I’m not sure if I have a lot to say about this week, I was away in London Saturday through to Tuesday visiting my boyfriend and seeing my best friend who is from Belgium as she was on a trip with her mum. It was nice to have a break, it sort of clears your head a bit which I think now that I probably needed it after the fast paced brain activity. Though it’s almost a curse in a way because I needed to disconnect but now I feel /too/ disconnected. Especially coming back Wednesday and being one of the two students in that showed up and stayed all day. There wasn’t enough flow for me there without tutors/students but I was happy to just catch up on what I’d missed and start on my sketchbook.
I spoke to Leah about what I was doing and what my project was based on. My plan at the moment is to create artifacts based on a fake high school shooting I made up and make it look like it is a real event in history, inspired by Mirielle’s work from last week. She referenced an artist called Jamie Shovelin who did near enough the same thing about a girl who “went missing” – Saatchi brought his work to later find out it was all a joke, the characters in the story were anagrams of Shovelin’s own name. After this I tried to think of artefacts but hit a stump almost because what could I make that included some sort of printmaking? (Not everything has to be made of print now which I’m relieved about because I felt like that would have limited me as well as taking up so much time!) A while ago I found a diy silkscreen tutorial on Pinterest and saved it for this project. I thought instead of wasting the print technicians time as well as my own waiting for them to make the screens I’d have a go myself. You’d need a frame of some sort, tights or mesh-y fabric, modgepodge and your image. The idea was to paint the modge podge where you don’t want the paint to go through. My design looked like this, it was inspired by the beginning days of Manson’s career which I’d read about in the Rolling Stone article (I think) on Manson’s most outrageous moments as well as his autobiography. His actions seemed very visual to me when reading them and I think that’s why I chose to use him this project because I felt it was easy to make work out of. This particular piece was inspired by the woman they’d convinced to come on stage, with a pillow up her dress as if she were pregnant, they got her to iron a nazi flag and then “perform and abortion” (which is why I gave Maz a coat hanger because it was never specified what with):
I actually really love it! I limited my pallet again (like with War Horse) because all the band artworks I had looked at prior to this unit seemed to have 3/4 colours involved. Here are some examples of an artist called Rhys Cooper:
I’ve always been into the really graphic-y alternative band artwork, it’s always appeared on T-shirts and posters and is common within the culture I’m in. Nothings more special then having a piece of art that relates to the experience you have when you’re at a gig or whatever – I think maybe as something I could potentially do as a job, it might be my calling. My Manson one maybe a little simplistic in comparison to my references but the thing with the 90’s a lot of the posters and such were simple. Looking at the posters Manson had in his book proves that maybe advertising wasn’t as much of an issue for a band as it is maybe today? A lot of them were hand drawn scribbles or collages of black and white images; bands such as Nirvana and Hole, Pearl Jam, all did the same. I dont think I’ll keep the images as shades of pink though, I just did this to avoid pre-colouring before I actually used it as a silk screen. The colours I assosicate with Manson are neon greens and halloweeen-y purples – much like the cover for his album “Smells Like Children”
The silk screening process was actually quite stressful and also didn’t entirely work. I was so thrilled to find a fabric (just a mesh-y curtain) that the paint seeped through and didn’t go all blotchy or anything; but the modgepodge didn’t set properly and I stupidly placed the image underneath without any thing to cover it and it stuck. So I (also stupidly) took the time to cut the image out with a scalpel and use that as a stencil – sort of like a silk screen stencil hybrid method of print. Oddly, I was speaking to a friend who does the graphics level 3 class next door at Canterbury College and he said they silk screen with stencils like this – he was baffled to the fact we used the light sensitive stuff. Anyway, methods of silk screen aside, I finally got it all ready and went on and just printed. I used Yellow and Light green to give the trippy “Smells Like Children” effect which came out okay. Only problem was the image was so intricate and small that I just had to roll with the bigger shapes – if im honest at this point I just wanted to show it’d work. The paper ended up sticking to the screen and bled a bit, but I was happy to have tried. Overall I’d rate this experience a 3/10 because it was time consuming (which is what I was trying to avoid), used up two whole tubes of paint and didn’t come out like I’d wanted at all. Maybe I could use the modgepodge method for something less complicated because I tried it again and it does block the paint just about. I was thinking I could make fake high school mascot t-shirts for evidence of this “school shooting” – who knows? I was thinking this image of Manson could have been a poster in my shooters room (Her name is Megan). Next im planning on making wikipedia pages and journal entries – problem is a lot of this will be digitalised. I still need to think of print! Hopefully it’ll come to me within the next few days.
I think through this I’ve realised why I enjoy working digitally so much because I can easily make it turnout to how I want/imagined, as well as adding and subtracting things to my desire. The strongest work I’ve created has been on Photoshop, I shouldn’t forget that.
Finally, last Friday night I’d come to some conclusion on the reason (what I personally think) lead Eric and Dylan to kill. I’d sort of had this explosion where I wrote down all the things I was thinking in my notebook – these people seemed to be fighting fire with fire. Its a combination of a lack of education/help on how to deal with negative emotions as well as being shown that fighting negativity with negativity is the way forward. Example; Aileen Wuornos (I love her and her story, don’t condone what she did but she’s one of those killers you kind of fall for because through documentaries you see this vulnerable lady who was kind of screwed over by the system and had to stare death right in the face for years until they did finally inject her. She was also a victim of her story being sold to the media and they used her to gain cash whilst she was rotting in prison – it was very bizarre) was abused by her father and sexually by her brother, nothing was expected of her and she was thrown out of the family home (I think she may have got pregnant? there was a reason why they threw her out on the streets. Either that or her reputation of sleeping around). Later to stay afloat she became, in her words, a “professional call girl” – in which she was also abused. She then killed 6 (possibly 7) men whilst she was “at work”. I think there was some sort of trigger, she thought back with what she had known through her childhood as abuse. There was also common factors between some killers – drugs. People like Charlie Manson, Wuornos, Eric Harris and Mark David Chapman all had an experience with drugs at some point. A lot of these people were lonely and had little friends – Harris, Klebold, Wuornos, Chapman. The idea of “God Complex” turns up a lot too – Manson, Harris, Kelbold, Chapman. I think Dylan and Eric’s motive was very much what Colubine 1999 said (the blog from last week) they wanted to be something, and wrong those who hurt them – by hurting! There’s no definitive answer but it surely is a combination.
Last night I watched a documentary called “Manson” – which was about (you guessed it) Charles Manson – on Netflix. Things like this facinate me anyway, and although I was into the whole killer documentaries before this unit I didn’t know a lot about Manson and “The Family”. Although, what stood out to me was the term “Helter Skelter” – which I believe is the title of a Beatles song? A woman named Gypsy, who was a part of “The Family” but didn’t take part in the killings, said Manson was obsessed with the idea that the black man would take control of the white man it was some sort of apocalypse to him. Whilst listening to Helter Skelter – Manson heard some kind of subliminal message that the Beatles were actually agreeing with him, being it the illusion of drugs or insanity or whatever. His plan to kill as many people as possible entitled Helter Skelter was born. How powerful is that? How is it possible to make so much conflict out of music? How bad is it that such things can be taken out of context? I think maybe he’s my next point of focus.
… I’m aware I said I didn’t have a lot to say. I think I use this blog as a way of writing everything down I could forget.