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Jane Dickson Witness, 1991
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I have been watching people watching, and painting that subject, among others, since I moved to Times Square in 1981.
My primary connection to the world is visual. I have to see things to understand them. Whatever issues I am gnawing at, in my own life, I find manifested in the world around me, where I can 'see' others in situations that feel parallel to mine. I can't step back and watch myself having an argument, for example. I'm not that detached. But if I can see someone else having an argument I can observe that and clarify some things about my own position. On this level all my work is a psychological self portrait. I've been called a voyeur, which literally means a watcher, but also implies some illicit thrill on the part of a covert observer, and often an unobtrusive one. I want to learn how others cope, where they resist, and where they give. I don't peep through key holes. I don't reveal anything people aren't already acting out in public.
Around 1990 I began to consciously examine some of the issues my earlier work had raised, of the taboo against staring (watching too intently, implying some predatory intent,) voyeurism (deriving erotic pleasure from watching) and the authority of the female gaze, as active subject, and/or as object looking back.
For years I'd been playing peek-a-boo with my neighbors in the welfare hotel across 43rd Street. I'd idly stare out my window into theirs, often to find, with a shudder, that someone else was already staring at me. Instinctively I'd jump back, close my curtains, or shut off the lights. They'd do the same, and then we'd peek out again. Sometimes I stare at passengers in other cars on the highway, just focus my eyes, without obviously turning my head, and 50 feet away, at 60 mph, they always feel it and turn to see who's watching them. This is a primordial predator/prey response, to be watched is the prelude to being eaten.
As I began the Witness paintings, I kept thinking about this unequal give and take, this game, "I want to see, to know, without being seen or known." These window-sized paintings are hung high. I want to turn the tables, from my earlier omniscient aerial viewpoint to a low angle looking up so that the complacent viewer, relaxed in his or her assumption of the safe observer role, is startled to find his or herself under surveillance. These witnesses watch with fixed intensity, yet their expressions, which would reveal their intent, remain obscured by the shadows. Then I took these issues of observation back to Times Square's heart, the porn business, and began frequenting strip clubs to further consider issues of power, sexual display and commercialized desire. One of the strong impulses here, and in much of my work, is an impulse to go where I don't belong, to acknowledge what I'm not supposed to see, to be the female viewer of performances aimed for male, gay or straight, consumption.
I chose to record LIVE GIRLS and GAIETY boys in oil stick on small pieces of sandpaper, the creamy oil strokes against the extra-coarse abrasive echoing the stripper's dance of allure and repulsion, soft flesh against hard-edged glitz. The small scale implicating the viewer in the intimacy of the peep. The material contrasts echoing the contradictory impulses, the complexity and ambivalence in which sexuality is rooted, which try as we might, refuses to be reduced to simple answers.
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