Project
by Chad Rossouw
Data Capture and life drawing
Katherine Bull's Data Capture: a muse fell somewhere between drawing, print, digital media and performance. This confusion of media is often an interesting dilemma when looking at art, but here it seemed to be self-reflexive: crossing media barriers to show that they are crossed. Her title seems to confirm this, in that the muse, the inspiration, is the process itself, the physical act of making analogue information readable by a computer. However, using a human eye, brain and hands to perform a task normally reserved for machines and software, brings forward a point about both our reliance on digital media and the slow death of traditional artmaking skills.
Sitting in the all white blank projects, in a white outfit, at a specially modified white easel (to fit her shiny MacBook Pro) Bull did live digital drawing in an isolated room. The nude models (Ed Young, Brendon Bussy, Barend De Wet and Willem Boshoff, on four separate nights) were rendered pixel by pixel, the process projected into a second space and the result later printed out. To protect their dignity (or ours) the models faced inwards, with only their butts facing blank's window. If you've ever done life modelling, or sat through a painful life drawing class you'll know it isn't the most scintillating experience. As you'd guess, the idea of the performance was better than actually seeing it, though there was a perverted satisfaction in confirming that Young's ass is indeed skinny without having to see the rest.
The reversal of roles between the traditional male gaze and female 'gazee' is the most important point of the work. My first reaction was to think it was a worn horse with a new saddle, but this faded as I realised that the art world is still a male-dominated institution. The Guerilla Girls in 2004 produced a new work which mimics the famous billboard (Do women have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the modern art section are female, but 85% of the nudes are female). In the new work, the first figure had in fact gone down. My reaction was just a symptom. Whether the reversal of roles affects any change is debatable, but it is a horse that still needs riding.
