Henrik Ibsen

HENRIK IBSEN

One of my favourite playwrights is Henrik Ibsen. He and Anton Chekhov are similar in their ability to write down characters as an entity in an entire universe. They remind us that life is a bit shit sometimes and that we are alone, but that we are ALL alone therefore all in it together. Here are some of my favourite quotes from his plays and a mood board analysis of Hedda Gabler.

The Lady from the Sea
Looking in the mirror and acknowledging what life is/isn’t.

Freedom of Expression:
“But my mind - my thoughts - my dreams and longings - those you cannot imprison. They strain to roam and hunt out into the unknown -which I was born for…” (Ellida, 206)

The Master Builder
The young and the old. Success and love in life. Inner demons and a loss of childhood.

Meaning:
“I was so alone, hollow, empty. In a cold and blue room - huge and empty, filled full of things I tried to give meaning to. My life meaning too. But now I’m filling”. (Solness, 72)



A Dolls House
Life’s meanings. Success and love.

Love and success:
“That’s just the point. You never understood me. A great wrong has been done to me, Torvald. First by pa and then by you.”(Nora, 97)

Hedda Gabbler
Repelled by the Realities of sex. Defying what people accept.

Life’s journey:
“And the train goes on” (Hedda, 278)

This Mood Board (below) was my direct reaction to reading Hedda Gabbler. The Board transits from childhood at the far left to death in adulthood at the far right.

A train track along the bottom to represent her journey in life and quotes from the play along the sides. The images fall vertically and each section along represents a stage in her life. The beginning 'chunk' is about childhood, innocence and what we imagined life would be like. It moves into a 'chunk' about adulthood and how it feels when you begin to realise that these things will not come true - the realities of life. Then onwards and into the only remaining stage - death. These images portray death as something peaceful because it is death that Hedda chooses when she can bear her adulthood no more. She escapes to death where she can sleep forever more and be or dream whatever kind of world she wants.

Love Stories in Romeo and Juliet/Where is Prince Charming?
"The anti depressants seemed to be working" 
Happiness is not so easy to come by.

"When I am grown up"
Mermaids as a symbol of virginity
'Dance Scrawls' - Lines scrawled to the melody of music
"Fuck off, I'm smoking" - Intoxicating and drugging oneself to get through the day can take you to somewhere else in your head more content than the real world outside of it.

"Sex" - Hedda is repelled by sex. The lady has a gun at her knees. The triangle is a symbol of femininity.
"Trapped" - Nowhere to go, lost in life and unable to imagine going anywhere that feels any better.

Anton Chekhov

ANTON CHEKHOV

Anton Chekov is one of my favourite playwrights. In all of Anton Chekhov's plays there are recurring themes and meanings and his plays are like accounts of his life and feeling, put into words and then spoken by characters - detailed analysis and wondering about being a human being and being alive. Chekhov is an exceptionally good writer not just because he speaks about how life has made him feel but also because everything he wrote down had a reason to be there in the text, it can all be joined up and together it will represent the main theme of the text. 

THE SEAGULL

We all start life free as a bird. When we discover love, we fall into it. However we learn that it is not so easy to land on our feet - there is a fine line between lust and partnership.
 
Expectations of life destroy life. Learning that fairytale love is delusional:
“All this if just nonsense. Love without hope - it only happens in novels. It’s really nothing. you’ve only got to keep firm hold of yourself, to stop yourself hoping for…hoping for the tide to turn…If love sneaks into your heart the best thing to do is to chuck it out…” (Masha, 167)
 
Growing up/sexual awakening:
“…A subject for a short story: a young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake as a seagull does, and she’s happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like the seagull here.” (Trigorin, 151)

THREE SISTERS 

A reminder of time passing. Time wasted with dreaming and hoping. Knowledge and education is not enough on it's own; nor is love on it's own.
 

Time:
“(drops clock and breaks it) Smashed to smithereens! (a pause. Everyone looks upset and embarrassed)” (Chebutykin, 300)

Hope for the future:
“I hate the life I live at the present, but oh! The sense of elation when I think of the future. Then I feel so light hearted, such a warm sense of release! I seem to see light ahead, light and freedom. I see myself free, and my children too…” (Audrey, 323)

All any of the characters in Chekhov’s plays ever seem to have is hope:

“Everything’s just wild grass”. (Masha, 282)

UNCLE VANIA

Decay and the old versus vitality and the young.

