Mo Throp

Chelsea College of Arts and Design
Director of Fine Art

Love Stories

My presentation will comprise of a five minute video documentation of my recent artwork Love Stories followed by a paper illustrated with slides of the artwork. The artwork is the final work submitted this autumn for my PhD examination.

Love Stories is a two-screen video which I recently installed in the West Gallery of the Wallace Collection, London and explores questions of romantic love as an impossible desire for the other. Using clips from movies, it explores how love-stories continue to define the contemporary subject in culture. The process of sexuation enacted in the artwork is related to desire, fantasy and jouissance and remains disruptive of the social order in the context of this artwork. It is purely libidinous and works outside the economy of procreation (capitalism and the family); it opens up the gap in the symbolic, accentuating the fact that phantasy is always at play; to produce for the viewer an experience of the self that is in flux and not submitted to the law.

In this paper I will describe how this artwork (within this particular museum) embraces the viewer in a space of erotic longing and desire which doesn’t return them to the usual relation to loss. Informed by Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming woman’ and more recent writings by Irigaray I argue for an engagement and creative response which allows for a dialogue of difference as non-oppositional; sensuous and expansive – it proposes a new relation to gender as beyond the hierarchical traumatic fixed mode oppositional positioning.

I explore how the experience for the viewer of these affects and intensities (Deleuze) transforms the self into perceiving difference – as allowing another kind of connection between the sexes – a crossing of each other to produce an openness to life rather than an attempt to overcome what is other than the self. Love Stories proposes the possibility of an active ongoing doing, a becoming’, arising out of the practice and the encounter with the artwork as a making and re-making of each other to produce a creative response. This is affirmative of a new subjectivity produced through the emotional impact of the artwork through a sense of the self as inter-active in the process of viewing. The artwork itself becomes productive in its undoing of representations as sites of loss.

This becomes then a space in which to lose and transform spaces of identity : an encounter which is productive of other possibilities – embracing, sensuous and generous – where desire is not experienced as a longing for that which has been lost, but rather as an expansion – a ‘becoming other’ through what is more than oneself; a desire which is a flow of connections and engagements , a ‘becoming’ in which the two are not set in opposition, but allow a continuous flow between and across ‘in perpetual dis-equilibrium’ (following Deleuze and Guattarri) to produce new endless possibilities. This then becomes the link to a new relation to the feminine where encounters, affective and sensual, destabilise and collapse subject/object dualism

The artwork allows a re-negotiation of this otherness that is an unacknowledged part of the self and which can be tapped via the emotional body – to propose a new relation to the feminine.