(To view images from the "Mother of God" organized by participants in the _gaia collective's Wonder Women residency project from which these questions come from please visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/d0ris/sets/72157594513527182/)

Interview with Liz Seaton

Manipulating the body; the body manipulated.

These questions were posed to the members of_gaia arts collective as apart of their March 2007 Mother of God exhibit.

Noelle Lorraine Williams Questions
This exhibition manipulates the body and its most intimate environments. In what ways does your work manipulate the viewer?

In what ways is your work a manipulation of sight and touch?

How do you manipulate the material to rework our understanding of history and contemporary culture?

How do you create a conversation around the manipulation of women’s bodies?

Bonus Question:
How does a “shared dialogue” and collective art process effect what you create? How does it manipulate the idea of the ‘individual” art creativity? How did the process speak to or not of the theory of a “collective unconscious”?

I dislike ‘manipulation’ in my day-to-day life. I don’t like it done to me — and I like to think that I try not to do it to others. Manipulation speaks too much of the application of unacknowledged force, a certain twisting of the arm, the intentional foreclosing of certain avenues for another’s range of possible decisions, abbreviating the range of choices for another, so that ‘someone’ can get one’s way, at ‘another’s’ expense. This seems disrespectful of the viewer, so I’m worried by this word. It seems to violate some kind of corollary to the (feminist) Golden Rule: don’t do to others, what you wouldn’t have done to you. Maybe, as an artist, I kid myself in this regard.

My pieces for Mother of God are The Three Fates. The first is a wall relief of a woman knitting waxy white cotton; the second is a free-standing ‘knitting spool’ in the form of a woman crowned with nails and holding a ruler, a tube of red wool knitting passing through her body and emerging from under her skirt. The third is a woman’s figure in relief designed to fit into the corner, black, white and red silk cords erupting from head, breasts and yoni. She holds a pair of taxidermy shears, and she is in the act of cutting the threads (taxidermy being the art of cutting up the body, in order to put it on display). Cotton speaks of the everyday; wax speaks of an effort to preserve and stabilize; wool, of warmth; red, of life; silk, of value and allure. The figures are all faceless, anonymous screens for the free projections of the viewer. Faceless seemed less manipulative – but I’ve caught hell for ‘universalizing’.

The Fates are meant to be representations of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, allegorical figures from deep history who were assigned the tasks of generating the thread of life, measuring it out, and cutting it short. They remain a meditation on the issue of fated-ness – the aspects of our embodied existence that seem inescapable. Is it manipulation to invoke a socially shared story? (probably). Is the viewer being asked to confront the historical question of how much our gendered embodiment continues to contribute to our fate?

Perhaps presenting any work of art could be considered a manipulative act like ‘fishing’ — offering a ‘lure’ for the gaze, with qualities as basic as scale, lighting and position a way of attracting and maneuvering the viewer into a physical relationship with the work. This relationship could be as variable as the viewer — but maybe, it’s not. Maybe small scale and detail is likely to draw the viewer close, while large scale overwhelms, and ‘position’ invites a more limited number of potential ‘promenades’ around the work.

The painting of the figures is meant to trace the places on or within the body which are libidinally charged, like the nipples or the heart. I hope the viewer resonates with these painted spots – yikes! Holy History of Sexuality! Great Shades of Foucault!

My corner-installed piece explicitly invites the viewer to connect being ‘cornered’ to the issue of ‘fatedness’ – most particularly ‘being cornered’ to the issue of one’s death, symbolized by the cutting of the thread. These pieces also invite the viewer to consider the issue of the inhabiting of the (female) reproductive body, a body which is also culturally and materially generative, which exists within limited time, and presents the female subject with conditions that are tricky to escape, at very least.

Maybe you create a conversation about the manipulation of female bodies, by manipulating them. Maybe ‘manipulation’ is an inevitable side-effect of ‘having a conversation’, and the possibilities that can be opened up or controlled will only be a matter of degree.

Maybe visual art is an act of seduction — so maybe art is inevitably manipulative? Maybe any given viewer has the right to refuse to participate or can participate in unexpected, uncontrollable ways – but maybe the nature of the gaze has, intrinsically, a certain forceful quality: you can’t ‘un-see the seen’. Maybe leaving a work of art open-ended in some ways, only makes art somewhat-less-manipulative (and maybe that’s a way that we distinguish art from propaganda).

Shared dialog and collective art process probably always effect the work, even when not participating in a consciously chosen and choosing forum, like Wonder Women. With respect to participating in Wonder Women, I changed my mind about material choices — like silk thread over rough thread — on the basis of discussion and happenstance. Some ideas of mine were sparked by dialog, but I also incorporated ideas had by others (perhaps they incorporated ideas that I had). I freely acknowledge that I usually seek out commentary and suggestions from fellow artists – and some, I use!

Group process has changed my mind about individual process: I now doubt that process is ever truly individual. I cobble together what I’ve seen and known; I consciously and unconsciously do visual research; I read; I actively prospect for ideas. Ideas happen inside and outside – why not consider them ‘shared’? We participate constantly in a social unconscious – we don’t think always how we maneuver within it. Aspects of social experience are also psychological, old, present, metaphorical, symbolically charged – ready to (re)assemble into “targets for the sacred gaze” — a kind of visual poetry, a language without words. Ways to live a human life, to have a human personality, are varied – but upon comparison, the ways aren’t THAT varied. We often tend to fall in grooves and channels that feel (almost) predetermined. Perhaps this is part of what we could consider a ‘collective unconscious’. Perhaps this also overlaps with our sense of Fate. Perhaps it is hubris to believe that our range of choices is so … unlimited … that we as individuals are in control.