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WYNNE GREENWOOD

Strap-on TVs

Strap-on TVs is the fourth installment of a twelve-part series of exhibitions entitled Has Art? Each month, for the next year, artists will be paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés.  The writer will provide a critical response to the work as it relates to the poem as well as offer scholarship about the artist’s practice as a whole.  As the exhibitions progress, a publication will grow and an idea of a group exhibition will be the result.

You can follow the progress of the publication and the exhibition HERE.

A printable PDF copy of Has Art? is also available upon request

Simply email: scott@lawrimoreproject.com

            legacy in the disappearance

                                                will totter
                                                will fall

                                                                            WILL ABOLISH

Teevees

by Amra Brooks

I have this teevee that used to belong to my dad.  It’s like the opposite of a flat screen.  It's huge and way too heavy to carry on my own and somehow, I guess because I don't care much about teevee's nor do I ever have the money for a new one, I moved it into five different places I've lived.  It came across country with me in the back of my station wagon.  It's so big that I resent its blatant occupancy and never want to designate a space for it.  So this big black square-ish thing lives with me. Sometimes I get someone to move it with me into another room, and I keep thinking I'll get rid of it or buy a cart with wheels so I can move it more easily, but I don't.  I don’t have cable so I just use it to watch movies that I think require more erect attention or a bigger screen than lying in bed with my laptop. When it was my dad’s, we’d gather around it and watch his horrible bird watching videos or old Katherine Hepburn movies, which I loved for the fast paced banter.  I have always gravitated towards deep teen dilemmas, 1970’s dramas, and documentaries about animals and outer space.  When the teevee is in the off position I just have to appreciate it’s potential.  Almost obsolete, it demands space, and stares blankly out at the rest of the room as one of the largest bodies in my home.

Greenwood’s Strap-on TV’s call attention to this antiquated technology and engage it to function as a body.  This transformation allows the object itself not to be a one sided projector of images. We can now much more readily project on to the object itself.  We are engaged in a dynamic. I think about the expectations we might come to this technology with.  We want to be entertained, or we want an escape, we want to fantasize, or we want to get off, or we want to learn something. We want to forget about real life, or we want to find a more real life.  What can the teevees show us about who we are and what we want? What happens when this awkward and cumbersome chunk of black plastic becomes a sexual body?

The two brightly colored televisions project vaginally shaped images that are seen through the hole of a painted-on black harness, where a dildo would go.  To many outside the queer community this sexual context might be lost, but as the title suggests it begs us all to ask, just what are these bodies of technology strapping on. The phallus is suggested only through its absence, the hole in the harness becomes a place-holder and the shape of their desire is open for interpretation. But the empty hole also allows us to see what’s really there, what the body is made of, so it’s not empty after all.  I am interested in this juxtaposition of what we show the world and what’s hidden, and all of the contradictions that make up selves.  The things we project, the things we put on, the things that we hide behind, and the things that help to bring out our more true selves.  There is power in that kind of vulnerability. We engender objects all the time and this is about what happens when that gender gets complicated and more fluid. Here there are layers, colors, patterns and shapes that all transform this chunky black square, that make us ask those questions and also consider what’s actually there underneath it all.

After just moving, my teevee has found it’s way to the center of my living room, where they traditionally belong, and I’m kind of okay with it there.  The only time I really sit in that room is when I’m watching a movie, like I’m about to do this afternoon. And I wonder if I’m going to try to hide it when people come over next time, or if I’m just going to let it do it’s thing and hang out with the party.

Wynne Greenwood  (b. 1977, Seattle, WA)

2004 MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

1995-1997 Undergraduate studies, Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Brunswich, NJ

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions and performances at The Moore Space, Miami; Participant, New York; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles; On The Boards, Seattle; the Hayward Gallery, London, UK; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Reena Spaulings Fine Arts, New York; Foxy Productions, New York; and at The Kitchen, New York (curated by Debra Singer and Sacha Yanow).

Group exhibitions and performances include the Moscow Biennale 2009 (curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist);  “Media Burn”, an exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, UK in 2008 (with Ant Farm, Josephine Meckseper, Martha Rosler, Jens Ulrich and K8 Hardy); New Report, The F Word, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Tracy + the Plastics, TBA Festival, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Tracy + the Plastics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, What is Human?, Transmodern Age Festival of Experimental Performance, Baltimore, MD; Tracy + the Plastics, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Hot Topic and On the Verge, videos for Le Tigre live performance, world tour 2004-2005.

Critical response to her work has been published in ArtForum, ArtLies, NY Arts Magazine, FlashArt, artkrush, ArtReview, Wire, Art in America, The New York Times, Resonance, Venus, and BUST by such notable critics as Holland Cotter, Jay Ruttenberg, David Rimanelli, Katharina Fichtner and Lisa Harris.  Her own writing has been included in ArtForum.

Wynne Greenwood lives and works in Seattle.