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Liz Lawrence, St. Mary's Project in Studio Art, 2008

 

 

 

 

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Short Statement

I have always been a conceptual artist. As a political activist, making art for art’s sake has always seemed like a waste, so when I make something I begin with ideas or content. In connecting my art to my activism, I want to be a part of the creation of structures that enable meaningful social change. This semester I decided to focus my body of work on the idea of consenting bodies. This content bridges the personal and the political through its activation of objects, spaces, and living bodies.

I define consent as a politicized consciousness and an action of the body. I am interested in consent as an alternative way of creating interpersonal relationships based in respect for shared needs and desires, and I see this as an important step towards eliminating the underlying systems and structures of our lives that are toxic and oppressive. I have three reference points for this term: the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness, the Quaker consensus process of decision making, and conversations about consent in relation to (and beyond) sexual assault policy development that I was peripherally a part of here at St. Mary’s over the past several years.

I think of my plaster objects as pieces of my body that have fallen off and are trying to find a way to fit themselves back on, or as fetish objects that I desire to have as a part of my body but that can never quite fit or be whole. There is an underlying notion of a body that is failed or lacking, something that is trying to put itself back together and be simplified. My attempts to pack up the body into some commodifiable or consumable form, however, only expose the body’s ultimate incoherence, an ambivalence and ambiguity that I have come to embrace.

Drawing from feminism, theories of performativity, and radical political thought the work dialogues with artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Ana Mendieta, and Laura Aguilar who have explored the question of what an artist consents to in the exhibition of her body as art. Like these artists’ work, my own work engages with the notion of the performative in that it values ambiguity, liminality, and multiple meanings over a clear message. It also uses performance and the interaction of bodies in real space as a transformative method of affecting change. I hope that my interactive installations break down the sanctity of the art object and that the conversations about and beyond these objects can be the beginning of the development of relationships of consent.

These objects are activated by touch and interaction. Having minimal inherent meaning or significance on their own, they are only important in the context of other bodies, living and moving through and beyond their space.

(Liz Lawrence, April 7, 2008)

 

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