Prop Talk

Description:

Presented parallel to the exhibition Properties at Western Front, Margaret Haines read a series of short stories titled Prop Talk: What’s Real? (2012). Focusing on three female protagonists, the publication considers the role of props in Haines’s filmmaking process while doubling as the trailer for her film Coco (2014). Throughout her presentation, her father, Tor Haines, responded to these stories, drawing from his own philosophical text, titled simply “Props.” Through a scripted play, Haines and her father reflected and debated upon the possibility of mimesis in fiction, cultural reference as calcified identity, the crisis of the object, digital props, selfies, and the death (rebirth) of art. 


Video documentation of this event is available upon request.