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Artist Statement for Zanette Kahler
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A CURRENT BODY OF WORK IS TITLED: (re)scripting a performative ‘self’ in a theatre of domiciled experience and everyday life
Luce Irigaray (1985: 136)wrote, “How to master those devilries, those moving phantoms of the unconscious, when a long history has taught you to seek out and desire only clarity, the clear perception of fixed ideas? Perhaps this is the time to stress technique again?...A detour into strategy, tactics, practice is called for, at least as long as it takes to gain vision, self-knowledge, self-possession, even in one’s own decentredness”. My work addresses these issues and explores the meaning and value of female domestic experience and is concerned with how that experience is translated into art practice. Importance is placed on the notion of ‘everyday’ and suggests that stories emanating from within the home have great significance: socially, politically and culturally.
Academic interest in contemporary performance theory and a long standing personal interest in the works of Antonin Artaud have merged to theoretically inform my research.
My work has never been a deliberate visual illustration of ‘cruelty’ or in its essence considered ‘abject art.’ It has evolved however, as a manifestation of abject experience. In trying to understand the meaning of ‘cruelty’ and its manifestation through my practice, I realise abjection has always been there – but hadn’t been named as such. If one were to trace or map domestic experience thematically through its visual articulation, a continuing theme of abjection would certainly come to mind.
For me it’s a lived and felt resonance or drive that promotes a need to comment on and question the phenomena of domestic experience as it applies to my life – as a woman, mother, one time wife and artist. The work, autobiographical in content and context, has become a crucible for ritual and everyday and bares witness to the notion of a performative ‘self’ in what I term a theatre of domiciled experience.
Images on this website trace the visual articulation of domestic experience. My practice has always been process orientated, with process often becoming a metaphor for experience which in turn conceptually frames the work.
Note: In 1991, I witnessed a performance of “The Cenci” [written by Antonin Artaud, First Manifesto Theatre of Cruelty, 1929 (Schumacher & Singleton Eds., 2004: 112)] by Drama students of USQ Toowoomba. Artaud, French theorist for the theatre, playwright, actor, poet, visual artist and one-time Surrealist, postulated a theatre that was designed to disturb an individuals identity in an act of cruelty that isn’t violent yet is physically felt through the body. For me the affect of this performance comes closest to mirroring abject experience and my understanding of domestic life. (I AM VERY INTERESTED IN MAKING CONTACT WITH OTHERS WHO HAVE HAD A SIMILAR EXPERIENCE VIA A 'THEATRE OF CRUELTY' OR ARTAUDIAN PERFORMANCE).
Irigaray, Luce. 1985, Gill, Gillian (Trans.). “Speculum of the Other Woman.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.(p 136).
Artaud, A. Theatre of Cruelty Manifesto, in Schumacher, C. & Singleton, B (Eds.) 2004. “Artaud on Theatre, The Poetic and inspirational Writings That Called for a fundamental Regeneration of Western Art. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. (pp. 112-118).
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