives it as extraordinary and unnatural, is unable to sustain and falls.

So the artist, beginning in reality - in that which already exists- starts moving toward a vision, an Idea, and with the cumulative momentum of that dedicated concentration, crosses the threshold from that which already exists into the void where, still moving forward, he creates a plane of earth where his foot has been, as the spider, spinning from his own guts, threads his ladders or highways through once empty space.”

            The medium she chose to interpret her ideas is coherent with how she describes her creative process. The camera is always moving in her movies even the character is motionless, and it is used to express that there is always a flow, especially in The Meshes of the Afternoon. To emphasize the importance of the subjectivity, she uses close-ups and jump-cuts. The camera is the eye to observe this inner journey and it is inevitable for the viewer to witness her subjective experience carried on the two levels of reality that are in collision. In Neiman’s words; “The camera was for Deren the modern instrument which could most naturally reflect its own conditions of observation: ‘local’ time and place and their changes, ‘the inalienability of subjective position.’ For her it was through personal, subjective experience that we gain access to the universal. Though among the most personal ever made, her films were addressed “to the poet in every man.”

It would be proper to analyze her second film At Land (1944), which introduces a critique of social rituals, in order to follow her conception in the understanding of the universal through her subjectivity, but since the film is not accessible for me now I will briefly touch upon how she uses the means of surrealism. In this film she was quite successful in harmonizing the irrational ideas followed by one and other leading to a final product which is a sheer logical combination of illogical shots. At this point I again refer to Sol LeWitt “Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into the belief that he understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. İllogic). Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually...” His sentences correspond to what Deren puts out with At Land as a conceptual artist, although the inception of the term conceptual art corresponds to 1960’s, two decades after her production period.

      In her following films A Study in Choreography for the Camera and Ritual in Transfigured Time, she expresses the different aspects of her identity, as a dancer, choreographer and poet, enabling the usage of the term “poetic psychodrama” to describe her films. Thomas Schatz in his book Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, writes that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” This explanation for poetic psychodrama separates Deren from the realist film-makers, which is also crucial in the standpoint of conceptual art against formalism.

      To conclude, Maya Deren could be regarded as a conceptual artist according to the writings of Sol LeWitt, but it is sometimes difficult for me to have an understanding of the concept of the artist if the outcome is extremely minimalistic in a materialistic sense to express the idea behind. Cinema as a medium is important for me in the sense that it is visually rich. To some extent I can agree with what Sol LeWitt writes on perception, “It doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art. Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.” It is obvious that perception is subjective, but it is important for me to have a connection with the artist’s concepts, that is why Maya Deren’s words are favourable for me in this sense, “And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haslem, Wendy. 2002. Senses of Cinema: Maya Deren

LeWitt, Sol. June 1967. "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artforum

LeWitt, Sol. May 1969. "Sentences on Conceptual Art", Art-Language

Neiman, Catrina. 1947. An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren

Schatz, Thomas. 1997. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Scribner

Lipo, 2010

Fighting Fat Cells, 2010

Bulimic, 2010

Bulimic is part of a series of works called “Cut this fat off of me!” that I produced along my thesis research process. The series is composed of six different artworks on how women perceive their bodies through the eyes of the others and struggle with fatness in different stages of their lives. The series tell the story of a lifetime with bodies through the stages; adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Based on the age differences in understanding and handling the fat problem one of the first works bulimic under 'Adolescence', conceptualizes the process how young girls sensationally become acquainted with their sexuality and their bodies, and with what measures they react to fat.

The studies of Heuenemann et al. indicate that excessive weight deviations tend to be more common among adults than adolescents, yet adults appear to be less concerned about their weights and less apt to take remedial measures that requires patience and determination than teenagers. Almost all obese and many non-obese adolescents are concerned about weight and they engage in remedial efforts more than adults. Concerning the age difference, due to their recent experience with the dramatic physical changes, brought about by the accelerated growth of puberty, adolescents are more self-conscious about their bodies than are adults. The desire to conform to others and to ideals in weight and appearance is particularly strong during adolescence, probably stronger than it is in adult life.

