Cathy Ray, Kate Buckley and Emma Osbourn
I developed a number of pieces for the X event, ultimately deciding to show one of my own new video pieces, The Man Who Mistook his Wife, alongside and older one (developed with Joana Cifre-Cerda), Lick, in an installation of broken tv sets plus the piece, Cathy Ray, that Emma Osbourn and I produced.
The material quality of the footage and choice of scenes I was drawn to became an interesting process. The more degraded images gave space within the action for the kind of embodied spectatorship and increased scope for tactile looking that Laura Marks describes in Touch .
Whilst discussing these thoughts with Emma Osbourn she suggested it would be interesting to use some cine footage she had found in a local collection of home movies; a cutesy 60’s stripper, coy, soft, pink toned, silent and vaguely comical suburban titillation. I had found an empty cathode ray tube that had the centre of the lining burnt out in a diamond shape, quite floral, vulva-like; the exterior of the glass was scratched across the centre ] so there was a very clear impression of the thickness of the glass. I had been planning to project video into the back of this and when Emma described the footage she had it sounded a great opportunity to collaborate.
We projected into the caseless, naked tube, the figure just showing in the stripped-out vulva shape on the back of the screen; it appeared as if she was inside the tv.
Like a cracked-up soft core peepshow, petal-like and suggestive of the place only skirted round, out of bounds within that genre, pressed up against the glass.