Jouissance

just spicy enough

2012-01-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

One thing American-born Asians and Latinos share in terms of racial assumptions made about them is that they definitely speak a different language (and get accosted by people who want to talk about and emphasize this magical otherness). This SNL sketch captures well how I think Hollywood deals with it:

Ethnic, but not TOO ethnic, because then it'd be weird!, i.e. Working from within racial stereotypes and sticking to the stereotypes ("Aiyaiyai!").

cool duo

2011-12-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

Transitions by THEESatisfaction

AV Club.

Great NPR interview w/ Jonathan Moore, Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction:

Jonathan Moore: As Ish mentioned a minute ago, we're here in Seattle, and so you're isolated geographically and essentially you pioneer or you die. You're in the wilderness. You make your way or perish.

ANN POWERS: That principle of self-invention can mask inequalities in a city like this.

JONATHAN MOORE: I lived in Atlanta for five years during college, and Seattle is probably more segregated than Atlanta, believe it or not. It is this kind of ideal that's propped up, that we live in a real liberal Patagonia-yoga-New-Age-type environment, but it can be really repressive here, if you don't have a sense of entity yourself.

You could live in Seattle and work as a white person and not have any interaction with people of color. They might not be in your office, they may not be in your school, they might not be in your neighborhood, so you just see them in passing, and that's not progress. That's not integration.

a visual pun for y'all

2011-12-01T21:27:00.001-08:00

i'm in gender(ed)? trouble if i don't finish this book before its due to the U.

art history at its best

2011-12-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

I Love Totally Looks Like.

aggressively depressed about the state of race in this country..+jam

2011-11-30T20:03:00.000-08:00

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH

Whosever "faith and values" these people are taking, they are NOT MINE.

aggresive non-participation in black friday..+ jams

2011-11-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Adbusters Barbara Kruger-inspired poster.

TRYING to not buy anything today..it's more difficult than it should be, probably.

Barbara Kruger “Plenty” exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, N.Y., 2010.

You Can Sell Anything..."Let's go around the room, what motivates you--'I wanna own a boat one day"

Barbara Kruger, I Shop Therefore I Am (I), 1987.

Buy Nothing Day 2007 ad.

But, calm down Adbusters, D. Racist brings a fresh perspective to commercial(i)s(m):

"It's irrelevant tell me where my cheddar went, money is my time and I like my time better spent"

Lastly, Choose Life.

a 90s versus 10s study of diversity..WHOOPS

2011-11-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I was going to write a short ditty about how Target's new ad campaign for its Levi jeans brand Denizen "did" diversity in an organic, almost natural, urban way as opposed to the staid and forced 90s way (as I saw recently on an infuriating trip to Target in Northgate (for the '10s) and as still seen at most Baskin Robbins joints on a big poster//on BK Kids Burger King happy-meal-equivalent bags(for the '90s))...but WHOOPS!

The online campaign is not diverse.

Observe 2011:

Versus 1989:

So then am I hopeful for these millenium teens, or wary that online, Target is less diverse than it is offline? Isn't online-ness the true measure of reality nowadays?
ps. I was about to complain about the lack of any female of color in BK Kids, but according to Wikipedia an Asian female was added..in the 2000s!

pps. i have limited HTML knowledge so here is a pic/description of her

link here

Furthermore, the brand sells in places where exclusively or almost exclusively brown/yellow people reside (At first I thought that the negative connotations of the etymology of the brand had to do with the fact that the brand was supposed to be more "street" and thus diverse, but the negativity is not mentioned on its website):

"Launched in Asia in 2010, dENiZEN™ was created by the people who invented jeans.

The dENiZEN™ name means 'inhabitant' – belonging to a community of family and friends. Denim is in the name, the heart of the brand.

The dENiZEN™ brand is currently available in China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore and the United States."

Also it appears from Levi's "Culture" webpage, the staff includes a diverse peoples, and "they" are okay with advertising that here:

Where's the disconnect here? Who is making these marketing decisions, and who do I ask to get my peoples behind the scenes represented in the front of scenes? Or are we too ugly, decision makers (Are these decision makers self-hating yellow folks?)?

This reminds me of the fact that Sex in the City takes place in New York City, the most diverse place, what, ever? and includes four white ladies as the main characters and therefore is not very representative of the City it purports to portray.

Anyway my point is, marketing people, stop making me feel unwelcome/unbeautiful/invisible and maybe I'll consider buying from you since you care to pretend you care. Maybe. Thanks Burger King, but uh, no thanks. Maybe when you include some other ladies of color..twenty years ago. I have this consolation regarding The Man: "Unhappy with your riches cuz you're piss-poor morally"

dung wisdom

2011-11-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

2011-11-24T23:21:00.000-08:00

nice

2011-11-24T22:51:00.000-08:00

MACYS rocks the boat

2011-11-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

YESS..the golden rare bird couple (although they could be friends I still like it) featured on Macy's MAIN webpage today, Saturday 11/12/11 9:55PM Pacific Standard Time:

Charlotte Wolff

2011-11-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

Studying Bonhoeffer reminded me that Berlin was a gay old time pre-Hitler post-WWI according to Ms. Charlotte Wolff, a sometimes cohort of my favorite guy Walter Benjamin. I was introduced to her via
Matthew Buckingham.

scary misogynistic violence @ the vag

2011-09-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

We just went to the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) to see the surrealism show and boy it was surreal...

to see how glaringly violent Hans Bellmer's work is to the female body (no wonder Frida wanted nothing to do with the movement)! to hans bellmer i dedicate this song:

Grant Wood

2011-08-24T23:33:00.000-07:00

Misinterpreted?

on the periodization of history (what have you done for me lately?) in three classical parts

2011-07-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

On modernism and postmodernism as seen in three different classical movements a la BEETHOVEN'S PIANO SONATA
N0. 26, OP. 81A.
1. Das Lebewohl (Les Adieux). Adagio - Allegro
2. Abwesenheit (L'Absence). Andante espressivo
3. Das Wiedersehn (Le Retour). Vivacissimamente

(More Here)

[Sonata in G major op. 81 a is perhaps one of Beethoven’s most popular sonatas, one of great originality. Beethoven published the programme of this work. Each part bears a distinct title: Farewell, Absence, and Return. The sonata was dedicated to the archduke Rudolf, with the following note on the manuscript: “Farewell on the occasion of the departure of His Royal Highness, the Honorable Archduke Rudolf, Vienna, May 21st 1809.” (Edwin Fischer, Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas). The sonata is also known as Les Adieux, title given by editor Breitkoph without Beethoven’s permission.

The sonata starts with a slow introduction where we notice the sounds of the bugle announcing the departure of the postalion and at the same time suggesting a feeling of sadness of leaving. Then there is rendered a picture of great joy, conjuring up the adventures of the journey presented with extraordinary humor. The second part – Andante – renders the feelings of the abandoned man, in echoes of the first musical theme. The sonata ends in an atmosphere of absolute bliss.]

