PROCESS

WHAT I AM DOING AND WHY.

I decided to look back at my work so far and decide why exactly im exploring this.

The method is to explore a different kind of portraiture. Documenting a process to make sure the subject does not go for their desired pose; but what I want them to look like. I do not want them posing to portray themselves the way they want to be seen. I am taking this and making them pose the way I want - showing a natural reaction to water. Water because of my investigations with my last project that I wanted to carry on but also mainly because its everywhere and has several purposes in peoples lives. It is also feared, it has so much power. People fear drowning; this is the emotional reaction I want to explore. I'm taking the relaxation place - a bath, and making it into a treatment area. Instantly the sitters feel unusual. In clothes because it isn't about nudity or the function of the bath but the person in it and their emotions. A uniform and process so it is purely about reaction.

SHOOT 5 - METHOD AND IMAGES

For Shoot 5 I used method 3 again to see what reaction I would get from a different subject, again a male subject but I thought it would be an interesting idea to compare them. I got a very similar reaction but the way in which this subject tried to keep himself underwater for as long as he could was to hold himself down using his arms and holding onto the side of the bath.
I think as I am this close to what I really want I need to step back and figure out what I want to capture. Do I want the reaction or do I want the affter effect as a portrait... I am going to now explore both, separating them so they are confusing and not easy to tell what they are. Doing the whole process and describing that process but putting it with a photograph of the after effect on emotions. Or having the moment of panic photograph with all the other ones I capture from other shoots? I'm going to try it all out, then to move onto a new location and method.

SHOOT 4 - METHOD AND IMAGES

METHOD 3 - treatment
Duration - 30 minutes
Location - Bath
Conditions - Warm Water, Full bath.
Uniform - White tank top and black/dark bottoms.
First 10 minutes - relax
10 minutes in - ask them to slowly lower themselves underwater and stay as long as they can.
Recover from panic.
20 minutes in - ask them to do the same as before.
Recover again.

This method worked well... I have now been able to capture that panic and disress I wanted to before. I was strict with how I controlled my subject. I noticed that the first lowering had a much more extreme reaction to the second. In the first one they would not know what to expect. So when the water shoots up their nose and they get the panic of thinking they are going to drown they react dramatically. But for the second lowering they know what to expect and prepare themselves a little more. I tested this method out before I did it for the shoot because I didn't want to put them through something that I didn't understand or feel. By the second time of lowering you know what to expect so you know what to do to try and prevent the water going up your nose... breathe out through your nose. But you can only do this for a short period of time and then you come up in a panic again. By the end of the process your body is confused, and your mind feels like mush. Its an intense method but it worked well. I am going to do another shoot for this on another subject, to see if they produce a different reaction. I'm getting closer to what im trying to explore and discover.

SHOOT 3 - METHOD AND IMAGES

For shoot 3 I used method 2. I wanted to test this method out on a female subject as well, to see what different reaction I would get. This shoot went well, it was very interesting as the female subject is naturally quite a nervous character and this made her very uncomfortable for the shoot. However I don't think this method really gets the emotions I wanted to explore, I wanted an exhaustion and a panic and very distressed not this subtle short moments of emotion that is more uncomfortable and a bit nervous than extreme. But would I be going too far if I took it more extreme? I'd probably have to warn the subjects before, maybe use Gillian Wearing's idea of using the public or stating what will happen but keeping it quite mysterious still.

SHOOT 2 - METHOD AND IMAGES

METHOD 2 - treatment
Duration = 30 minutes
Location - Bath
Conditions - Warm water, half full.
Uniform - White tank top and black/dark bottoms.
Ask the subject to be serious and then whatever they say I will dismiss.
Ask them to relax.
10 minutes in - pour warm water over them.
20 minutes in - pour cold water over them.
25 minutes in - 5 minutes to relax and recover.
I chose this method in reaction to my trial method, I took the duration down to 30 minutes because I could still get the emotion and tension through a shorter time that 1 hour. I had the same location of the bath for convenience as I am still at the experimental stage. I kept the water luke warm so it would still get colder - especially when the cold water was poured over their head. I chose equal intervals for pouring the water so they would get a chance to slightly recover but still provoke that nervous feeling of what will happen next.
Overall this second shoot was very interesting, this time a male subject, his reactions got very extreme, he got distressed, upset and confused. I documented this and I have cut it down to 10 images for the process. These images are very interesting. I want to try this method on a female subject to see how diffrernt the reactions are.

FRANKO B

In this piece, naked, covered in white body paint, Franko walks down a long canvas aisle. He is lit up on either side from the floor by florescent tubes, and bleeds from calendulas in his arms that hold his veins open as he slowly and ceremoniously walks the length of the canvas towards a bank of photographers at its base. Blood pools at his feet at each end of the “catwalk,” where he stands before turning around and beginning his march again. The performance is structured to resemble a fashion show, and the blood splattered canvas Franko leaves in his wake is used to make unwearable, or at least, un-marketable haute-couture, to mummify household objects, and to make pocket-sized souvenir paintings. The experience of witnessing this performance was riddled with the questions you might expect: You couldn’t help but think – should we be doing this? Is he o.k.? What are the ethics of participating in this event? I had seen photographs of his work and expected to be shocked, anxious, and perhaps even repulsed. In other words, I expected that this work would provoke a visceral response — in part because I know the artist, and because the experience of witnessing this sort of body art was at the time fairly new to me. But also because the photographs of his work boil his performances down to stark images of his wounded body – encounters with Franko’s body in the context of the performances themselves are challenging, but not for reasons one might think.

