After filming the 'Slaughterhouse of the Damned' video, which I wrote about in my last post, I decided to play around with the carnage that had been left behind.
I felt there was more that I could get out of the materials I was using. I started by continuing on with the slayed meat theme by nailing the blood sacks to the wall of my studio space. This caused the 'blood' to dribble down to the floor. The act of hammering the nails through the fake meat felt extremely aggressive and almost sacrificial. I decided to use all the larger sacks I'd
continue with the theme of the outcome, it was a fun experiment, and I enjoyed acting against the objects, which felt very Paul McCarthy-esque. I did feel that the lifelessness of the hanging sacks meant that maybe this could be experimented further with. However, I am slightly concerned that the nails through them could have biblical connotations of crucifixtion, which I'm not sure is relevant to my aims.
The next idea that I played around with way the marks that had been left over from all the fake blood on the paper that I was using as a background for the film. The paper captured that actions almost as much as the recorded footage in a sense that every blood splatter or spill made direct contact with it, which made it truely feel like evidence of a crime scene, the aftermath of a violent act. Although the aesthetics of it are extremely different, it did remind me somewhat of Doris Salcedo's work,
looking at haunted objects, questioning what happened to the people that owned these every-day domestic tools. I found a strand of hair that got caught up in the carnage and made me wonder whether I could push this idea further, what happened the person whom the hair belonged to? The wonderful abjectedness of hair, this thing that is a part of you, but also breaks away so easily, is dead, is such a large part of our bodily identity, like skin. I wonder if these ideas could be built upon in future experiments. It makes me
think of work by Helen Chadwick, which is so heavily abject that it makes me feel uneasy. However, maybe the hair thing is over done, and maybe the connotations are too female to avoid making it about identity politics and feminist perspectives. This experimentation also slightly reminded me of Kazuo Shiraga's work, although far less violent and painterly, the darker colours used in these paintings appear more grossly realistic towards bodily fluids, concealed and decaying, even though it is obviously fake. To continue on the theme of using my body to connect with the work I am making, which I have been dipping in and out of over the last month or so, I could try painting with my body, using my form to make marks, maybe recreate a Schneeman 'Meat Joy' style performance and see what marks are left over. But then again,
maybe we've already scene so much of this that it would be difficult to bring anything new to the table with it. Another piece of work that comes to mind is Cindy Sherman's photograph 'untitled #190', which shows a bodily, food-like, gut spilled, decaying and crawling, ambiguous mess shot close up, and makes the audience's stomach churn. Maybe actually making a disgusting substance and playing around with it would 1) be more realistic 2) have a higher level of the abject 3) bring across more ambiguity. Maybe combining food and body imagery and blurring the boundary between the two could continue on the cannibalism theme that I have already started. However, maybe these ideas don't clearly refeerence the more absurd contexts that I've been researching. Some issues that I have with this experimentation is that the
fake blood doesn't really look like blood at all, it appears to light, nearly pink and has the consitency of water, rather than something thicker, which is making me wonder about experimenting more with liquids but also about playing with real meat to really tick that materiality box. To really create the sense of carnage, maybe it would be fun to Jackson Pollock a whole room with paint and meat. However, I'm not sure this actually meets my context.
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