feeling listless

Video Art I love art. I was almost part of the art world. But I can count the number of art objects that have given me a gut wrenching emotional response on one hand. In fact for two years I thought I was bored by art and might want to move onto something else.

Georgina Starr changed all that in one look. I was at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds one day, I forget the exhibition, and in the corner a monitor was filled with static. Curiously I approached, and stood a few feet away as the connected video began to play.

The screen revealed image of a girl. Dark hair, dark eyes, cloudy white face except for some slight redness around the cheeks, wearing a black cardigan over a white t-shirt and grey skirt.

She was leaning against a wall, head resting on her shoulder her arms crossed, looking straight at me through the screen.

She was crying.

Not crocodile tears. The camera never lies. No - these were genuine tears, the kind you get when your world has crumbled and all you have left are the chopsticks in your hair and the boots on your feet.

I was crying.

Not about anything specific. It was euphoric I suppose. A release.

Another piece of me wanted the climb through the screen and give her a cuddle. Tell her it would be OK.

And the video continued. For what felt like hours. Just five minutes Then it was gone.

I decided not to watch it a second time. Then.

But I came back. Again. And again. Each time a saw something new in her and myself. For the time I was watching the video I was seeing something I couldn’t control – that this was something I couldn’t change for once. It just was.

After a while, the sleuth in me took over. I found out that the girl was Georgina Starr, an artist who’d had international commissions. The Institute’s library eventually acquired a video shot by Starr in the same style as the ‘Crying’ video describing its inception.

In fact she was feeling depressed. Felt herself begin to cry and decided to video it to help examine her own pain, in a way creating piece of art which should have an effect only on her audience of one.

And for a few moments, me. Only twice since have I felt that same burst of emotion in a gallery space, but its been enough to remind me that the reason we love art is what does to us, and what it reminds us about ourselves. Thanks, Georgina.

[Long term readers will recognise this post as the text from one of the portals from the old version of the website. I've had stormer of a cold over the past few days so rather than dribbling madness all over the place, I thought I'd just offer something newer readers may have missed. Georgina's official website is still quite minimal initially, but this Google search will point you in the direction of recent exhibitions]