Fandom as Methodology by Catherine Grant

Author:Catherine Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

6

“Shipping” (as) Fandom and Art Practice

Owen G. Parry (owko69)

This chapter draws a relationship between fandom and contemporary art by turning to fandom as a site of inspiration and motivation in my own art practice. In 2015 I initiated the Fan Riot project, an expansive art project exploring an increased resonance between art and fandom since the Internet.1 Re-imagining the canonical tropes of relational aesthetics and the archival turn in contemporary art, Fan Riot explores the figure of the adoring fan as an unassuming model for collectivity, mobilisation and revolt. Fan Riot includes a fan club series with contributing fans and artists working with fan-like tendencies; publications exploring the relationship between critical art writing and fanfiction; and a series of artworks and performances, including two works commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts, London in 2016 that I will discuss here: Larry!Monument a multimedia installation and fictional monument to the Larry Stylinson fandom, focused on the romantic relationship between One Direction boy band members Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles as imagined-into-being by their adoring fans; and Larry Stylinson Performance AU, a role-play performance staged at the monument and performed by two Larry lookalikes.

More specifically this chapter turns to “shipping”: a speculative method in fanfiction of creating new erotic relationships between characters or celebrities un-substantiated in the official narratives or source texts, and characterised through fan-authored processes of imagining, re-writing and “fictioning.”2 Shipping, initially derived from the word “relationship,” “is the desire by fans for two or more people, either real-life-people or fictional characters (in film, literature, television, etc.) to be in a relationship, romantic or otherwise.”3 Shipping manifests through practice in the formation of transformative works including fanfictions, vids, illustrations and memes self-published on Internet platforms like tumblr, YouTube, fanfiction.net and archive of our own and includes an infinity of possible narratives: fans of, for example, Harry Potter or boy band One Direction create transformative works by using those official, usually commercially driven texts and narratives to create their very own versions, whether that be a “curtain fic” (or domestic fic) in which an enamoured Snape and Harry go shopping for curtains; a hurt/comfort fic (or death fic) where one band member, Louis, cares for the other band member, Harry, who has a terminal illness; or a One Direction/Harry Potter crossover in which Harry Potter is a performance artist and Harry Styles an art critic who “bodyswap” to help each other out of “sticky” situations.

An exclamation mark (sometimes called a “bang”) between two words in fandom, for instance “Married!Larry,” denotes a trait!character relationship between a character and a trait of that character. There are infinite possibilities for re-working popular texts, but fanfiction mostly focuses on relationships between characters, or celebrities in real-person fiction (RPF). The romance genre is thus the most popular, and includes specialist tropes like shipping; “one true pairing” (OTP – a fan’s favourite romantic pairing or “ship”); and slash or femme slash, focused on a same-sex relationship or narrative, “usually one imposed by the author and based on perceived homoerotic subtext.

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