Hope:
“…No, ignorance is better…At least there’s some hope…” (Sonia, 220)
 

IVANOV

A man’s struggle to come to terms with life as it is. The parallels between naivety/youth and reality/older age.
 
Searching for meaning:
“I used to be young, eager, sincere and intelligent…And now…lazy soul, tired and broken, without faith, without love, without aim; I wander about among my friends like a shadow, and I don’t know who I am or why I live…Already it seems to me that love is silly…that there isn’t any meaning in work, that song and impassioned words are trivial and old fashioned…” (Ivanov, 113)
 
THE CHERRY ORCHARD

The old vs. the new. Living in ignorance. Work and love for purpose. Accepting the past/life and moving on.
 
The Student:
“Face up to the truth once in your life.” (Trofimov, 43)
 
THE BEAR

Two people haven given up on life find reason to live it again through love.
 
THE PROPOSAL

Selling a soul.

Ownership:
“I don’t understand this! What right have you to give someone else’s property?” (Lomov, 426)

From the Beginning, What is Art?...

From the Beginning, What is Art?...

WHAT IS ART?
Art = Communication

We communicate so that we can express what is inside our heads. 

Why do we have to communicate?

Lacan‘s ‘Mirror Stage’ is the point in an infants life when they first look into a mirror and recognise their ‘other self’ traumatising because they are forced to recognise that they are not the most important nor the only person in the world. They are alone in these thoughts restricted by language and the symbolic order; and even if the rest of the world feels the same loneliness and detachment the infant will never know for sure. This recognition of ‘other’ makes the infant feel as if they have lost a feeling best described as ignorant contentment in the arms of the mother who cares for your every need. ). Lacan goes on to explain that the infant grows up to always unconsciously desire to find this wholeness or ‘thing’ they feel they have lost. Lacan believed we could find this ‘Thing’ in art and other people - ultimately in communication. 

Arthur Miller would agree. “I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone - Arthur Miller” (Driver, 1960). 

How do we Communicate?

To communicate we must philosophize/try to understand what is inside our heads. We also need at least one other person to communicate to.

We communicate using anything available: words, paintings, music, theatre. Art can often communicate more effectively than words alone because it can use more than one of these things.“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being - Oscar Wilde” (Notable Quotes, 2011). More so words according to Freud are a barrier in our way of communicating - they are less natural than other forms of communicating and their limitations (25 word alphabet) take away from expressing fully what one may mean. In other words, sometimes words are not enough and art helps to communicate when words fail.

"It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us-ANTONIN ARTAUD, The Theatre and Its Double" (Theatre Quotes, 2011).

What is the result of successful communication?

Communicating through art can also help transport us to a place which can affect us more strongly, a liminal space meaning “threshold” - a space of transformation, of possibilities, of the sublime and where adherence to the social world is un-necessary. 

If art successfully communicates is can make a person feel catharsis, a feeling of completement, total satisfaction and an unconscious state of feeling or in other words provisionally fill the 'lack' Lacan believes we have “an emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem or seeing a dream” (Turner, 1982). 

Mucha

MUCHA

LOOKING AT THE ARTIST AND CREATING

One of my favourite artists is Alphonse Mucha a czech art nouveau painter. Art Nouveau is a style organic and flowing in style used in painting and also design and decoration. Mucha's symbolic paintings turn women into goddesses of nature and the earth.
I took his images and contrasted them with sharper angular images.

Detached from Nature
Contrasting Mucha's painting in its organic splendor with a film reel representative of technology.

Curves and Shapes
These days it is fashionable to be skinny, despite the fact that most of us are a little rounder than skin and bones. Many would blame the fashion industry for what is classed as beautiful today. I do think it probably originated from there but I think it is emphasised and made worse by marketing, media, music industries and film industries.
In fashion, designers design for different reasons and one of those reasons is as an outlet (they design clothes just as an artist paints a picture) and therefore when displaying their designs nothing works better than a very straight up and down canvas,  rounder woman takes the eye away from the garment - in fact one designer once said if he could he would use magic coat hangers to float down the catwalk to display his clothes. Outside of fashion our natural shape is not a size 16, primitively we spent time exercising our bodies more than we do today hunting and gathering. Convenience and technology allows us a more comfy life.
Notice the background is angular and jutting in contrast to the flowing shape of the lady.

