Associate – first trials

P 16th February 2021

For the Associate: Archives brief our group chose the topic of lipstick.

Personally, what I find interesting about it is its complexity: the variety of opinions, biases, approaches, reasons for using it or not; connection to society’s expectations; women’s identity; media shaping a certain image of what is feminine for commercial purposes; women being judgmental towards themselves and each other; the aspect of empowerment and independence versus the aspect of objectification of woman’s body.

At first each person in the group would work with loose experiments, coming up with different methods of approaching archives.

Movies

The first archive I reached for was movies – scenes in movies using lipstick as a way of conveying the story, of telling something about the character’s features, relations between the characters, or womanhood in general.

What caught my interest in the text ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’ by A. Mbembe was the fragment:

A montage of fragments thus creates an illusion of totality and continuity. In this way, just like architectural process, the time woven together by the archive is the product of a composition.

Maybe movies are not fragments of real life, but they shape the understanding of what does it mean to be a woman in this society, they illustrate how she sees herself, as well as how she is perceived, or what is expected from her.

I think that in each fragment you can point out some feature, or understand something about the character which was depicted by means of using a lipstick in the scene. My intension was to combine them together and by contrasting with one another, bring those values out even more. What image of a woman is painted by these scenes?

YouTube comments

The next ‘archive’ I thought was worth exploring is YouTube, especially the comments under each video.

I searched ‘why do I wear lipstick’, and under the videos telling about reasons to wear or not wear lipstick, or about its history, there was a ton of different, interesting comments, stating different opinions.

There was a visible contrast between the variety of opinions in the comments, and the approach to lipstick in the videos themselves – usually in favour of make-up. It felt like in the videos you can see only one side of the story, and I was wondering what will happen if I combine them with each other.

I don’t know if my bias is visible as well, but I was trying to focus on clashing opinions without giving my own.

Pinterest was a similar story: there were lots of motivational, empowering quotes about lipstick as a self-esteem boost, eventually a bit of self-deprecating humour.