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How does this relate to my own work? By switching the roles of the aggressor and the victim, Bruce Nauman is perhaps implying that there is no wrong or right, and that we merely take on roles in relation to each other. The work relies on the viewer watching different people move in and out of characters and this, combined with the slow motion alterations of the original footage, succeeds in ‘destroying’ the sense of the individual person and of right and wrong, to a confounding and unsettling effect. I have been trying to explore this idea of ‘moving in an out of character’ within my own work, as a way of attempting to discuss ideas of social performance. I liked the ‘bad acting’ effect of getting normal people to perform roles originally scripted for films, and watching them struggle to remember their lines or completely forgetting them, thus breaking the illusion of character.

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Eugenia Lim’s The Australian Ugliness was lengthy relative to the other films in the exhibition (30 minutes), yet was easy to watch (perhaps in part due to the womb like room with giant pillows in which it was being displayed in). It features the artist moving through the space in and around 30 Australian architectural sites. In clip she is sitting around a table of architects, observing them in a detached silence as they discuss plans. In another, she is stroking the concrete support structures of a museum, or holding hands with an old woman dressed up in a costume designed to resemble the building they are standing in front of. There is also footage of people moving through these spaces: for example, we see a group of asian tourists photographing something but we don’t get to see what that is. The work takes its title from a book written by the architect Robin Boyd, which makes a link between the ugliness of Australian architecture and the way Australians see themselves. Lim examines this in her work, as she has written: ‘if architecture is the reimagining of the world as human, what do our buildings say about us? Through choreographed actions and interventions by ambiguous, coloured, ageing or queer bodies into the icons and interiors of Australia, my take on ‘Ugliness’ seeks to question: who holds the right to design our spaces, and who are they designed for? Who shapes our built environment and in turn, how do these forces shape us?’

How does this relate to my work? Although the themes explored in this artwork are very different to those in my own work, I was interested in the way that Eugenia Lim re-contextualised the architecture by presenting it through different people, which is what I try to do with dialogue. On a more formal level, however, I particularly liked the way that three different films were being displayed on three screens next to each other. Although the footage was different on each screen, the images interacted with each other almost creating a new space that encompassed all three videos. The multiple screens felt overwhelming at times, and I didn’t always know where to look, which made me think it might be quite interesting to display the three versions of the romantic comedy script I reinterpreted on separate screens at the same time, instead of consecutively.

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Kaylene Whiskey is an indigenous Australian artist living and working in a small aboriginal town in South Australia. In her paintings Whiskey appropriates the visual language of aboriginal art (using the dot technique and earth tones) but instead of depicting natural or abstracted forms as is done in the more traditional artworks, she paints series of comic strips, imagining what would happen if her favourite American pop icons were to come to her home town. They feature Cher, Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton and the like, their speech bubbles written in english but spelled in a way which is evocative of an aboriginal accent. They are often pictured growing Minkulpa trees, which is the native Australian tobacco plant. History (particularly Australian history) is often whitewashed and manipulated to suit a western point of view; Kaylene Whiskey is able to reinvent American pop culture from an aboriginal perspective in a way that remains playful and joyous.

How does this relate to my own work? I was interested in the way that Whiskey brought the format of the comic strip into the realm of ‘high culture’. My work at the moment is centred on dialogue, which I have up to this point been exploring through performance and video. However, these pieces made me think about new ways in which dialogue can be presented. There could be something interesting about recording fleeting or awkward remarks in a permanent, visual way (such as in the form of a speech bubble), as well as the suggestion of dialogue through videos of people conversing without sound, or the sound as a piece in itself, removed from the video footage.

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Phoebe Waller-Bridge has written a new hit-series for the BBC called Fleabag. It’s premise is of the kind that features a witty female protagonist in her thirties, stumbling through life in search of herself; the viewer watching all along and sharing in her successes and comedic failures. However, what distinguishes Fleabag from its genre is the fact that this protagonist regularly turns to the camera and makes some kind of side remark to the audience (also known as ‘breaking the fourth wall’). Sometimes she reveals her true thoughts, which are at odds with what she is saying to another character, making for a humorous juxtaposition, and sometimes she simply gives the camera a knowing look or rolling of the eyes. This technique creates a sense of intimacy between the main character and the audience, as though they are the only 2 people that know what is really going on. It also creates a kind of double narrative or ‘multiple reality’: one is the reality where all the characters are interacting with each other as they do in a real world scenario; the second reality is one where Fleabag extracts herself from the first reality and comments on what is going on in it. Fleabag is living her life as a character within the show whilst simultaneously being aware of the fact that she is being filmed for a TV show. The situation becomes even more ‘meta’ when one of the characters appears to notice the fact that she is speaking to the camera (all the other characters act as though this isn’t happening). This character does not acknowledge the presence of the camera, yet insists that she is speaking to ‘someone else’.

