Today in lesson, we were able to really discuss as a group and as individuals what art is to us. A girl in my group said the quote above and that really got me thinking about the process of creating art.

For me, art has to evoke something. When I look at art, I want to be able to understand, sympathise, empathise or simply enjoy the visual in front of me.

I put it like this: art is what you make of it. It is easy to call yourself an artist but if said art does not evoke any sense of emotion, can it really be called art?

For me, the longer the lasting effects of a piece has on the audience, the better the art. Take for example the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who creates installations made from the natural world. Part of their poignancy the installations only last as long as nature allows it to, and in the process of decay, the visual of the piece alters.

 ‘Andy Goldsworthy is a brilliant British artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations. Besides England and Scotland, his work has been created at the North Pole, in Japan, the Australian Outback, in the U.S’ (Caddy 2014)

 

(Goldworthy, 2010)

 

 

 

 

Look at the reverse of this, sometimes a grotesque way of creating art results in something that can be deemed as aesthetically pleasing and almost beautiful. As an example, I would like to draw attention to an artist, Millie Brown, who creates her pieces through drinking coloured milk and then regurgitating the colourful liquid on to a canvas. These are some of the works that have come from this practice.

You could argue that the actual act of regurgitation is art in itself, but referring to my previous statement, how can anyone find this process aesthetically pleasing!?

Food for thought…

NOT to be regurgitated…

 

Cited Texts

Milliebrownofficial.tumblr.com, (2014). MILLIE BROWN // ARTIST. [online] Available at: http://milliebrownofficial.tumblr.com/ [Accessed 19 May. 2014].

Bibliography: Caddy, J. (2014). Morning Earth Connects & Celebrates Arts & Ecology. [online] Morning-earth.org. Available at: http://www.morning-earth.org/ [Accessed 25 May. 2014].

Class Exercise, during which we were given the opening:
Lights go black, chair extreme down left. A very tight spotlight comes up on it, from the side. A voice is heard…

From here, my hands began to write faster than I could think! This exercise opened my eyes to how creative you can be if you let your mind runaway with itself. Although the outcome was a monologue of a dark nature and tone, I felt I had written something that could really be developed in to something that could eventually be performed. Here’s what I came up with:

 

Lights go black, chair extreme down left. A very tight spotlight comes up on it, from the side. A voice is heard…

Lights go black, chair extreme down left. A very tight spotlight comes up on it, from the side. A voice is heard on stage as the lights go up on the chair.

 

Voice:

That’s where she sat. The last time I saw her, she was different.It was as if someone had removed any positivity from her thoughts. Through the reflection on her face, I could see what she could see. The bleak reality that things  weren’t about to get better any time soon. She turned to me and asked with her eyes wide, what can I do? How can I make this better?

The sound of flatlining continues throughout the rest of the speech, because of this, the voice struggles to be heard and is forced to strain the retelling of the story.

I hesitated. The worst thing I could have done. Because in that moment of hesitation, the reflection of my face, she  could see what I couldn’t see – a way out. A way to make it better, to make her better.

The voice stops.

Lighting change, up on to a figure, on a higher platform, blue light. Figure stands looking down as if ready to jump.

It was me who had to tell her parents. I was waiting at the hospital, with a mind in disarray. Was this my fault?

Mrs. Croft walked towards me, removing her gloves, cheeks pink from the cold outside or from running towards her daughter’s fate. I began to rehearse what to say in my head. Do I admit fault? Do I tell a mother that because of a slight moment’s hesitation from her daughter’s best friend, her precious baby girl took her own life? As she made her way through the ghostly hospital hall, she saw it reflected on my face. The despair or guilt, which one more prominent I am unsure.

What happened next, was not to be expected. As Mrs Croft registered my facial expression, what I saw reflected in her face, was not that of despair, bereavement or loss, but relief.
She sighed, stood still and in the softest sweetest voice, she says, – what a shame. She moved past me, redressing her cold hands in the gloves removed just moments ago, confusion clouded my vision as she added ‘I suppose it had to happen at some point’.

Rage is the only thing I remember next. They say their are seven stages of grief – for me, anger came first but in the most unexpected of ways.

Actor pulls out a book, titled ‘the seven stages of grief’

____________________________________

 

 Texts Explored

Recover From Grief, (2014). 7 STAGES OF GRIEF. [online] Available at: http://www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html [Accessed 21 Feb. 2014].

Spalding Rockwell Gray (June 5, 1941 – ca. January 11, 2004) was an American actor and writer. He is known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

 

Notes from his piece: Swimming to Cambodia

 

The way in which Gray tells a story:

Liminal format.

A frequent shift in tone and atmosphere achieved by tone of voice, speed of speech and the use of dramatic pauses.

