Wanting to Want: Musings on Desire

Thoughts in Process: Thoughts on Process: Thoughts for Progress:

The follow words are written to help my class visualize what I am trying to produce over the next few weeks. I am including the process, origination of ideas and thoughts on the end product. Settle in. I hope you enjoy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29sex-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Women who want to want&st=cse

I read an article over break about women who want to want….. sex. The article emphasized desire as a media construction, and arousal as the real sexual feeling that most women experience. So this desire, this highly sexualized personae modern women are supposed to employ, with fancy outfits and fun sex toys could all be modern marketing ploys. But even if we are aware that the media creates this expectation, we can still want it. This article, about a modern myth forced on a modern women, reminds me very much of Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystic and the modern equivalents of the issues she raised in her liberating (at the time) novel.

So I have started creating work in relation to this idea, materializing it, breathing into it and hopefully helping to demystify desire. I am hand-stitching I want to want I wish I wanted, repeatedly onto my slip, the slip I wear underneath my dresses and smells like me. From far away, the slip looks like a delicately decorative undergarment meant to entice. But when you read the words, I hope the hesitation comes across.

I see the slip being a piece by itself, but I also hope it becomes a character in a view and a large scale photograph. The video would involve me as the subject in the garment. The environment with be close cropped but warm and inviting, sexual in nature. I see myself tracing the words that I have taken hours to stitch on the garment, taking my time as I trace the words with my fingers. I hope the whole experience with encapsulate the juxtaposition between the words and the action, showing the tug of war that is occurring between wanting desire and having it.

I also see this as a photograph, large scale and imposing in its nature. The images in my mind right now are both alluring and at the same time create very strict barriers of what is possible. The garment entices but the words repel. I want to create that in the photograph as well…. more thoughts on this as they come to me.

Is this issue personal? Wanting to want. Thinking I should want. Being pressured to want. These are all issues I think about regularly in regards to my personal choices my artistic output. The issue of being told you want something, believing you should want something, and thing then not wanting it is a powerful issue in my life, especially in regards to my role as a female. In a lifetime when women can “have it all” what can I really have? What is really possible in the expanses of just one person? Because really, it’s just me and I only have one lifetime. So how do I choose what to want?