zoe beloff: lecture questions and response

Visiting Artist Lecture: Zoe Beloff: November 2nd, 2010

"Zoe works with a wide range of media including film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media, installation and drawing.Her artistic interest lies in finding ways to graphically manifest the unconscious processes of the mind. She considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes she uses archaic apparatuses, sometimes, new analog/digital hybrids. Each project aims to connect the present with the past, to create new visual languages where modern media will once again be invested with the uncanny."

A: Beloff states : "Coney Island still is "the people's playground." As an artist, I think one should welcome the opportunity to make work for a popular audience. It's perfectly in keeping with the democratic spirit of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytical Society itself. I guessed that most people would not have heard of Freud. I teach in the Media Studies department of a four-year college and none of my students have even heard of psychoanalysis. Right from the start, I knew it should be colorful and incorporate sound and motion, so that even small children would have fun."

I am terrible confused. So although you state that it is the people's playground, you go in with an intention to influence them. What better way your ideas and philosophy than to do it at a setting where people are strategically gathered for fun and entertainment. It's feels contradicting in all of this. If it is the people's playground, and you wish to do work for the popular audience, but essentially you are wishing to educate them, in a way somewhat passive-aggressive way. You say it's for the people, etc, but there's still a plan, with an intention, and it's more for you than the people. I don't know how I feel about that.


B: The apple does not fall far from the tree.
I was surprised and not surprised to learn that Beloff's parents were both psychologist. I wonder since Beloff was brought up in such a tight bubble of psychology and analysis, could her work function out side of that bubble? In a sense, the work seems to be too incestuous. Could another element leak in and mingle within that bubble, or would that turn the whole dreamland upside-down?

Three words that define the artist and work: projection, unconscious, theatrical
The strangest feeling came over me after listening to Beloff spoke. The strange feeling came from the fact that I was this physical person sitting in this physical space listening to this physical person talk, believing every work she had said and at the end realizing I had not known where I have been in the last two hours because all of it was unreal, which makes me feel like my unconscious was extra out of it to not realize any of it at all. My unconscious was made present. Beloff spoke about how home movies were products that reveal more truth then what the maker anticipated. In a way, her presentation was like that too. Towards the end, she talked about the different ways she had deliver her presentation and most of the time in a non-academic setting, she does not reveal the back side story to her audience. Perhaps in this presentation, she shattered my illusion. I was so convinced and a puppet to her words, and in the end, I felt I was robbed of my innocence. It was like a joke gone bad. I believe it was very brave of her to use Albert Grass as a vehicle in which she could carry out herself. It was safe to hide behind an alternative self. She said it broke her out of her shyness.
I think that in itself was her most interesting piece. The performance. She documents and believes that mental patients sort of perform for their doctors, there was a theatrical aspect in their hysterical fits. Her presentation was that of a performance. She was so fluid during the performance that no one would have realized or picked up on what was real and what was not. In the end, the revealing of the truth of identity, the flawless fabrication of the two, that made the audience question what was imagination and what was the truth. Her work was effective in doing just that, making people question and wonder. She said, even if it is fictional, it is still based on real things. The work was simply that. Social and historical elements float all around us and they wrap around us and take on these new forms. We are not who we think we are, our unconscious reveals that, although sometimes we are not conscious enough to see it.
I really enjoy the reflexive part of her work. She constructed miniature models of theater and projects virtual people onto it to portray hallucinations. At the same time, here we were sitting in a small theater ourselves watching a woman perform before us too. I cannot help but wonder if Beloff has dissociative identity disorder or realizes that it may appear that way to others. If she did, I think it would be fascinating if she had projected a virtual 3-d image of herself delivering the presentation.