mortality – lesley's headspace

Breyer P-Orridge: What am I reading…

“In the ’90s, the artist embarked on a startlingly extreme project to erase gender boundaries and reach a state of ‘pandrogeny’ with h/er (to use the preferred pronoun) wife Jacqueline Breyer, known as Lady Jaye. Together they became Breyer P-Orridge, a single unit that dressed alike, acted alike and, thanks to a series of cosmetic procedures including twin sets of breast implants and nose jobs, eventually looked alike, as documented in Marie Losier’s 2011 film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.”

http://www.factmag.com/2013/09/26/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-on-life-art-and-the-quest-for-pandrogyny/

I was looking up bio-artists after today’s class too, and I discovered Breyer P-Orridge, who is actually incredibly relevant to a lot of my themes. Breyer P-Orridge, as a single unit of being manifested in two people (I’m actually not sure which pronouns I should be using to refer to them), reminds me a lot of a physical manifestation of Castor and Pollux, except with way more of a relation to pop culture.

The interesting thing is that Lady Jaye, one half of Breyer P-Orridge, passed away in 2007, but Genesis Breyer P-Orridge continues to live the pandrogeny project they birthed together. In summary, they underwent surgery to look more and more like each other and began adopting the same kind of clothing and styling to transcend the limits of separate bodies.

I quote from the article,

“P-Orridge’s absolute dedication to erasing the boundaries between life and art, and between man and woman, is palpable in the freestanding soliloquys that seem to tumble out of h/er mouth at will, reaffirming the self-directed narrative; a legacy of many years of public speaking, shouting and acting up.”

This is terribly fascinating also because it could help me form some answers to the question I was exploring in my dictionary project – what happens to Pollux after Castor is killed by Lynceus, and how does he deal with that grief? I’m not entirely sure that that’s the core focus of my FYP any more, but it’s still a fact of the myth itself and it might still be productive to keep this as a consideration.

I wouldn’t delve into Bio-Art myself but I’m looking it up right now as a source of visual and conceptual inspiration.

Second Life

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-strange-second-life

I was never very interested in Second Life or the Sims franchise even though I had one or two Sims in my childhood and I was a fan of SimCity for a bit. Simulated reality is a wonderful way of capturing the imagination (I take Pokémon way too seriously) and creating an immersive, total experience. I wouldn’t be the only one to tell you that a Pokémon battle can get emotional, even if you look as if you’re casually button-mashing and interacting with pixels that don’t have any bearing on real life.

Creating an alternative lifestyle for oneself on a virtual platform would posess even more of a hypnotic draw, and my job isn’t quite to explain it but to note down whatever is relevant for my research.

People are very self-interested, for one. If you create an avatar resembling an idealised version of yourself (not your physical self – a version of yourself that you feel is authentic to your personality, which has no bearing on what you actually look like) you’re bound to invest time and effort into it, regardless of whether it’s tangible or not (and this makes me wonder if we should place more value on tangible goods as opposed to intangible goods, and why intangible goods are often regarded with contempt especially with regard to gaming). It isn’t unheard of for people to spend real money on their virtual possessions in Second Life and consequently to form very lasting attachments to these possessions.

The mutability of Second Life also offers a freedom that real life does not accord to you. Any aspect of the appearance is easily altered, and the environment bends to a coder’s will through several clicks and keystrokes. The phenomenon of virtual control versus real-life passivity (the thought of repainting my room, for example, makes me shudder with horror because so much effort is involved) is quite seductive.

Second Life is also subject to its own share of crime – virtual property can be duplicated and stolen, the system can be glitched and slowed down simply out of a vindictive pleasure in disrupting the order of things and the mutable age and appearance of Second Life avatars has already resulted in simulated child pornography becoming a very real phenomenon. There are communities that indulge in ageplay, which I don’t exactly want to go into more depth with than I absolutely have to. I find it unpleasant, and it’s tangential to the key issue that a virtual reality comes with its own set of conundrums and codes that don’t necessarily correlate with real-life society’s.

Another issue I was interested in more was death and virtual reality – firstly the death of an avatar (dying in Second Life returns you to your home location), the murder of an avatar (there are specific combat-centric locations in SL where you can bear arms and fight to kill – otherwise killing is a no-go) and what happens to the avatar if a real-life user dies. (And equally, what happens when a real-life user considers SL more real than his/her ‘real’ life.)

