polly prine - short story
Polly Prine's career as an artist was almost over before it began, because of a 'pornographic' installation. Jonathan Barber hears her side of the story
The lives of others
In June 2002 a small gallery in Newport, South Wales played host to three unknown artists and a furious tabloid controversy. Expected to lose money, the self-financed show was intended for "Friends and family, really. We thought we'd be lucky if 300 people went through." Instead there were demonstrations, death threats, and the kind of outrage that recalled the nineties heyday of the Young British Artists.
At the eye of the storm was then 22 year old Polly Prine, and a video installation she had made called C'mere Then. Her installation was condemned as obscene, and the artist accused of being a prostitute and exhibitionist. The truth was far more complicated and interesting than the knee-jerk reaction allowed.
For a start Polly Prine is not her real name, but was adopted even before university. Far from being attention-seeking she is a painfully shy, secretive and circumspect young woman. C'mere Then remains unique in her work as the only piece in which Prine herself appears. "It's more interesting to look at other people. You don't know them, you're not familiar with their lives, their self-perception." Ironically it was exactly that fascination with the lives of others that caused her to create the installation. But irony is not the word she would use, "It is what it is. It ended up like it did because certain events, certain emotional reactions came about during filming that were more compelling than what was originally conceived."
What was originally conceived was a series of short documentary films on the relationships between different youth 'tribes' in Newport. Although Prine was studying fine art, and regarded herself as a sculptor, a number of her friends and fellow-students were engaged in filmmaking. She picked up the camera because, "It seemed like a good way to gather material. At first it just sat there, dozens of tapes in old shoe-boxes, just names written on them... for reference really. Then a friend suggested editing some of the best bits together."
Initially reluctant, Prine was only persuaded when the friend who first made the suggestion showed her what could be achieved. The friend edited ten minutes of footage into a sequence that told a story of cultural dislocation. At first Prine was appalled that sections were taken out of sequence or cut down to just a couple of sentences. She felt it was "dishonest", and that it misrepresented its subject in favour of a simplified narrative. Yet something in the short 'documentary' fascinated her and she kept returning to it until, as she says, "Something happened. It still seemed fundamentally untruthful, but I felt that if you were upfront about the story you wanted to tell then you could film people and use the edit to focus what you'd got afterwards."
She then wrote a detailed framework for what was intended to be a series of films about the youth 'tribes' she saw all around her every day. The first film would centre on a two groups, some teenage boys who hung around near a local park, and the teenage girls who walked past them every day. "It was fascinating," she says, "the boys were clearly inexperienced, but they had this macho pride that came out as sexist shite. They'd ask the girls to come over and suck their cocks, and all this. On the other hand the girls were self-possessed and intelligent, but it was like they had to get validation from the boys. Even if it was sexually demeaning."
She still had to get the two groups to open up, and started by talking to one of the girls. After a couple of weeks she was accompanying them on their promenades, but was not yet ready to start filming. She soon discovered that the two groups were a lot closer than they initially appeared and spent a great deal of time together, "And sex hardly came into it." The display she'd witnessed, the boys sitting on a wall throwing out sexual challenges as the girls walked by, was a small part of their relationship. Some of them had slept together, but at that time they all had boy- or girlfriends outside of their respective groups. A lot of their time was spent together; talking, drinking, and smoking cannabis.
"It's more interesting to look at other people"
Eventually Prine started to take her camera with her, and then to film whatever happened. She began to accumulate a lot of material, but despite the amount of time she devoted to the project she could not make it come to life. "It was just really boring. I thought there was a story there, but I couldn't bring it out." Then something happened. From one point of view the film got out of control. From another point of view serendipity called. Prine has no sympathy with either view, "Do I regret what happened? No, I don't. Am I glad it happened? Of course not. But it happened, you have to live with that."
What happened was that one evening she was alone with two of the boys, Ahmed and Charlie, with her camera. They had spent all afternoon drinking and smoking cannabis, and she found herself flirting with the boys. They were exchanging the kind of sexually-charged backchat she had seen the groups of boys and girls throwing back and forth, and that first inspired the project. "But then things got a bit out of hand."
Although she was not attracted to either boy she found herself giving Ahmed a blowjob while Charlie filmed, and then giving Charlie a blowjob while Ahmed filmed. "Luckily I forgot to bring my tripod." The boys intended to film themselves as they had sex with Prine at the same time, but needed somewhere to situate the camera in order to film it. "I couldn't have stopped them," she says now, "but I absolutely didn't want to be in that position." While the boys were searching for boxes and furniture to provide the perfect surface to rest the camera the rest of the girls arrived at the house. In the ensuing confusion Prine took her camera and left.
