Before the image, the music starts. It is Robert Wyatt's 'Free will and testament', providing the background and 'subtitles' for the images. As Wyatt starts to sing, a woman in a large plastic bag comes into view. Her head protrudes from the bag and she's wearing a plastic shower cap. She sits against a wall but she is not alone in the space: there is another woman present who wears a bag over her head carrying the slogan "I Love NY". With a brush in her mouth the first woman paints on the plastic bag around her and on the head of the other woman. A disembodied body painting itself and someone else. To Donegan head and hand are references to the relationship artist/model and artist/canvas. In her long quest for the nature of these relationships and for insight into "the painterly gesture" this black and white recording of a performance is yet another link. Here she also integrates the art of drawing and painting with time based formats like performance and video to visualize with a healthy dose of irony the relationships she sees between these formats. She is concerned with ideas that would not enter the picture if we would not change and or manipulate our positions. The fingerprints she uses can be interpreted in a similar way: as visual elements which are not visual per se. In this game of shifting she also plays with the viewer and Wyatt's lyrics become quite appropriate. Can a spider understand the nature of arachnophobia? he asks. "I have my senses and my sense of having senses. Do I guide them? Or they me?" This is but one possible way of seeing the world the way we see it, Donegan seems to say, or: "Had I been free, I could have chosen not to be me".
– Carla Hoekendijk
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Camera: David and Kenneth Goldsmith
Cheryl Donegan ° 1962, New Haven (USA)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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