Red Star Motel

This is a series from Chinese photographers Liu Song and Chili called Red Star Motel. I'm very interested in the transformation of the same space through the varying of character and activity. The explicit violence of the series - whether sexual, brutal, or kinetic - is in sharp contrast to the drab, quotidian hotel room. I like this series particularly as a contrast to some of the other images I've posted, which have been consistently clean and distanced. These are everything but.

Bill Viola

Still ruminating about the possibility of using video in LULU, I started to think about the painting that is created in Act One and persistently sticks around through the entire play; how in the last act Lulu's devastated body pales in comparison to the image of her former beauty; how Alwa, Schigolch, and Geschwitz kneel before the icon in worship of their now dissipated goddess. The painting's fixed impression of Lulu is integral to the story, yet isn't the act of painting portraiture somehow dated in a modernized production? How else could Schwarz capture the image of Lulu?

The following images are stills from video installations by Bill Viola, whose slow-motion portraiture could be an eerie reference point for a less-dated approach to the ever-present picture of Lulu. Click the links for the full videos.

"Acceptance"
2008

"Silent Mountain"
2001