I propose to create a video installation in the White Room for my final project. It will be called An Installed Experiment Involving Memory, Space, Art, Spectatorship, and the Spillage of Secrets. The video will be a recording of myself sitting on a wooden stool in the White Room and reading aloud from my diaries (called Bath Books). By “performing” in front of an audience on video, I intend to play with the concepts of memory, time and space (the video is a memory of my being there before the audience arrived, the space has the memory of me being there, layers of time seem to blur, then become distinct again…). The video will run long (an hour of film or more) and possibly “looped.” The video will be projected onto a screen before multiple rows of chairs. My installation will be open from April 30th until May 3rd. Advertisements around campus will attract spectators during this run, but I also intend to invite the audience of “Theater Night” on May 2nd to visit the White Room and experience the installation for approximately ten minutes.
The purpose of this project is to experiment with autobiography, performance, memory, time, space, spectatorship, voyeurism, and the (blurred) boundary between public and private. By virtue of addressing the lived experience of being female (self-identified as well as socially-identified), this project aims to explore themes of gender and sexuality in the sections of my journals that I will choose to read aloud. What I choose to share with the audience will therefore render a portrait of my gender and sexual orientation identity.
This work will self-consciously refuse to deny being personal, intimate, and (possibly) apolitical; I intend to admit to my own self-indulgence by making the absence of critical voices and political connotations in the installation conspicuous. By calling attention to the fact that my installation is expositional and explicit, I hope to instigate questionable reactions from my audience. I would love for my spectators to re-consider the epistemology of autobiography, performance, and voyeurism.
The reason I have chosen to install this project in the White Room is because the White Room is an accessible theatrical space that is ideal for exploring the relationship between spectator and installation art. The room can be set up like a movie-theater configuration, with a projected image and rows of seats for spectators, dark walls, surround-sound… It is precisely the fact that the White Room is a theatrical space that encourages me to use it for this installation, because it calls into question what is appropriate for performance, for the stage, for the “high art” of theater-- and also what is appropriate protocol on the part of the spectators: should they be listening to me reading from my diaries at all? Are they innocent spectators, or hungry voyeurs? And lastly, what am I—a radical exhibitionist, an artist, or a person caught unawares on tape reading her secrets? WHO is innocent and WHO is responsible?
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