 |
Gallery Exhibitions  Narratives / Blogs |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Katherine Nolan | London, UK Katherine Nolan, a research student at University College for the Creative Arts at Epsom, UK, has created I Get it 5 Times A Day, a two minute and fifty second performance video of a woman who looks directly into the camera and invites the viewer to partake in her pleasure. The question raised in Nolan’s performance is gender and how it spirals and spins in different directions as the position of the viewer and the object of desire shift in relationship to each other. The traditional binary gender positions, in which the feminine object is consumed by the male gaze, break down according to Nolan. The viewer is not offered the single position of mastery as he looks at this video; instead there are multiple points of entry into this fantasy. In Judith Wilson’s essay, “Images of Woman: The Photography of Cindy Sherman,” she comments, “Sherman’s pictures force upon the viewer the elision of image and identity which women experience all the time: as if the sexy black dress made you be a femme fatale, whereas ‘femme fatale” is, precisely, an image.”1 In Nolan’s video, she seductively bites a strawberry then closes her eyes, throwing her head back in satisfaction. The viewership of the feminine object is not as comfortable as the clichéd seduction might suggest. “I Get it 5 Times a Day” effectively turns our gaze onto the function of the male gaze in art. The model in this performance is presented as an object of male fantasy as she seductively bites into a strawberry. I get it 5 times a day shows the objectification of women under the male gaze but then “undoes” this traditional gender role-play by blurring the traditional distance between viewer and subject. By shifting the position of the viewer and the object of desire in relationship to the frame and temporal space of the video, the roles reverse. The viewer and the object of desire switch positions as the photographic frame is broken during the performance and Nolan seems to be asking, “How does it feel to be on the other end of the looking glass? Now that the roles are reversed does that make me less of a woman and does it make you less of a man?” The end result of Nolan’s piece is to show the “undoing” of gender as a performance with herself as the performer. The shifting positions of viewer and object show femininity as an effect that gives way to an illusion forcing the viewer to reconsider and reconstruct a feminine identity. 1 Judith Wilson, Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000-‘Images of “Woman”: The Photography of Cindy Sherman,’ Ed. Hilary Robinson (Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Massachusetts, 2001) - by Tina Johnson
|