Research Frameworks Update - 02/12
This was yet another project that had a pretty great start. At first, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about a research-based project because research is the less practical part of a project and that sometimes makes it less interesting. But I was happy with the way the project was conducted, starting from a quote. I chose the Kurt Cobain one (they laugh at me because I’m different I laugh because they’re all the same). It's very tacky, but it's something my younger self would probably relate to a lot, and I thought I could easily connect it to subcultures and music, since it’s from a grunge artist and that's a subject I'm really interested in.
But my thought path changed fast. Fred suggested me to look at some avant-garde art and movements which challenged the concept of ''Art'' at their time, so I looked into a few I could think of. But then my brain took yet another direction. Because of Kurt Cobain, I remembered his wife, Courtney Love, who was a pioneer in the kinderwhore movement. I'm really attracted to the concept of kinderwhore and went to do some research on it. It consists on taking the most constraining parts of femininity and subverting them through fashion, and it translated a lot on music onto what became known as riot grrrl music, a derivative from punk rock. I love punk music, and have for a long time, so I took this opportunity to research a little more into riot grrrl, since women have always been so overlooked in the movement since its very roots.
This led me to the concept as the female as the non-male, the second sex, the male as default. I have a lot of curiosity around this idea and I usually like observing how it manifests in society, so I investigated how it manifested in art. There are a lot of female artists talking about this, talking about being invisible, and I was delighted to see it since it’s probably my favourite feminist concept. Nonetheless, I decided to stick to riot grrrl and its derivatives; it’s not merely a music-based subculture, but an independent art based one as well.
Seeing how I was supposed to create something out of this research, I thought initially about making a zine, since it’s a punk staple and its super easy and cheap to make. To be completely honest I haven’t completely discarded this idea yet, since it’s very relevant to the entire research, but I have already made a zine for project 3 and I wanted to explore something different as this project’s outcome. I talked to Jaygo a few weeks ago and started considering a collage that I would print in the print room with Marcelo. I’m thinking about taking a lot of staple riot grrrl imagery and text and combining them into a poster (or even a zine that turns into a poster) that I would proceed to glue around downtown.
However, I haven’t been paying virtually no attention to this project as the next ones kept coming, so I haven’t experimented at all yet and that what I need now in order to make this decision. I intend to do this sometime soon.
