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M+, Hong Kong. Gift of Tracey Moffatt, 2018, © Tracey Moffatt. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
On View
Mediatheque
Tracey Moffatt 翠絲．莫法特
Lip 唇
1999
The Australian artist Tracey Moffatt developed the eight videos in her Montages series with editor Gary Hillberg, her long-time collaborator, between 1999 and 2015. In each work, Moffatt weaves together scenes from popular media that relate to a particular theme, often calling attention to archetypes and the dynamics of personal relationships.
Lip, made while Moffatt was living in New York, is the first of the series. The ten-minute video cuts together clips from Hollywood movies featuring interactions between Black actresses playing housekeepers or cooks and the white women characters who employ them. Moffatt selects segments where the Black characters talk back, or ‘give lip’; their sharp, often funny reactions both call attention to and subvert the power relations embedded in the films. Two songs by the American soul singer Aretha Franklin, ‘Chain of Fools’ and ‘Think’, provide an intermittent soundtrack to the exchanges.
Moffatt has described the Montages as ‘hymns to cinema’, and her knowledge of and affection for the popular medium is apparent in the sequences she creates. In its focus on characters seen as marginal and subservient, Lip foregrounds the limited range of roles granted to Black actresses. Even more pointedly, the work uses the artifice and formal techniques of film to pick apart stereotypical representations of race and gender.
Lip, made while Moffatt was living in New York, is the first of the series. The ten-minute video cuts together clips from Hollywood movies featuring interactions between Black actresses playing housekeepers or cooks and the white women characters who employ them. Moffatt selects segments where the Black characters talk back, or ‘give lip’; their sharp, often funny reactions both call attention to and subvert the power relations embedded in the films. Two songs by the American soul singer Aretha Franklin, ‘Chain of Fools’ and ‘Think’, provide an intermittent soundtrack to the exchanges.
Moffatt has described the Montages as ‘hymns to cinema’, and her knowledge of and affection for the popular medium is apparent in the sequences she creates. In its focus on characters seen as marginal and subservient, Lip foregrounds the limited range of roles granted to Black actresses. Even more pointedly, the work uses the artifice and formal techniques of film to pick apart stereotypical representations of race and gender.
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