Paragraphs on Make-Up Art — Cristina Garrido

Paragraphs on Make-Up Art
2022

Single-channel digital video HD; color; no sound; 16:9.
3’43″

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The video shows close-ups of some of the most popular and widely followed make-up YouTubers worldwide—such as Jaclyn Hill, Jeffree Star, Jackie Aina, Nikkie Tutorials, Patrick Starr, Samantha Deepak, and Bretman Rock—offering a make-up tutorial.

As the sequence progresses, we see them on camera going from completely bare-faced to applying creams, powders, contouring, blush, and glitter, radically transforming their appearance and dramatically altering their features. In this silent piece, their actions, taken out of context, acquire a hypnotic and immensely plastic quality, almost as if they were a painting in motion.

In contrast, beneath their transforming faces, a series of slogans in English appear as text, offering advice – or rather, commands – to hypothetical artists. These phrases are excerpts from Sol LeWitt’s 1967 text Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, seminal to the conceptual art movement.

In his text, LeWitt provides guidelines for artists who want to create conceptual art. In his words: “Arbitrary or chance decisions would be kept to a minimum, while caprice, taste and other whimsies would be eliminated from the making of the art. Color, surface, texture, and shape only emphasize the physical aspects of the work. Anything that draws the viewer’s attention to this physicality is distracting from our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive device.”

The colorful images in the video nod to the instructions that made LeWitt famous and that he pioneered as a way of spreading and reproducing his work. The contrast between the light-hearted, cheerful demeanor of the YouTubers and the sobriety and austerity promoted by the text aims to question still deeply ingrained notions of what is superficial or essential.