Ulrika Andersson : Examining a Moment, Critical Essay of Own Practice
July 3, 2006

There is always a moment during any given situation in which I take a second to reflect on how that moment is becoming a part of me. It can be as simple as watching paint run from a brush, or as complicated as a personal conflict with someone. Rufus Wainwright sings, “stop me making movies of myself” over and over in his song. I always think about what that could mean to him. I take this as visualizing how I could look from an outsider’s perspective through visual imagery. I obsessively read biographies, because they are a presentation of the subject as the author wants us to see them. I intend to do the same in my work: present how I view my surroundings and self during an action. I identify with the way films like Blow Up, Trainspotting, Last Days, are presented. I empathize with the stories in the biographies by people like Ronnie Spector, Andrew Loog Oldham, and David Sedaris. It becomes through the lenses of those works that I “make movies of myself” and it is through painting, installation, photography and performance that my work becomes realized for a new audience to witness. The viewers’ perspective in the work could be described through the way that works of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Anne Daems, Barry Lavae, Vanessa Beecroft, and Paul McCarthy are viewed.
      Biographies are a pivotal influence on the way I make my work. By writing stories authors gain witnesses in their readers as I wish to gain witnesses through the viewers. The moments captured in my paintings and photographs have the feeling of film stills. Something has happened before and something will happen after, but the moment of the still hangs heavily, and allows time for thought and introspection, the time we are rarely afforded during an action. “The Stones were at home in my new office and enjoyed the lack of formality, as Annabelle lay on the floor answering the phone.” This is how Andrew Loog Oldham describes his furniture-less office in his autobiography. It’s a moment like this one, in which I draw inspiration from my work. I picture Annabelle lying on the floor of a stereotypically 60’s designed office and how that moment has resonated with Oldham. These quick mental snapshots resonate with me as well and are the subject of my work. Smoking cigarettes in the alleys of New York City provided the melancholic atmosphere in my earlier paintings. Painting nearly all the studios for my BA show simply because I loved the way house paint, rollers and marks on the wall looked, led me to make a series of work about a woman and a paint roller.
      My work attempts to capture these moments on multiple levels through the use of different media. I create an event by first building an installation, having a performance in which a model interacts with that installation, and then I document the event through photography and painting. The installation, photos and paintings are all presented together allowing the viewer to witness not only the moment, but also the situation in which it has occurred. “Blow Up” by Michelangelo Antonioni is a film that reflects how the different media in my work serve to bear witness to an event. In the film the protagonist witnesses and photographs a murder. The photographs are the evidence that the murder has occurred, and when they are stolen, and he has not been able to get anyone else to see them, the action of the murder or the body, it becomes impossible to know if what he has seen has actually occurred. In my work, by creating installations as well as the paintings the viewer serves as a witness to my creations in both the paintings and the environment the ‘performance’ occurred. The installations provide a context. Artist Barry LeVae made an installation in which you enter a room with a path taped from one side of the room to the other. The sound of running steps and then a loud bang plays over and over. The viewer is told that the artist recorded himself running down the path full speed into the wall over and over for 45 minutes. The room with the path provides the set up for the performance and the sound is a witness to what has occurred there. The viewer can reconstruct the event with the information given, the same as they can do in my work.
      In his work “The Painter”, Paul McCarthy does a performance of a painter with huge tubes of paint which he squeezes out on to large canvases and all over himself. The performance is the piece for him as well as the documentation of the performance ie. video and photographs becomes a piece because it bears witness to its occurrence. Carolee Schneeman’s work is also made various media. She does performances which are documented through photographs, and does performances involving paintings and photographs. All of the pieces become “work”, even the actual scroll from “Interior Scroll”. Similarly in my work there is an aspect of performance when the model is for example painting the walls. The representational paintings, the installation and the photographs all bear witness to the fact that the ‘performance’ has occurred. This makes the viewer consider the reality of the situation as well as the fictional aspects of it. The performance was not “real” in the sense that it was carried out in order to make the resulting images and installation. For McCarthy, the performance is the most vital aspect, while for Schneeman, all of the aspects are equally important, “Eighteen silver gelatin prints of "Eye Body 1963/2005" document one of her famous early performance pieces, where she integrated her paint-splattered body in a studio environment of painted panels and constructions. A fragmented portrait highlights mesmerizing Picasso-esque eyes, and a languid Carolee sprawls naked against an expressionist wall. "Everything I do is a form of painting. I put the body where the brush is."’ For me, the different mediums take on different roles representing different realities or fictions. Within that play between reality and fiction I am able to exaggerate and idealize the images to my whim and fantasy of what I want them to be.
