"It doesn't matter" Final Project Essay Lori Amor Magazine pages cover the whole room. They are pasted to the walls, ceiling, floor and window, obscuring them completely. Walking in, the images and words merge together to form a chaotic pattern all screaming out at once. None of the pages succeed in dominating the room but the amount of useless information is overwhelming. There is a person standing in the corner of the room. She is wearing a dress and a wig made up entirely of magazine pages (See Figure 1). Her face is painted in a bizarre exaggeration of the glamour models. make up that can be seen on the magazine pages surrounding her. She walks closer to the video camera and mutters the words "It doesn't matter" and then reaches out to turn the camera off. The screen goes black. This project is meant to show what impact advertising and being a consumer has on a person's image of themselves and how other people see them. A person becomes the person they are told to become by the media and by advertisements or they attempt to become someone else by buying the products they are told to buy to become that person. Magazines have advertisements and articles that could be said to be instructions on becoming someone else. By dressing up in these advertisements and surrounding myself with them I hope to illustrate that these instructions don't really matter as the image we project is ultimately up to the outside world. Through the process of evolving my work I have researched the work of many other artists and filmmakers, particularly the work of Chris Cunningham, Tomoko Takahashi, David Lynch and Cindy Sherman. Whilst looking into video artists I came across the work of Chris Cunningham who makes music videos and television commercials[i]. I was impressed by his use of technology to create realistic special effects and by the way he was able to tell quite complicated stories in a short amount of time. It was his short video titled "Mental Wealth" that inspired the original dialog and the time span of my video. This video, which was used for a Playstation commercial, features a young girl with an insect/alien like face and body and a very high voice with a Scottish accent. (See Figure 2) Despite this strange appearance and odd voice it still seems she wouldn't be out of place in any normal situation. This contradiction is one of the things that make this video so interesting. The other is what she is actually saying: let me tell you what bugs me of the human endeavor i've never been a human in question, have you? mankind went to the moon i don't even know where grimsby is forget progress by proxy land on your own moon it's no longer about what they can achieve, out there on your behalf but what we can experience up here and of our own time and it's called mental wealth (laughter) This dialog, which is vaguely reminiscent of Jenny Holzer's truisms, is something you might not expect to hear from this character. It seems like it should be said by someone much older, a wise man passing on his wisdom, perhaps. The fact that she looks more alien like, however, lends her a certain amount of credibility in that most people imagine aliens to be more clever than humans, to have all the answers. Although no one has ever actually met an alien the media have portrayed them this way so people believe it. So, in a sense, this video reinforces the stereotype. Tomoko Takahashi uses objects in her work. (See Figure 3) I had planned to do something similar in creating my set but rejected the idea as I realised it was not the objects that I wanted to focus on as much as the reason the objects are acquired. I decided that I would focus on magazines to express this as they have been influencing people for much longer than most other forms of media and they fit very well into today's disposable lifestyle of brightly colored imagery and easily read, up to the minute information. I have noticed that my work has a lot of similarities to the works of Cindy Sherman and David Lynch. These two I will discuss in detail and use to reinforce the ideas that I am trying to communicate within this project. Becoming a different person and acting out another role is the focus of most of Cindy Sherman's earlier work. She photographed herself acting out stereotypes that the world around her had of women. Although these were merely photographs they were called untitled film stills as if to suggest there was a complete narrative to go along with the still image. This narrative was left open to the viewer to interpret in any way that they wished just as a real person's image is also open to interpretation. Where one person might look at someone and make a judgement about that person based on their outward appearance, another person might look at them and think something completely different. For example, in a series that she did for Artforum she photographed herself lying down in a bed with black sheets pulled up nearly to her chin. (See figure 4) Her make up in the picture is smudged and the blonde wig that she wears is dishevelled. Critics who said it looked to be the scene after a rape misinterpreted the photo. It was believed the series "reaffirmed sexist stereotypes".[ii] In the exhibition catalogue she states that her intentions for the photograph were to depict "someone who had just come home in the early morning from being out partying all night, and the sun wakes her shortly after she has gone to bed." Not only did she use the Untitled film stills and other self portraits to create narratives about stereotypical roles but she also collected clothing from thrift shops and used make up to transform herself into other people when she went to events and gallery openings. Because she didn't maintain the character that she dressed up as it could be interpreted to mean that a person's outside appearance, although important in some sense, does not change who that person is, where they came from or what they will be doing in the future. Even though she was dressed up as that person she did not actually become that person. If this is true then why is it that so many people believe adverts when they tell them that they need only buy a product to become what they would like to be? I have also been looking at the films of David Lynch and they have greatly influenced my way of thinking in this project. In the movies that he makes he seems to deal a lot with identity and the way that people behave. He takes stereotypical people and puts them into uncharacteristic situations, which evolve the characters into people they never would have been otherwise. For example in the movie Mulholland Drive[iii] he takes a young would be actress, Diane, and in the beginning puts her into the setting of a dream world with a mystery that she needs to solve. She becomes almost like a detective in old mystery movie in which there are bad guys, a woman in need of help and clues that seem to come from nothing as they investigate. She imagines herself as an innocent girl hoping to be a Hollywood star and in her dream she becomes that person. In the end, though, the clues force her back to reality and she cannot escape the truth that she is not this innocent person any longer. Diane was probably seduced by the glamour of Hollywood enough to think that when she got there it would be like the media have always portrayed it to be. Things would be easy and as soon as she arrived she would be suddenly thrust into the glamorous life of a movie star. These things didn't happen as she had expected. When her lover (who had previously gotten the lead part in the movie that Diane herself had auditioned for), left her, Diane was twisted by this into playing a new role. She then took on the role of a murderer but when she couldn't cope with the knowledge that she paid someone to kill her lover she created a new role for herself in her own mind creating the dream world we see in the beginning.[iv] The roles we play are always changing. We are different people in different situations and the things surrounding us influence our personal image. Magazines and other media play a massive part in most people's view of themselves. They tell us what we should look like, what we should wear, where we should go on holiday, who we should trust and anything else we need to know but are these the things that really matter? Does it matter who you are at all? _____________________________________________________________________________________ [i] "www.director-file.com". 28 May 2002. . [ii] Cruz, A., E.A.T. Smith, and A. Jones. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. [iii] The City of Absurdity . The Mysterious World of David Lynch. 28 May 2002. [iv] "Everything you wanted to know about Mulholland Drive". Salon.com. 28 May 2002.