FAREWELL (identity begins to erode)

Part One-->POP<--Black to De/Post-racial Michael Jackson

Because "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough"-era Michael had a firm grasp on his identity as a black solo artist, he exhibited certain modernist tendencies.

He was an idealist struggling against a racist industry. He was certain of his blackness: no nose job, black curls, a chocolate complexion. In the video, he has an obvious place in time: disco, 70s, blaring horns. He's gleeful, singing "keep on, with the force don't stop." And why not? He's coming off of the tail end of civil rights and black power. There is a lot to look forward to at this moment in his life. He's a rising star.

Contrast that warm Off The Wall smile and amazing green screen with the high production quality of "Black or White," in particular, during the uncomfortable crotch-grab/break-stuff epilogue.
Not only has MJ become de-racialized (post-racialized?)--his nose is pointier, hair is long and flowing, and his skin is now a golden tan. But what's notable is MJ has als olost his place in time and history (OK, I know having MaCaulay Culkin at that age dates it a bit but the imagining of the races in their 'native' costume is always a bit of a time warp). He's become unmoored from his beginnings. Michael at this point is pluralist and multicultural--touting the many colors of an ethnic rainbow--Russia, India, New York, Culkin with his '90s poster-child friends on a city stoop.

During MJ's fondling dance scene, you sense the angst all the fame and talent has wreaked on MJ. He's made it. He's transcended racial boundaries to become the King of Pop. He's made a name for himself. But now what? MJ asserts (via an anonymous black disembodied voice transferred to McCaulay Culkin the wiz-kid much like in those Talk Boys commercials & even in Home Alone), "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color."

At the end of the video Michael/the panther (a black panther, I might add) breaks windows and rips his shirt open. It's as if the golden age of postracial happiness were a goddamned lie and only NOW has MJ become disenchanted with that dream (despite the wonderful optimism displayed in the previous frames and in the song itself)...

**(A)SIDE NOTE:
I realize that I am trying way too hard to make too many things fit into my grand narrative. But the fact of the matter is I believe there are tendencies to each conceptual period and I am trying, however fruitlessly, to assign these tendencies to tangible object lessons to test whether there really can be any sense of distinguishing between the periods.**

ABSENCE (Sanctity gives way to Godlessness)

Part Two-->ART<--Constantin Brancusi and Kiki Smith

The Modernist canon of ART often is male, a presumed Genius, and white with few exceptions (Are Kahlo, Bourgeois, or O'Keefe Modernist & do you have to be male or white to make it into the Canon (Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis?). Thus their artistic practice often must uphold this Genius-aura. By contrast, those who trickled out after these giants (or who cut down the giants?) are less stringent in practicing a Genius ruse. As Liz Brown once summarized, whereas Brancusi took photographs of his sculptures in order to document them as artworks and wanted the photos to reflect the sculptures as art, Kiki Smith views (especially taking photos of her sculptures) each and every part of the process as a (potential or actual) artwork in itself. The emphasis on process not product de-emphasizes the Genius myth, that romantic idea that an Artist is a Divine, Special being with God-ordained talent (rather than a humble human who wrought their work out of blank canvas or raw material after years of practice and toil).

return (jouissance and pre-racial bliss)

Part Three-->RACE<--Dear Frederic Jameson in 1986: So you critique the postindustrial consumer society concurrent w/ Postmodernism. But besides having a plethora of shoppers-oriented-cultural-niches no longer based in the "commonality" of the golden '50s, we get identity politics and critical race studies, which is cool, right? Or is it?

A large part of the toppling of great White Male Genius Myths had to do with the civil rights movement for/by black(men) and (white)women. However, once you deconstruct those founding forefathers, what are you left with? Definitely a lot of confused white male nongeniuses as well as a lot of distinct ethnic/gender groups rallying for their different voices to be heard (by everyone, but especially the white males formerly known as geniuses & the institutions calling the shots on geniusdom). And one symptom that I have noticed in these specific groups is a strong identification ritual that results in a similar Myth/merrymaking to the one that they were toppling to begin with: "We are XYZ group" (Black men, white women, Taiwanese Americans, Asian-American-females alike) and we won't take any prisoners.

If these super-identificatory splinter groups are Modern, then, the Post-Modern person (an individual as opposed to a group, perhaps a pariah) may be somewhere between color-blind and color-conscious, some kind of amalgamated cyborg that may or may not acknowledge and/or exoticize&celebrate difference, and is open to that KKK/pureblood fear of admixture and other abhorrent abominations. Sure, Michael acknowledges he's black, but does he care what color you are? No, you're his brother, his sister, his lover, black, white, etc. Sure, Kiki Smith could acknowledge her art can be rooted in her identity a lady, but is it a (in Jen Graves' words) monument to her own genitalia a la Judy Chicago? Not in a capital-F Feminism kind of way. Lastly, does one's choice in friends and lovers being different colors of the rainbow reflect a post-modern consciousness? I would argue yes. Thanks, the '90s and Postmodernism!

R.I.P.

2011-07-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

Beautiful painting.

Originally I found it paired w/ Hypnotize. But I like juicy better.

I love this Tee:

No, people visiting the Henry and relentlessly touching the art, we HAVEN'T changed our no touching policy!

2011-07-21T13:49:00.001-07:00

Awesome Onion article.

Um, whoa

2011-07-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

Peter Saul's (colors/style/content are) intense even for me, but I admire his no-holds-barred approach and the fact that he was (loosely) associated with the Hairy Who. I just heard about him via Brooklyn Rail.

Village Voice on Saul: "The 76-year-old Saul is exactly the sort of machete-wielding painter that contemporary art needs today. Blessed with a chronic case of artistic Tourette's, he delights in japes at the most varied cultural targets—Republicans and Democrats, hedge funders and hipster artists, bandwagoners and vanguardists alike come in for his savage Sioux scalping...While churning out decades of astoundingly deft painting in his signature cartoon style, he has become that much-prized-but-rarely-encountered cultural commodity: a genuinely nonconformist, Mark Twain–ornery, American original."

Clemunteena Gweenburg, 1971. Colored pencil and gouache on museum board. 41 × 31 in. Collection of Sally and Peter Saul. Courtesy of Haunch of Venison New York.

Angela Davis, 1972. Color lithograph on paper. 37 1/2 x 30 in. Struve Fine Art.

Amboosh, 1975. Color lithograph on paper. Struve Fine Art.

See also Struve Fine Art and Frieze Magazine's review of his January exhibition:
"Even the lowbrow pop of Disney was too sweet for Saul, whose paintings borrow from cartoons a transmutative energy as sinister as it is playful...Saul’s characteristic pyrotechnics [are] gripping and silly, mordant and demented, in equal measure."

cool show opening tonight, wish i could go

2011-07-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

Mark Warren Jacques

and

Jesse Brown
(You may know his work from around town)

Shimomura vs. Hannah Montana

2011-07-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

In very untimely news, how do you think the Asian kid feels in this picture?

Maybe like this? Crying a little on the inside?

(Yellow Terror, 2008, acrylic/canvas, 60 x 72 inches. That's Shimomura low in the center, making slant eyes.)

