After watching Sam Taylor Wood's video called A Little Death, where we watch a hare decaying and a peach sitting by it staying healthy, we discussed what we felt about it as a class and it was surprisingly very controversial. Although the video itself was very simple, it was also extremely ambiguous because everybody had different perspectives on what Sam Taylor Wood was trying to portray.
In my opinion after watching the video I felt a slight sense of nausea from watching the hare decay, but after thinking about the video itself and not what was going on, my interpretation on it was that Sam Taylor Wood was trying to portray life and death in the continuous video clip. I don't believe she was actually trying to show a hare decaying, in fact she was trying to show a living thing dying. This made me think further into what she was trying to make people think and I came to a few more conclusions such as the hare represented a poor and deprived human that dies because it doesn't have the nutrients or medicine needed to keep it alive and the peach represented a richer human that has everything needed to keep them alive, and this whole thing represented how looks at the society of today, meaning we look at charities and most people don't give to the needy because they just simply don't care whereas people look at celebrities (The rich) and practically bow down to them for doing irrelevant things such as getting implants, going to jail or even taking drugs. Taking drugs, going to jail, drinking alcohol, etc. are things we all frown upon when it comes to 'poorer' people, for example a lot of people say "I'm not going to give homeless people money because all they'll do is spend it on drugs and alcohol" and continue to leave them on the streets not having a care in the world but another example, Lindsay Lohan took drugs, went to jail and much more but we still let her off, and why's that? Because she's a celebrity with money! Now we come back to the hare and the peach. I strongly believe it represents the way our society thinks and where our priorities lie.
The Clock- Christian Marclay
The Clock is a video installation that is originally twenty-four hours long that is shown in the White Cube. This video installation is extremely simple but is also complete genius and this is because it took the maker of the video, Christian Marclay two whole years to make! The video shows a numerous amount of movie clips that show clocks or somebody checking the time, the genius of the twenty-four hour movie clip is that the time it shows on the video is made to synchronize with the time in real life. This is such a simple idea but takes a serious amount of time and commitment to accomplish it. It almost makes people feel more connected because of the time and once people realise the time in the video installation is the same time as the real world, we begin to feel a hint of anxiety as we continue to watch and understand what is happening. I began to think deeper into the installation and something that stuck out to me was the fact that when watching a movie, it takes us into their world which makes us oblivious to the time but what Christian Marclay did was make us more aware of the time, which I also thought he did to show us what today's society are about. we are constantly checking time, we are time conscious, time obsessed and time has become oppressive to a point that we can't escape it anymore. A saying a lot of people say is "Time is money" and once again, this enhances how time obsessed we have become. I don't believe Christian Marcley made this because he was bored or because he thought it was a cool thing to try out, I think he did it to make people realise just how time conscious we have become after all of these years.
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