Research and development in art and design is a central, conspicuous and integrated aspect of KHiB's efforts. The following text is a description of a research project initiated by Professor Karen Kipphoff of the Dept of Fine Art during the fall of 2008. This is the first part of the project - labled Phase 1.
Intention In continuation of Floating Characters I wish to further develop a mannequin or puppet that offers several possible ways of using it by mechanical manipulation. By assigning up to three players for the movements it will offer a great potential for externalizing certain characteristics, functions and esthetical appearances to not just the puppet but to the players as well. The puppet and players can thus exchange the subject-object binary allowing for several characters where at first sight only a single one is perceived. It is my plan to then use this puppet as the central object in an installation and/or staging dealing with the topics of: private / public / fetish / clone / automaton / cocoon / alter ego. The work is supposed to result in an installation/staging for theatre.
Inspiration, Material, Background In Werner Schwab’s Präsidentinnen three grotesque characters are portrayed and in the three plays Come and Go, Where When and That Time of Samuel Beckett there are three characters as were In Floating Characters. Three players, three characters, multiple possibilities for the portrayal of diverse aspects of life such as youth, middle age and old age or inside, outside and contested site. Possible analogies to real characters could also include Hillary Clinton, Lynndie England (Abu Ghraib), Angelina Jolie …or Miss Marple, Mother Theresa and Meret Oppenheim. Gavin Turk’s characters (based on Samuel Beckett’s threesome Lucky, Pozo and Estragon) “Waiting for Gavo” includes the threesome of Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Elmgren/Dragseth, the curators for the Nordic Pavillion at the next Venice Biennial showed the piece Drama Queen at the 2007 Skulpturen-Projekte Münster. The piece referenced the artists Giacomettti, Koons, Bourgeois, Rückriehm and Bill. Puppet and object theatre seems to have a come back!
I wish to look at the way a figure sheds skins and how it is perceived in the external gaze. The banal comedy of the Hillary Clinton / Barack Obama spectacle and how its is fed to the worldwide public as well amongst other earlier media events fuel my interest in the shifting relationship between the private and the public body and how this is manifested in everyday life, politics, media, monuments, face-books and my-spaces.
Obviously there also is the topic of the gendered and/or sexed body and the fetish. Artists as diverse as Hans Bellmer, Lynn Hershman, Annie Sprinkle, Paul McCarthy, Pierre Molinier have been intrigued, harassed and obsessed with the subject and have given it form. I wish to look at this again from the 2008 perspective of the chameleon implicit in a puppet. The possibility of shedding skins like James Bond slipping out of his dark and slippery wet suit under which appears the perfectly ironed white dress suit underneath which… intrigues me.
Surely Hillary won’t be shedding Obama to turn into Bill to gulp up Diana and create Angelina out of Heath, but the liquid body as described in several recent essays is of interest to this project as is the prosthetic body, the cyber-feminist body and that of the good old marionette / Bunraku figure.
Read about Karen Kipphoff's previous project, "Floating Characters" (in Norwegian only)
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