-Regina Hackett on Roger Shimomura

Or like this funny, dapper Canadian fellow? Thanks to Ella for sharing!

cf. Dr. Seuss--A shout out to Mary Woodward, I think, for pointing this out to me at the Bainbridge Island Historical Society in her book (?) a few years back. This book, Looking Like the Enemy also looks interesting.

If I were a rich woman

2011-07-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

I would also commission a giant illusionistic ceiling fresco with my family crest. Whether I would call it "The Allegory of Divine Providence and Hong Power" is another matter.

Piero da Cortona, Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power, 1633-1639, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

Matika Wilbur

2011-06-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

Organic vs. Origin.

She's got a series at the SAM through August 14th:
Save the Indian and Kill the Man. She juxtaposes the stereotype of a native person as perpetually (Plains) Indian, romanticized and blended in with the landscape and the past(cf. this gaudy Indian head ring, and a contemporary person just doing their thang.

Check out more of her work here:
Matika Wilbur Photography

Also, at the MLK Jr. Day Parade in January, I saw some super hip young punk native teens, and they had a sign that had a stern archetypal Indian on it (better rendered than this one, but similarly phrased):

why oh why did I miss this show

2011-06-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

Like all the best of Jim Henson, Cousin Itt, that Looney Toons hairy guy, Snuffleupagus, and anything else that is imaginative involving a plethora of fringe and hair. SAM says, "We call them a beautiful, joyous, EXUBERANT, colorful opportunity to explore an ALTERNATIVE WORLD which challenges conventions and inspires new ways of thinking."

on the enduring appeal of exoticism

2011-06-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

"Exoticism (from 'exotic') is a trend in art and design, influenced by some ethnic groups or civilizations since the late 19th-century... Like orientalist subjects in 19th century painting, exoticism in the decorative arts and interior decoration was associated with fantasies of opulence.

Exoticism, by definition, is "the charm of the unfamiliar." Scholar Alden Jones defines exoticism in art and literature as the representation of one culture for consumption by another.[1] An archetypical exoticist is the artist and writer Paul Gauguin, whose visual representations of Tahitian people and landscapes were targeted at a French audience."

Gauguin, so obvious (speaking of which, coming to SAM next year, ooh perhaps to get served!) But how about some less glaring, but still grating examples of exoticism?

Bands naming themselves something exotic just for fun/and/or to expand their notion of their identity beyond ("plain 'ole") whiteness: The Angry Samoans, Half Japanese, Beirut.
Suburban kids, like myself, really really liking hip-hop and gangsta rap.
That episode of Pete & Pete w/ a bowling ball that was given to Petes' grandpa by a "Tibetan magic man" (maybe not in so many words, but he was Tibetan).

I haven't quite got it yet, but I am trying to put my finger on what the fine line is that separates creepy/sexist/racist jerk-parading-as-enlightened exoticism (like Gauguin) vs. non-creepy/non-sexist/non-racist normal person exoticism (or perhaps it shouldn't be called exoticism at that point). Maybe it all depends on the direction of the power dynamic. Who is being exoticized by whom and to what end? Is it a sexual fetish (again Gauguin)? Is it devaluing the exotic culture by minimizing its degree of civilization ("the noble savage")? Is it overvaluing the exotic culture's oneness with nature or touted magical powers (Pete & Pete bowling ball episode)? Is it a completely random name-drop just for fun (bands listed above)? If so, I regret to inform you that you can't refer to real cultures casually from a mainstream p.o.v. (i.e. male, anglo saxon protestant american) AND not raise an eyebrow from this yellow lady.

"One-of-a-Kind Genuine Indian Head Nickel Rings Won't Last"

2011-06-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

The email ad I received with the title of this post as the subject states, "The Indian Head Nickel coin was designed in the early 20th century to honor the proud heritage of Native Americans and the spirit of the American West. Minted only from 1913 to 1938, this favorite among coin collectors has now become the centerpiece of this bold, unique Indian Head Nickel Men's Ring... The historic Indian Head Nickel collectible coin at the ring's center features a composite portrait of three great Native American chiefs, and each ring is truly one of a kind..."

You'd better get one before they run out!

2 Legit 2 Quit (back in the '90s)

2011-06-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Robert Schubert's review of Louise Bourgeois @ National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne(Art & Text 53 Jan. 1996, p. 71):

"The ciphers of Bourgeois's influence [on young Australian artists] can be most keenly felt in her use of synthetic materials, and the way this abject materiality gets woven into her preoccupation with the body. Exemplary here is Mamelles (1991),

whose phalange of pink rubber breasts (amorphously compeating for definition as indictments of feminine bodily experience) finds parallel with work developed by women artists in the 1990s. Yet the exhibition also demonstrates how little regard Bourgeois has for staking a claim in the essentialism which seems to dominate recent feminist art. It is not possible to link Bourgeois's engagement with the body to an unreconstructed essentialism without at the same time excluding the explicit genderfuck developed by her sculptural work in the 1980s...

the power of Bourgeois's work lies in the mixed pleasure and horror displayed towards the body. While her reception in Australia has been largely determined by the autobiographical and existential significance of her work, it is the ambiguities of flesh falling through the cracks of gendered boundaries that elicits the sense of astonishment pervading the exhibition.

untitled

2011-05-14T00:00:00.001-07:00

This is an excerpt from the Pagliacci Pizza Secret Shopper Review I've spent the past hour or two writing regarding their music and movie poster decor:

"More nonwhite peoples on your walls please! Perhaps you can dig up some retro hong kong movie posters in Italian....or a Hollywood movie with African-Americans? I know pizza is Italian but this is a very diverse country of immigrants from different backgrounds, even if that's not the myth that pervades Hollywood. I suppose the mix of new movies (Twilight) and classics (Rear Window) and cult directors (Terry Gilliam) fits the aesthetic of Seattle/Hipster/the music played (Hipster Ironic & filmically literate). Please also incorporate liberal Seattle's "racial awareness" if not de facto diversity, theoretical diversity into your aesthetic."

Beuys, Jay-Z, & Louise Bourgeois: a true fallen soldier of hip-hop.

2011-03-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

You ought to check out rising art star Jayson Musson, the genius behind Hennessy Youngman a.k.a. The Pharaoh a.k.a. the Row-House Raconteaur.
Beuys-z & In Memoriam (Louise Bourgeois + Boyz II Men, an unbeatable combination!)

Cf. Barack Obama battles the Pink Robots, Ehrenstein and the magical African-American friend.

African American Images from the 1890s to the Present

2011-02-26T22:35:00.000-08:00

A wonderful treat to read,look through,ponder--

Related exhibition descriptions:

Posing Beauty (Exhibition) @NYU/@Newark Museum/@Williams College Museum of Art

Notes...