Ultimately, what matters is how these two works provoke us to scrutinize the image, looking for signs of sincerity – in doing so, they court our attention and force us to draw near. That ambiguity is the very thing that seduces us – in our hearts we hold onto the possibility that someone might be crying for us. (“I miss you.”) This is what is disturbing about Franko B’s performance – not that he bleeds, but that in doing so he crosses a boundary, and carries us with him as he does so. He shifts questions about art and emotion to the audience, moving away from the self-reflexive representation of the artist’s emotional state, to the production of feelings themselves – a risky move if ever there was one, if only because he asks us directly if, and how, we plan to love him back. - Jennifer Doyle

Franko B - 'I'm essentially a painter who also works in performance. I come from a visual art background and not 'live art' or theatre, and this is very important to me as it informs the way my work is read. In the last 20 years or so I have developed ways of working to suit my need at that particular time, in terms of strategy and context, by using painting, installation, sculpture, video and sound.'

Franko B performance from Tim Ashton on Vimeo.

Franko B is best known for his live performances, which he began to make in the mid-nineties. He has described these acts as focusing on the visceral “where the body is a canvas and an unmediated site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable and for the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition.” In Franko B’s performances, he uses his own body as a site for the expressive representation of the visceral acts catalogued above. He exposes his own need and vulnerability in a starkly exposed manner that usually incorporates his physical nakedness, and the controlled shedding of his own blood. - David Thorp

Franko B's performance art is so similar to Bruce Nauman, both using themselves as the subject of performance, expressing their passions and beliefs through shocking and interesting work. Franko B's work is so incredibly personal, he exposes himself and his vulnerable qualities in an honest way. I love his use of paint to create himself as a canvas, this could be interesting to use in my own work combining with the water. Like the ideas I had before about having coloured water to see if the reaction is different.

BRUCE NAUMAN

Bruce Nauman works with sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking and performance art. He has a mathematics and physics background. His work focuses around his interest in language - often playful but he has very serious concerns at the heart of his practice, he is fascinated by the nature of communication.
Frustrated by the human condition, he approaches art making as if creating an ongoing series of experiments in which all the diverse areas of human activity - including written and spoken language, and physical behaviour - are tested.

'my work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. Its not that I think I can change that, but its just such a frustrating part of human history'

This video - 'Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square' - 1967-68 asks the question - is he doing this to amuse or trying to communicate the mundane aspects of everyday life?

Martin Creed(Turner Prize Winner 2001) about Nauman - 'I think h'es the King, basically - Elvis!'

I find his work fascinating especially his performance art work, using himself as a subject expresses exactly what he wants it to show. This is the way I worked last year, using yourself to create and show an opinion and narrate it through photography and video. This time I am creating a feeling or opinion through another (my sitter) and getting them to express it.

GILLIAN WEARING

Gillian Wearing is influencing my ideas a lot since I researched her, her ideas are deep and very interesting. She uses a similar technique with posing but at the same time as making the people pose the way she wants there is an element of her own control in there too.

Above is two images from 'Take your top off 1993' and three images from 'signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say 1992-3' both images she is exploring different ways to get her subjects to pose. In the signs series she is controlling their pose through getting them to write something they want to write on the card... this will change their way of posing without them knowing it through the words they have chosen.
Wearing also works with a lot of video and sound which is very interesting she stated about a body of work of hers that 'nothing is more alienating to anyone unaccustomed to it than hearing one's own voice played back on a tape recorder. What the apparatus records - what the objectified ''others hear - is not what resonates inside my head when I speak. The recording makes me consious that I have no true voice. Instead, I have two voices that do not harmonise, that contradict eachtoher: an interior voice and an exterior one. Others never hear me just as I hear myself. Moreover, this splitting of the voice, or opacity of voice to speaker, can never be directly represented. I can never communicate to another person the sound of my inner voice.'

This idea is very interesting as it makes so much sense but you never think about it. She thinks outside the box, into the unusual overlooked emotions and ideas we all have, focusing on issues about self confidence and self realisation.
She invited anonymous members of the public to participate in a large number of her projects with signs requesting certain things e.g 'Confess all on video, don't worry you will be in disgiuse. Intrigued? Call Gillian. - 1994.
I love this idea of getting people from the public to participate in these ideas and undergoing the methods and treatments. I might try experiment with this later in my exploration to see what different effects I could get. I would have to plan it down to every small detail.

Confess all on video, don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. 1994

SHOOT 1 - METHOD AND IMAGES

SHOOT 1 - I decided for my first shoot to simply explore a method/treatment to control the emotions of my sitter. I started off by choosing my uniform - a white tank top and dark bottoms/knickers. I then decided that it was going to be in the bathroom because thats where I had decided to start my investigation and experimentation as it was the easiest accessible place to start with and it means I can focus more on what my sitter is doing.
My method for this shoot... luke warm bathwater, half full so it cools down, clothes because it will make the sitter feel uncomfortable. Start by making the sitter lie back into the water and close their eyes and relax for 5 minutes... I chose to do this so they would feel relaxed but still confused. I then got the subject to sit up in the bath, this would be around the time the water is starting to feel a bit cold. And having their top half of their body out of the water will make them feel colder anyway. I then got the sitter to kneel and sit on their knees. I then left her there in silence and dismissed any questions she asked.
The total time she was in the bath was 1 hour 4 minutes. In this time she got cold, confused, upset and eventually curled up in a ball to try keep warm and to try calm herself down as she was very distressed. I then told her to egt out the bath and stand up and look straight ahead. The last image that I have put up is this emotion. Distressed.
Maybe I couldn't be this mean to my subjects as she was very upset with me after... but as much as that was bad it really intregued me to see how other people would react to it. I need to test out a few other methods before I decide on my final treatment. I am going to stick with the bathroom as then I can do it in any location and not have to worry about access etc. Overall the images are not technically brilliant but that will come later, at the moment I want a purely documentary approach, research and experimentation with lighting will come later.