That's what we want, Margie....;)
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That's what we want, Margie....;)
Thanks for the advice guys. Like I mentioned...I will tell my friend.
Hey..did you guys enjoy your weekend? I know I did....we were bad.:D
Here's what I did with my weekend. Consider this a warning about taking art history classes.
Two Interpretations of Vito Acconci's "Pryings"
Vito Acconci’s 1971 video Pryings presents the viewer with a disturbing, violent, ritualized struggle between a man and a women, acted out by Acconci himself and Kathy Dillon, who is variously described in the literature as his partner, companion, and long term relationship. Although the conflict between the two performers is bizarre, protracted, and borders on brutal, no significant change in status occurs throughout the video and so the struggle itself rather than any outcome becomes the thematic center of the piece. As with any work of art where the primary focus is one element pitted against another, the viewer inevitably tries to interpret what the two elements represent, and what the conflict between them signifies. I have come to the conclusion that because the video is so stripped down aesthetically but what imagery remains is so powerful that two equally compelling interpretations are possible, but I am unable to commit to one or the other, which I believe to be Acconci’s intention in creating Pryings.
I will begin by thoroughly summarizing the events shown in the video: for the entire length of the piece the figures of Vito Acconci and Kathy Dillon dominate the screen in close-up so that their faces appear very large. Although at no point are the performers shown in full figure due to the tightness of the shot, it can be seen that Acconci wears a dark turtleneck shirt and Dillon wears a short sleeved t-shirt or blouse. The two performers never speak – the only soundtrack consists of their breath and the sound of their feet on the floor, and more faintly, what sounds like a train passing a crossing on a road (the repetitive thump of the wheels on the track, the rush of air, and a bell ringing). The image is black and white and the background, apparently the interior of an artist’s studio, is seen too fragmentally and out of focus for the viewer to gain any further impressions. The only action is of the two figures struggling with one another as Acconci tries to immobilize Dillon, expose her face to the camera and then force open her eyes with his fingers. Dillon resists his actions by trying to escape his grasp, trying to hide her face by covering it with her hands, by turning away, and by tossing her hair between her face and the camera. At those times when Acconci does successfully force open one or both of her eyes, Dillon rolls them back in their sockets to conceal the pupil and iris from the camera. Acconci’s appearance is obviously masculine with coarse features, medium length hair, a receding hairline, and prominent sideburns. Other masculine traits include his relatively large size, especially notable in the shoulders and hands, and the fact that his hands are visibly hairy. The expression on Acconci’s face remains impassive. Dillon’s appearance is unmistakably feminine in contrast: her tight-fitting top reveals her breasts, facially she has finer features, and her long dark hair is worn loose. Although more of her naked skin is exposed than of Acconci’s, she appears to lack any body hair. Dillon’s expression is also largely impassive except when she seems to be grimacing from effort or ‘screwing up’ her features to make it more difficult for Acconci to open her eyes. In addition to the fact that as a man and woman, Acconci and Dillon inevitably seem masculine and feminine, I suspect that the hairstyles and clothing were chosen as wardrobe for the video because they emphasize the physical gender traits of the performers and because they demonstrate the current fashion of men’s and women’s clothing and hair for the time the video was shot. The reason such a choice might be made would be to emphasize the sexes of the performers as much as possible without making nudity and thereby a literal sex act an implication of their close physical contact. Thus, each performer doesn’t merely represent themselves, but also the broader categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’
The violence of Pryings is strictly implicit. At no time does Acconci threaten to bodily harm Dillon, he merely controls her movements as best he can. Dillon, in turn, doesn’t try to harm Acconci in her escape attempts, perhaps by stomping on his feet, biting his hands, or kneeing his groin. The parameters of the struggle are strictly set and fully honored. Of course, the viewer is constantly reminded of the possibility of rape because of a number of visual factors, including the forced opening of part of a woman’s body by man who is larger and stronger than she, the similarity in appearance of the eye and the vagina, and the emphasis the camera and costume place on the body of Dillon and the almost archetypical female quality it represents in the context of the video. Because the camera operator focuses the camera whenever possible on Dillon’s face and Acconci only appears to the extent that his presence is necessary to immobilize her and force open her eyes, she becomes the central figure of the video. Because the camera moves to keep her in the frame no matter how she struggles and thrashes, a third presence that of the camera operator is implicit in the video. Taking this into account, Acconci’s actions take on another meaning; in addition to a rapist by implication, he becomes a pimp or pornographer by implication, forcing the woman struggling against him to reveal herself in a context rife with sexual overtones to a third party (the photographer) and then another party further removed from the entire performance. This final viewer is of course us, the audience, or if we interpret the performance as a crime of rape or prostitution, the witnesses. While it is true that I am assuming a male gaze on the part of the camera operator and the audience, I find such a presumption plausible in light of the fact that the work is attributed to Acconci. It’s true, of course, that Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay that named the male gaze was not published until four years after the taping of Pryings, but the feminist critique of male dominated media and professions preceded it.
