Essay's and Reviews

Interruption and Situation

The Work of Victoria Melody

by Will Pollard

‘The landscape is littered with the mysterious and the abnormal and the deeds that must be performed to stay in kilter with them . '

Brian Catling

Introduction

The honesty in Victoria Melody's work strikes the viewer immediately. As is clear from the work contained within this exhibition, she is fascinated with that which remains unsaid, unheard, unseen, unfelt; with voicing concerns with and of the world. In taking this stance she continues a tradition of artists, such as Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden, who are concerned with making visible the invisible.

In being asked to contribute to this catalogue, an essay on Melody's work and its relationship to Live Art, I am again made aware of the complex and dynamic topography of the current climate in which artists are operating. I have to confess a certain ambivalence to the term Live Art. For me art was never ‘not' live.

It is important to point out that how an artist orientates themselves to specific ‘movements' can be very different from the reasoning an institution or funding body might have in using such terminology.

I think it is more useful to emphasise the role that the body, both literally and metaphorically, plays within work contained under the umbrella term, Live Art. I want to frame the critical and specific relationship that is the body , as an intertwining of expression. The body is simultaneously the means of expression and the thing expressed.

A novel, poem, picture, or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning accessible only through direct contact, being radiated with no change in their temporal or spatial situation. It is in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art.

In looking at Melody's work it is important to address the use of the feminine body. Her work is formed from the position of embodied experience, and as such, accounts implicitly for sexuality, gender, and also psychological states of embodiment, such as consciousness and the unconscious.

The way in which Melody employs the body in her work, reminds me of the use of the body by other artists such as Helen Chadwick and Carolee Schneemann. These artists have used the totality of the body's capacity to experience and perceive phenomena as an integral aspect of their work. When using the term body I do not wish to continue the dichotomy, instigated by Descartes, of body and mind. For me the body cannot exist without the mind and the mind cannot exist without the body. The body, as totality, is an embodied sensory organ that simultaneously feels the world while learning from the experiences it receives from the world. Every experience is a learning experience. The sensate (embodied) subject is conjoined with the sensate (embodied) object. The body and the world unite in a union of consciousness and matter.

The proposition of this essay is to contextualise Victoria Melody's recent work in relation to a number of arising issues within the field of artists using their bodies, in simultaneity, as both the means of expression and the thing expressed. Before talking about some of the key themes in Melody's work I would like to look at three of her video works.

Three Video Works

The One (2004)

The One ironically displays the disembodiment of the masculine (in relation to the feminine) within the narrative romantic syntax of 1940's black and white films. I imagine the great screen relationships, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942), Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940). While watching The One I found it hard not to imagine the mannequin as Cary Grant's torso; being swept around and around on an empty ballroom floor. This notion of disembodiment is made all the more acute through the stark, and amusing, illumination of the apparent dichotomy between self and other (though it is more fruitful to contextualise this interrelationship as self and non-self).

Melody plays with the culturally and historically ascribed role of the feminine in relation to the masculine to draw out current specificities of identity such as the interrelationship and reciprocity of self and non-self. As Merleau-Ponty said of this relationship, ‘We function as one unique body' . The feminine and masculine are complimentary features of an apparently bifurcated being. Melody bares this ontological relationship of being through an appearance that challenges, yet encourages, our engagement as mediator. She makes explicit in The One that being is the singular totality of embodied experience.

Revolution (2004)

Revolution again playfully engages and interrogates ascribed identity, while invoking trans-historical aspects of the feminine. Against a blue background we see two breasts with ‘show girl' style tassels being rotated (such an activity would have historically been ‘performed' for a male ‘audience'). There is also a plaintive country-style song playing, at the closure of the song the words (sung by a man),   ‘there's only so much time' can be heard.

Revolution , while subverting a specific relationship between the feminine and the masculine, draws our attention to the feminine as the source of cyclicality; or more specifically, to the connection between the feminine and cyclical phenomena, as is made manifest through nature. Talking of nature, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘it is the flesh, the mother' . This is made explicit through the final lyrics to the song; temporality and cyclicality is the realm of the feminine, and implicitly nature. All this is offered in an initially whimsical action that, over time, yields an intense profundity.

Bastard Bee (2002)

Bastard Bee immediately presents us with a characteristically obtuse, amusing and incongruous image. Melody, dressed in a clown-like bee costume, revs up an electric chain saw, after initially wielding the chainsaw at the camera she saws directly down the middle of a chair.

The chair can be a useful item, something that supports us in rest or work, though Melody is using the chair here as an object of apathy. When it comes to addressing our anger, and other emotions, apathy can be the object of obstruction. Jim O'Rourke says,

Your thinking on your feet

While your sitting there on your ass.

There is something beautiful in even the harshest of sounds. Letting out our emotions can be a painful experience and sometimes it feels like we need a chainsaw to help us cut through the dead wood.

A bee can sting. A saw can sever. Bastard Bee calls to our attention that which stings us, that emotion, or punctuation, that insists our engagement with our self.

Breathing Air

The critical problem of catharsis is central in Melody's work. The word catharsis is connected with collective and personal emotional release and in its original sense comes from Aristotle's Poetics where it is used to define a specific aspect of the role of drama in society.

In a world dominated by celebrity, immediacy, superficial interactions between surface values; masks talking to masks, Melody's work insists in the audience (mediator), a fundamental personal, social and aesthetic responsibility.

