The new idea for our performance piece was mainly inspired by Karen Finley. “Her performance work, all self-authored, was mainly centered around the oppression of women and resultant feelings of rage and self-loathing, but also addressed sexual repression, domestic abuse, homosexuality, and other taboo subjects.” (Holmes) Finley uses the mantra from the second wave feminism, ‘the personal is political’ to bring awareness to issues that are usually private; this is something we wanted to inject into our piece too. We wanted to have scripts based on the nudes and our own personal stories to tell to the audience.

We decided to start our performance in the entrance of the building. We then aimed to talk to the audience about ourselves, including an inner monologue style of speech while putting on our makeup. We were not aiming for the make-up to be applied perfectly – we could make mistakes, poke ourselves in the eye, scrunch up our faces, make mistakes and then redo it. By putting the make-up on we would make ourselves into an image of what society might expect us to appear but in a highly stereotypical way. However, at the same time, we also wanted to make it clear that the wearing of make-up is still our own choice. That there can be a dichotomy in terms of the use of make-up, its effects and how it is perceived.

We would then take the audience over to the room with the nudes in and ask them to stand in front of one that catches their eye. We wanted to convey that the understanding of a painting depends on what the picture brings to us in terms of its context – historical, political and social as well as the artistic nature of it (colours, form, materials, textures etc.) However we also wanted to convey that our understanding today depends on our perception from a contemporary viewpoint as well as taking into account personal viewpoints. To help the audience develop their views, we decided to use the facts about how many males compared to females actually painted the pieces to show the dominance of male artists in previous eras.

We then planned to finish our piece by returning outside and removing all the makeup and tying up our hair because wearing makeup is a continuous cycle that has to be repeated every day.

After delivering this idea, we received more feedback. Again we had overcomplicated it. There were too many things happening and we lost our key meaning due to changing ideas and trying to fit more in. A key point raised was that we can’t rely on an audience to interact with us. They may not want to take part or they may not be enough people as there are many other performances that are happening on the same day. Also, we lost our feminist approach by trying to show that make-up isn’t necessarily bad. More refinement is needed and a much clearer view. We are still very keen to keep make-up as our key theme, the rest either needs to be discarded or changed dramatically.

Bibliography

Holmes. L.  Progress Through Provocations: Analyzing the Work of Karen Finley. [Online] Available from: http://cujah.org/past-volumes/volume-iii/essay-3-volume-3/ [Accessed: 1st March 2015]