Performing and Documenting Post-Internet: Feminist Needlecraft and a Poetics of Surveilling

Abstract

My doctoral research practice consists primarily of gallery-based needlecraft performances and moving image works made from the performances’ documentation. I have mended clothes belonging to community members, unravelled and reknitted yarn into new garments, and sewed labels onto the clothes of gallery visitors. These performances have been recorded using security and action cameras and the resulting stills and footage edited into new video works. My overarching argument is that, given that one of art’s dominant contexts is that of capitalism, in which ideas and objects may be defined in relation to their role as luxury commodities, one more ethically-tuned approach to artmaking is to turn away from the art market and adopt a feminist critique of contemporary culture that recognises women’s unpaid labour. Following the Conceptual principle of dematerialisation, I have oriented my practice away from commodity production and opened it to temporal performative practices, claiming feminist purpose in my use of needlecraft as a gendered performance medium. My performance practice of ‘total giving’ is a metaphor for the invisible ‘iceberg economy’ of women’s unpaid labour that props up and enables capitalism. A further argument is that since our everyday relationship with photography has changed in the last few years due to the saturation of mobile phones and surveilling cameras, contemporary lens-based practice needs to reflect new conditions of presentness, performativity and operator-less affect. These conditions have changed our understanding of the medium and our way of being in the world. My use of selfsurveillance and screens during performances models our conscious performance of identity in a condition of perpetual present-ness, the centrality of performance documents to contemporary life, and the possibility of experiencing affect from surveilling camera footage with its qualities of displacement and objectivity. There are thus multiple differing registers and histories to this work: the gendered nature of textiles and its feminist roles; art’s sticky relationship with capitalism; the ongoing feminist project to achieve equity and agency under capitalism both in and out of the art world; how camera phones and the internet have made us performers in a perpetual present; finally, how the ‘cool’ gaze of a surveilling lens might paradoxically invoke emotional responses in viewers. These differing strands have emerged as I have sought to analyse how my work might meaningfully and poetically contribute to contemporary life and culture, and advocate ideas I believe important for any culture’s healthy progression. A further dimension to this work is the emotional apprehension of transience, which has long been core to my photographic work and now extends to my performative and textile work. The Japanese concepts mu, ma, mujo and mono no aware are important. Mu and ma speak to consciousness of absence and transience; emptiness that is full of possibility; space or interval that is profound. Mujo speaks to the understanding that everything that is born must die, and mono no aware means consciously to attend to, and/or to take poignant, mournful pleasure in, impermanence. My work is also informed by the cinema term temps mort. Translating from the French as ‘dead time’, temps mort refers to the cinematic time before or after action takes place, characters enter the frame or narrative progresses. My final installation plan is to merge live performance with material relics of previous performances and video works created from surveillance documentation of previous performances. In doing so I aim to create spatial and temporal proximity between performed activities and their material residues and documentation, presenting both as interdependent, integrated artworks.