Garip Fruit

Art is not created in a void. The essence of artistic creation is not the making of something from nothing. Art concerns the transformation of what exists. Transformation is the constitutive element of originality. The transformed thing preserves its essence within itself. Yet it differs from its essence. It is new. It is original. The relationship of art with the ideological emerges at this point: continuity and difference. The relationship established with the mythological is important for this reason. Mythologies are not 'empty' narratives. Mythology is not a fairy tale. Within its own distinctive texture, it is the ideological discourse of the day. It contains the ideological. It points to the ideological. It produces the ideological. From the oldest known myths to the present, woman is drama, our consciousness, our body and our unconscious. She is a reality beyond herself. A kind of 'constitutive outside'. To think of and examine her as an entity and reality is the search for and examination of the 'other' and 'transcendent' dimensions within humanity itself. Woman is dialectical.     Yet despite this dialectic and constitutive function, woman has remained 'strange'. She has been considered 'odd'. She has been regarded with suspicion. She has been seen as foreign. She remains outside. She has still not been internalized. In 'Strange Fruit', Susie MacMurray turns toward what is inside while outside, what is foreign while familiar. Working from the lyrical, poetic and mythological, she shapes the real, the fictional and the imaginary. She reconstructs the mythological. In doing so, she directs her ideological critique toward the mythological. She questions the limits of art's reality and the metaphysics within which woman has her place. In the art-woman duality and dilemma, she examines the complementary and the deficient. In these works where the poetic is established as a meta-language, nothing exists beyond the aesthetic. The intrinsic reality of aesthetics, as the highest ordering and ethical plane, carries the work to its most appropriate form and content. While the aesthetic and poetic becomes the most effective tool for validating truths otherwise misspoken, MacMurray uses this possibility to create a universal work that transcends times and concepts across the contexts of woman, body, performance and womanhood. MacMurray's works are a critique of and contribution to history. And this approach is the most effective instrument for questioning humanity as itself. Humanity and the great unconscious, humanity and the collective unconscious, humanity and myths, humanity and reality: Strange Fruit!