In fact she went home to her parents' house for a fortnight, and then did not look at the film for another two months. "I wanted to pretend it hadn't happened." When she did look at the tapes she had it was clear she could not make the documentary she had intended. As she says, "Most of the footage was really boring. There was no story." Or rather, there was a story, but it was the story of how a filmmaker lost control of her own film, and it was not a story she wanted to tell. But she persevered, spending "eight, nine hours a day, every day for three weeks," trying to bring some order to the material she had.
She approached it methodically, writing different synopses in her notebook. "I already had a script sketched out, but that was irrelevant now." The difficulty was twofold, most of the footage was uninteresting, and the narrative inevitably concluded in the blowjobs. She realised that the film she had fell into three distinct 'moods'. There was the film from the last night, there was the footage she had shot in the weeks before, "which was really boring. I'd been shooting with a final edit in mind, like it was already written. It was stilted, I hadn't given them room to be themselves.", and finally there was material she had filmed with the intention of it being filler, but which seemed to have the greatest vitality. Most of her energy was spent in attempting to reconcile and integrate these different strands.
The solution, when it came, was unexpected. "I think visually," she says, "especially when I'm tired." One morning around four o'clock, after at least eight hours writing, Prine found herself doodling, and nodding off. Eventually she gave in to the inevitable and went to sleep. When she woke the pen was still in her hand, and the last page of the notebook was covered in random scribbles. However, when she looked at the rest of what she had done the night before, she got tremendously excited.
"The writing was rubbish," she explains, "but the doodles were brilliant. I didn't even remember drawing them, and yet the solution was there." What she had drawn were a series of boxes arranged in triplets. She started to work furiously to edit three separate films from the original material she had, to be shown simultaneously on three screens arranged in a triangle around the viewer. One film was as nearly as possible the documentary she had in mind before filming began. The second film was a sequence of raw footage so arranged as to emphasise the tedium of what she had. The third film was the filler material. Edited into each film, at first out of sequence, and then gradually synchronised, was the footage of Prine giving the blowjobs to Ahmed and Charlie.
C'mere Then is actually a subtle and intelligent work dealing with a sensitive subject. Despite its reputation the film is a lot less explicit than you might expect. As Prine explains, "They didn't really know what they were doing. The light's wrong, the camera's wobbling all over the place. I mean if you want titillation you'd be better off watching adverts." Which may be true, but did not prevent the angry protests and notoriety that followed.
Afterwards it is no surprise that she took some time off, although it seems as though a hiatus was already in order. "We were eager to get our work out there, but it was the wrong time for me at least. I had a lot of extraneous theory and baggage from university, and I hadn't created anything I felt really happy about in a long time. That's partly why I was messing around with film, to find something that I could engage with. Everything I had in the show was transitional and immature. The attention to C'mere Then was exhausting, and it was annoying because John [Fenn, who creates mock palimpsests] and Kate [Buckman, a video artist] had much better work. But then they were able to go on and get pieces in other shows. I just didn't want to talk to anyone or explain anything so I went home."
Prine went back to live with her parents, and to hedging, work she had done before university. "It takes a lot of concentration and physical effort, you don't worry about trivia." She is keen not to misrepresent the period though, "It was only three months." After the first month she started sketching and taking photographs, and within six months she had moved back to the city and was thinking about exhibiting some of her new work.
That new work was both reminiscent of C'mere Then and utterly unlike it. The similarity is in the emphasis on the communities and identities people forge, and how they do that. The difference is that Prine is nowhere to be seen. "There is an identifiable personality and style to it," she says, "but I'm not projecting a subjective self into the work." In fact her installations use video and audio elements, among others, largely generated by the people who are the subject of the work. "I originate the broad idea, and at the end pull it together into a clear form, but it should be how these individuals and groups see themselves and portray themselves." Otherwise, she says, the work is simply about the artist.
It is tempting to believe that her experience with the press in 2002 lies behind this desire not to misrepresent her subjects. But she pulls out a notebook that dates from the period when she was planning C'mere Then. On the first page she wrote, "much more interest'g to get their perspective - already kno what i thnk + not interested" This is unusual in young contemporary artists, who often appear to engage with the world only as a means of displaying their own ego. Although typically Prine sees things slightly differently, "In one sense you could say it's me that's wrong. We can only experience the world subjectively in the end."
Right or wrong her work is refreshing. She does not confuse her arguments and themes and get distracted by the minutiae of her own internal dramas. Instead her work is absolutely clear, to the extent that it is easy to miss how complex it is. If nothing else, she has learned from C'mere Then how to edit her own work. There are few other artists working today so willing or able to learn from their mistakes.
