POP 786 Friday 23 December 2011
Today’s POP is Stephanie. ‘We Buy and Sell Dreams’
In part II of Dover Street's fun-filled evening 'Love is Tender', frequent Comme collaborator Katerina Jebb displayed her most recent project Simulacrum & Hyperbole. The work, consisting of imaginary 60-second adverts for speculative products, broadcast on Jebb’s hypothetical network Lucid TV, was set-up alongside shelves housing ironic perfume bottles created by the artist and an LED light programmed with improbable persuasions. Slogans such as POLITICALLY NEUTRAL CHROMOSONES, SELF REPROCATING, HERE ALL OUR BEST MEN ARE WOMEN, and WE CAN FIND BEAUTIFUL THINGS WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS are simultaneously hilarious and completely unsettling.
46
17
In this piece, the artist who often explores representations of gender and the body through the combined use of film, photography and fashion, investigates and highlights structural truths and dualities such as the real and artificial or human and artificial. She emphasises contrast in both form and content, with oppositions highlighted by the calibre of personalities involved in such minimally produced, low-budget films. Through the use of parody, Jebb has produced a strong cultural commentary on the beauty and media industries as well as the highly effected position of women.
Notions of the hyperreal and simulacra as discussed by Plato, Deleuze and Baudrillard, are heavily layered within her sarcasm.
I sat down with Jebb at Dover Street for a quick few to pick her brain about the current project, her thoughts on Baudrillard and our current state of hyper-reality.
You’ve chosen extremely strong, powerful and interesting women to play in each short. How did you select them?
It’s true, I have friends who are actresses. But when I choose people, they have to be ready to step forward.
Imagine there’s no money; these people are not paid. They’re taking a day out of their lives to do this for me. The fact that they say yes to do it, that’s already a gift. Especially for them to say, “Sure, I’ll say that, I’ll say that line. It’s inspiring because it means everybody isn’t doing things for money; that financial reward is not the only criteria for someone to do something. It means sometimes thinking out of that equation. As there is no financial transaction it’s purer. And it’s not owned by ( fill in the dots ), it’s owned by me, the players, as a collective. It’s still underground because it is not owned by a multi-million dollar company .The reason it works is because it’s raw and no one else is interfering with the level of taste, good or bad.
That’s why I love this project so much because there are so many layers. Baudrillard said “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Your films are very much exaggerations, but also reign scarily true and precise.
The hyperreal, counterfeit reality, is really something; an exhausting subject, but at the same time deeply fascinating. It is the very fabric of the present time and moreover of the future.
You could say all objects are real, but some are more real than others.
Are we in the simulacrum?
Where we are right now? I think we’re beyond that now. Especially with technology. I think we’re even beyond hyper-reality, because of everyday objects such as GPS, the virtual world of cyberspace; it's all artificial intelligence. I mean, in anything [holding iphone] it’s omni-present, it’s surround sound, surround augmented possibility. What’s that expression? 'From the sublime to the ridiculous'. We have now entered into a realm of ‘the technological sublime'.
Will you extend this theme or project at all?
Yes, it is a continuing work. The works almost propose themselves.
Now I am looking at the relatively serious side of the subject of simulacrum, and I’m working with a professor of philosophy, Guido Brivio on a short film work which is really on the subject of beauty in the aesthetic sense of the word.
When I do make serious works they are sometimes less seen, which is really quite funny. I just spent one year on a documentary about the object of clothing which the painter Balthus wore for sixty years, which is now an exhibition in the Chapel where he is buried. I always hope that light and dark are able to coexist in a natural manner.
__________________
Have a look at Mind & Soul Control, 1 of the 11 shorts from Jebb’s series Simulacrum & Hyperbole, launched online exclusively for thepop.com.
Starring Isabelle Townsend, this segment quite literally highlights that blurred boundary between realities, advertising a capsule that claims to give women ‘a constant state of terminal inertia…to anaesthetize the thought process’.
Think about it.
About this Pop
You’re currently reading “POP 786 Friday 23 December 2011”, an entry on THEPOP.COM
- Published:
- 23.12.11 / 6am
- Category:
- ART, FILM, POP OF THE DAY
Related Pops:
- Post Navigation:
- « POP 785 Thursday 22 December 2011 / / / POP 787 Sunday 1 January 2012 »