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On my trip back from Toronto, I struck a conversation with a young woman next to me (she's about twenty-five, so she doesn't qualify as "that" young, and is actually a grown adult). She was traveling from New York to Toronto for a week's vacation. She is studying financial management at the New School. She said she was from Toronto (Pickering, a town about 25 miles from Toronto), and already has a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Toronto, a small, and not particularly good, art program.
She did her final art thesis on a "video installation" which is really an easy way out for not very talented students of art to present something "artistic."
Here is the technical part of her work:
- She covered her face with white powder.
- She sat in front of the camera and taped herself holding an apple in front of her mouth for a few minutes
- She sat in front of the camera again for a few minutes taping herself holding a cylindrical object smaller than the apple.
- She filled her mouth with blood-red liquid, and started to tape as she let the liquid spill out of her mouth
-She super-imposed the first image over the second image.
The effect she wanted, and got, was of her eating an apple, with blood gushing out of her mouth as she ate the apple. But, without the apple showing any signs of having been eaten.
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Red apples from the vampire movie Twilight,
which clearly influenced the young woman
who is the subject of this post.
I immediately went into a non-judgmental, analytical mode:
"- Snow White (your white face), Red Rose (the blood from the apple)
- Snow White is pure, but what's wrong with Red Rose (a rose is good, isn't it?)
- Vampires, blood from eating flesh
- Eve and the apple"
"Yes, pretty good," she said.
But, she said she was also working on menstruation and the beginnings of adulthood for girls which starts out with blood. That her white face was to make a strong visual contrast with the red blood and the red apple. That Snow White is a symbol of purity, while the red blood shows the impurity of adulthood, and the corrupted nature of woman (i.e. menstruation is the beginning of the impurity).
She couldn't quite make a clear analogy between the apple and Eve, but I think it is the same idea of the fallen, corrupted woman, that she had. Although she didn't say so, it is also clear that the white powder-mask she covered her face with is also a sign of her purity, and how adulthood, menstruation, etc. is making her less pure than her younger, childhood years. She talked a little about the Hunter from Red Riding Hood as well, insinuating some kind of rape, or forced sexual meaning.
It was all a little convoluted, but very interesting. Young adult women these days have no idea what to do as adult women. A few decades ago, women in their early twenties were married and had at least one baby by the time they were twenty-five. Now, twenty-five year-olds don't only prolong their adolescence (this girl was back at school after several years in a dance program, then she was in New York for a masters in finance at the New School, so she never really had to be out in the real world) but they seem to regress even further back in age, and in their psyche, as they grow older and old.
One think I noticed about this young woman was how much she lacked self-confidence. This seems a contradiction, considering her art thesis is an aggressive and violent piece. But that "artistic" aggression is a channeling of a self-centered, narcissistic personality. She wanted me very much to "like" her ideas, but at the same time, she has tells me her story of a bloody, vampiric art piece which is liable to turn off and repel any normal person.
But it repelled her too. She confessed that the experience affected her so negatively that she hasn't done any "art" since then. And that is why she went into finance. "After all, like art, finance is about communication," she tried to explain.
"No, art is about creating. I don't know what finance is about, but I would assume it is about negotiation money in various way. No relation at all with art." I was a little harsh, which put her into more of a "pleasing" mode for a while.
The conversation petered off. How much can there be to talk about when the subject is so unpleasant to her? I was just intrigued, and could have gone on for a while, including finding out more about her mother was picking her up at the bus stop. "Are your parents divorced?" would have been my question, a little less bluntly asked, perhaps.
But, such are modern (or post-moder) women these days. They just cannot handle life. Their morbid, narcissistic, suicidal tendencies are coupled with a latent aggression that spurts out in unexpected moments. But, when it comes to the practicalities of life, they have nothing to grasp on to that will pull them out of the abysses that all of us encounter at times. But in her own morbid way, this girl likes these abysses, and manipulates them as much as she can.
I switched her off and turned to the window, and looked at the beautiful landscape rolling by me. Let her handle her apples and demons on her own.
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