blue foto, green foto, red foto
‘Blue Foto, Green Foto, Red Foto’ is the collective title for three large video projections of the artist, Justine Williams, making staccato-like movements while dressed in eponymously coloured faux-futuristic costumes. Williams transformed herself beyond recognition into a trio of coloured Gollums, or hideous Coppelia-dolls that performed mechanical mime against a prism of mirrors, the kind seen in strip parlours or pole-dancing dens. It was an impressive and extraordinary spectacle with a strong air of strangeness about it. Why had the artist gone to such lengths to make herself into an odd cretinous techno-beast?
The fast answer is that the artistic tendency towards making strange evinces a deep sense of frustration at the insufficiency of ‘reality’. Conversely, it is within the subconscious of unethical regimes of power to distrust the sinister and the uncanny, because such expressions reveal the natural consequences of bad faith. I would probably speculate that Williams did not have much of this in mind, but ‘Blue Foto, Green…’ was strange enough to rouse more than a laugh. It was so idiosyncratically unsettling that it could make you speculate on some ulterior purpose.
One of the great preoccupations of the avant-garde was dressing up. The dress-up is not the first or even last lesson in doctrinaire modernism, but if you look closely, it is everywhere: from Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, to Picasso’s Cubist theatre costumes, to Rodchenko’s Constructivist clothing, to the mannequins of the Surrealists. But it was the Futurists and the artists of the Bauhaus (Oskar Schlemmer principal amongst them) who used costume to muddy the divisions between illusionistic painting, sculpture and theatre, so that all three became resolved in one form, allowing the work