I like how this week is titled Dreaming. It seems appropriate for the Angela Joosse's installation art - which has a dream-like, otherworldly quality. This holds true especially in her installation piece in The Leona Drive project, Dear Ruth.
This mixed media installation piece took an amalgamation of personal relics of one woman's life, a resident of 9 Leona Drive for 40 years, and deposited them in all over the kitchen of the house. It was done in a way that I'm assuming Ruth never really decorated her kitchen. Psychedelic colours and glowing lights accompanied excerpts from poems, cookbooks, letters inserted in cupboards and projected into the sink.
I can't believe no one bothered to clean this woman's stuff out of her house after she died. There were so many sentimental remnants. Angela's work paid tribute to Ruth's life where no one else bothered to, and did it in a contemporary, artistic way that admired this mysterious post WW2 life and probably inspired lots of people.
Installation art is super cool. The Leona Drive Project facilitated the work of several artist projects for an exhibition in a 6 vacant homes that were about to be demolished. The installation artists worked to create multi media projects, including the use of audio, architectural installation, projection, photography sculpture and performance. The installations in the project all relate back to the concept of the "good old days" ... where women made tuna noodle casseroles, vacuumed in high heels and crime went unreported. Dear Ruth takes the life of Ruth, a product of the good old days, and turns it into something a little more radical, a little more colourful, and somewhat sinister.
I find it a bit sinister, anyway. But I suppose the point of art, if it is to be called art, or good art, must be a bit hair raising.
In Angela's artist statement on her website, she reveals the thing that horrifies her - the prospect of creative acts and revolutionary ideas being appropriated by those venues that can turn anything (and everything) into marketable products. That seems to be the dominant fear with technology. A fine line exists between technology helping us to be radical and revolutionary, and slipping into a state of technopoly. Either that, or we simply get distracted by Craigslist or something ... either way, its a fine line between help and hinder.
Angela notes that we are drawn to phenomena that are little known, in order to keep our work fresh and our ideas innovative. She expresses anxiety about the paradox of merit in giving a voice to that which is unknown, and at the same time, the disgrace of making this sacred unknown palpable for consumption.
Oh, paradox! We live in such ironic times. Where is the line between paying homage to something and simply messing it up? They say you should only cover graffiti with yours if you know it can be better. Not everyone is going to agree that my tag is better than Pam, Beth or Sherry's tag. And I don't necessarily believe that the sole purpose of art is to please other people. If that were so, there would simply be no challenge or radicalism.
Angela ponders how we can let the phenomena teach us the terms appropriate to its description. I think the difference between paying homage to that which we wish to represent, and simply messing something up is this - we have to let the phenomena speak to us, instead of imposing our preconceived, self serving ideas on it. And there are limits. We have to leave a bit of mystery, I think. The artist can satisfy the desires, but must leave a little bit of mystery for the phenomena, to acknowledge its unfathomable depth.
"The camera can so easily reduce the fullness of living moments to quantifiable fragments" Angela states on her website, testament to the fact that it's the artist job to produce a feeling of the vastness of life in their art when the media doesn't do it automatically. Dear Ruth was a success because we saw Angela's interpretation of Ruth, with continuous glimpses into the vastness of her many relationships. The installation celebrates that there is more to life than we really see.
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