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Both Marcel Duchamp and Sarah Lucas and Marcel Duchamp subvert ideas of gender in these images. However, David Hopkins in Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp argues that Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Selavy is decisively drag: he is a man ‘dressing up’ as a woman. Lucas’ appropriation of masculinity is, on the other hand, more ambiguous. Lucas appears undeniably ‘masculine’ without having to alter her appearance. In doing this, she perhaps captures something more intangible in our understanding of masculinity as well as bringing to question our understanding of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Lucas’ work has been described as ‘sexist’ against men, which raises and interesting question: does a woman have the power to offend and/or ridicule a man in the same way that a man can to a woman? And if this is not the case, how justified are women in ‘man hating’?

I am most interested in dialogue. I try to distort ordinary conversations by changing their context. In doing this I hope to invite the viewer to question the way we use dialogue in order to relate to each other. I am most interested in the sort of social interaction that has less of an obvious purpose (sometimes we interact with one another with a clear motivation of communicating information, whilst other times we converse seemingly for the sake of ‘making conversation’). I strive to present the sometimes alienating nature of this sort of interaction and seek to highlight the unspoken codes of behaviours we operate by during these conversations. What brought me to this point was thinking about the relationship between the therapist and their patient. To me this is a bizarre type of social interaction that does not exist in the ‘real world’. It is very self aware in that the therapist and the patient remove themselves from the conversation and examine the conversation itself. For example, the therapist might say ‘perhaps I should not have disclosed this personal information to you, does it change the way you now perceive me?’ I want to see what would happen if one were to apply this element of self awareness to a normal conversation, by writing a script for a performance between two characters where they engage in a normal conversation, which is occasionally interrupted by the two characters reflecting on their interaction. This idea was also informed by reading Impro by Keith Johnstone. In this book Johnstone argues that that the purpose behind ‘making conversation’ is to assert superior or inferior status between the people in the conversation.

I also use discourse as a way of exploring traditional ideas of masculinity. For example, I made a film where I memorised an interview with the artist David Salle and performed it with my mother on my bed while she combed my hair. I did this as a way of appropriating male discourse and recontextualising it in a hyper-feminine interaction. However, throughout the process of making my work, what I have come to find most interesting is actually how people have reacted to it, often arguing that it is offensive to men. I seek to examine the desire to be provocative and what we understand to be controversial in the current climate of ‘political correctness’.