 

To some extent, when voicing the characters of those mentioned in the story, Gray adopts a different persona in order for the order to differentiate who is talking within the story being told such as the accent adopted by Gray when portraying Ivan.

 

‘First you suffer, then you synogue’ (Gray, 1987)

 

Changes the tone through lighting and his proximity to the microphone – close to the microphone changes his voice and allows him to deliver lines with more prominence. Uncanny use of abstract music allows audience to focus on more prominent part of the story. Once lines have been delivered with a sense of sincerity, Gray breaks the seriousness of the piece as the music also stops delivering lines such as ‘but of course I wasn’t going to tell her that’ evoking laughter from the audience.

 

Setting: He sits in front of an audience, with nothing but his notes, a microphone and the backdrop of a blue sky. This forces the audience to concentrate solely on the speech of the piece, rather than seeing the performance as an aesthetic piece.

 

Hand gestures also enables the telling of the story. When smoking marijuana, he mimes the action of taking ‘two tokes’ – this adds to the comedic factor of the story. The piece is also enhanced by the sound of a storm in the darker tones to the writing. The experience that Gray describes of being high is hilarious due to the state of panic in which this part of the story is told. Microphone effects such as echoing also enable Spalding to portray the way he is feeling at this point.

 

Also cuts to use of media in order for the story to progress. Humour is key theme throughout, when describing a director with which he worked, he says he was a combination of ‘Zorro, Jesus and Rasputin’ evoking laughter from the audience.

 

Some soliloquy elements – frank honesty of internal thoughts, eg. North Korea, ‘snapping on the way to by soup from the supermarket’ – when delivering this, audience are given a sense of dicomfort. Is Spalding’s bipolar disorder evident here? Autobiographical work, audience invited to laugh by Spalding at his irrationality and obsessive nature and off tangent subjects of which he speaks – e.g tattoos.

 

The pointing to Cambodia also breaks the story up before Gray talks on another subject.

POLITICALLY SATIRICAL

‘Operation Breakfast’

Mocks those in charge of this movement in the Cambodian area inviting the audience to laugh. This section ends with a sinister tone and the mention of genocide, allowing the audience to understand that they have been invited to laugh at a topic which is largely negative and frequently ignored in the media.

Dialect between Spalding and ‘Jack Daniels’ – no break in speech, change of tone and pitch in voice allows audience to distinguish who is talking at that given moments well as the change in camera angle every time the narrator changes.

 

Breaks story in order to directly address the audience.

Cited Texts
YouTube, (2014). Swimming to Cambodia – Spalding Gray. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JboW8AHE7A [Accessed 19 May. 2014].

My FIRST idea is to explore female characters throughout history and explore different personality traits that may have not been explored in other interpretations. This resembles Carol Anne Duffy’s work, ‘The World’s Wife (Duffy, 1999)’, in which she wrote  a collection of short monologues/poems written by the famous women and the wives of famous men throughout history.

Some of the poems of intrigue:

– Queen Herod

– Mrs Midas

– Mrs Darwin

– The Devil’s Wife (Moira Hindley)

– Medusa

 

 

30th January, 2014

Joan of Ark – before burnt at stake, reveals she has powers and leads thousands to their deaths. She relishes in this and sees it as her ‘greatest achievement’.

(Abernethy, 2013)

Virginia Wolf – Stones in her pockets. A final monologue before death. Each stone in her pockets, are the things leading her to the state of despair. Children, writers block, lack of appreciation for her work. End with haunting song:

lay me down,

let the only sound

be the overflow,

pockets full of stones. (Welsh, 2013)

 Blue lighting end, a fan to look like underwater? An idea to explore

Eve: Talks about the frank reality of only living with, having sex with and seeing Adam everyday. (She is less than pleased with this situation!)

 (Commons.wikimedia.org, 2014)

Cited Texts

Abernethy, S. (2013). Joan of Arc – A guest post by author Deanna Proach. [online] The Freelance History Writer. Available at: http://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2013/04/16/joan-of-arc-a-guest-post-by-author-deanna-proach/ [Accessed 19 May. 2014].

Commons.wikimedia.org, (2014). File:Lucas Cranach the Elder Adam and Eve.JPG – Wikimedia Commons. [online] Available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_Cranach_the_Elder_Adam_and_Eve.JPG [Accessed 19 May. 2014].

Duffy, C. (2000). The world’s wife. 1st ed. London: Picador.

Welsh, F. (2014). What the Water Gave me. [Online, Spotify] London: Universal Republic.

Vidani, P. (2014). [online] Available at: http://theliterarysnob.tumblr.com/post/34814003525/awritersruminations-virginia-woolf [Accessed 19 May. 2014].