| Skye Thorstenson: In regards to the grotesque, I’m not sure how to talk about that. I don’t actively seek out taboo topics or try to solidify the grotesque. Normally what I plan to do is a bland reiteration of something—a memory, a scene from a TV show, or film that sticks with me. I think most of my experiences that somehow metastasize into the grotesque come mainly from my childhood. I remember learning to monitor what is "real" and what is "not real,” what is benign and what is not. In my youth I think I questioned things that seemed to destroy themselves as familiar objects and become monstrously unfamiliar. |
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Jenn Norton is an artist based in Toronto, and Skye Thorstenson is an artist based in New York. The text below is the conclusion of a conversation they held for NY Arts by volleying videos on Youtube.
Skye Thorstenson: In regards to the grotesque, I’m not sure how to talk about that. I don’t actively seek out taboo topics or try to solidify the grotesque. Normally what I plan to do is a bland reiteration of something—a memory, a scene from a TV show, or film that sticks with me.
I think most of my experiences that somehow metastasize into the grotesque come mainly from my childhood. I remember learning to monitor what is "real" and what is "not real,” what is benign and what is not. In my youth I think I questioned things that seemed to destroy themselves as familiar objects and become monstrously unfamiliar. I remember having this comic book, the Dazzler, about a sort of disco-themed heroine that shot sparklers from her fingers. I remember looking at the cover of the comic and noticing that she was missing pupils and nipples. I went through most of my comics and drew in the four dots that made these things more human.
Now looking back—those rearticulated images that I sabotaged would be seen as grotesque—and it was simply a benign and naïve gesture. The experiences that remained were afterward layered over—when I look back on those innocent memories, I look back through transparencies tinted with memories of violence, adult humor, and sex. A sort of cultural pollution has happened. I can no longer look at children’s shows like H.R. Pufnstuf and The Muppet Show without seeing references to drugs, irony, or the terror of being kidnapped by a boat with hairy arms. There is this great film that kind of touches on this that I think you would love called Spirit of the Beehive.
Now most of what I do is inspired by Roland Barthes and this thing he calls the proairetic code—a sequence of movements that create suspension no matter how banal it is. It’s like a striptease where you feel like things are going to be revealed or answered. But then I don’t, and leave it ambiguous or sometimes it ruptures into a sort of unexpected spectacle that becomes deflated and unbearable the longer I let it play out.
I’m also fascinated and inspired by the lives of celebrities in a broad sense. I’m an avid reader of Perezhilton.com, and love how he creates this sense of hysteria about his gossip tidbits. It’s something akin to watching the speeding banners of doom on the lower third part of the screen on CNN (Which you effectively played with in your film). I also loved how suddenly the newscasters became the silhouettes with the modulated voices—as though they were the victims in need of anonymity.
Britney Spears’ lifestyle could be an example of how I process my work. First you have her generic performances that are safe but maybe a little edgy, then you have her off-screen persona—a parent of two children, evoking normalcy—and suddenly you have a hysterical woman who shaves off her hair and attacks an SUV with an umbrella. It’s a startling image but it persists in the media sphere until it becomes rendered null and it loses its potent edge. It suddenly becomes a caricature, unreal, and funny. All of which makes me think of Harold Bloom’s introduction in Gulliver’s Travels, "Swift rather dubiously seems to want it every which way at once, so that the Yahoos both are and are not representations of ourselves, and the Houyhnhnms are and are not wholly admirable or ideal. Or is it the nature of irony itself, which must weary us, or finally make us long for a true sublime, even if it should turn out to be grotesque."
Your work also does this dance with the grotesque and uncanny and I would love to hear how and why you do a dance with those themes.
Jenn Norton: Celebrity also affects my work, but as you say, in a broad sense and not by the particular. The idea of transforming private into public and discerning representation as a human entity, or identity, becomes increasingly fascinating to me, as it seems to be a natural inclination for many to broadcast their lives through various technological means. “Celebrity” is a mutable concept, and is increasingly elastic as public and private bleed into one another. Corporations reach their target market upon the same platform where individuals converse, expressing ideas within a public forum, and create content for themselves, their friends, and whomever cares to pay attention—like the conversation you and I are having right now.
I use the grotesque in my work to de-familiarize the content; to make monster mash-ups of known genres and to divorce the vernacular of our own media experiences. The grotesque, in my mind, is the hybridization of opposing states, characteristics, or feelings—the natural and artificial, living and dead, whimsical and horrific. The pop star in the universe of Transfer Station, Cherry Pop, is an infantilized yet hyper-sexualized version of those in our own. Not that pop stars don’t already function within this schism, but Cherry Pop serves as a caricature of a woman child, plastic and real. Even the name Cherry Pop hovers somewhere between innocence and the loss thereof.
As you mentioned, Britney Spears has gone through quite a metamorphosis, living between opulence and debasement. As she crumbles out of the rubric required to achieve über–pop star status—beauty, youth, and a svelte, unblemished physique—she is strangely sought after more now than ever before. The components that built the mediated Britney have ceased to function, affecting the “real” Britney, and people want to see the mechanism implode under the pressure. I don’t think of this as something that is being done to her, or that we as an audience are being force-fed information we don’t really want. Everyone involved, the producers and consumers of the B.S. information industry, wield equal agency.
“Supply and demand” is obviously not a new idea, but lately I have been thinking about the way audiences shape the spectacles they observe. When I refer to agency it is not at all in a moral way, rather agency in the context of authorship within a series of self-perpetuating actions—a Möbius strip of cause and effect. Transfer Station is not a video intended to emphasize the cult of celebrity, but the construct that surrounds it. It is about the vehicle in which entertainment, fear, propaganda, and celebrity function as one.