A critical point of interest is the fact that the repeated attempted violation is of Dillon’s eyes, and the fact that she successfully hides the pupils and irises of her eyes from the camera. The video camera is of course, at its essence, a mechanical eye. Further, because the particular camera used to tape Pryings is being actively manipulated by an operator it is possible to conclude that the camera operator has the same relationship to his or her camera that Acconci has to Dillon (at least for the duration of the performance.) The difference is that while Dillon is a person with a will of her own, which she exerts by resisting Acconci’s attempts to peel open her eyes, the camera is simply a piece of machinery that makes no attempt to resist its operator. From this, it is possible to construe a feminist message from Pryings, since the contrast of Dillon’s willfulness to the camera’s will-lessness impels the viewer to understand that the male/female difference exhibited by Acconci and Dillon is negligible compared to the sentient/mechanical difference exhibited by the operator and the camera. Acconci and Dillon are more alike than different but the camera and its operator are more different than alike, and so because the camera lacks any will of its own the power relationship between them lacks the moral aspect that can be drawn from the struggle between Acconci and Dillon. While I found the implicit master/slave relationship between Acconci and Dillon disturbing and rife with sexual menace, the operator/machine relationship seems perfectly innocuous to me. Only the emphasis on Dillon’s eyes even evoked the idea of the camera as a separate entity from my own eyes or those of the camera operator, in fact, I found myself questioning the camera operator’s relation to Acconci and Dillon without thinking of the camera at all. I have failed to discover the name of the camera operator for the shoot of Pryings and I believe whether the operator is a man or woman makes little difference to the overall effect of the video. Because the operator never makes his or her presence known except by the operation of the camera, a male gaze may be safely presumed because of the presence of Acconci, as I said earlier. If we accept the notion of the activity recorded in the video as a metaphor for sex, and further as a metaphor for rape or prostitution, we find ourselves siding with Dillon against Acconci. Although the narrative is simplistic in the extreme, the presentation of Acconci as attacking and exposing Dillon against her will casts him as a villain. Further generalizing Acconci as “man” and Dillon as “woman” yields the idea that man brutalizes woman, and forces her body to exposure and to open thereby metaphorically penetrating her. This rather literal interpretation of the action, if not the actors, fills the viewer with revulsion and male violence and sexism while ennobling female victimization and resistance. Such a view may be characterized as both radical and fatalistic, because the narrative of the video offers no solution or even progression to the conflict presented.
(cont.)