I still haven’t answered most of my own questions about existence (in terms of the virtual sphere) but this is my starter kit of thoughts for the fact-fiction issue I’m exploring.

Emma Kisiel’s ‘At Rest’ Series

Emma Kisiel’s At Rest Series

“At Rest is a photographic series depicting roadkill on American highways and addressing our human fear of confronting death and viewing the dead. My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, generally in American society, people are separate from wildlife and the souls of animals have little value. To cause the viewer to feel struck by this notion, I photograph memorials I have built surrounding roadkill at the location at which its life was taken. At Rest expresses the sacredness to the bodies of animals hit by vehicles while crossing the road. Statement revised 2014.”

I find this series oddly beautiful and macabre. In the same vein as my explorations on mortality, I’d say it isn’t necessary to do what I’ve been doing at the moment and make death all about skulls, etcetera (thanks, Vishaka, for the feedback). I could go with something macabre but this photo series is rather inspirational in that it makes death something more restful and memorializes the oft-ignored roadkill.

The Sick Rose

From The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration by Richard Barnett.

I love how the book cover and contents marry a more vintage illustrative style with modern sensibilities (use of the grid and sans-serif type). I’m interested to do something like this on a smaller scale for my project, perhaps to produce a book/booklet/magazine in this kind of vein.

Siamese twins

Drew this as part of an exploration on the Gemini twins/mortality and time. I enjoy doing quite a bit of macabre-looking illustrations in my free time and I’m carrying that aesthetic over in my explorations just to see how it works out. I liked the idea of using Siamese twins to see how else Gemini could be represented.

What is my project all about?

Castor and Pollux, in classical mythology, twin heroes called the Dioscuri; Castor was the son of Leda and Tyndareus, Pollux the son of Leda and Zeus. They were brothers to Helen and Clytemnestra. Castor excelled as a horseman and Pollux as a boxer. They were great warriors and were noted for their devotion to each other. In one version of the legend, after Castor was killed by Lynceus, Pollux, in accordance with the classical tradition that one of every set of twins is the son of a god and thus immortal, begged Zeus to allow his brother to share his immortality with him. Zeus arranged for the twins to divide their time evenly between Hades and Heaven, and in their honor he created the constellation Gemini. According to another legend, Castor was killed by Idas. The Dioscuri were widely regarded as patrons of mariners and were responsible for Saint Elmo’s fire. They were especially honored by the Romans, on whose side they were said to have appeared miraculously during the battle of Lake Regillus.

Read more here.

The myth of Castor and Pollux forms the basis of my project in that there are several interesting points to do with time in that one story about the twins of the Gemini constellation. Firstly the dichotomy between mortality and immortality, with one twin having a vastly different perception of the passage of time from the other. The potential of death for one versus the enduring existence of the other, when both twins are physically (and presumably biologically) identical, where the second dichotomy lies – undeniably similar, yet vastly different. It seems almost paradoxical to me that two people devoted to one another should be so divided by relative lifespan. The division of time between Hades and Heaven may also be an interesting thing to explore, though my primary concern is the differing lifespans of the twins themselves.

This is just the conceptual basis. I haven’t yet decided what direction to move in beyond that of an illustration-based project with possible video documentation being one of the outcomes.

Other sources of inspiration that I will draw on to conceptualize the final outcome will be astrology and the zodiac (star charts, birth charts, the Zodiac Man) as well as the traditional tarot deck. I like the illustration style used in all these esoteric things and the depth of meaning that these objects can have. Nautical illustration may also be relevant since the twins are patrons of mariners (as above), which is a lovely twist for me because I rather like nautical illustration and marine cryptids (the kraken, etc.).

Tattooed Seniors

Senior Citizens Reveal What Tattoos Look Like on Aging Skin – My Modern Met

I’ve always, always been interested in tattoos (mostly from an artistic perspective). As a point of relevance to how we’re looking at time, I like seeing how all these tattoos these people have accumulated remain a constant on their skin while also changing along with them (i.e. fading due to exposure to sunlight, distorting due to the changing elasticity of their skin). There’s that same tension there (to me) as there is in the Castor/Pollux mortal/immortal dichotomy I’m looking into. Not to mention these photographs are quite stunning in themselves.