STOP.LOOK.LISTEN: Patty Chang's Fountain

Patty Chang's Fountain video work displayed at Haggerty Hall Art Museum was intriguing to watch. It first caught my eye recognizing that a girl seemed to be making love to herself or another person who shared her physical qualities, and since it was the first video that caught my attention, I literally stopped, looked, and then listened. The video drew me in because it triggered my curiosity of how Chang was able to portray the act of lovemaking to herself in front of the camera. My first guess had been that they were twins that were in the video. In Fountain, Chang seems to have put the camera at a 90 degree angle that would capture the footage at a length that would deem appropriate in capturing her act of slurping water off of a mirror laid down on the floor. As I watched her taking her time drinking the water off the mirror’s surface, the pauses that were taken in between her drinking were great in emphasizing her looking at herself in a deep stare that could be taken as a ‘seductive’. I interpret her look as seductive because she certainly took her time looking at herself as if it was another person then slowly drinking the water off the surface as if she was deeply kissing someone. If I had not read the brief abstract provided in the pamphlet, I would have mistaken Chang being insanely in love with another female. This work of hers can be related to the familiarity of the Greek myth of Narcissus - of a man whom fell in love with his own image. The Greek myth could be easily understood of what happened to Narcissus but to see it in Chang's Fountain brings out a different feeling in witnessing such an act - it's disturbing to witness such intimacy that is often thought to be private.

In Chang's Fountain, the only sound that could be heard throughout the video is the sound of her 'slurping' the water off the surface of the mirror. The pauses in between her slurping offer a silence of observation and thought of what can be interpreted of the actions made by Chang. In connection to Aaron Ximm's idea of sound providing an environment for different thoughts, Chang was able to establish, you can say, a type of 'environment,' in which the only sound heard was her contact to the mirror. Thus that specific sound took me on surprise at first because I had no idea that she was drinking water off the surface of the mirror until I read the abstract provided in the pamphlet. Therefore the sound was able to trigger a curiosity, a concentration of what the sound was and its purpose in the video. I couldn't seem to put a finger on it so I assumed that it was just a sound made when contacting her other self whom seemed to be in another world. Thus it created a type of environment because of the sound provided by Chang's drinking of the water, but in contrast to Ximm's idea of regular sound as music, I think the slurping is as plain as the 'noise' a drain would make.