A nearly opposite reading of Pryings may be constructed if one takes into account the common figure of speech “open your eyes” meaning an exhortation to pay attention to one’s surroundings and to stop ignoring relevant facts. Because Acconci appears to be trying to literally force Dillon into seeing, we must take into account what it is that she would see should he succeed. As mentioned before, the environment of the shoot is almost entirely obscured to the viewer, so all we can be certain that Dillon would see were she to relent and permit her eyes to be opened, and to focus the iris and pupil that she rolls back into her skull on her surroundings would be herself, Acconci, the operator, and the camera. We can assume Dillon already knows of the presence of Acconci and herself, through her own self knowledge and the tactile sensation of Acconci handling her. Therefore the only things remaining to be revealed to Dillon are the camera and its operator. Acconci himself never meets the mechanical gaze of the camera or the sentient gaze of the operator and audience that lie behind the camera. However, because his eyes are open and focused on Dillon, and because he attempts to turn her face to the camera he must know that the camera, the operator, and by implication the viewer are there as well. I have already noted that Pryings is attributed to Acconci, and this claim of authorship puts him in a position of power relative to Dillon (and possibly the camera operator and audience as well.) This reading also reveals sexist attitudes in the video, but this time on the part of Acconci in his role as artist rather than in his role as ‘man.’ If Dillon is not willing or able to open her eyes and confront the reality of her situation on her own, and she in her role as ‘woman’ must be forced to do so by Acconci in his role as ‘man,’ then Acconci’s role as an artist is severely condescending to the ability of women to recognize their own plight in a sexist society. In this interpretation, man wishes to liberate woman from her ignorance of the mechanical eye that regards her and throws her to the mercy of the male gaze, but woman lacks the wherewithal to do so on her own, and even with the most unsettling and forceful urging successfully resists man’s attempts to (literally) enlighten her. I would like to reiterate that the struggle depicted in Pryings appears to be eternal, for the video introduces us to the action in mid-struggle and it persists until the end, robbing the viewer of any sense of beginning, middle or end to the conflict. The viewer can is led to conclude that the action was underway long before the camera began taping and will continue long after. The background is marginalized into unimportance so that the struggle becomes the entire world of the video, nothing except woman and man in conflict is shown or even implied, and that is fatalistically presented as constant and without conclusion.
When two interpretations of such a simply formatted event are possible, with the only evidence of the authorial intent so obscured, we must take into account the possibility that the author intended the ambiguity. Since the only reason that a particular one of the interpretations should find favor with a viewer depends on the motives that said viewer projects onto the performers, no absolute conclusion may be made about the intent of the artist. The artist may have intended for the video to provoke two contradictory reactions. In fact, I think that probably he must have, which is why the action takes place in such a peculiar, stylized way. The minimalist aesthetic, plot, and production of Pryings leave all extraneous window-dressing stripped away. Without dialog, speakers of any language will be equally capable of interpreting the video. Without a change in the action, the struggle between Acconci and Dillon lacks any context except their sexes. By eliminating context and reducing the struggle to a set of ritual gestures repeated constantly throughout the running time of the video, the viewer is forced to interpret the gestures through only the filter of his or her own prejudices and conceptions. Art often functions in this way, but the more abstract and minimal art becomes the more important what a viewer brings becomes to that viewer’s interpretation. I believe that Acconci deliberately exploits this effect in Pryings so that he can provoke the viewer to confront his or her own preconceptions about sex and sexism and conflict and sexual conflict and sexist conflict, but most especially the last two.
couldn't you have trimmed that down to like a funny lymric or something?
A funny limerick wouldn't have been much of a warning now, would it?;)
There once was an artist named Vito
Who thought it would be super neato
To make his best girl
Show her eyes to the world
And tape it for posterity, yo.
How was that?
I think I am ready to change my avatar! :confused:
I look evil.:eek:
Well friends,
It seems we will pass into 3000+ posts and 200+ pages without me. I'm leaving for China tomorrow and probably won't have the luxury to post here for a bit. If I can post, I'll do it on the Shaolin forum, since that's where I'll be.
I gotta hand it to "evil" Margina - her first new thread and it tops them all - the queen mother of all threads.
I'll post with you all when I get back. keep the peace! :cool:
Have a great time Gene, and Thanks!:D
I knew you could do it CHANG...
I feel so much more educated now...
and return home to us all!
safe journey, Gene.
peace
h.o.
Viva la revolucion!!!
I got SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS as my avatar :cool:
Last friday came some hot chick with her mom and her doggie to check some alergy the little dude was having.
Between this and that and making questions to the stupid trainee (that meee :D) wich limited me to saying "i dunno, its my 1st semester" she commented on some dog we were looking at before: "That dog was huuuge, HE HAD BIG BALLS THIIIS SIZE"
She draw the size of the balls with her hands on the air, the way she made it was like a human head
I need to change my avatar:p
I think it's about timeI changed my avatar too, actually.
I have an idea for it too.
:)
Have a good trip, Gene.
Blimey. It was surprisingly hard to find a pic of Cornholio!
Haha! I need TP for my bunghole!
:D