Part of the book's purpose is to "challenge conventional perspectives on how identity revolves around beauty...(xx)"

Maria Elena Buszek on why Ebony began to feature attractive ladies on the cover (although their first few issues did not): "Beauty is skin-deep -- and that goes for brown as well as white skin. You'd never think it, though, to look at the billboards, magazines and pimp posters of America. Cheesecake (photographers' jive talk for sex-appeal pictures) is all white. But the Petty Girl notwithstanding, Negro girls are Beautiful too. And despite the fact that Miss America contests hand out "for whites only" signs, there are thousands of Negro girls lovely enough to compete with the best of white American pulchritude (xxiii)."

Regarding the marketing of advertising imagery et. al., "these images were targeted to a market where the consumer idealized and modeled the new look: beautiful, glamorous, stylish, and most of all desirable. Paul Gilroy argues that 'the Black consumer of these images and products, multi-variant processes of consumption, may express the need to belong, the desire, to make the beauty of Blackness intelligible, and to somehow fix that beauty and the pleasures it creates so that they [can] achieve, if not permanence, then at least a longevity that retrieves them from the world of pop ephemera and racial dispossession (xxvi).'

Ifétayo Abdus-Salam's American Exotic series poses the quetsion,"How do these images simultaneously influence the psyche, ideas and self-perceptions of African-American women, and the outside opinions of others (xxvi)?"

Abdus-Salam, Self Portrait as Pam Grier I, 2005
Archival Inkjet Print

"Sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig has observed that 'the rhetoric and staging of black beauty contests...grew out of a deliberate effort to demonstrate the falsehood of white depictions of the black race.'"

conversation w/ the author

Meat is life!

2011-02-26T21:43:00.000-08:00

It's a shame I don't have a convenient portal to NYC to check this out (Perishables
A solo presentation of new works by Ron van der Ende @ The Armory Show Pier 94 | Booth 1414 March 3-6):

Ron van der Ende, Still Life, 2010

Bas-relief in salvaged wood

70.8 x 40 x 4.75 in | 180 x 102 x 12 cm

Ah well, at least I have a tiny printout of this one:

Pieter Aertsen, Meat Still Life, 1551
Oil on wood panel
123.3 x 150 cm (48.5 x 59")
University Art Collections, Uppsala University, Sweden

Like other moralistic satire pieces, you get to play find-the-Christ. Fun!

"In the 16th and 17th centuries it was quite common for theologians to see a slaughtered animal as symbolizing the death of a believer. Allusions to the 'weak flesh' (cf. Matthew 16:41) may well have been associated with Aertsen's Butcher's Stall where - like on his fruit and vegetable stalls - a seemingly infinite abundance of meat has been spread out."

I've always read this painting however, as an aspect of the flourishing of capitalism (the proliferation of dead meat and other commodities available to all) in a largely Christian area and the ensuing ambivalence between wealth/greed and faith.

But don't forget Paul's injunctions in Romans 14, even during this Lenten season:
"Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them...Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God." Take that, Jesusveg!

P.S. I recently got to see one of my most beloved find-the-christ pictures of all time at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan. It is cited by the Met's Timeline of Art History as an early example of still-life painting (with Joseph and his tools in the right-hand panel. And like Jesus, the first artist (Ron van der Ende)grew up with a father whose medium was wood.

Yoshimoto Nara

2011-02-02T23:17:00.000-08:00

Kwon Kisoo

2010-12-18T12:55:00.000-08:00

Check it out

2010-09-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

I have decided to create.

A creation not of intellect but of experience.

Jouissance. this is the title of this blog we have been following. But what does it mean? For me, right now in this moment it means nothing to me but of pleasure. Pleasure is something I haven't felt in quite some time because I've been too busy freaking out about my newly realized adulthood. Goddamn it.

My epic move from the Northwest back to Oahu has been the up and down variety. It's been a major development into my new found sobriety. A type of sobriety that has made me realize I am much more psychologically out of my fucking mind than realized prior. A sobriety that has taught me more strength than I have ever known. A type of sobriety that makes people return to the life of substance.

From week to week it's been a difference of emotions. One week I am exploring the joys of paddle boarding, surfing, beach combing all the while acting like I've gone completely native. The next week I am freaking out wondering what the hell am I doing back here?! Waking up screaming 'holy shit, why did I come back here?' 'What the FUCK!?'

I feel unwelcome to experience this pleasure. I feel like I'm cheating on what I have worked so hard to obtain. But crap, what was that? I am so frustrated that I don't even know why. I'm too drunk to even care.

Please me but please yourselves.

This is jouissance.

Dutch Renaissance paintings and Bodily Functions

2010-07-06T12:04:00.001-07:00

I love this debate over the ever-important question, why do dogs pee in 17th-century Dutch churches?
One person's quest to find the truth

taring padi is awesome

2010-05-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Indonesian art collective (Taring Padi means fang of the rice paddy) founded in 1998 after Suharto stepped down says, Love your neighbor!

Two taring padi members/associates presented their awesome and inspiring work at Open Engagement this weekend.

An early cultural manifesto they had consisted of five antis: anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism/anti-feudalism/anti-militarism/anti-elitism. They also built a library for local children with money they made from the proceeds of their artwork. The library was also supported by donations from a kindergarten in Seattle!

When the collective was assisting in the raising of farmers' and villagers' spirits after the 2006 earthquake via scarecrow-making, Taring Padi drew on traditional Indonesian shadow puppets (Wayang Kulit), making scarecrows with the farmers out of cardboard instead of leather...Nearby artist Eko Nugroho also updated Wayang Kulit:

love it.

2010-04-24T14:28:00.001-07:00

Rosson Crow, I Just Can't Stop Loving You
2009, Oil, acrylic, and enamel on canvas, 84 x 114 inches

The central Jeff Koons/Michael homage becomes much less gaudy, more reverent when placed next to the coffin with roses spilling over.

Mo Ichi Do (One more time)

2010-04-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

Again. Hip-hop and Takashi Murakami (Previously: Kanye West's Graduation album cover & Pharrell's The Simple Things) @1:54 in Jay-Z's video for "Blue Magic."

I wonder, what's the mutual attraction between Murakami and hip-hop artists?

additional Notes...

Like Pharrell, Jay-Z owns some original Murakamis.
Comparing Damien Hirst on money and death to Jay-Z on money and death=AWESOME: "As in Jay-Z’s music, [Damien] Hirst’s meditations on wealth frequently accompany meditations on mortality. The Hirst pieces Jay-Z gravitates toward are those in which this theme is especially prominent: the diamond skull, which references memento mori, and which Hirst has described as a laugh 'in the face of' death; the spin-art skull paintings...dominate Jay-Z’s 'Blue Magic' video."
Speaking in a sweeping generalization, does this mean that hip-hop(read:black) artists enjoy contemporary and/or pop art, and folksy/rock(read:white) artists like Fleet Foxes or Deep Purple dig early Netherlandish art?
This brings us ALMOST back full circle (kinda): Jay-Z references Hirst references memento mori, a motif in Vanitas paintings (oft-associated with Flanders/Netherlands, countries which churned these out about a century or two after Bruegel and Bosch), which "are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death."