The installation draws attention to one very common eating disorder among adolescents that is bulimia, simply by placing two 60x90 cm mirrors across each other, one covered with real puke. When the viewer stands in between the mirrors, s/he sees the reflection of the image of the puke going to eternity. Bulimia is a fatal disease if not treated properly.

Thelma and Louise

Thelma and Louise (1991) is often referred as a successful mixture of different genres in a single picture. To begin with, it is possible to trace the elements of contemporary Western, seventies ‘buddy’ movie, and most notably road movie. Since it is the story of the journey of the two heroines Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), it will be more appropriate to analyze the film within the scope of road movie, without losing out the influence of the other genres that are well placed in the movie as the indispensable roadside bars for an American road movie.

The film opens with the introduction of the two main female characters separately with the scenes from their daily routines. The viewer first gets to see Louise in the café she is working. The first bits of information provided is that she is a self-dependent middle age woman with some emphasis on her being hard-edged as she talks like an elderly sister on the phone to Thelma, while smoking. On the contrary, Thelma is a young housewife, who is oppressed in her marriage by her husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald). The road story begins as the two women hit the road for a little weekend escape from their seemingly not entertaining daily lives. It will not be wrong to claim at this point that as opposed to most of the other movies within the road movie genre, Thelma and Louise’s journey does not start with a drive for the search of something related to their being or a higher aim to leave everything behind. But it is still an escape from their lives although their initial plan is to get back to their routines after a couple of days of break.

The story evolves as Thelma and Louise become outlaws after Louise murders Harlan (Timothy Carhart) when he attempts to rape Thelma in the parking lot of their first stop on the road. From this point on their little escape from home turns into a bigger escape from the police and their route shifts to Mexico, which is the ultimate direction of American outlaws for freedom when the West closes down. Up until that moment in the film the Western influence is present to be felt strongly, especially with the men and women dressed alike in the Western style and filling a Western space with the scene in the roadside bar. When the two heroines lose the direction of their lives after the murder, a map comes handy to show them the route they have to follow to reach Mexico that is passing through Texas. Louise’s refusal to go to Texas can be read as the refusal of the movie to mess about genres as they offer wide spaces that can conjugate different styles. The movie instead follows the main lines of the road movie still with notable references to Western, such as the panoramic views from John Ford’s Monument Valley.

As common to road movies, the two women’s relationship changes form as the journey takes place. They get to know each other better while they get to know themselves better and develop a more emotional and deeper relation. In that sense, the film can be said to have elements of seventies ‘buddy’ movie because the relationship they develop on the road converges to the typical male protagonists’ buddy relationship as they admit their new identities as outlaws. Thelma and Louise has been the focus of different criticism by the time it was released, most of which aroused from that shift in gender perspective. One interpretation of the movie was that of a feminist reading whilst antifeminist reading was also among the popular critique. It is hard to agree with both claims since the movie is a collaboration of a liberal director, but still working in a capitalist Hollywood cinema industry, Ridley Scott and the female screenwriter Callie Khouri. So it will be more appropriate to analyze the gender aspect of the movie while going deeper with the characters and at the same time considering the loose end in its gender discourse.

Since the change that the two women go through will be the focus of the analysis now, it is important to look at their ex-ante and ex-post conditions in relation to the journey. Thelma and Louise before the journey fit into two different woman stereotypes of the late eighties and early nineties. Thelma is typical to the continuation of a tradition of young housewives, whom are in need to secure themselves with the first man they have interacted in their lives and more or less dependent on their husbands in life because they are inexperienced to sustain themselves. This dependency also creates a sense of isolation from life for Thelma and once she is on the road she is eager to experience whatever the road brings to her with an enthusiasm of a teenager, but she also portrays a vulnerable woman since she does not have the knowledge on how to respond to potential threats that are awaiting her. On the other hand, Louise appears to fit into another socially accepted woman figure by that time, which is self sufficient to stand as a single woman, but in order to do so she must play the tough woman. In comparison to Thelma, she is more organized with her life and suspicious to whoever approaches to her because she has some sort of a social phobia as a consequence of her interactions with life. The differences in their characters first give the sense of a default power relation amongst each other of Louise being dominant in this friendship. From those ex-ante conditions, two women go on the road that will create a change in their standpoints and Scott gives the hints of this change right after the journey starts with the scene, in which Thelma takes a cigarette from Louise’s pack and acts as if she is smoking while watching herself on the side mirror of the car and says “Hey, I’m Louise.”

