Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Cabinet of Curiosities


The main parts of the lessons we have been doing have been concerned with 'Cabinets of Curiosities'. These were what came before museums in Renaissance Europe and were a collection of random objects from all over the world. They were typically put in one room and were for people to walk around and look at the objects, as many people would not have been able to travel abroad to see these things at the time. People were shocked and amazed by what they saw and the 'cabinets of curiosities' had great interest in them.

Below are some images of traditional and contemporary 'cabinets of curiosities'.







I found the lessons we had interesting because of the historical significance of these cabinets of curiosities. As the pieces were inspired by pieces of artwork that we saw at the Tate Modern and which inspired us, I found it very exciting to explore how we could get the message of the piece of art across to the audience in a physical way, like Artaud practised and directed. The piece of art that I suggested and which we ended up using as our inspiration for our group piece is the picture on the left, of a newspaper being scribbled on. The smiling televisions painted over a rather sinister news story show how the media and television reports mask the brutal truth of the story. Also, the writing being scribbled over just leaving the picture means that the reader will just get a snapshot of the story rather than getting the truth. We found this message very interesting as a group and thought we could get some good work out of it.
The process of devising that we followed was formulating a question based around the art and then answering it through physical improvisation. Our question was, 'who says what is important?' We thought that this left us a lot of space to really explore the topic but were slightly concerned that the vagueness of the topic would leave us with little direction. Our piece evolved greatly once we began devising. We began by using a large wire frame and pushing letters through it which Leanne, playing the Media, censored by pulling them out and scribbling on, then giving them to the audience. We felt like something was missing and continued to devise and develop for hours and several rehearsals before we came up with the idea we are going forward with. Our final piece is purely physical, with very little spoken language. We have a series of still images depicting dominance - the media's dominance over the government and the media and the government's domincance over the people. We link these images with movement, with everyone's objective being to write on a piece of paper and get their point of view across. However,  as the Media is the strongest power, it always wins.

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