Benjamin, Bruegel, & (Judi and Ron) Barrett

2010-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

Reading The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's massive thousand-plus-pages work describing the significance of the 19th-c. Parisian precursor to outdoor shopping malls, his quotation from a French parody of Louis XI brings to mind one of my favorite books:

as well an awesome Bruegel (The Land of Cockaigne, 1567):(pg. 7)

Exposé of 1935, III. Grandville, or the World Exhibitions

Yes, when all the world from Paris to China
Pays heed to your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon,
The glorious Golden Age will be reborn.
Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea,
Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain,
And sautéed pike will swim in the Seine.
Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground,
Garnished with crushed fried croutons;
The trees will bring forth apple compotes,
And farmers will harvest boots and coats.
It will snow wine, it will rain chickens,
And ducks cooked with turnips will fall from the sky.

-Langlé and Vanderburch, Louis-Bronze et le Saint-Simonien (Théâtre du Palais-Royal, February 27, 1832)

Each of these three nature-bearing-ready-to-eat-food works presents a different moral: in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, food turns deadly; in Bruegel people become lazy and fat; in the Benjamin quote, having your basic (albeit fancy) nutritional needs met paves the way for commodity fetishism. That is, the next line Benjamin writes after the quote reads: "World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish."

Perhaps partly because we today are awash with plentiful fast food options from golden arches to extensive prepackaged frozen foods, all much less delicious-sounding than the gourmet food of Langlé&Vanderburch, we are propelled into the world of fashion, advertisements, and sex sells: "World exhibitions propagate the universe of commodities...Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service (8)." See also Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 151, 152.

However, food-as-commodity can be sexualized itself ---- and the food industry and fashion industry vie for our attention and negate each other (the more you indulge in those juicily unhealthful burgers, the less you look like the models presented by the fashion world). You can't be a hot burger model and eat it too.

Shimomura to speak at Wing Luke Thursday

2010-03-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday, March 18 at 7pm

Wing Luke Asian Museum

719 South King Street

An American Diary, A Lecture by Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura will present An American Diary, a 60-minute lecture on his work spanning over 40 years. Shimomura's paintings, prints and theatre pieces address sociopolitical issues of Asian America. Learn how his work has been propelled by various historical and political events, as well as his own physical environment which has been constantly filled with his collections ranging from Walt Disney memorabilia to World War II stereotypes of Asian people.

Shimomura website
Regina Hackett review of the current exhibit showcasing Shimomura--Yellow Terror--on view through April 18th.
Jen Graves's review

2010-03-01T18:48:00.000-08:00

Memes & Memetics by Susan Blackmore

2010-01-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T20:36:00.000-08:00

Jean-François Lyotard: ‘If we accept the rules of engagement, now we can begin to play the game.’

Modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that now more than ever the human experiences are of simulations of reality rather than reality itself. It is mode, a system of control. But who is exactly is in control? Are we not breaking the rules here by believing in that which we cannot see? The key concept here is to never stop questioning.

How do we know we exist in the form that we inherently believe we do? We only exist in this human layout because that’s what we have sought to trust in. The possibility of defying that notion is only an implausible truth since we are only human after all. The post modern condition is a result of advance changes. Out with the old, in with the new. Origins can no longer simply take root in history, it must fight for validity.

“Symbolic language, being self-referential, had moreover the capacity to take itself as its own object, hence to provide its own memory and critique. Supported by these properties of language, material technique in turn underwent a mutation: it could refer to itself, build on itself, and improve its performance” (Lyotard).

We are only a condition of ourselves. For every action there is a reaction; that is the post modern attitude in regards to how it all came to be. The symbolism of language allows interpretation, improvisation, and altering perspectives. But at the same time in all its freedom, the openness of language formation, myth creation, and historicity leaves too much exposed for errors or the usual Freudian slip. What makes humankind able to evolve is our ability to input information and our ability to output information. It is the human instinctual need to survive even if only thru preservation of existence. How can we be so sure the manner in which receive information is correct? Perhaps the inaccuracy is that although message projection is successful, the methods in which we recognize truth from fallacy can be highly experimental, depending on thought process and personal systematic beliefs of faith, a false sense of assurance.

Lyotard's work is a representation towards constant opposition to universals. The bulk of his research is persistent and epitomizes the ‘collapse of the grand narrative’ or metanarratives that imbues generality. He is sternly critical of many of the ‘universalist’ assertion of the Enlightenment. Lyotard wanted to break barriers and conceptualized a type of reasoning that did not center a focus on discipline as a means to get answers. His works undermines the essentialisms of the Enlightenment’s principles that generated their expansive assertions.

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), he argued that our age in context to the postmodern condition is discernible by a ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives.’ These meta-narratives (or ‘grand narratives’) are ostentatious, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progression of history, the knowledge of everything by science, and the possibility of unconditional freedom (Lyotard).

Lyotard argues that we have stopped believing in narratives of this kind and are sufficient enough to represent and contain us all. We have become aware to difference, miscellany, the incongruity of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason post-modernity is typified by a plentitude of micro-narratives (reminiscent of Richard Dawkins and ideas of memes). For this perception Lyotard borrows on and re-construes the idea of ‘language games,’ based on the works of Ludwig Wiggenstein.

With Lyotard, the term ‘language games,’ also referred to as ‘phrase regimens,’ he signifies the variety of knowledge of meaning. The incalculable and impossible to measure are the disconnected systems where meaning is produced and the convention for their transmission is created.

This ideology of Lyotard’s develops into something more vital and central in his 1979 work Just Gaming and The Differend (1983) where he develops a post-modernist theory ‘justice.’ The speculation here is the annihilation of human being is indirectly implemented by the idea of the micro-narrative, and the role the language game plays- the part where it is symptomatic for the collapse of ethics.

“You often say: “Let us be pagan,” and “Let us be just.” Commonly, these two requirements seem to exclude each other. Indeed, justice, insofar as it is generally thought within a Platonic problematic, calls for the fixing of a criterion of judgment, which is something that paganism seems to proscribe. When you bring the two prescriptions together, are you thinking of a justice of a different type? Then, what is it? Or is justice the necessary exception to paganism? Then, what is the meaning of this exception? Is it the return of a nonpagan externality within paganism? And if so, why?” (Lyotard).

In order for the engagement to work properly, universals are not permissible in world that has lost faith in meta-narratives. And the same for ethics, it is unworkable. Lyotard disputes the notion that justice and injustice, in truth still has a place in post-modernism. For ethics to work in an equivalent structure, the language game needs installation. When people stop believing, the system collapses, unable to move forward, unable to reproduce or replicate- the end of the transmission.

Pha-real?!

2009-12-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Pharrell Williams recently collaborated with Takashi Murakami on a 6-foot sculpture called The Simple Things (2008-2009), featuring a black & rainbow DOB (Murakami's copyrighted character) jewel-encrusted objects the producer/rock star/designer can't live without (Doritos, Heinz ketchup, Pepsi, condom, sneaker, baby oil, cupcake). Also according to Michael Wilson's article "Frontin'" in Modern Painters (Dec 2009/Jan 2010), Pharrell admires and collects: Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and KAWS, because their work "isn't serious or snobby or stuffy." The Simple Things sold for $2.8 million.

