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GIMP ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: audio / video performance | sonorization | CD

AMELIE DUCHOW | GIMP | CD | sync | sc-007

artist: AMELIE DUCHOW | GARY NEEDHAM format: audio / video performance | sonorization | CD concept and music: AMELIE DUCHOW production: sync 2016

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AMELIE DUCHOW | GARY NEEDHAM | GIMP | live at NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY | Nottingham UK

Etymologically the expression gimp is attested since 1660 from Dutch gimp or french guimpe, a kind of trimming. A gimp suit is a garment designed to cover the body completly used in BDSM to objectify the wearer. The audio composition “Gimp” by Amelie Duchow is inspired by the text “Bringing out the gimp”, Fashion Theory 18:2 by Gary Needham, exclusivly released in collaboration with Yvonne Trew and Gary Needham for the Fashion Continuum event in Nottingham on 22/04/2016 , UK . Gimp is released in a 100 copies special limited edition CD format, cover in 4 mm black rubber hold with 2 black elastics. Gimp CD contains a 12 minutes single track with the voice of Gary Needham.

GARY NEEDHAM Gary Needham is senior lecturer in film and television studies at Nottingham Trent University. He has broad interests in film, television, art, visual culture, and fashion and has researched and published in those areas. He is currently working on a book on Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick and another on Warhol’s work in video between 1965 and 1975. He has previously authored and/or (co)edited the following books: Warhol in Ten Takes (2013), Brokeback Mountain (2010), Queer TV (2009), and Asian Cinemas (2006). Gary is also associated editor of the journal Film, Fashion, and Consumption.

GIMP I have been interested in the figure of ‘the gimp’ for a number of years particularly the way it circulates in different contexts from popular culture, art, fashion, SM, and I wrote about this in an article in 2014 in the journal Fashion Theory. ‘The gimp’ is a derogatory term for a figure that is first mentioned in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction (1994), one that previously had no name. The gimp is a figure often clothed or ‘encased’ in leather or rubber with an emphasis on head covering and masking. It is the gimp mask that holds the most fascination in its play of secrecy and disclosure (who is behind the mask?), to provoke and horrify, and to play upon imagined fears of dehumanization, of not having access to the person behind the mask. The refusal of connection, identification, the faces, feelings that the mask engenders in audiences, has been the basis of exploration in performance, photography, sound, and installation especially ‘bringing out the gimp’ in live performance spaces - when the gimp otherwise remains on the page, on the screen, and in the mind. Those ideas were tested at the IFFTI/Polimoda conference in 2015 in which ‘the gimp’ was first conceived of as a performance in the context of fashion (with Yvonne Trew and Laura Allen) rather than more conventionally written as a theory, an idea, and an argument. The most recent iteration at Nottingham Contemporary in 2016 was a further development of the project in collaboration with the artist Amelie Duchow in which I recorded a vocal of spoken extracts and key words from the original written article for which Amelie developed a new work and object simply called 'Gimp'. Amelie's 'Gimp' conceived an electronic sound-scape as a type of sonic counterpoint to ‘the idea’ that the gimp generates as a figure of risk, transgression, fear, and misunderstanding. The question of what kind of music both embodies the gimp and works alongside it, does the music produce similar feelings that the gimp itself generates when it is an image or presence, what is the difference between seeing and hearing this ‘idea’ of the gimp, can we explore an argument and a theory through audio-visual performance itself? Like the gimp, I am interested in exploring the limits and boundaries of those images and sounds that trouble the very core of our identity and what it means to be human or not human. Gary Needham