Susanna Browne

Thesis Proposal – 1st Draft

Tentative Title

Introduction

This year I’d like to examine contemporary notions of romantic love as informed by an age of entertainment/informational devices such as Pinterest, Blogs, Reality TV and film (to name a few). How does popular consciousness today affect the way we look to romantic love and ideas around marriage?

It happened quite quickly. Suddenly, all my friends were getting married. And suddenly, I wanted to get married, too (mimetic desire?) This made, and still makes, me feel very mixed. I find it difficult to reconcile my desires as an artist with my desires for a wedding and romantic love as a be-all, end-all kind of action. It’s this in between territory, of knowing and resisting but also ignoring and giving in, that I want to expose. I am in on the joke but I’m also the subject, a happy target. Can I be both?

Every morning I check the wedding blogs. Half of me is making fun, the other half of me is gladly swept up in the fantasy. Just this morning, I was looking up what it might cost to rent the Vancouver Art Gallery for my wedding (though I am in a relationship, I am not engaged.) My mother has work in the permanent collection there and I thought of what it might be like to have this work behind my partner and I as we said our vows. I like to imagine this moment, and do it often. This probably has something to do with the fact that he isn’t here with me in Rotterdam, so I refer to memories or fantasies to conjure his presence.

Over the past year, I’ve come to see how romantic love, for many of the women I call my friends, has become entangled with ideas around narcissism, perfection and competition. I’ve watched the groom’s role diminish. Once, a friend who’d just become engaged, ran into the kitchen of a restaurant where we’d just been seated, desperate to find out if the water glasses we were drinking from could be ordered by the hundreds.

I would like to examine romantic love through the multiplicity of voices that comprise my own understanding towards the subject. Who are these women? There’s me, there’s the reality show contestant, there are my clients...Today romantic love is mediated through sites such as Pinterest, wedding blogs, and reality TV shows like The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise. I myself have watched these shows, and over the years, have moved through my own relationship to love with their narratives as a parallel to mine. This has perhaps given too much fuel to fire of fantasy and unrealistic expectation.

I imagine the written component to be a combination of poetry, anecdote, fiction, observation, and psychology. My final work will be an installation that brings to life these various voices. I want to complicate or invert the symbolism of objects attached to ideas around romantic love. What if a woman becomes so carried away with the fantasy that she neglects the very subject that allows her dream to come to fruition? What would that look like? A smashed champagne tower, a destroyed bridal bouquet.

Bringing in the legacy of women who were married before me; my mother and her relationship to marriage. Her stories. Observational disclosures. Confessions.

Relation to previous practice

The theme of romantic love has been moving through my work for some time. In Contenders (2011-ongoing), I collect screenshots from the last episode of every season of popular reality TV dating show The Bachelor, each image depicting the moment when the losing of the final two women is told she is not The One. Some grief-stricken, some angry, some humiliated, the women of Contenders play with the public/private notions of heartache, resisting the joke while telling it themselves. The chosen images from each season are edited together into a silent, slideshow-like film, using an effect of panning in and out on each image to create drama. As a new season airs, a new screenshot is taken and added to the end of the film. Initially this project came about as I was going through a break-up and looking for relief/reason/hope. By examining the heartbreak of others, I aimed to focus my own. Sometimes I’m disappointed by the fact that I am now in a happy relationship, as the part of me that allowed this work to come into being is now closed.

In You Are All I’ve Loved (2012-ongoing), I draw more on personal experience rather than that of the world at large (though I am interested in it's relatability as a framework: what would you do if all the lovers you ever had where in one room together Here, I am completing life-size monochromatic oil-paintings/portraits of my past lovers according to my synesthetic associations with their person, distilling memory to a single chromatic essence as a way of untangling and dealing with sadness or loss in a manageable way. The titles are numbers, according to their chronological appearance in my life. Each panel is two feet across, with the height dictated by the height of the actual man himself. The paintings lean against the wall suggesting the way a person might do casually at a party, or an opening. The colours range from white (the worst) to soft pastels (mediocre) to deep, saturated hues (the most meaningful). Here, again, I’m interested in how my relationship gets in the way of the initial intention of the project. That I would have to deviate and ruin the thing I wanted most (stability in love) to keep the work going, is an appealing aspect of the piece.

The summer before arriving at Piet Zwart, I worked at a high-end, one-on-one matchmaking service based in Vancouver. Presented with what could only be described as in-depth character studies in the form of client files, every day at work I was able to scour these parcels of personal longing and romantic history, with the intention of giving them parallel life alongside their use as my job material. As one might imagine, the discussion of the contents of these files is very much tangled up in rules of confidentiality, so I am still in the process of figuring out how to respect the boundaries of the company (I continue to work remotely for them while in Rotterdam) while still dealing with data in a way that relates to my practice. This has allowed me a kind of insider knowledge and specialized view on romantic love and dating.

Relation to a larger context

Artists like Sophie Calle and Frances Stark, who have also looked to romantic love as material. Also someone like Anne Collier who deals with ideas around cliché. Myfanwy McLeoud, who looks to elements of nostalgia and her own personal history and memory as material.

Practical steps

I have been reading a variety of materials on and related to ideas of Romantic Love, from wedding blogs themselves, to academic texts, to more scientific books on how and why we love. I also recently visited a wedding fair here in Rotterdam, where I made notes and videos of both the vendors and the attendees. Since TV and film also informs a collective idea of romantic love to many, I plan to move in from this angle as well. I’ve been trying to corral/collecting all of my material into one place, and have subsequently created a website for the occasion called Champagne Princess. File:Http://champagneprincess.weebly.com I hope the website is something a bride to be might come across and think for a second might be something she could use.