Medium Specificity Piece - Makeup and Ideas about Beauty

Artist's Statement:

For this project, I decided to focus on the medium of makeup. As a woman, this is the most pervasive artistic medium in my life, as I work with it every single day. I thought about the qualities that are unique to makeup, and I realized that a human face is essential to using makeup as an art form. It turns out that if you take the face away from makeup, it's just a bunch of chalk and mud. I guess that you could say this about most artistic mediums. Clay, without being shaped, is just mud too. Paint, not on a canvas, is just a tube of liquid that we probably shouldn't drink. However, I think that this medium goes deeper. Makeup is an essential part of many women's daily routine, including my own. I rarely leave the house without makeup on, and when I do, it is only for a quick errand. I would never think about going to school, church, or anywhere important without at least having basic makeup on.  I can’t say the same thing about the medium painting or of clay. Women around the world smear these liquids and powders and pastes on their faces everyday in order to feel beautiful. For many women, including myself, makeup is an obligation and also an investment in ourselves.

Beauty rituals have existed for thousands of years, but modern beauty rituals have become extreme, fueled by the beauty industry and mass media telling women and girls what beauty looks like, and by showing them exactly where they fall short in meeting these ideals.  This media attack on girls has had a profound impact upon the past few generations, a phenomenon that has explored in many works, including the documentary Thin, which explores the modern anorexia epidemic in the US. This epidemic has largely been fueled by the media and beauty industries, as they constantly barrage girls into believing that they are not good enough. I also thought of the documentary Miss Representation, which discusses the ways that the media is giving girls a skewed expectation of the way that they should look. Both of these documentaries came to my mind as I was conceptualizing this project, as they have both been very influential to me in my realization of what the modern media does to young girls. I was once a victim of that media. As a tween, I spent a significant amount of my time absorbing fashion magazines and doing everything that I could to be as beautiful as the women on those pages. In working on this project, I also thought of an episode of the National Geographic show Taboo, which depicts extreme beauty rituals from around the world. The most haunting of these were women in Russia who were willing to have their legs broken and stretched out just so they could be just a few inches taller. Isn’t there something wrong with our beauty industry if women are willing to subject themselves to pain, to the point of getting their legs broken for the sake of beauty? This is not beauty. When I was young, I was told that pain is beauty, and beauty is pain. Shouldn’t it be the exact opposite? Shouldn’t being beautiful be being comfortable in your own skin? As I was working on this project, I thought about the comic “Show and Tell.” Instead of showing you what beauty is, I decided to tell you about it. I used the medium of my own makeup (consisting of mascara, lip gloss, foundation, eye shadow, lipstick, and blush) to show that beauty is not these products, as the modern media and beauty industry would have us believe. There is nothing beautiful about the project that I have created. It is not astounding, breathtaking, or wonderful. It is just some paste and chalk on a canvas. The beauty resides not in these products that we put on ourselves, but in the faces beneath the products. Beauty is not these things that we put on our bodies everyday in order to assuage societal norms about beauty. Beauty is not making yourself starve so that you look like the model on the cover of Cosmo. The modern media and the beauty industry have given women a skewed view of what beauty is, and has told them that they are not good enough. My answer to that nonsense is in this piece.

History Story - The Pogy

            This project was centered on the creation of a historical narrative. Since the project involved writing my first screenplay, I knew that it was going to be an interesting experience from the start. This assignment ended up being very challenging from a technical aspect. I had never used Final Draft before, and I was completely unfamiliar with the interface of the program. Hannah and I struggled to even format our assignment, let alone write anything. Additionally, we decided to loosely base our screenplay on some experiences that my dad had when he was in the Navy on the USS Pogy submarine. Choosing to focus on a situation from my family history was also an interesting choice, as it made me very partial to the character that was portraying my dad.  I wanted to make him the hero of our story from the beginning. From the readings and viewings that were completed in preparation for this assignment, I really liked the emphasis on how our family members have played small, but very significant roles in the creation of our history. In the process of interviewing my dad for this assignment, I found out that he was on the same submarine that the movie The Hunt for Red October is based on. He was on that ship only a few years after the movie came out, and the USS Pogy was still responsible for many of the most secret and dangerous missions of the Gulf War. This was something that I had never discussed with him before, but it really hit me how much this was like the story about the lady who ironed the king’s shirts. Both of our family members have played small parts in the grander scheme of history. I think that this was an interesting realization to have, as I had never before considered the role that my dad played in the navy, and the long-term implications of that. Throughout this project Hannah and I took stereotypes and things that we had seen from other movies that we had seen about submarines, and the armed forces in general. We also made several references to Tom Clancy and Sean Connery, as an inside joke to the fact that this is the same time period as The Hunt for Red October. However, we did make an effort to make sure that we were not directly working from the plot of The Hunt for Red October, as we wanted to make this screenplay our own. We also wanted to end the tension of the script with a kind of silly moment, as the characters realize that the submarines are really whales, and by Lieutenant Clark winning the beard growing contest. Overall, this was a challenging, but rewarding assignment, as we learned to write our first screenplay.

Collaborating by Choosing Not to Collaborate

The theme of this week was process, and Max Johnson and I teamed up to work together. This was a very interesting project from the start, because Max and I have very different styles of artwork. He is into fiction and surrealist film, and I am into realism and documentary film. When trying to pick a topic, we went back and forth for a long time. I would suggest a variety of short sound documentaries. I really wanted to record the process of grocery shopping. I was thinking back to the “Routines” videos, and how short and simple those processes were. I wanted to portray something very simple, but something that is also a part of our everyday lives. Max would then suggest a fantastical idea. This went on for a very long time; until I finally made the comment that I wished that we were recording our conversation, as it was getting to be pretty entertaining. That was when this idea came. We decided to do both of our ideas, and show the process of how we tried and failed to portray those ideas. In the beginning of this project, Max had mentioned how difficult it would be to collaborate since our styles are so different. In the end, however, we were actually able to collaborate extremely well.  One thing that really stuck with me from the “Routines” videos was the sense of heightened reality that was present. This was also very evident in our piece, though it was accomplished through acting. Before we started recording, Max and I were having a very thoughtful and polite conversation about the pros and cons of both of our ideas. We were both being too kind to one another, and not saying that we really did not want to do the other person’s idea. However, when we actually were acting out the processes, both of us became character’s that were heightened versions of ourselves. We were still Max and Emily, but Angry Max and Frustrated Emily. While showing both of our failed processes, we yelled a lot. We were quick to snap at each other, and criticize the other person and their artistic merit. As a person with minimal acting experience, it was interesting to take on a character, and to try and portray that character fully. For this project, I was thinking about pieces of media that are about very simple processes, and Max was not. I know that the process of getting ready for the day is overdone, but I once saw a commercial for Coca-Cola that portrayed the process of getting ready for the day in a very creative way. That was the thought behind my idea. I wanted to portray something beautiful in a very simple process. I could not convince Max of the beautiful simplicity of my idea, and in the end, we chose to collaborate by not collaborating. I think that our finished project, and the process that it portrays is really great because it is the most honest process that we could have done. This is merely a heightened version of how we were already collaborating, which makes this piece an authentic and insightful one.

Listen to The Process of Being Creative