since 2015
Blush is an ongoing research project on blushing as a strategy for art production and reception. It examines the structural effect of the bodily blush in its capacity as an aesthetic function. It has taken form in a lecture performance and a greater video work is planned that restages the common experimental set up, that the psychological community uses since the 1950s. Steps are one is filmed singing, then one watches it together with one's friends, during this watching the bloodflows are measured. The images below are taken from a video study for this set up.
Blushing as a function is situated between body and psyche and between the personal and the social. Rooted in the body it builds a frontier towards the other and at the same time creates a place where the other enters into one’s own flesh.
Can You Blush? is a questioning of art works which grants every piece of work a strong interior blood flow. The question: Can You Blush? doesn’t ask for a correct standing or the worthiness among others. It asks wether you can create a moment of simultaneous visibility, for body and psyche, the personal and the social and produce a flicker identity of both. We wondered whether all art, as it structurally provides surfaces, could be rooted in blushing, whether it was a basic function that causes the emergence of drives which would manifest in one way or the other. Thus we assumed that in each work there could be found a certain quality of blush, a regional change of color coming from within and towards an imaginary gaze of the other, altering the work’s appearance for only a second, suggesting a different mode of existence. In this sense, the central question to approach a work would not be “What does it show?” but “What does it hide?” and in which particular way. An approach to art that proposes an altered economy in looking at things. It enables to ignore parts of the art work, pushing them aside or suspecting decoys and coverups resulting in a perpetual attempt to make it blush.