Louise’s dominance over Thelma does not change until JD (Brad Pitt) steals the money that Louise gets from Jimmy (Michael Madsen) in order to get to Mexico. Louise killing Harlan creates the first shock in Thelma and Louise’s relationship but since they behave respectful to each other all through the movie they take the responsibilities of their own actions and play the strong to fix the problem they created for both of them. In other words, first shock comes from Louise losing her control over what she sees and it is now her responsibility to take care of the situation and Thelma still appears to be the weak one to be taken care of. After the only night they spend off the road, they realize that JD fooled Thelma and ran away with their only asset to their freedom. The loss of their last hope breaks Louise’s strong image and now it is time for Thelma to take control and get Louise back on the road. This break point works as a tool to balance the power scale of their relationship and they become buddies, running to the same end consciously and willingly.

The feminist reading of the film focuses on what unites Thelma and Louise in their journey to their freedom whereas antifeminist reading of the film concerns what follows after they form that male type of alliance. Feminist manifesto finds its form also as a character in the movie, which is the sympathetic detective Hal (Harvey Keitel), who keeps his belief till the end in the heroines being ordinary women, driven to extraordinary ends by male oppression. This is actually the main idea that the movie advocates. There are several indicators in the movie to claim that feminist manifesto holds, such as Thelma being oppressed by her husband, Louise with her mystical past presumably a traumatic experience of rape, JD as an abuser of Thelma’s naivety, Harlan’s attempt to have sexual intercourse as opposed to Thelma’s wish, the truck driver’s almost absurd reaction to the two women travelling on the road and so on and so forth. These are direct critique to American culture with its easily accepted empty pleasures and demoralized sexual chauvinism toward women, in which Thelma and Louise stand as feminine figures who are still struggling to redefine their individualities.

The antifeminist critique can be explained through the similarity between Thelma and Louise and another famous road movie Easy Rider. In Easy Rider, the two heroes hit the road for the search of freedom, as well as adventure and hedonistic fun. In that respect, Thelma and Louise offers the same thing, but the underlying approach to a decaying culture beyond desire. The similarity of the macho actions in both movies can be explained as the standpoint of antifeminist critique because what those feminine figures stand for should be a protest against that macho violence rather than a portrayal of dangerous phallic caricatures of the same behavior, if the movie advocates some kind of a resistance to women’s oppression. The problem defined and the action taken in order to fix the problem seems controversial if the resistors also adopt using the same tools that cause the problem. The movie falls into the same trap while trying to define that trap, for the sake of entertainment that conventional Hollywood cinema has to offer its audience by turning tragedy into tragicomedy. Yet, it is argued that the film evoked sympathy in male audiences and enabled them to engage with the women’s story through attributing male characteristics to the two heroines. Although the antifeminist reading puts a strong emphasis on the fallacy of using male symbols such as the usage of guns and violence, the film insisting on the tragicomic aspect by letting the heroines make their own feminine ways how to use those symbols, as can be realized from their polite way of committing the crimes by uttering how sorry they are to do it every time they break the law, is claimed to have worked out in delivering the underlying message to a larger number of audiences. The analysis here then results in a harmonized cinematic conveyance of the depiction of the two believable female figures by Callie Khouri when combined with the heroic representation of Ridley Scott.

