I know this isn’t my usual style but it’s hilarious. I was dressing up for Halloween and couldn’t bring myself to do a half hearted effort, so of course I went overboard. The hair and make up took me ages to put on, not to mention to get off! In approached attending a fancy dress party with all the care I would put into an art piece, most of the other people at the part didn’t go to that much trouble, some didn’t even wear a pair of devil horns.
This makes an interesting point about narcissism or more specifically my narcissism. It doesn’t have to be about looking beautiful, jut about getting attention - as filtered through ones own narcissistic censoring agency. When considering what to dress as I thought Marilyn Monroe of course sprung to mind, because my previous academic interest in her and also having the suitable outfits and trimmings. But the artist in my didn’t want to do what girls usually do - go as something sexy or pretty, like a slinky cat woman. So a zombie Monroe occurred to me as drawing on both feminine iconicity and horror film gore. I really liked the juxtaposition of this. Sparkling diamonds and rotting skin.
It drew lots of attention at the party (which of course I loved), both because it was so disgusting and yet glamorous glitzy, and because I had obviously put in so much effort.
I liked being in the persona. It did something to all those rehearsed Marilyn poses from photo/video shoots. It is of course an extremely knowing incarnation of Monroe. The gore counteracts the cliché of the femininity whilst allowing a performance of the more fluffy, girlie side.
Elwes notes the tendency in contemporary art to recycle nostalgic imagery of Hollywood cinema. This speaks to a more mainstream, widespread tendency to nostalgically reiterate in today’s media saturated culture. A quote here seems particularly fitting and reveals a potential in the use of the affect of the glamour/gore juxtaposition persona within my practice.
“ The demise and ghostly resurrection of film seems to have been triggered by the proliferation of moving image delivery systems. Film theorists have now consigned ‘Cinema’ to a pre-digital past. The digital now marks a threshold before which we are likely to be watching a cast of dead people, spectral icons of Hollywood magically preserved and reanimated on celluloid” (Elwes, 2005, p. 168)
Elwes speaks in an uncanny tone of the effect of the digital era of video on cinematic imagery, entombing it in the past and swathed in nostalgia. Nostalgia being a dreaded attribute in the contemporary art as it seems to indicate a non-critical and indulgent subjectivity.
Certainly previous visual work has drawn on Monroe’s imagery, but I have withdrawn from obvious allusions to her image. Though I am still interested in the agency that a monroesque persona can afford in the performance of the feminine, the over-use of her image makes this difficult.
The use of the zombie Monroe could be a way of circumnavigating this problem. I’m attracted to it also because of the humor involved in it. It would be a sharp turn within my practice though, from subtle humor to the more farcical, though I have always seems to court the cliché. I’m cautious about the use of this person, but at the very least it has re-enlivened my narcissistic passion for dressing up which seemed to have gone astray.