Interview from here:

link

2009-12-21T15:30:00.001-08:00

Top babies on album covers.

the straight poop

2009-12-13T02:03:00.000-08:00

Bert Rodriguez tells it like it is:

AND, he gives to charity.

Now if that's not a plus, I don't know what is.

I also don't know what his work (the blank freestanding wall above) currently on view in Seattle's about exactly, perhaps something to do with his daddy issues (consider that on his official website the title is "A Wall I Built With My Father" but the caption lists the wall as being built between the artist and his father. Check it out as part of Western Bridge's show Parenthesis. Picture by Mark Woods stolen from Jen Graves's review. Regina Hackett covers it too. THE SHOW ends next Saturday 12/19/09.

Japanese Artist Meiro Koizumi wants to remake The Last Samurai

2009-11-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

During his lecture tonight, I had the privilege of seeing Meiro Koizumi's awesome new video, Works like a Dog (I think it's called that?), based on his and (Japanese)immigrant experiences in Bellevue, tonight. Apparently, "New York Times art critic Roberta Smith aptly noted, 'His videos are 'Punk’d' for intellectual sadists.'" See his work at Open Satellite in Bellevue or Hedreen Gallery on the Seattle U campus before it flies away on January 9th, 2010!

Lifted from Koizumi's site, a still from an older video Jap (2003)

He had some thoughtful things to say about nationalism, nationality, WWII losers vs. winners, and loyalty. Particularly interesting to me--speaking about the Western gaze at Japan, he concluded that while Kill Bill is a healthy image of the multicultural world, Last Samurai is a sick image of multiculturalism. But THEN he proceeded to say that when confronted with the choice of what kind of art he wanted to make, he concluded that he would much rather make a Last Samurai type of art than Kill Bill.

Perhaps he's ever the optimist I am not, but as I asked why he would choose the sick image over a healthy one, he responded that there are enough healthy images out there, and likened these two images of art as medicine or poison--Koizumi asserted he wants to make medicine, but then again, there are times when he wants to make poison. Smells like Derrida's pharmakon to me: "The beneficial essence or virtue of a pharmakon does not prevent it from hurting...Painful pleasure, linked as much to the malady as to its treatment, is a pharmakon in itself. It partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable. Or rather, it is within its mass that these oppositions are able to sketch themselves out."

What do you think?

vs.

p.s. You can find a WMV video of an adorably bumbling Koizumi, talking in more dualisms about his art, here from Mori art Museum.

Source:

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 99.

A Woman on Women on Women

2009-09-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Check out film theorist Laura Mulvey on the streets of NYC in the exhibit The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women--

Cora Fisher of The Brooklyn Rail writes:
"Touting Laura Mulvey’s essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' as the curatorial premise of its group show, The Female Gaze: Women on Women, Cheim & Read promises a look into how women see themselves and other women, surveying self-portraits, portraits, and female nudes, all by women artists...

The contemporary viewer wonders, if we are really living in a so-called 'post' era—post-feminist, post-racial, post-gay— can the identity politics of its premise be truly invigorated by this survey? Does there exist an inter-female gaze purged of male scopophila?"

Well I don't know but I love this painting Big Blonde in the Weeds by Lisa Yuskavage (2001) at the SAM (not so much the one mentioned in the article). It is beautiful, curvy, sensuous, mysterious, and apparently not digitized online except in a tiny thumbnail from their website.

p.s. One of the photos from the show--Blonde Girl with Shiny Lipstick, NYC by Diane Arbus (1967) looks like femmebot britney spears:

An OK Movie & Upcoming Seattle exhibit

2009-08-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Cremator (1969)-- A so-so movie made better by its inclusion of the right panel of Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1503-4), especially close-up shots of the devil-bird who consumes and defecates people:
Coincidentally, the same detail graces Deep Purple (English band best known for "Smoke on the Water")'s self-titled album of the same year. Deep Purple came out just three months after The Cremator and includes the song "The Painter" which goes, "Painter, come colour up my life/take away the misery/take away the strife." About that: Bosch's work is in black and white on the album cover due to a printing error but the band kept it anyway, & I'm not sure that this detail of Bosch takes away misery or strife. Rather Bosch depicts both in great detail.

For more recent Awesome Netherlandish Painting on album covers, cf. Fleet Foxes's use of a Pieter Brueghel, nicely summarized in this MTVNews article:
"'[Brueghel's Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) is] this sort of really detailed, 1500s thing, but actually it's horrible, like, everything that's going on is like a disaster,' Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold said. 'All the stuff happening in that bucolic scene is weird, people defecating out of boxes and sheep getting cut through the gut.'"

Returning to nontimely art-in-film news, I think I noticed an Alexander Calder in Sabrina (1954), in Linus's office. A retrospective entitled "Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act" will be at the SAM soon, Oct. 15, 2009-April 11, 2010.

+
Lobster Tail and Fish Trap (1939). From MoMA website.

Petty? Concepts of Age

2009-08-17T02:36:00.000-07:00

have to start somewhere . . .

I feel like I’m somewhere around 50 years old, at the present juncture in my life. Yet I am only recently 24. Perhaps most people, when they are happy (and/or if their perception of their own age is unbothered) don’t really think of age much. I did not until I moved to a place where all my previous activities and other self-expressing signifiers were made irrelevant. I believe my internal overaging stems from the cultural differences between the Arctic Alaska bush and the places I’ve lived most recently: Boston, MA and Bellingham, WA. Culture shock will out.

In both of the latter locations, I lived in an urban center. Where I live now semi-resembles an urban center: the town is small and compact, and in the Barrow, Browerville, and NARL sections of town, there are business centers with nearby residences. This is not unlike either Boston or Bellingham. The types of businesses, however, are completely different. Instead of bars, late-night restaurants, and a wide (or at least some) variety of everything, there are only 8 restaurants in town and the only social establishments are churches, the bingo hall, and the roller rink. No bars, no coffee shops, no music venues or art galleries to be found. Also, walking between locations is possible (especially now, in the summer), but even in the summer is moderately uncomfortable to do with extreme winds and a complete lack of paved roads or sidewalks. Moving here, I have changed all of my out-of-the-house activities drastically, and from activities I considered to be befitting of my age and temperament to activities which feel unbefitting to my age.

My only social activity is a weekly knitting group, which I happen to love, but still—an activity conventionally thought of as for old women (though yarnwork and other stitchery are presently not unvogue among young women—google “knitting blog” for example). I go to work from 8:30 to 5:00pm every day, the monotony of which routine is both comfortable and mind-numbing, a sobering truly adult experience. At work I am treated with respect and given tasks which both utilize my mental capabilities and whither them. It is lovely to feel respected at work, something I feel my age has not truly afforded me in many of my other recent positions. However, this additionally makes me feel as though I have aged (a catch-22 in that overcoming the respect factor I feel as though I have overcome age, when I am still young). Perhaps I should celebrate this accomplishment in the workplace in itself without reading age into it.