Back to the topic of change that Thelma and Louise go through, there is an issue of relativity still to be touched upon. Although the journeys reveals a lot about the two main characters, it is easier to observe the change that Thelma goes through whereas the viewer gets to know less about Louise. They come to the same grounds on their escape to freedom but Thelma deviates more from her initial state. She discovers the repressed lust in herself towards life. Once she goes out her limited life she realizes that she does not want to go back and does whatever she has to do in order to keep being on the road even if it requires her to break the laws. Although in the beginning Louise seems to be the one who does not want to surrender and keep going till she reaches a place where she will be free, Thelma does not pause to join her as soon as she realizes that she was trapped in her own prison by attributing such importance to an unloving husband. The relief from her mental prison makes her act in the opposite direction with such passion that she becomes the one that leads the way to their end. Louise on the other hand, does not deviate very much from her initial set of mind. She is fond of her freedom to some extent in the beginning and she is headed towards that direction whole throughout the movie. She experiences a different kind of relief in the sense of her repressed emotion from a past trauma which finds a way out to the surface, but that does not create a domino effect in her reactions and she does not experience a major change in her character.

The end of the road in Grand Canyon is both physically and metaphorically the end of their journey. Until they reach the cliff in the Canyon they were able to shift to sideways, changing their destination for the sake of being able to move on. The dead end of the road, revealing their ultimate end, brings them up to the final point that they have choose between going on or giving up. As freedom, being reduced to the only option of eternal freedom after death, the two heroines decide, acknowledging the irreversible change they had been through, to keep moving and reach their eternal freedom with Ridley Scotts’ freeze frame. With such a heroic ending it is possible to step back from the reality within the film and look at the tools Scott uses to turn the story into a myth. Two angelic figures fly into a deep opening holding hands, and another heavenly good figure trying to reach them before their salvation. He refers to such tools to break the thick air of a tragedy also in some other scenes some of which are mentioned above as the ridiculous truck driver and the Rastafarian biker who blows joint to the policeman locked in the back of his car.

The narrative structure of the film is also chosen as convenient in a way not to disturb the audience with back and forth movements. The narrative is linear and as plain as possible meaning that there is no use of special editing or voice over. The only structure notable is the parallel narrative of the women and the police. The escapees and the chasers are shown with a parallel timing and Scott makes good transitions from one story to the other especially after Thelma’s robbery scene when she starts telling what happened in the story the story shifts to the chasers line and the viewer watches the robbery from the police’s screen. These smooth transitions strengthen the flow of the road movie and leaves necessary space for the viewer to digest the on the run rhythm of the road story and follow the timing of the episodes. Additionally, the setting of the parallel stories works as a reminder to the viewer where the story started from because the police is located in Arkansas, with the people that the two women left behind, till the end of the movie when the two lines finally emerge. In the meanwhile, the viewer is reassured of the incidents happened on the road by encountering the people involved in the storyline of the police. In other words, the viewer is left to enjoy the privileged position of getting informed about both of the stories even before the two parties figure out what is going on with the other story.

As prior to the road movie genre, much attention is given to the landscape in the film. The open spaces head along with the deserted highways of the American dream enforcing the idea of freedom as the two women proceed with their journey. The photographic images from the different timelines of the day such as the dawn and the sunset create a feeling of continuity in the flow as well as referring to the women’s control over their own time by being able to experience all the difference feelings the day has to provide them to link their broken identities in a continuum of time. The images also change as they escape from the reality of their initial lives, the massive machinery, oil drilling equipments fade into the images of Monument Valley. Especially Louise lightens up with all the faces she confronts on the road. She loses, leaves, her belongings after each confrontation of herself in the other. She leaves her watch and earrings to the old man then she throws away her lipstick after seeing the old woman becoming more simple, admitting herself the way she is and gaining her freedom by losing her belongings. All those scenes being emotionally strengthen by Hans Zimmer’s influential music with the classic tones specific to road movie and Western. Ridley Scott seems not to have missed one single detail to put out a complete movie of road movie genre.

For Women, 2009

For Women is a video installation based on the findings of a research on what women would prefer to see in porn movies. The video to be installed is made according to fifty women's answers to a questionnaire on their preferences in porn watching and shows a man's face while masturbating for 1 min. 30 sec. While the installation analyzes the female gaze on pornographic images, it avoids being explicit. In order for the viewer to question the intimacy that she/he develops with the image, the installation is screened inside the elevator of the exhibition space using the up and down movements of the elevator as its primary reference to the act on the screen.