Curves and Shapes 2
Another contrasting image with the flowing shapes in the ladies dress and the angular background.

Tango Curves
Using a modern image of two tango dancers arranged with a decorative wave from one of Mucha's paintings. The contrast exists in the passion and ferocity of the dancers to the flowing shape of the wave that overcomes them.

Dance Art

DANCE ART

Dance Scrawls

Dance Scrawls are what happens when you listen to music and then 'scrawl' to the beat, rhythm, lyrics etc. I wanted to find a way to communicate through painting the emotion and passion in dance. Dance is an art form like any other - it communicates and connects. What follows are some pieces of art I have developed using 'Dance Scrawls' to try and capture the feeling of dance and therefore captures the 'power' part of the Design.

Artistry is a way of communicating more advanced than language – it uses the senses and the mind as well as the body. Theatre may be one of the more effective means of this because it communicates in more than just one way. Theatre practitioner Vsevolod Meyerhold connected the psychological and physiological processes and focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion outwardly. He wanted to create a theatre where he could express himself un-restricted – words and a backdrop were not enough. He took inspiration from Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre when they toured in Moscow. These were perfect for his physical and spiritual expression. He also took techniques from film.

He was a student of Stanislavski’s and therefore was revolutionising theatre at the same time as Stanislavski’s acting ‘system’. The difference between the two was that Meyerhold thought that people felt physically before they felt emotionally. 

Meyerhold wanted his set to be a part of the story telling and progression and to create unity between the actor and set.

He didn’t want it to stand alone and represent a one dimensional scene from the play. Just as Artaud used gesture, voice, lighting etc equally alongside dialogue to communicate more fully, Meyerhold’s set made the audience use their imaginations by using a code of scenic language which he called ‘grotesque’

Watching ballet dancers and drawing them as they move from move to move before enlarging a section of the page of scrawled dance motions and tilting it on an angle.

Playing with the body of a dancer. What I find particularly beautiful about dance as an art form is that it uses the physical body to an extreme not needed today, for instance we no longer hunt for our food or walk miles for water thanks to technology and Asda. Watching a show by Cirque du Soleil’s will blow your mind at the sheer strength and stamina of the performers - they can shape, stretch and hold their body in abnormal positions with balance, elegance and perfection. They were amazing to watch because they show us things that we never imagine our bodies could do – and in most of our cases never will do. Performing to these levels requires a fit body but also a lot of skill. I watched a Break Dancing show in Le Monde, a club in Edinburgh, and was blown away by the absolute electricity of the boys performing – it was pure skill and I was affected by it the same way I was when I watched Cirque du Soleil or Alex Cane Pole Dance for the first time because they could do things with their bodies that I had never seen before. 

Those that suffer from depression have something in their head that is broken and just like a broken leg or arm you must attempt to heal it. When the mind is broken you need mental medication - anti depressants - but sometimes the pain and sorrow is so real that taking medication feels as if you are numbing yourself to who you really are. When a heart breaks so too you’d think that you should heal it like the head however there is no medication for a broken heart and again you can run the risk of holding onto the pain because it is so potent. Unfortunately sad sorrows are a burning fuel for artists and so help little in medicating a broken head or heart but what can help is other people.

“Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way” (P30). Ishiguro, Kazou.2010. Nocturnes. Faber and Faber: London

“What did I know? But for another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky” (p86).

“That’s why, Mr Gardner, that’s why these songs you’ve been singing all these years, they make sense for people everywhere. And what do all these songs say? If two people fall out of love and they have to part, then that’s sad. But if they go on loving each other, they should stay together forever. That’s what these songs are saying. I understand what you're saying, friend. And it might sound hard to you, I know. But that’s the way it is” (p31). Ishiguro, Kazou.2010. Nocturnes. Faber and Faber: London

Empty Hearts and Jacques Lacan

EMPTY HEARTS AND JACQUES LACAN

                     

This painting called Lady in Pink was a direct reaction to the quote 'Baby says she's killing herself...because she doesn't feel like Baby'. I liked the contrast between life and death and you might notice than the lady in pink has a cigarette burn hole through her heart - a stab at the 'Mirror Phase' a theory by Jacques Lacan. 

