IB Making Art

The piece that I have chosen is actually a movie clip.  The clip is by Melanie Smith and particular piece of hers that I want to talk about is called Parres III and it about three minutes long.  It is actually part of a trilogy along with two other clips that were created between 2004 and 2005. It is a two channel video projection transferred from 35mm film to a DVD.  The title Parres is a small town on the outside of Mexico City, this is where all of the videos are shot.

The video starts off with the camera looking through a window and what looks like a white girl standing behind it.  All of a sudden the window is painted white and that is all the viewer can see.  Next, someone from the other side of the window starts to wipe down the window but the viewer cannot see who it is.  The majority of the video is spent watching an unknown person wash down the window.  It is finally revealed at the end of the video that the person who is cleaning down the window.  I didn't think much about the lightning or the colors because those didn't have nearly as big of an impact as who was actually in the video.  I was able to pick up that the location was a tad under developed and could be a little sketchy if it were night time.  During the film I didn't understand what was trying to portrayed, but immediately after it ended the message clicked.  It was the colored man cleaning up the white people's mess.   The two points that I thought about were segregation and immigration.  

I thought of segregation because it starts off with a white person and ends with a colored one, even though it is the same location they are there at totally different times.  To me it was hinting at even though we are now in this period of total freedom where whites and colored are allowed to mix and use the same water fountain, it still feels as though we segregate ourselves.  From personal experience I see it every day walking from class to class or passing by the cafeteria.  We tend to stick with our kind and that is just a sad fact of life.  I'm not saying everyone everywhere is like this but I definitely see it happen and thought of that when looking at the piece of artwork.  The second thing that I thought of was immigration.  This came to mind because illegal immigrants usually have low paying jobs because they are not legal residents. I don't want to make assumptions about the piece, but the man at the end could have fit the stereo-typically role of an immigrant.  These people are usually the ones that are cleaning up behind the "white privileged people."  This also brings me to the point of who has the final say of the message?  Is it the artist or the viewer? I have asked myself that many times over the last few weeks when I study an art piece.  If the artist is not there to tell you the message, is the public's opinion of it automatically correct?  There are not definite answer to these questions, and they still haunt me all the time. 

I really enjoyed watching this piece because it is so frank and honest. Melanie Smith points out the sad hard truth that many of us are so ignorant to face. As a society, we think we have come such a far way from the past and we think we have made it.  Made it to where?  There is no one destination that we are looking to land on.  We need to be changing and evolving for the better and we need to be doing it all the time.  Yes, we have come along way, but yes, we have a far way to go.