The lives of others
In June 2002 a small gallery in Newport, South Wales played host to three unknown artists and a furious tabloid controversy. Expected to lose money, the self-financed show was intended for "Friends and family, really. We thought we'd be lucky if 300 people went through." Instead there were demonstrations, death threats, and the kind of outrage that recalled the nineties heyday of the Young British Artists.
At the eye of the storm was then 22 year old Polly Prine, and a video installation she had made called C'mere Then. Her installation was condemned as obscene, and the artist accused of being a prostitute and exhibitionist. The truth was far more complicated and interesting than the knee-jerk reaction allowed.
For a start Polly Prine is not her real name, but was adopted even before university. Far from being attention-seeking she is a painfully shy, secretive and circumspect young woman. C'mere Then remains unique in her work as the only piece in which Prine herself appears. "It's more interesting to look at other people. You don't know them, you're not familiar with their lives, their self-perception." Ironically it was exactly that fascination with the lives of others that caused her to create the installation. But irony is not the word she would use, "It is what it is. It ended up like it did because certain events, certain emotional reactions came about during filming that were more compelling than what was originally conceived."
What was originally conceived was a series of short documentary films on the relationships between different youth 'tribes' in Newport. Although Prine was studying fine art, and regarded herself as a sculptor, a number of her friends and fellow-students were engaged in filmmaking. She picked up the camera because, "It seemed like a good way to gather material. At first it just sat there, dozens of tapes in old shoe-boxes, just names written on them... for reference really. Then a friend suggested editing some of the best bits together."
Initially reluctant, Prine was only persuaded when the friend who first made the suggestion showed her what could be achieved. The friend edited ten minutes of footage into a sequence that told a story of cultural dislocation. At first Prine was appalled that sections were taken out of sequence or cut down to just a couple of sentences. She felt it was "dishonest", and that it misrepresented its subject in favour of a simplified narrative. Yet something in the short 'documentary' fascinated her and she kept returning to it until, as she says, "Something happened. It still seemed fundamentally untruthful, but I felt that if you were upfront about the story you wanted to tell then you could film people and use the edit to focus what you'd got afterwards."
She then wrote a detailed framework for what was intended to be a series of films about the youth 'tribes' she saw all around her every day. The first film would centre on a two groups, some teenage boys who hung around near a local park, and the teenage girls who walked past them every day. "It was fascinating," she says, "the boys were clearly inexperienced, but they had this macho pride that came out as sexist shite. They'd ask the girls to come over and suck their cocks, and all this. On the other hand the girls were self-possessed and intelligent, but it was like they had to get validation from the boys. Even if it was sexually demeaning."
She still had to get the two groups to open up, and started by talking to one of the girls. After a couple of weeks she was accompanying them on their promenades, but was not yet ready to start filming. She soon discovered that the two groups were a lot closer than they initially appeared and spent a great deal of time together, "And sex hardly came into it." The display she'd witnessed, the boys sitting on a wall throwing out sexual challenges as the girls walked by, was a small part of their relationship. Some of them had slept together, but at that time they all had boy- or girlfriends outside of their respective groups. A lot of their time was spent together; talking, drinking, and smoking cannabis.
"It's more interesting to look at other people"
Eventually Prine started to take her camera with her, and then to film whatever happened. She began to accumulate a lot of material, but despite the amount of time she devoted to the project she could not make it come to life. "It was just really boring. I thought there was a story there, but I couldn't bring it out." Then something happened. From one point of view the film got out of control. From another point of view serendipity called. Prine has no sympathy with either view, "Do I regret what happened? No, I don't. Am I glad it happened? Of course not. But it happened, you have to live with that."
What happened was that one evening she was alone with two of the boys, Ahmed and Charlie, with her camera. They had spent all afternoon drinking and smoking cannabis, and she found herself flirting with the boys. They were exchanging the kind of sexually-charged backchat she had seen the groups of boys and girls throwing back and forth, and that first inspired the project. "But then things got a bit out of hand."
Although she was not attracted to either boy she found herself giving Ahmed a blowjob while Charlie filmed, and then giving Charlie a blowjob while Ahmed filmed. "Luckily I forgot to bring my tripod." The boys intended to film themselves as they had sex with Prine at the same time, but needed somewhere to situate the camera in order to film it. "I couldn't have stopped them," she says now, "but I absolutely didn't want to be in that position." While the boys were searching for boxes and furniture to provide the perfect surface to rest the camera the rest of the girls arrived at the house. In the ensuing confusion Prine took her camera and left.
