The Camera is Unstable
Aleena Cohene, That's Why We End, 2012-2014.
I was accepted to be a participant in Western Front's Media Arts Workshop with Aleesa Cohene. My initial thought was that this workshop would be an intensive of sorts, where likeminded artists working in time-based media would come together and create something with Aleesa's facilitation. It was instead a workshop where she'd teach us her techniques for editing and categorizing films that she would then appropriate into her own work. Sort of research assistant type work.
I admire that Aleesa is sharing her creative process, making space for dialogue around the (archaic) patriarchal cinematic tropes used to portray women on screen and to also bring a generally isolated, solo practice into a "collective" experience. Given the material we began looking at in the first session (Aleesa's) and the kind of conversations that came up, I understand how necessary the collective support is; the material is heavy and quickly becomes painful, angering and spiritually deteriorating. But as Aleesa stated: It needs to be done. And I agree.
The aim for this workshop specifically was to focus on POC women in hollywood cinema. Aleesa hasn't been able to do it until now for two reasons: first being, as she stated: that her whiteness is awkward and subjectively incomplete, and second: because there hasn't been enough material out there to pull from; seeing POC women (alone on the screen) is embryonic in cinema. We were asked to work with material from 2011 onward. So, it was lovely to walk into a room filled with people of colour working creatively (though my fair skin stung like wet cheeks in a frosted wind...but that's another story).
In a short amount of time together, we did a serious deep dive into re-learning and re-seeing hollywood cinema. Sure, the feminist in me has acknowledged the reductive, stereotypical crying, flailing, highly emotional woman portrayed on screen, how she is always in relation to a man even if she is the lead protagonist...
Here are two facts that I learned (and observed) from the workshop:
- Whenever a POC woman (and often man) is alone on screen, the camera is never stable.
- A woman's sadness on screen is almost always portrayed alone, by herself and filled with emotion. Her happiness, however, is almost always shown with a man beside her, or shot over the man's shoulder in the frame.
Some notes that I wrote and will explore/unpack later:
- Prioritize practice over aesthetic
- Appropriating as a form of creating, rather than re-creating: differences of re-creating
- Proces: exhaustion until the relief/release itself is the work
- Affect: In cinema, first & second reactions (micro-reactions). Affect as opposed to narrative, affect as communication
- It is through the isolation of repetition that serves to expose a historical repetition (or trope/narrative) of women. Using the same cinematic strategies against itself. Exposure as a means for self-reflexivity, but also exposes itself to re-creat, or perpetuate the same narrative. But I don't think that her work does that, but it certainly could.
- Demonstration...de-monster-ative
- projected identities
- hold in a non-fixed stated...juxtaposition of ephemerality and documentation of performance artists who come from a social minority against the unstable, un-fixed camera re: POC.
Another key aspect that really go my brain going on was her use of scent in both her sculptures and media work. Aleesa works in a scent lab in L.A. and has created all sorts of compositions that subtly perfume the rooms once installed. She's been doing this for many years now and she expressed her work in scent as a thorough re-training of her nose...I couldn't help but think what a spectacular way to get yourself out from behind a screen and incorporate a deeper embodied component to your practice. The use of scent seems like a no brainer to me, yet, until she began describing it, I hadn't thought of it much.
The part that got me is when she described the chemical compounds of human blood, breaking them down into their elements and looking for things in nature that can mimic the same combination...and get a scent called "blood". She used this smell while working with video around the 80s AIDS activism...describing the work alone was powerful...
Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn't Kill, 1989
One of my friends at school had once described to me her first sculpture that she had made at ECU where she used real dairy cream. The smell was overwhelmingly sweet and created an absorbing musky intimacy. Her work explored breastfeeding and motherhood...it made a person cry during her crit, because he was so moved by the piece. It's those moments of complete affect that remind me why we "make" objects...
Now I ask myself...
What are the ways to work with scent a haptic evocation? How can scent be manipulated to break personal barriers..or perhaps prejudices, when viewing a work? Can scent work to resist ephemerality through to its trigger into memory as we sensorially locate our understanding of the scent? (this calls of Memory Serves by Lee Maracle...maybe scent might be a way to explore her text!).
