Claudia Bucher
dal 30/6/2006 al 28/7/2006
Segnalato da
30/6/2006
Claudia Bucher
L2kontemporary, Los Angeles
The Adventure of Claudzilla. As a performance-installation artist, the goal of my practice is to explore master cultural narratives and conceptual framing devices as they define and influence personal identity. The latest body of work developed out of an aspect of the previous body of work which focused on biotechnology.
The Adventure of Claudzilla
As a performance-installation artist, the goal of my practice is to explore and
research master cultural narratives and conceptual framing devices as they define
and influence personal identity. The latest body of work developed out of an aspect
of the previous body of work which focused on biotechnology and the master framing
device of Scientific Research. In this last series, the potential possibilities for
mutable identity by way of genetic/robotic engineering were explored. This series
landed at the feet of the idea of cultural evolution as a mechanism by
which biological evolution could be superseded. Here we operate in the land of the
meme rather than the gene.
The master framing device of cultural evolution has led to a desire to
explore identity, permeability and mutability through the realm of pop-culture
virtuality: the internet, gaming, comics and so on, where sci-fi fantasies and fears
about mutation, abnormal superpowers, violence, desire and destruction are
memetically sequenced. This arena seemed like the most logical next step for
exploring identity as a memetic construct and was the only genre that made any sense
as a way to process what I was experiencing in my own personal life and
simultaneously with the political world at large. If the government of the U.S.
could enact its own absurdist comic book-like action adventure drama, well then so
could I, hence, The Adventures of Claudzilla and the C-Men.
In this age of pre-emptive war, Claudzilla purposely references Godzilla as an icon
of nuclear destruction. Claudzilla is a scuba diving suicide bomber creature from
the kelp forests. The C-Men, a take off on X-Men, are iconic dysfunctional past,
present, and future-possible lovers either real, fictionalized or imagined. They
include: Crackman, Crankman, Christman, Crapman and Carman, to name a few. The
sphere in which they operate is the current memesphere. Instead of the
term action figure, I have created the neologism mematar
which is a combining of meme + avatar. A mematar would
be the physical embodiment of a particular meme. Claudzillas C-Men are
representations of the orbiting and competing memes that have tried to
influence the mind of Claudzilla.
As a performance artist concerned with conceptualizing identity, I am exploring the
ways in which my own identity can be framed as a collection of memes. The episodes
in the series so far consist of the following: Episode 1, performed at Track 16
Gallery in November 2005, Dive Attack Plan RRR! (Captain LeKong and Claudzilla
inadvertently blow up Los Angeles while searching with their crew for terrorist
C-Men amongst off-shore oil rigs), Episode 2, presented for COLA 2006 at the
Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Dream Wars in the LA Memesphere: from kelp forests
to salt flats, the secret life of mematars revealed: Claudzilla and Carman in love,
Episode 3, now being presented at L2Kontemporary, Memaginary Survival Vehicles for a
Hostile Memesphere. All three of these episodes are being presented as some
combination of performance, installation, sculpture and video, however, the ultimate
goal is to create a book out of all this material: a memologue.
Reception: Saturday, July 1, 7-10pm
L2kontemporary
post industrial art for the post industrial age
990 N. Hill St. #205 - Los Angeles
Hours: Thursday-Saturday, 12-6pm; or by appointment