Georgina Starr

Georgina Starr (born 1968) is an English artist and one of the Young British Artists.

Georgina Starr was born in Leeds and now lives and works in London. She attended the Slade School of Art (1990-92) and the Rijksakademie Van Beelende Kunst, Amsterdam (1993-4).

She works with found and collected objects to construct autobiographical installations. She has exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions, including the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale.

She is one of the "second wave" of YBAs, whose art is more akin to the explicit confessionalism of Tracey Emin than the minimalism of Damien Hirst. Her work has been described as "quirky, personal, heartfelt, confessional, paranoid" by Momus, who recorded:

Georgina explained to me that for her paranoia is a magical state of mind, because it's all about entering the realm of the imaginary. For instance, although she doesn't really like horror films, she rents videos of the slash 'n' stalk variety and tapes the soundtrack, then walks around the city listening to them on a Walkman, the creepy music and sudden violent sound effects somehow lifting everything onto another level of reality. Once she bumped into Gilbert and George just when the Walkman reached a horrible knifing episode, and it was... splendidly creepy. [http://www.imomus.com/boswell.html]

However unlike the work of Tracey Emin, who uses her often extreme confessional autobiography in an illustrative way, Starr takes her stories and constructs complex and often impenetrable new worlds in which other characters join her to create darkly obscure and obsessive scenarios using sound and video.

In many of Starr’s works the ephemeral structures of social communication are completely stripped away so that she can use the remaining material to create a model scenario for conversations with herself.

David Frankel notes in his article in Artforum:

This mix of autobiography and distance is concisely stated in Crying, 1993, a five-minute video installation showing Starr standing in a corner of her studio, in tears. If expressionist art demands the simultaneous release and recording of deep feeling, then this might be expressionism's quintessence - but as the tape plays again, and again, emotion becomes performance. What may have been a problem for Jackson Pollock here appears as strategy: repeated, the gesture that carries emotion loses meaning. Yet enough of a trace of it remains that one would be ashamed to write it off as rote or fake; better to say that it becomes elusive and unreliable. And Starr, who seems to show us herself so openly, eludes us too. Thus in Frenchy (1996), the second part of Hypnodreamdruff (1996) shown in New York, Starr again combines her own life - her memory of performing in a school production of Grease when she was 15 - with artifice: this time around she picks one scene from the musical and plays all the parts. There's a video, in which we watch her do this; and there's an installation, the bedroom in which the conversation seen on-screen takes place. Starr - we recognize her face by now - seems both a familiar presence and, as she plays the scene's different characters, an unknowable one, multifaceted, all of these people and none of them.

Like many artists of her generation Starr uses herself in the work, however there is an overwhelming feeling that she is not actually present, not truly identifying herself to us.

Frankel elaborates on in his Artforum article:

One effect of Starr's combinations of video and installation is a feeling of absence: where you sit and stand, on that bed, on that rug, Starr herself once played the parts you're watching on TV, but she's not there anymore.

The loss of identity has continued to be an ongoing theme throughout Starr’s oeuvre. In her most recent large scale work Theda (2007) Starr uses the lost films of silent movie legend Theda Bara as a starting point for a video performance where she scrutinizes and dissects her own physical identity as she attempts to act out every emotion of the silent performer in close up using only facial expression.

Jonathan Romney in Modern Painters in 2007 notes:

Starr runs through the codified expressive repertoire of a Theda-era performer with such precision that any ironic distance evaporates. The poster for Theda shows a séance, and indeed Starr makes herself the medium. Through her playful, tender homage, the silent goddesses speak again.

Books

* "Georgina Starr", Ikon Gallery 1998.
* "The Bunny Lakes", Emily Tsingou Gallery 2002.

External links

* [http://www.georginastarr.com/ Georgina Starr website]
* [http://www.myartspace.com/interviews/interviews/art-space-talk-georgina-starr.html Georgina Starr interviewed by Brian Sherwin- myartspace.com]