Occasionally I help out with programs for children at the public library, which my sister is in charge of. Though I have volunteered with children for most of my young life, using my free time to be with them creates further feelings of adulthood. I go out to eat with a couple friends occasionally, and every once in a long while I have drinks with friends at the house, but it does not feel as festive as going out somewhere. It feels like co-alcoholsim (though it’s not often enough to actually be). I know that a lot of parties are always happening with the young people in town, but (young though I am), getting trashed at random people’s houses every weekend is not exactly my idea of a good time. See above notion of co-alcoholism. However, perhaps I should be trying out more of these as opportunities to meet other people my age. I know that I have been shy.

Since my out-of-the-house activities have differed so drastically, I have tended to stay at home, where my at-home activities have not changed much from past lives. I still like to read, cook, watch movies, write, sew and crochet &etc. The lack of tempting activity outside of the house has led me to turn completely inward, where I can at least maintain those aspects of self. One difference is that I have felt the need to self-educate much more than I ever did living elsewhere: reading, studying for the GRE’s, watching Sister Wendy dvds and looking at art books to try and keep up with art history. Even if the rest of me is withering, I have endeavored to keep my mind a living thing.

A major signifier of self which I feel is rendered irrelevant in Barrow, AK is dress. Though I do believe that physical appearance is never the only self-identifier, it is the first thing that people see, and as someone who delights in visual culture, I have always enjoyed wearing things which made me an individual in my own eyes. The weather in Barrow is quite extreme. Currently, it is the summer season and everything is melted—we are enjoying global-warmingly high temperatures around the 50’s and there’s no snow—but the unpaved roads are rutted and muddy and the winds are still rather fierce to be out in. Physical apparel is almost completely weather-related here, with good reason. In temperatures as low as 70 below with the windchill in the winter, a wool coat and ballet flats are what you wear if you want to get frostbite (even only walking to and from cars!). In the summer period, it is not sensible to wear anything you don’t want to get mud splattered on, as the town is a soupy mud bowl. So, in comparison to my past lives, instead of putting on mascara and a dress I made myself to go out and see live music, I am putting on boots and a heavy jacket to go to the grocery store or knitting group.

Also, since 40-45 hours of the week are dedicated to work, my workwear is predominantly my life-wear. For work I am required to wear professional-looking things, which in general are fairly homogenizing, on purpose. I still have the option to personalize these things as much as I can, but I do miss the life of a student and the ability to look as disheveled as I’d sometimes like. A lot of the home-made or altered clothing that I enjoy wearing in Bellingham is just not suitable for the workplace, and definitely not suitable for the Arctic. The adulthood of dressing like a professional all the time additionally makes me feel old and boring. Perhaps what I am actually resisting here is not old age, but adulthood.

Iñupiaq women young and old, and a lot of white women in town as well, wear beautiful home-made shirts and shirt-dresses called atikluks. There are also male-versions of atikluks, but mostly I see them worn by women. These are very beautiful, with decorative trim, in bright highly-patterned prints. I see that other people in town use these to express themselves and identify themselves with Iñupiaq culture, but as an outsider, I have not really had access to these. I could either have a nice Iñupiaq lady sew me one, or I could pay exorbitant amounts at our one fabric store for a pattern and the fabric to make one myself (which I am considering, honestly). But, as an outsider to the culture, I have been hesitant. After all the myriad ways that white American culture has infringed on their way of life, maybe I should not be allowed to wear an atikluk. Or maybe wearing them is a sign of celebrating Iñupiaq culture, which I think is probably the general notion. They are lovely and aesthetically, I want one! Is it conformity to want to assimilate in some fashion to the culture of the place you’re living? Is it weakness of self to not pursue my previous ways of dress whole-heartedly though I’d look crazy and I already don’t know anybody? My answer so far to these questions has been to dress for necessity alone, in work clothes or Alaskan-weather gear, both of which make me feel old.

I think my age-identity problems here stem from the fact that my previous methods of social self-expression are either not possible, or simply very different from my experience here, and so the things I can imagine to do in their stead are old-people things. There are other methods, belonging to the different culture amidst which I have chosen to reside, but I am still trying to feel those out. Especially when I know I won’t be living here forever, it is hard to branch out into a new community. Coming from larger urban settings, I am used to community involvement not being necessary in order to feel lively and young.

The Iñupiat Heritage Center is full of wonderful artistic and historical artifacts of the Iñupiat people, and features occasional cultural showcases and activities for them. I have not spent a great deal of time there, though as an art gallery, it is something from my past life of young activity that I could technically perpetuate here. I have definitely looked through the few galleries and attended some Eskimo dances, but I have not gone in weekly or anything (that would probably be seen as fairly odd as no weekly activities are held there, to my knowledge).

If you do not act young or dress young, at least by your own estimations, are you old? Perception affects and creates reality, but how do we define the age we feel ourselves to be and therefore act out? I have defined my aging factors as activity and physical appearance. But, not being able to see myself as others do—seeing my body as fragments below me, draped in clothes out of necessity instead of creativity (as my fragments used to be), not seeing the young person’s head on top of that body without a mirror—perhaps I am exaggerating my limited viewpoint of my dead physical appearance to an unnecessary degree. Although, all the very friendly Korean restaurant owners in town say I look older than my sister, who is five years my senior, so maybe it’s time to start buying the wrinkle cream.

Chinks of resistance/an excuse to showcase some artists I like while commenting on the forever foreigner syndrome and psychoanalyzing race.

2009-08-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

Cherry blossoms, kimonos, servicing Asian women, Buddhism, and happy ancient rural villagers. To limit our exposure to the dirty, uncomfortable, nuanced experiences of race, a few entertaining yet convenient signifiers of Asia summarize each country and sometimes, the whole continent. The entertainment industry inflects meaning of ethnicity and cements the divisions of race. In Jean-Louis Baudry's psychological exploration of film, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” he writes that discontinuous elements--differences--must be removed to sustain an illusion of continuity, because filmmakers strive to provide the "ideal vision." If the goal of film and television is the prevention of deviations from the norm, certainly the dominant practice of casting main character Americans as WASPs with a few requisite stereotypical nonwhite characters effectively renders any other American as abnormal.

Furthermore, this stereotyping of American homegrown values and looks (the self) defines who is outside (other) to the domestic identity. For examples, when a brown or yellow person is depicted in a popular film, he is perpetually, due to a different complexion or eye shape, seen as foreign and therefore other to the normal way of being American. With the rendez-vous of previously isolated countries, each race has fantasized about the other. For example, the circulation of early Japanese photography taken by German, Dutch, and American expatriates and later, Japanese followers, depicted samurai, geishas, public bathhouses, and staged seppuku, those elements of the culture that were most appealing to a Western exotica-buying market. Over 100 years later, however, the same motifs show up in film, because these ideas of Japan are still bestsellers.