My initial reaction upon entering the exhibition space was one of shock, something I am not familiar with feeling in an art gallery, as these days it seems like nothing is shocking anymore. This is certainly not the first time I have seen nudity in art, but there was something about the way Betty Tomkins had so crudely cropped these penises and vaginas, removing them from their context (the person/ body) and blown them up to such a large scale, that was particularly jarring to the eye. It was hard to tell if the images were black and white photographs or paintings, which made them even more unsettling. At the time of making some of the earlier pieces in this exhibition, Tompkins received a lot of backlash from the 1970s feminist movement, accusing her of perpetuating the male gaze. However, modern critics now describe her work as ‘breaking the monopoly of the male gaze’. What caused this change in the public perception of Tompins’ work and why is it now heralded as ‘providing a vital platform for ‘#MeToo’ when it was once considered sexist? How can Tompkins really be ‘offering up a female perspective on sexuality and desire’ if she is using the same images that are used in porn aimed at men?

Perhaps it is simply that when a woman recreates objectifying images she appropriates the male gaze and takes charge of it simply by being a woman. However, what if the viewer does not know who made the artwork? Would we still be able to detect this ‘female gaze’?

Or could it be about the fact that she is painting (a traditional act of labour, skill and devotion) images from porn, something that belongs to dodgy websites that people clear from their browser history. Perhaps by blowing up these images and presenting them as art in a ‘civilized/ high culture’ context, Tompkins is moving these images from our private, secret realm and confronting us with our own complicity with the objectification of the female body. She asks us why we are willing to condemn sexual objectification in certain situations but seem to be willing to ignore it when it occurs in the context of porn.

How does this relate to my own work? I am interested in the fact that Tompkins’ work was perceived as sexist at the time of its conception, which introduces the idea of a woman herself as a perpetrator of sexism. I am interested in questioning whether this is in fact even possible, as well as examining to what extent the meaning of a stereotypically ‘male trope’, such as the male gaze, changes when it is taken on by a woman.

Nethaniel Mellors’ Ourhouse appears more like a TV show than a fine art film. It is shot cinematographically, set in a normal house with characters dressed in every day clothes and initially seems to lack that absurdity that we have become so familiar with in contemporary art (think Paul McCarthy nude slathering himself in ketchup in Sauce or mumbling ‘De Kooning… De Kooning…’ whilst puncturing a canvas with a comically phallic giant paintbrush in The Painter). It is only when the characters are introduced that the film starts to become strange. An old man stares vacantly out of the window with a jarring smile, a woman seems to be teaching a man whom she calls Bobby how to speak gobbledy gook. There is something about the bizarre behaviours of the characters, that when contained in the realm of normality by the use of dialogue and narrative, and cinematography, become somehow more shocking and unsettling than a film with a more ‘abstract’ narrative and characterisation. It is so nearly normal but also so far from it.

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Ryan Trecatin uses himself and his friends in his videos. He transforms his friends into characters, giving them general instructions but also allowing them to improvise. In this way, the characters appear to develop their own intricate narrative that is secluded from the other characters, perhaps commenting on the construction of the ‘self’ in the modern day. Perhaps what makes Trecatin’s work so captivating is the way that he combines directed and spontaneous acting.

The Square is a poignant criticism of the art world and in a broader sense what makes us human. It highlights the discrepancy between what we claim to be our beliefs and how we behave in our day to day lives. The protagonist, Christian, head curator of a white cube gallery in Stockholm, claims enthusiasm over the most recent work being displayed ‘the Square’, which aims to create a radical space of trust and caring, an example of  the currently popular relational aesthetics. At the same time, however, we see his morals tested and fall short again and again, as a neglectful parent, lover that forgets the name of the woman he sleeps with, climaxing when he pushes a little boy down the stairs and shuts him out of his home. In an interview, he seems unable to explain the meaning of the exhibition, resorting to art world jargon such as ‘exhibition/ non-exhibition’. Ruben Östlund draws attention the often absurd way in which contemporary art operates with an anticlimactic scene of a cleaner accidentally vacuuming over a piece of dirt in one of the artefacts which is a pile of dirt in the exhibition, followed by the frantic attempts by the curators to replace the same piece of dirt. Similarly, we are subjected to an excruciatingly long performance by a man behaving like a wild animal, attacking the guests at a black tie dinner. This perhaps suggests that civil society is but a thin veneer over a more animal reality.