Metamorphosis of the Feminine – The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

January 23, 2014September 23, 2014startind

Georges Méliès, Bluebeard, 1901.

The following essay performs a close textual reading of two extracts from Angela Carter’s, The Bloody Chamber. Given the constraints of the assignment [1,000 words] this is a rather crude analysis which, unable to unpack its implications, leads in some respects to the generic and the obvious. In spite of these concerns I have nevertheless aimed for perceptual depth. Since the two passages are analogous I have privileged the former while drawing upon the latter. Rather than litter the post with copious footnotes you can read the Angela Carter Extracts here.I have given the page numbers for reference.

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.” [p.6]

Carter’s employment of language here is extremely precise. The idea of clasping, of holding fast suggests power and possession (to have and to hold until death do us part?), as if the Marquis’ hands are literally round her throat. If we read this metaphor as asphyxiation, of becoming unable to breathe, and the ‘choker’ as a restriction of the body, particularly the neck (an erogenous zone) and vocal cords this would also increase the awareness of one’s own body as an object. His apparent gift is not just a symbol of wealth but a contractual exchange to which the female protagonist is committed by receiving and wearing it. At this point the choker metaphorically pre-figures the female protagonists fate in the final act and what appears to be her inevitable decapitation.

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Rapture

January 19, 2014September 23, 2014startind

Loïe Fuller (physical poet) & The Serpentine Dance, 1862-1928

“Yet we are talking about major ruptures that affect everyone, every generation, and all their images, languages, ways of life. From one moment to the next, this opens in us, allowing us to see this vast drift (derive) of the world. From one moment to the next, we find ourselves sensibly and physically outside of ourselves, outside the blind slipping away of our tiny stretch of time. We see the night that borders our time, and we touch on some aspect of it- not the future, but the coming of something or someone: the coming of something that is already of us and of the world, but that has to come from somewhere else, displaced elsewhere into an unimaginable elsewhere.”

Text quoted from the Changing of the World in A Finite Thinking (2003) Jean-Luc Nancy, Ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford University Press: USA 2003, pp.301. Image reproduced from http://www.erinwylie.com/2012/08/loie-fullers-the-serpentine-dance/ accessed 19012014.

Walk On, MAC Arts Centre, Sat 8th Feb-Sun 30th Mar 2014

January 8, 2014September 23, 2014startind

Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813). Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author

“The Pilgrims Progress, or, Christians Journey from the City of Destruction in This Evil World to the Celestial City in the World That Is to Come”. Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813. Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author.

“The geography of our consciousness of reality is one of complicated coastlines, lakes and rugged mountains.”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Serpents Tail: London 1991, pp.147

In perfect peripatetic timing with the exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Uncommon Ground, Warwick Arts Centre, Sat 18 Jan – Sat 8 Mar 2014 Walk On at the MAC celebrates 40 years of Art and Walking. The exhibition seeks to examine the myriad ways that artists “since the 1960’s have undertaken a seemingly universal act – taking a walk – as their means to create new types of art. The exhibition proposes that, across all four of the last decades, artists have worked as all kinds of explorers, whether making their marks on rural wildernesses or acting as urban expeditionaries. The exhibition brings together nearly 40 artists who all make work by undertaking a journey on foot. In doing so, they all stake out new artistic territories. Featured Artists include Francis Alÿs, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Julian Opie, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Melanie Manchot, Tim Robinson, Carey Young, Tim Brennan, Mike Collier, Brian Thompson, Alec Finlay, Chris Drury, Dan Holdsworth and Richard Wentworth to name a few.” Continue reading →

Mapping the Itinerary 2014

January 3, 2014November 18, 2014startind

Caspar David Freidrich, The Wandered above a Sea of Fog, c.1818

Caspar David Freidrich, The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, c.1818

“Resolve to perform what you ought and perform without fail what you resolve.”

Benjamin Franklin

Hello Every Bodies and welcome to the New Year here at F=R=A=G=M=E=N=T=S.

Since I have now acclimatised to my new surroundings and the concept or being post-institution, at least as far as my art education is concerned, it is my intention that this year be highly strategic. Thanks to the public institution of the Royal College of Art this private institution, active membership of one, has a strong constitution that accepts responsibility for populating its own flaura and fauna. Like any Visual Arts MA graduate at present there are a number of complex negotiations to undergo, not least the issue of my re-location. Sans RCA these also include practical issues of space, facilitation of practice, technical support, production facilities, critical input and peer support to name a few since one has effectively been decentralised, and you might argue ostracised since I am now no longer in the centre [London] but at the periphery [Regional].

I will of course be continuing with Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in Literature and will post regular updates on critical writing. I will also be following a particular strand from my MA Thesis on Eco-Poetics. Working between these two poles the aim is to outline a territory for practice whereby these routes will eventually converge. I am currently undertaking research for the preparation of a PhD application (the seeds of which were sown in said Thesis). Working with and against these two routes the aim is to construct a path of one’s own through phenomenology, feminist theory, geography, poetics and continental philosophy. Ingesting new intellectual fodder excavates the latent in practice enabling the turning over of new ground to reach a new practical and theoretical horizon. I hope, partially at least, to represent this journey here and of course your company is most welcome.

Yours deep in the thicket that is the Bibliography ,