In fact she went home to her parents' house for a fortnight, and then did not look at the film for another two months. "I wanted to pretend it hadn't happened." When she did look at the tapes she had it was clear she could not make the documentary she had intended. As she says, "Most of the footage was really boring. There was no story." Or rather, there was a story, but it was the story of how a filmmaker lost control of her own film, and it was not a story she wanted to tell. But she persevered, spending "eight, nine hours a day, every day for three weeks," trying to bring some order to the material she had.
She approached it methodically, writing different synopses in her notebook. "I already had a script sketched out, but that was irrelevant now." The difficulty was twofold, most of the footage was uninteresting, and the narrative inevitably concluded in the blowjobs. She realised that the film she had fell into three distinct 'moods'. There was the film from the last night, there was the footage she had shot in the weeks before, "which was really boring. I'd been shooting with a final edit in mind, like it was already written. It was stilted, I hadn't given them room to be themselves.", and finally there was material she had filmed with the intention of it being filler, but which seemed to have the greatest vitality. Most of her energy was spent in attempting to reconcile and integrate these different strands.
The solution, when it came, was unexpected. "I think visually," she says, "especially when I'm tired." One morning around four o'clock, after at least eight hours writing, Prine found herself doodling, and nodding off. Eventually she gave in to the inevitable and went to sleep. When she woke the pen was still in her hand, and the last page of the notebook was covered in random scribbles. However, when she looked at the rest of what she had done the night before, she got tremendously excited.
"The writing was rubbish," she explains, "but the doodles were brilliant. I didn't even remember drawing them, and yet the solution was there." What she had drawn were a series of boxes arranged in triplets. She started to work furiously to edit three separate films from the original material she had, to be shown simultaneously on three screens arranged in a triangle around the viewer. One film was as nearly as possible the documentary she had in mind before filming began. The second film was a sequence of raw footage so arranged as to emphasise the tedium of what she had. The third film was the filler material. Edited into each film, at first out of sequence, and then gradually synchronised, was the footage of Prine giving the blowjobs to Ahmed and Charlie.
C'mere Then is actually a subtle and intelligent work dealing with a sensitive subject. Despite its reputation the film is a lot less explicit than you might expect. As Prine explains, "They didn't really know what they were doing. The light's wrong, the camera's wobbling all over the place. I mean if you want titillation you'd be better off watching adverts." Which may be true, but did not prevent the angry protests and notoriety that followed.
Afterwards it is no surprise that she took some time off, although it seems as though a hiatus was already in order. "We were eager to get our work out there, but it was the wrong time for me at least. I had a lot of extraneous theory and baggage from university, and I hadn't created anything I felt really happy about in a long time. That's partly why I was messing around with film, to find something that I could engage with. Everything I had in the show was transitional and immature. The attention to C'mere Then was exhausting, and it was annoying because John [Fenn, who creates mock palimpsests] and Kate [Buckman, a video artist] had much better work. But then they were able to go on and get pieces in other shows. I just didn't want to talk to anyone or explain anything so I went home."
Prine went back to live with her parents, and to hedging, work she had done before university. "It takes a lot of concentration and physical effort, you don't worry about trivia." She is keen not to misrepresent the period though, "It was only three months." After the first month she started sketching and taking photographs, and within six months she had moved back to the city and was thinking about exhibiting some of her new work.
That new work was both reminiscent of C'mere Then and utterly unlike it. The similarity is in the emphasis on the communities and identities people forge, and how they do that. The difference is that Prine is nowhere to be seen. "There is an identifiable personality and style to it," she says, "but I'm not projecting a subjective self into the work." In fact her installations use video and audio elements, among others, largely generated by the people who are the subject of the work. "I originate the broad idea, and at the end pull it together into a clear form, but it should be how these individuals and groups see themselves and portray themselves." Otherwise, she says, the work is simply about the artist.
It is tempting to believe that her experience with the press in 2002 lies behind this desire not to misrepresent her subjects. But she pulls out a notebook that dates from the period when she was planning C'mere Then. On the first page she wrote, "much more interest'g to get their perspective - already kno what i thnk + not interested" This is unusual in young contemporary artists, who often appear to engage with the world only as a means of displaying their own ego. Although typically Prine sees things slightly differently, "In one sense you could say it's me that's wrong. We can only experience the world subjectively in the end."
Right or wrong her work is refreshing. She does not confuse her arguments and themes and get distracted by the minutiae of her own internal dramas. Instead her work is absolutely clear, to the extent that it is easy to miss how complex it is. If nothing else, she has learned from C'mere Then how to edit her own work. There are few other artists working today so willing or able to learn from their mistakes.
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