A Life Documented

"...for the artist, this sense that she is herself the text, means that there is little difference between her life and her art...the effect of a life experienced as an art or an art experienced as a kind of life..."

(Susan Gubar: The Blank Page and Female Creativity)

I have always documented my life - through journals, poetry, photography, film, music... Before I could document my own life, it was documented by my mother, through her visual art.

For the last year, I have collaborated with my partner in creating our own videoblog, thecommonpeople and now, I am creating this blog. More bizarrely, I was recently a participant in a television 'documentary' - an interesting, enlightening, challenging and not wholly pleasant experience. I did not take part in the TV programme for any stardom dreams. It was much more personal than that. I don't even own a TV - and never have! But it did present me with a fascinating experience as an artist. To engage in the process gave me an opportunity to be both aware of myself as observed and then to see that self edited, transformed in a creative process through film-making, and returned to me through the act of viewing a DVD. Thus becoming in that action, the observer and the mediated-observed.

In the initial contract, I had to agree to the 'reproduction of my physical likeness, in the known universe and unknown, in perpetuity' - (honestly - that was the wording!). In the documented life, this is exactly what it becomes - both me and not me. It is the creation of Me through art.

What is it to be both observer and observed? How does this connect with the 21st Century media obsession with 'reality television', the documentation of 'ordinary lives', or the increasing number of 'tv confessionals'? What about our obsession with documenting and sharing lives through this, the medium of Blogging?

I have a theory that in time, this exposure will eventually lead to a more connected, emotionally transparent world. That this reclaiming of media is infact a 'quiet revolution'. However, having recently just survived the weighty judgement of TV viewing folk, I can see that before we reach Utopia, we might just have to go through the increasing tendency to label, box and accept/reject with alarming speed that seems to also accompany such programmes.

Which takes me to an old favourite of mine, the bad-boy Byron (more on him later - he and I go way back!). This pretty boy made an artform of his life. He was, in effect, the first self-created celebrity, maintaining just enough haze of what was true and what was created as to intrigue the social gossips. Of course, he wrote his own downfall and received the all too familiar condemnation from his former fans. Not to be put down, he had a gilded coach made in a replica of Napoleon's, and left London on the day of his exile, in style and two-fingered glamour and went off to became a revolutionary hero, dying young and beautiful in some romantic location. On his death, his estate protectors burnt all his diaries, thus securing his fame for years to come. He created his 'observed image' to the extent that no-one knows the reality - and one is left wondering - did he?

What is the truth of a created life? What is the creation? The interior becomes exterior, the private is made public. By documenting our personal existence, we empower our self to be active in the creation of the past, the present, the future. Self-obsession becomes self-documented analysis becomes self-knowledge becomes recorded existence. In the end, I return to the belief I began with - that our greatest creative act is our lived experience.

"...Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. And you can change your life any time if you are not enjoying the dream. Dream masters create a masterpiece of life, they control the dream by making choices..."
(Don Miguel Ruiz)