      My work is very much about presenting these images in a sort of idealized way. Elizabeth Peyton’s subject matter in her paintings is of rock stars, celebrities and people she admires. She “subsumes the star within her own fantasy, makes him hers, makes him perform for her on her terms”. She is a fan, but keeps her subjects on a pedestal, and does not delve into the reality of their lives and situations. In my work I present that which I encounter on a day to day basis, within art, music, film, videos, sports, riding on the tube, reading a magazine ad, passing a storefront window, smoking cigarettes in an ally, with a similar esteem. The things that interest me the most are the absurdities and intrigue that happen to people personally. Anne Daems is another artist who approaches small moments with high esteem. In her work, ‘81 girls that could be a model’ has been described as “…women you see every day on the tube, the bus, walking down the street: unremarkable yet with a hint of beauty, a specific, personal kind of beauty.” The beauty of Daems’ work is best described by the protagonist in Elizabeth Winthrop’s book Fireworks, “Things become unfamiliar or impossible if you think about them too hard.” The moments are “unremarkable”, but the more one considers them, the more “unfamiliar” they become, and therein the beauty lies.
      Cindy Sherman is another artist who has had an influence on my work. In her ‘Film stills’, “‘Image’ has a double sense, both as the kind of woman fantasized,... and as the actual representation, the photograph.” There is a distinction when looking at an image between seeing it as a person in the situation or seeing it as a whole scene with a person in it. Sherman combines these ways of looking at the image. My work has been struggling between the two.
While my earliest work was about the person in a situation, my more recent work has been more about the situation the person finds themselves in. The constraints of working in my current studio at art school and the consideration of making art after leaving school and out in the “real world” has lead me to examine where art exists within my life. The work I am in the process of making has become much more literally autobiographical. I am taking pictures of a model through all the windows in my house, doing various things like cooking, bathing, sleeping, coming home, and also painting. I consider the frame of the window to be a metaphor for how as an artist when painting or photographing, frames the thing he or she is representing. The window as a frame is a direct reference to Gus Van Sants film “Last Days”, a film about the last days of singer Kurt Cobain’s life. The film has almost no dialog, instead it is often long shots of quite scenes of him moving around his home, eating, on drugs, dressing up. One scene is a long shot panning out from a window, which we see from the outside, the main character in a room running from instrument to instrument playing frantically. There is no sound, just the visual impression of what is going on in the moment with an acute awareness of the fact that we as the viewer are present. In my work, I intend the awareness of the viewer in the moment, not as an intensely voyeuristic one, but as another element or a presence in the piece.
      Considering that music, film and writing are an influence on my work, a connection can be made to both high pop culture and low pop culture. Andy Warhol made “high pop culture” out of everyday household goods. “The term ‘Pop art’ was first coined to describe the aesthetic value of mass produced goods”. While many look at Warhol’s work as a commentary on consumerism, the real impact of it on me was that it brought this “aesthetic value” to everything and anything I encounter, which has influenced the way that I represent things in my work. A can of paint and a high heel are represented in a way which recounts advertisements from the 50's. It is a painting and represented in a “high art” form, using mass art as an influence. My work has a strong respect for any type of pop culture because it is integral to the way we view things. The designs of major album covers like Srgt. Pepper’s are forms of high art consumed by the masses. To dismiss pop culture as mainstream and therefore not serious (like art school students felt about Jazz being authentic, whilst other music was not important) is to ignore what makes our culture the way it is.
      As a result of the influences of writing in my work, I am working on quite a bit of writing about things that have happened and happen in my life. Everything from as small as my horror at the things English people name their pubs, to 48 hours spent in a New Orleans prison. The writing began after rereading a David Sedaris book. He writes about his insane life and family. The writing is really funny straight forward narratives (surely exaggerated for effect). At the end of his short stories he always twists them in the most poignant way, so that almost immediately after laughing one gets choked up. While I do not do the writing to be read, I hope that my writing will find its way into my work and that my work will be the exaggeration and poignant twist that will represent the things in the way I see them.


Bibliography

1. Burnett, Craig “Beauty, anybody?” Art Review, issue unknown

2. Frith, Simon and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Routledge, 1989.
3. McAuliffe , Chris. “Art is the Altar at which Fans Display their Idol Worship of the Rock’ n’ Roll Guru” World Art, issue 19.

4. Oldham, Andrew Loog. Stoned. London: Vintage, 2001.

5. Scobie, Ilka. ”Corporeal” Artnet February 2006
http://www.artnet.de/magazine/usa/reviews/scobie02-02-06.asp

6. Winthrop, Elizabeth Hartly: Fireworks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.


Other research books read but not cited:

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces. London: Picador, 1997.

Sedaris, David. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Great Britian: Abacus, 2004.