Christina de Middel’s piece ‘Party’ explores how a text can have its meaning abstracted through direct manipulation and association with additional imagery. Middel describes the piece in the passage below:
“If there is to be a revolution there must be a party”. This is how one of the most iconic and politically engaged book of the century would start if we applied an intentional filter. The filter would hide the parts of the slogans and sentences that got eventually obsolete in the last decades and the book is the Little red one: “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung”, the second most printed book in History (after the Bible) but a book that can only be found nowadays in China at some tourist shops. In an attempt to build a documentary object that to pushes the limits of documenting with images, the series “Party” presents a deliberately personal approach to the contemporary Chinese society and adds layers of significance by choosing a loaded platform. Using censorship to erase the parts of the text that are no longer in use in the country´s routine, the resulting pages become a script where the matching images build a series of diptychs that dynamical raise the question of the real nature of Communism in China these days. – Direct quote from Middel’s website What Middel presents is an abstracted version of events, which is abstracted further with the addition of images not original to the text. The new text that has been created is realised in reality via association with the accompanying image; a new relationship and narrative is created. The visible act of censorship which can be identified by what isn’t there draws us into further enquiry about its original content. What can help resolve this however is the page numbers which have been left untouched. Acting like markers, an investigation could be taken further by comparing the original and new texts using the page numbers as reference points. When it comes to working with books, I think that the two key things that I need to look at are the use of reference marks/checkpoints throughout the text, and the manipulation of existing information through censorship, the folding of a page etc. The journey through the text should be addressed, not just the text printed on the page.
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AuthorThird Year BA Hons Fine Art student studying at Falmouth University Archives
April 2017
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