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. His ‘Mirror Stage’ is the point in an infants life when they first look into a mirror and recognise their ‘other self’ traumatising to them because they are forced to recognise that they are not the most important nor the only person in the world. They are alone in these thoughts restricted by language and the symbolic order; and even if the rest of the world feels the same loneliness and detachment the infant will never know for sure. This recognition of ‘other’ makes the infant feel as if they have lost a feeling best described as ignorant contentment in the arms of the mother who cares for their every need.“If we could  communicate with the mosquito, we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self importance and feels itself also to be floating centre of the universe” (Nietzsche 2007, pg 48). Lacan goes on to explain that the infant grows up to always unconsciously desire to find this wholeness or ‘thing’ they feel they have lost or are lacking.

"Lacan predicted the mirror stage face-off of the alter Ego of the subject and its secular Ego upon the asymmetrical encounter of the speechless infant with the unfathomable mystery of the gaze of the Thing. It was this primordial stage of encounter with the other that invested art with a fundamental theatricality and made the manufacture of every work into a battle where victory could not be guaranteed" (Levine 2007 pg 90).

Lacan believed we could find this ‘Thing’ in art and other people - ultimately in communication. Arthur Miller would agree. “I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone - Arthur Miller” (Driver, 1960). 

Baby was innocent

Baby was cute

Baby was in love

And baby cut her throat

Her mummy and daddy cried

And her family were all sad

She was loved by many

And more lives were harmed

Toddler was innocent too

And toddler was beautiful

Toddler fell in love also

And she knew what to do

Toddler knew something from the start

And Baby kept quiet

Because it was toddler who cut his throat first

And Baby stopped being quiet

By Millie Crow 

The image below was a gift to my Scottish Auntie living in America.  I adapted the painting and took images from a Scottish fairytale book and used them as a background to enforce the childhood theme behind the woman. I made sure it was Scottish fairy tales so as to make it personal to my auntie.

Levine, Z. Steven. 2008. Lacan Reframed. London: I.B Tauris and Co.

Nietzsche, Frederich. Trans Fritzche, Peter. 2007. Nietzsche and the Death of God. USA: Bedford

Tom F. Driver, 1960. Strength and Weakness in Arthur Miller. Vol. 4, No. 4. New York: MIT Press:

“‘Oh why can’t you remain like this forever!’…You always know

 after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end” (J.M. Barrie's

 Peter Pan, 1967 pg1).

“’I don’t want to be a man’ he said with passion. ‘I want always to

 be a little boy and to have fun’”(J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan, 1967 p44).

‘I’m youth, I'm joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I'm the little bird 

that has broken out of the egg.’ This, of course was nonsense; but it 

was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least 

who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form”(J.M.

 Barrie's Peter Pan  1967 p188).

Puppet Mural, Free Will and Power

PUPPET MURAL, FREE WILL AND POWER

The End of Pier stop animation company asked me to design and paint a mural for them inside their new studio space in Glasgow. Because their films are stop animation I played around with the idea of puppets and their free will. I designed a doll puppet held up by strings and gave her a life of her own. In her arm is an open birdcage and from the birdcage fly birds out. These birds were also puppets only they have broken free and their strings drag  along the ground. The doll puppet is seen to be pulling down on her own string above her with her other hand in pursuit of what the birds are doing.

What makes us truly human is our free will - it allows us to make a choice and then act upon it. No matter the constraints we can still have this so long as we adapt to the environment we are in - we can choose to get emotional or not and we can choose to fight or not. 

    “This choosing of the self by the self without which free will is impossible, unthinkable...”

We are free when we can make choices.

     “Without that knowledge the mind...would remain prisoner of itself, its reasoning would simply be a form of madness...it is reason which frees us from this. It frees us from ourselves”

(Spoonville, Andre Comte. 2005. The Little Book of Philosophy. London: Vintage).

Free will gives us power. 

