Moving on from last week's 'No Strings Attached' work, I decided to push the idea forwards into my contexts of interest. Rather than just exploring a space, I used the exploring hands to play with meat.
I played around using greenscreen like the previous video but I found that this didn't work very effectively when wanting to make it look like the fingers were digging into the meat. Instead, I mirrored the video so that there could still be more than just one set of hands. At first I just had the original sound of the meat squishing. However, I played around adding recordings from a porno to the video, creating a more comic, absurd and uncomfortable atmosphere. I liked drawing the comparisons between meat/food and sex/bodies, both being disgusting and pleasurable, both being about bodies and primal instincts, about survival and life, as well as death. The meat used in this was diced beef, so the chunks look very unnatural and processed. I feel that this makes it far less gross and therefore, less effective. However, I think could almost be a positive in some ways because it links well to the pornographic sounds as they are both processed pleasures, almost fake and make for human consumption in bitesized forms. If I were to re-create this piece I would try with sloppy bits of offal and I'd also play more the sensuality in the video, using close up and exploritive camera angles, slowly devouring with the meat with the eye. By exploring the meat pornographically, I hope to display these connections between meat and body for the sake of reminding us of our own fleshy bodies.
The pornographic and pleasurable meat reminds me very much of Carolee Schneemann's 'Meat Joy'. However, I would like to make my work far less serious than hers as I feel the comic is something that I wish to use to drive my work forward, almost going against the self-important and macho energy of Viennesse Actionism and 70's abject feminism. Maybe I could even go as far as to slightly make fun of them for it. I wonder if my work is becoming too similar to theirs' and where this is just something that has already been done. It must be time to return to the drawing board and really pin point those key contexts and aims of my practice.