Laura+B.+Final+Project

My video:

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For my project, I chose to focus on Lena Dunham’s “The Fountain.” Dunham shot “The Fountain” when she was a 21-year-old student at Oberlin College. In “The Fountain,” Dunham, dressed in a bikini, showers and brushes her teeth in the fountain until a security guard asks her to leave. The video quickly brought her to YouTube fame. However, after the success of her film “Tiny Furniture” at South by Southwest, Dunham chose to take the video down from YouTube. She did not want the first thing people found when googling her to be the comment section of the video discussing her weight. I have included links and other research I have done to better explain the video since it is no longer available. Dunham has mentioned in interviews that she originally made the video as a performance parody of the scene in the Trevi Fountain from La Dolce Vita. I have included a YouTube video of the scene from La Dolce Vita in the links above. After watching both videos (I had seen “The Fountain” before Dunham took it down), there are many structural changes that Dunham made when creating her video. After deconstructing her video, I created a formula to use to make my video.

Dunham made this video on her college campus in an extremely public place. Oberlin, Ohio is smaller than Washington, DC but there are many public areas that could be used for a similar purpose. Though she broke rules by going into the fountain, she complies with the security guard when he asks her to get out of the fountain. The conceptual strategy of this video is making something private extremely public. In “La Dolce Vita,” Sylvia casually runs into the fountain in her evening gown. Dunham planned to go into the fountain on a certain day while wearing a bikini and pretending to shower. Dunham is often makes her body the subject of many of her works. She does not have what is considered the ideal female form. Without Dunham’s body, “The Fountain” would lose its purpose. It would be unlikely that someone would shower in public. However, everyone showers. Dunham’s work explored the public vs private dilemma of what many people do every day. People shower and brush their teeth everyday but rarely do so in the presence of others, especially strangers.

I chose to film my performance by the fountain in Dupont Circle because it serves public stage. I filmed it at rush hour when there would be the highest volume of traffic- the most potential for unsuspecting audience members. Like Dunham, I used a public space as a stage for exhibiting a private performance. Similar to Dunham’s video, I am forcing the viewer to watch me watch myself. This challenges the way they see an individual, in this case me, by unintentionally seeing the private act of me checking myself out as I would if no one were looking.

Although I was not doing anything extremely out of the ordinary, many passer-byers stopped to observe. My prolonged performance made some viewers uncomfortable. One man asked my roommate what I was doing. When she responded, “checking herself out.” He nodded and responded by saying “I feel like I shouldn’t be watching this.” This comment captures what I wanted the audience to feel from this performance. They were observing what typically is a private moment and somehow knew it was not meant for the public eyes. The viewers were uncomfortable that I forced them to become voyeurs, observing a private act that is performed by many people but not something typically exposed to public eyes.

By staging my performance at a fountain I hope to pay homage to Dunham, and Sylva before her. Yet, I feel that my performance took the idea of revealing a private act in a public sphere a step further by staging it in a more highly trafficked area. It added another layer of voyeurism- the viewers of my video are watching the public watch me watch myself. It is an overall uncomfortable scenario, but I hope it will challenge the audience to think about the lines between what is public and private.

Original Artwork:

Lena Dunham "The Fountain"

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This is the video Dunham based her work off of. []