Caroline Bergvall

This afternoon I saw Caroline Bergvall speak. She's a writer and performance artist - she didn't perform, but showed us some of her work and talked about the kind of themes she addresses in her work. Her work has to do a lot with time and space, and I almost put myself into a trance listening to her (she has a really sweet accent - I think she's French but lives in Britain) and thinking about time and space. She does some site specific work, but, for example, she was saying how space (say, like, your childhood home - the physical home) is so tied to memory that it's basically an illusion. She also talked about how language corrupts us - well, how it forms us and effects us - and how USING language, and LISTENING to language is this intimate experience.

She also addresses gender issues using the visual arts (although, her poems/writings are very visual as well) - such as the work at left, which is Duchamp's LHOOQ (and a reference to Magritte's La Trahison des Images - I'm also seeing a ref. to The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, but she didn't mention it) with the Mona Lisa removed (leaving Duchamp's add-ons, the male characteristics - the moustache and beard - which take the form of female characteristics, namely breasts and uh, bush.)

I wasn't really familiar with her work so I looked up some online when I got home - to tell the truth, it's not the sort of thing I could read for hours, but it's certainly interesting and clever. Here's a excerpt from one of her artists books.

I found some of her work online - Eclat was specially packaged for online viewing (and printing out, if you like).

Here are some of her reading/performances.