I would like to take a moment to outline further this notion of mediator, as it is a vital aspect of her practice. I am using the term mediator here to describe the position of the ‘audience,' (the term audience always feels so inadequate for such a vital, potent, and embodied experiential phenomena that is the participation in a work). The term mediator insists an active and critical actuality that posits the mediator as central to a situation that is an artwork. The ‘artist' is the catalyst to a situation that is the artwork. Her work asks a critical question, where is the limit between the artist, artwork, mediator, and thus the world?

The notion of responsibility in Melody's work manifests itself as an intricate intertwining of phenomena that constitute embodied experience. For her, the artwork acts as a personal, social and aesthetic interruption, a rupture in the surface of masks. The work acts as punctuation (punctum ), a sharp, succinct and visceral radiation from the situation that is the artwork. It is only a quirk of human experience that we should experience this apparent interruption as something from outside ourselves. Her work asks us not to ignore these paradoxical interruptions, paradoxical in the sense that they are not interruptions at all, they are closer to ‘real' experience than ‘everyday' experience. Melody's work calls our attention to the critical notion that the punctuation is only made manifest through an intertwining of our experience of the world and the world's experience of us.

Where something punctures me may differ from that locus of puncture in you, or even, what punctures me may caress you, or vice versa . This core of embodied experience, this embracing, this consciousness of the puncture in our own being, is called forth in, and through, Melody's work.

Play Fullness

One of the facets of Melody's work that I find fascinating is the playful quality of engagement with the world. This immediately calls to mind the way in which a child ‘plays' with, and in, the world. I think this form of nobility is also particularly apparent in the work of numerous other artists who use their bodies, in simultaneity, as both the means of expression and the thing expressed, for example Alastair MacLennan and Seiji Shimoda.

Other artists throughout our differing histories have understood the connection between childhood and art, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Bourgeois and Paul McCarthy. Melody's work starkly incarnates a space that connects childhood and the artwork. This space is made accessible to us in our mediation with the artwork. Experience extends from childhood into the artwork, but equally importantly, the artwork reaches back into childhood. Her work foregrounds in consciousness (as an interruption), the closeness, immediacy and necessity of childhood and the artwork.

And there's only one experience I know of that can confirm, apart from all externals, that one is desiring the right thing and living one's own life. When each time one encounters beauty one suddenly feels oneself to be devoutly continuing, across all the intervening years and inner chasms, one's childhood; when one feels that one's present moment would fit exactly against that edge where childhood borders somewhere on confusion and chance, on the pressure of things great… It's the only source of praise and confirmation one can trust...

Voicing the Unsaid

We all feel like screaming, for a multitude of reasons. It is not our primary concern that we have the need to scream, what is more important is that we allow ourselves to scream. A scream does not have to be a solitary act. Edvard Munch foregrounded the relationship and necessity of ‘the scream' in relation to society in his painting, The Scream (1893).

When Melody runs to the top of a hill to release a scream we not only find an image of the act of screaming, but also a childlike engagement with emotion that knows nothing of socio-cultural conduct or other forms of repression. Crucially, what we see is an action that is an image , an image that fits ‘exactly against that edge where childhood borders somewhere on confusion and chance…'

There is something paradoxical about a scream: In its fragility and subtlety we find an experience that is a response to the world, but equally in a scream, the world finds expression in and through us. This reciprocity is characteristic of embodied experience.

Melody's work insists in us that we confront a liminal space between childhood, art and embodied experience, and specifically, through the apparently profane action of venting anger (amongst other emotions), orientate ourselves to desire and that experience that is ‘living one's own life'.

Belfast, New York

October 2005

Brian Catling in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), (2004), Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing, London), p. 47

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (1962), The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), p. 151

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (1968), The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press, Evanston), p. 215

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (1968), p. 267

Jim O'Rourke, (1999), Eureka , Eureka (Domino Records, London).

Roland Barthes has used this term in relation to photography in his book (1993), Camera Lucida Vintage, London, p. 26

Rainer Maria Rilke, (1998), Diaries of a Young Poet (W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London), p. 168

Ibid

Victoria Melody: Ventilation by Rosemary Shirley for a-n magazine (January 2006)

Millais Gallery, Southampton

4 November – 17 December

In ‘Ventilation' Melody presents her ongoing research into popular strategies for exercising anger – as you might imagine screaming and shouting feature quite prominently. Throughout the pieces on show there is an aesthetic of cabaret and grotesquery, with a little Benny Hill thrown in. This is most evident in the performance which took place on the opening night where Melody appeared as the sequinned hostess of a game show which incorporated many Saturday tea time stalwarts. The audience were taken through popular elements of ventilation such as physical violence (bashing each other with foam sticks, last seen on ‘Gladiators') and listening to sad songs (played in a ‘name that tune' style), finally we were invited to guess the top ten forms of ventilation which appeared on a home-made ‘Family Fortunes' score board. The game show as performance seemed an appropriate way to present the research, referencing the anger, frustration and boredom often provoked by the genre.

Melody also borrows formats from popular culture in Vent Head , a pseudo documentary, profiling a piece of wearable technology created by the artist to enable the user to vent their anger and re-use the energy expended. Endorsements by QVC-style presenters, ‘man on the street' interviews and Open University-type scientists press our consumer buttons but never satisfy them.