Pulling my Leg?

Rama Port Pull

The winner of the 2007 COCA Anthony Harper Award, Rama Port’s Pull references Mona Hatoum’s Pull with Port’s work adopting Hatoum’s presentation of the artist’s head upside down on a video screen with a main of hair below the screen for the gallery visitor to pull. It is this point of entry to the artwork and the intention to engage the viewer in the work that Port has deliberately taken from Hatoum. However, Port’s work engages its audience with very different objectives. Hatoum’s presence in her work and her interest in performance art, as well as the manner in which she unsettles viewer expectations of reality (and by implication of identity and non-being) make her work darker and more disturbing than Port’s. In contrast, Port’s work, although to a certain extent unsettling, is informed by an optimism and interest in sexuality, affirming life and being. On one level her work provides an answer to Hatoum’s in its celebration of existence and its humour, and the way in which it questions the sense of alienation and pessimism in Hatoum’s piece. Accordingly, Port’s work is also informed by ideas that have been consistent in her practice over the past two years.

Warren Feeney
Director
COCA

Regarding Pull (previously titled Hair Pull) by Rama Port

This work has clear references to a number of different sources including that of Mona Hatomn, Tony Oursler, TV reality show Fear Factor and Japanese photographer(name not yet sourced) (image of sunflower and lily in mouth).

While, superficially, Pull looks like still shots of Mona Hatoum's 1995 performance piece, it differs in a significant number of ways.

1. Hatonm's work was a three day performance piece where she was attached to the hair and responded in real time.

'In Pull The viewer was invited to pull a hank of hair hanging down in a specially constructed niche below a TV screen. When the hair was pulled, the artist’s face on the screen registered a feeling of pain or discomfort. The hank of hair was in fact attached to Hatoum despite the illusion of the TV screen above it. The TV screen and the viewer acted as the public sphere and the artist’s face and body physically behind the screen acted as the personal sphere. In this three day performance Hatoum placed her actual face and body behind a TV screen rather than making a recording representing it. This is in order to draw the spectator’s attention to the private versus public dichotomy and to invite the participating viewer to question the realm of the public and the private.' mireille.astore.id.au/Thinker/hatoum.html

2. The five different video pieces of eating dirt and flowers have no relation to Hatomn's work.

3. Rama has documented these references in the theortical essays that has informed and document this work earlier in the year. Had I known she was submitting it for the competition I would have advisored her to entitle the work Pull (after Mona Hatomn). She has however referenced the work by using the same title.

I would also note that that with all respect other works in the show bear more than a passing resemblance to other great art works including the photo of snow on centrally placed tree and the aluminum cutouts of leaves and bugs looking a little killeenish. I could go on. After all one strand of Postmodern dialogue is the dilemma of influence. There is nothing new in art.(?)

Janet Abbott
Head of Department
Fine Arts
Design and Arts College of New Zealand
116 Worcester Street
PO Box 539
Christchurch

In regards to your message I thought it pertinent to respond with some written information.

While my own work uses a similar a frame work to Mona Hatoum’s own 1970’s performance piece, there are a great many differences. I use what Michael Balktin referred to as a discursive horizon, as far as feminist works go.

I haven’t personally seen any of her video works, I’m not sure if they are recorded at all. Her work Pull, is a live performance piece where the camera shoots her face as visitors to a gallery pull her hair, she is hidden. At the crux of her work relies on the audience’s surprise as it is revealed she is actually there.

I’m not sure what the details are of her actual performance layout in the gallery, I have only seen one picture, she might be behind a wall?

My own work is within a machine space, and while I am upside down, and have hair hanging down, it is not my own real hair, as in the case with Hatoum. Where visitors tug on her hair, causing an immediate real response.

I haven’t seen her video I don’t have a clue what her responses were! I have no idea if there was sound involved, or talking.

In my own work I make my own response and address the audience directly, all my work is pre-recorded and is linked to video chapter imagery. Hatoum as far as I know, doesn’t have any flower eating or dirt. I sing and speak, sigh, shrug etc, these are personal attributes to this work.

In my work the box and screen themselves don’t have a connection to Hatoum’s work, I have no idea if she even projected images or used a Television screen. Sorry if my information on her work is a little unknown, but there isn’t much info available that I have seen on her gallery installation technique. I have a computer chip that is specifically designed to change scenes. I have also designed a switch that connects to the DVD player and this is what controls the image change when the hair is pulled. As far as I’m aware these are unique to my own Pull work.

We are both upside down, with hair hanging down; I have also called my work pull, in regards to the innuendo of audience participation action, of hair pulling.

Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist, I am a New Zealand one, and we are both females with long hair. I don’t much resemble Hatoum’s 70’s persona otherwise.

I have included some information on my background and theory in regards to this work. Also an artist statement containing other influences. I have also written an extensive statement of my works relationship to Screen Theory, of the gaze, theorists, such as, Lacan, Mulvey, Cindy Sherman and deconstruction and semiotic theory, pertaining particularly to Barthes and Derrida. Please email me if you require this.

In this Post-Post Modern time there are not many successful artists that can be said to have been original to the point of being unaware of other similar art, or to have created a work without past influence. I have been inspired by Hatoum’s digital work, and have built upon it in a personal way. Responding to the ‘Hair Aesthetic’ that lends itself to the female form. My work can be said to be unique in the way I have used my own form, and while there is a close relationship to appropriation, my work relies on my individual own personality to create interaction between the image and the audience. So I believe that it can hold it’s own when it comes to original form!

Thanks, I hope this clears things up for you and others enquiring about the background of this work.

Rama.