I then took the image I designed and re-created it  on the walls of Edinburgh. The First one was done using make-up (thinking on the job!) and the second with a little spray paint.

I love graffiti art because it is an art form that really takes advantage of the world around us by using it as a canvas. It contrasts to the bourgeois galleries and their perfectly hung paintings which may or may not have meant anything to the artist. Graffiti art is not something you just decide to do one afternoon after a cup of tea - it requires planning and execution. The execution of which is tricky because it is illegal. What I am saying is that these artists are passionate about what they do because they make the effort to get their work out there in a way different to a studio artist. These artists are alive and real, living in the now designing and publishing straight away.

Below are pictures of the close in Edinburgh where I did my own graffiti art. The closes in Edinburgh are very old and going down them feels like going back in time. This particular one has been covered in graffiti art.

Banksy is one of my favourite artists because of his designs and his respect for the structures he paints onto. His work states the obvious but an obvious we were not aware of until he points it out. He does this with humour, poking fun at our capitalist tendencies and the power consumerism has over us.

I read a book called 'On Desire, Why We Want What We Want' by Allen Irvine. There is a chapter on Stoicisim which is a Hellenistic school of philosophy. What I love about the Stoics is their attitude to power: they say “Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to he declares but instead want them to happen as they do happen” (Irvine 2006). Irvine describes having power as something achievable if we listen to our intellect and don’t give into our desires. What we want and what we need are two different things: we need to stay alive - water, food, shelter? and people (I personally believe) and we want, well many things especially in a day and age where marketing campaigns and advertisements tell us me NEED something we don't. The Stoics are saying that things we want will come to us if they are supposed to.

Below is one of Banksy's images of which I have altered. 

The original looked like the image on the right hand side. I took away the guns and changed the meaning of the image using the quote 'It's so easy to step on roses' as stimulus. It is about the progression of love: the boy and girl hold onto the balloon all the way up the hill until they get to the top and it slips away into the sky. The hill is made of rose petals I have stuck on and up the side is written 'assumptions'. Assumptions can end a relationship and cause the balloon to float away.

Sam's Freedom Video

SAM'S FREEDOM VIDEO

RITUAL

Two things make up The Design for Living - power and love. Success, as in a pursuit of something you love doing - doing something that makes you feel fulfilled. And love, as in loving someone and being loved in return. Or to put it more simply The Design for Living is loving people and loving what you do day to day!

The Rivers of Clarity By Almada Groen

“Shall I be able to express, one day, my love of work – my desire to be a better writer – my longing to take greater pains. And the passion i feel. It takes the place of religion – it is my religion” (Groen).

The girl in this video is called Sam; she is an art student and creating art is what she loves doing day to day. It gives her purpose and therefore power. This video is a representation of how that makes her feel. She is away physically and mentally from the exterior world, in an environment making art with other artists - she feels free. The song choice to the video is Back to Freedom by Bellylove.

She works with nature and then re structures it into different forms. In the video she shows us some of the materials she is planning on using, one of which is a bundle of sticks. The video follows what Sam does with the sticks as she tries to find a brush to sweep them up and find a storage space for them. The reason this is shown in detail is to show the 'behind the scenes' of her work, the process behind the creation. Looking at a beautiful piece of work strung up in a furnished and decadent gallery grabs the attention of many, but personally I am more interested in the person who made the work. 

Sam is currently at Duncan and Jordanstone Art College in Dundee and that is where the this video was filmed. The interior shots are of the university studio spaces and corridors. The reason I filmed the video here is because of its large open and white spaces - they scream sanctuary and freedom. One shot is of a long corridor lined with statues and with a black and white tiled floor which reminded me of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the threshold you have to cross to get into a liminal space i.e. Alice goes down the rabbit hole and Sam goes down the corridor.

All the shots in the building are in chronological order of Sam during the day. The shots outside are of her with her mum working backwards to their meeting at the end of Sam's day at university. The reason her mum is in the video is because she represents Sam's love of a person - the other part of her Design - and therefore the two parts of her design come together at the end. The shot of the leaves swirling around the ground is shown twice - this shot represents the beauty in the outside world through nature. Nature will always be there and is always a power that is a part of everyone's Design.