[-empyre-] Response to artwork #8: Beth Collar - Brainstem Thinking

[Helena Haimes]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--- Does the title refer directly to what she's doing/acting out?

- 'Feeding' that clay sculptural object – nurturing? But with a rank ham
sandwich

- Pain / guttural noise from the depths of her belly

- 'Mum' repeated, horrifyingly. Then "Don't look at me, I'm angry (hungry?)
in the morning". This feels like a dredged up, horribly recurring memory
snapshot of either a mother or an adolescent's anger, stuck on repeat.

- They fuck you up your mum and dad

- This does have something of the German death metal band about it...all
the odder because it's coming from an inimitably British woman (she has the
odd bumbling moment here punctuating the guttural noises and repeated
phrases which confirms this.)



-- 
Journalist and Critical Writer
*www.helenahaimes.co.uk *
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[-empyre-] Response to Artwork #8: Beth Collar - Brainstem Thinking

[Eoghan Ryan]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thoughts that come up sequentially as watching documentation -


Ludite-

Interior/ not virtual but in a different space-  inside a brain?

Between the brainstem and the stomach? right or left side?

Recalibrating.

Apes make fire,- 2001 space odyssey - The dawn of man scene with the
monkeys and the column.

The feeling when you have just woken up in someone else’s house.


What age is Beth? Teenager? Younger? Older? Ageless? Folkloric?

Why the cheap sandwiches? This is not a social performance. These are not
sandwiches you bring to a friends house.

As such - Is it a depiction of a lonely logic, an introvert logic?

For sure, with the feeding of the clay stomach, their is logic and purpose,
a definitive task


Mom address- ‘don’t look at me, I am hungry in the morning’

Motherhood and aggression

maternity

passing and inhereted

Both having and rebelling against the mother, feeling shame and anger and
also nurturing and feeding the stomach. An acknowledgment of necessary
consumption or feeding and repulsion and shame. Dont look at me, but this
is something I have to do.

 I am not a mother, but I am.


Repulsion and care.

Like When you have to empty your catheter bag.

What is being digested and who is digesting?

Surrogacy? As in, Beth is aiding and nurturing this thing, this clay thing.

This Stomach brain. This Brain stomach.

Body acoustics

Mimicry

Pig vocals

The vocal chords of a pig and sub culture guttural vocals- "pig squealing",
which is a squealing vocal technique to sound like a pig.

guttural voice - something awakening

Build up

Anxiety  of something awaking. What is going to happen? Should I go to the
bathroom?


Memory loss- back to the brain

logic becomes repetitive and  dilapidated

falling in on yourself

voices in head get confused with voices in belly. Hangry, hungry and angry


The voice taking over

Perpetual uncertainty

When does repetition become mantra?

Frustration at the headlessness

Pathetic, round in circles or perhaps gurgles

Mosh pit logistics thats the logic of the stomach, an inherent headless
logic and inevitably run out of things to do, so you just do the same
things again and again and then?

 nature of performing stomach brain?


-- 
www.eoghanryan.ie
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