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intro. Strange |strānj| adjective. My father always took a sort of mischievous pleasure in introducing me to his friends as his slightly "strange and unusual" daughter, a quote that comes from the cult movie Beetle Juice. As a child I was particularly interested in fear and horror. I watched almost every Hitchcock film I could get my hands on, quoted the Twilght Zone daily and as a teen eventually converted to witchcraft as a religion, an effort that only lasted a couple of years. At my parents’ 10th wedding anniversary party I joined the guests dressed as a vampire. My first profession of choice was a sincere aspiration to be a coroner. The prospect of spending my days understanding the mysteries of how a person would have died was oddly reassuring. It could probably be analyzed as a desire to control some of the things I knew I would have the least control over.
Synonyms: bizarre, singular, abnormal, anomalous, peculiar, odd, queer and unusual.
a short preface. David Foster Wallace, the critical essayist and recent suicide, states in one of his articles that we [people] relate most in our "prurient and dumb interests" and least in the deeper, more important ones. But some experiences are unavoidably universal. Dying is one.
a motive.
the structure of a supernatural tale. In his essay about H.P. Lovecraft's body of work, Michel Houllebeque describes the typical structure of a tale of horror. "A classic understanding of the weird story might be summarized as follows. At first nothing at all happens. The characters are bathed in banal and beatific happiness, adequately symbolized by the family life of an insurance agent in an American suburb. The kids play baseball, the woman plays piano a little, etc. All is well. Then, gradually, almost insignificant incidents accumulate, dangerously reinforcing one another. Cracks appear in the glossy varnish of the ordinary, leaving the field wide open for troublesome hypotheses. Inexorably, the forces of evil enter the setting." This framework, though the most common, is just one of a few that I have collected in my research. In his film Mulholland Drive, David Lynch chooses a different approach by establishing a normal narrative for almost half of the film until suddenly one massive gesture breaks the normalcy and shifts the entire film into a non-sensical collection of vignettes. In contrast, the Lovecraftian model, somewhat closer to the tradition of surrealist film, favors situations where nothing is ever normal. Upon entry, the viewer is immediately launched into the strange, often without any point of reference.
phenomenon. Aside from narrative structures, artists have investigated visual and tactile ways of "making strange." These attempts look to phenomenology and experience as devices. For example, in his work, "A Frontal Passage," American artist James Turell provokes in his viewer pure sensory displacement, confusion and disorientation. I encountered the work in the opening exhibition of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. It was a dark room which seemed to have a well-lit red rectangle hanging on the back wall. As you approached the piece it revealed itself to be a hollow space, an entire room behind a cutout on the wall and a bright red light piercing through. The experience was purely aesthetic, but also intimate as the perceptual shift that occurred was quiet and personal to each viewer. The concept of Ostranenie, originally used by the Russian critic Viktor Sklovskii as a term for literary analysis, means to make the commonplace strange, the familiar alien. In his gentle and yet invasive gesture, Turell achieves just that. Similarly in outcome but not in tactic, Korean artist Do Ho Suh's work entitled "Staircase" is a life-sized sculpture of a staircase, represented in complete detail but made of silk. Through a change in material the functional structure turns non-functional, the weight of the silk slightly alters the posture of the object and the everyday experience becomes spiritual.
selected works. (under the influence) Werner Herzog's documentary work and his concept of fiction as truth has informed my work significantly. In an attempt to disrupt linearity and build fictions I designed two publications. The first, called "-ship" is a publication combining the work of 27 artists and writers on the theme of authorship and modeled on the contemporary phenomenon of collective authorship: Wikipedia. The design mimics the web interface and navigates in a non-linear fashion through links and tags. Along the same lines, my next experiments, entitled "A Narrative Kit," combine personal narratives from interviews with the stories of literary characters to make a new hybrid plot and protagonist. This project takes the form of a book hollowed-out and constructed by pieces of ephemera. The viewer/reader must piece the clues together to re-construct the story, thus provoking an unusual experience of a written story.
As my experiments progressed I became curious and encouraged by the tactile and kinetic quality of objects. I recalled the French poet and writer Francis Ponge, who used descriptions of the objects that surround us every day to illustrate complex human emotion and behavior. "Things" can contain the memory of how we used them while forcing the viewer to make a new interaction with the object. I began making experiments, this time in 3-dimensional forms. "A Broken Thing" is a chandelier which I constructed, in collaboration with Mary Banas, out of a collection of broken objects acquired from a variety of sources. These broken and discarded things are re-combined into a new functional object.The stories of how they broke are printed black-on-black so that one must hold the paper up to the light source in order to reveal them.
In the early parts of the XXth century, a sincere aspiration to see the viewer interact with the work was inherent to the Bauhaus school. Most specifically, Lazlo Moholy Nagy's experiments with light and space are striking. Through them he intended to address all of the senses of the viewer: sight, hearing, motion and even equilibrium. My most recent experiment is an installation called "a manifestation" which combines sculptural objects with video and audio to create a visually disorienting space. The flickering light of a Dreamachine (as designed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs) competes with the two television monitors to provoke a hypnotic experience. Although the installation is a perceptual experiment, it is coupled with a "catalogue", a book which collects the wide range of sources and influences that informed the various parts of the installation. The catalogue acts as an anchor to digest the phenomenological experience.
pop culture and graphic design. Pop-culture science fiction and horror allow us to bring into focus collective concerns through the filter of very personal reactions. Pop culture--defined by the collective mind of Wikipedia as "the views and perspectives most strongly represented and accepted within a society," whether literature, music or film-- connects the individual to an enormous mass. Through pop-culture film, music and art the viewer transcends the solitude of his or her experience and finds common ground. However the debate over whether it is possible to experience the uncanny in popular culture is relevant at this point. Can the strange be popular? Graphic design is a form of making which gives itself the requirement to be accessible and wide-reaching. It enters the realm of the familiar and the everyday, it is required to be functional and in that way acts within the realm of pop-culture. It is simultaneously a personal and a collective experience. Like the weather, like dreaming, like losing and dying.
it ends at the beginning. "Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange." David Foster Wallace. |