Compare early Japanese tourist photos with stills from The Last Samurai:
189-? Kitchen (Preparing Dinner)

2003:

What’s the difference? The Japanese in The Last Samurai appear to be aware of the Westerner present (Tom Cruise), so that’s a step forward from the staged idea (i.e. a false ideal of Japanese preservation of antiquity although modernity was rapidly occurring in Japan) of the absent Western gaze in the 19th century photo.

189-? The Farmer Planting the Rice Spronts

2003:

No one could deny interaction between Japan and the U.S. today; the former picture, again, frames the Japanese tidily separate from a Westerner; in the latter, the camera follows Cruise as the Japanese man trails behind and listens to
Cruise’s identity issues while other Japanese work the farm.

According to an ideal vision of cinema, popular movie representations neglect to depict cultural differences within and between countries. Despite the existence of Japanese Americans since the birth of film in the 19th century, maintaining the “ideal vision” of a homegenously WASP America required Tom Cruise to play the lead role in a film purportedly about samurais. Filmmaker Kjell Hansen, having first been excited about the idea of a samurai epic, was utterly disappointed by the casting choice of Tom Cruise: "I decided that The Last Samurai was more along the lines of misguided, preposterous, and arrogant...The impression left by the trailer might appeal to those to whom the idea of living in a samurai village with a submissive wife fulfills a certain fantasy of romantic, pastoral purity. The magical transformation of Tom Cruise into the champion of a foreign people also fulfills a power fantasy. To quickly ascend like he did, Cruise must have had something special quality the other warriors did not have." I could not have said it better myself.

Another popular film featuring the character(caricature) of Asia, Memoirs of a Geisha, cast well-received Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li as Japanese geishas, despite China's resentment of Japan over the Pacific War and Nanking.

1999 Random House cover (predating the 2005 movie)

Note the book cover's sepia-coloring to make it look more antiquated and the testimonial: “You are seduced completely.”

19th c. photograph

Additionally, parts of Golden’s tale are loosely based on a real-life 20th-century geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, who according to Wikipedia, “felt betrayed by Golden's use of information she considered confidential, as well as the way he twisted reality…[she] denounced Memoirs of a Geisha as being an inaccurate depiction of the life of a geisha.” The reiteration of Far Eastern culture as it was in the past, written and directed by non-Japanese separates these films from Japanese experience, and titillates an American imagination while reinforcing the ideal American as Tom Cruise, and the ideal Asian as an exotic, black-haired, small-eyed foreigner, with no regard for national or cultural differences or the possibility of black-haired, small-eyed people being local and NON-exotic. Consider this reviewer’s ease in believing Memoirs: “What is most surprising about this book is [not] that the author is male and American but that he writes so vividly and accurately through the eyes of a woman in another time and place.[emphasis added]” People can indeed be seduced by the ideas of antiquated customs in a foreign land, whether it represents reality or not.

In contrast to the above examples, when Asians and Asian-Americans represent themselves, they eschew a presentation of an exotic, century-old image of beautiful women isolated by impotent men. Two artists reclaiming their potency, Roger Shimomura and Yasumasa Morimura, display a keen awareness of their racialized Asian male bodies, usually viewed as impotent and feminine, or not depicted at all (e.g. where is Gilmore Girl character Lane Kim’s father?). Morimura represents his toned body in every possible shocking way that upsets color boundaries. It is nude, it has a phallus, it is off-white, and gender shifts.

Yasumasa Morimura,Portrait (Twin), 1988

Morimura,Black Marilyn, 1996

Morimura, Psychoborg, 1994

His choice to mimic controversial boundary-crossers - - Manet’s black servant and non-idealized whore Olympia, Marilyn the iconic peroxide-blonde Norma Jean, and Michael Jackson, the late and great ambivalently-raced musician - - is telling.

Roger Shimomura, an American whose own government sent to an internment camp, paints not necessarily his own body but events pertaining to him and other Asian Americans. His depicted experiences speak to the wider experience of this group and the general feeling of being nonwhite in a country steeped in racial hierarchy and cultural collisions.

Roger Shimomura, How to Tell Your Friends from Japanese-Americans, 2000

Shimomura, Untitled, 1983. Metro Bus Tunnel @ Westlake Station.

**CHECK OUT a ton of SHIMOMURA's work on view now at the Wing Luke Asian Museum now (Sept 11th 2009 through April 18th 2010!**

Shimomura thus renders visible the injustice done to the collective body to which he is assigned by racial categorization.

Asian female bodies have been unable by and large to escape their perceived submissive and exotic otherness. This is a concept inscribed on her body against her will. Judith Butler writes of the process of becoming a proper subject, “I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a mediation that takes place outside of me, in a convention or a norm that I did not make, in which I cannot discern myself as an author or agent of its making.” This inability to escape one's assignment as abnormal may account for the disappearance of the self-representational bodies of Maya Lin and Jen Liu.

Maya Lin, 2x4 Landscape, 2006, installed at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA.

Jen Liu, still from video Comfortably Numb, 2006.

Having an Asian American female body myself, I know how fun it may be for others, whether it's based on 2 Live Crew or Kubrick, to spout "Me so horny, me love you long time" at me and other Asian-looking female bodies, suggesting our subject-positions as foreign hookers. On the receiving end, it is annoying but not unexpected. Racial awareness has not relinquished its hold on me since this and other such comments have endured from childhood to the present day.

A similar sentiment might be felt by artist Maya Lin. Her abstract, nonfigurative design for the Vietnam War memorial (currently reproduced to view at Acacia Memorial Home on Bothell Way, north of Seattle!), did not have a name or face attached to it when selected. But when Ross Perot caught wind of her ethnic background he called her an eggroll: "When twenty-one-year-old Yale student Maya Lin won the competition for the Vietnam War Memorial commission, her profound design, with its black granite displaying a stark list of all the 58,000 Americans who died in the conflict and set into a gash in the earth, was controversial for more than its aesthetics. The selection process was anonymous, and the Ohio-born Lin was identified by only a number until her sketches were selected. Once her face was attached to her art, there were murmurings that she was the wrong choice because she was a 'gook.' For example, businessman Ross Perot, a major promoter of the project, frequently called Lin 'eggroll' and, according to press accounts, 'he hated that she was Asian.'(Wu, 93-95)" No wonder her art does not make a big deal out of her race (i.e. is non figurative of her own body), lest someone be alienated by its eggroll-iness.

New Yorker Jen Liu's art, equal parts American pop-culture and literary fantasy, depicts videos and paintings of Caucasian monks of a fictive ancient cult, and thereby is not directly related to her own body. When Liu's psychotronic work came to the Henry Art Gallery, I had a visitor (who undoubtedly made a point to notice my nonwhiteness) ask me for no apparent reason whether Jen Liu was "Oriental." He proceeded to tell me of his ventures and time spent in Asia, as though his appraisal of my race and her race gave him the right/need/privilege to discuss what he perceived to be Liu's and my shared exotic culture.

I propose that some young other(ed) children develop negative racial images of themselves when exposed to them frequently in media representations, in tandem with similar concepts that other children or adults provide and reinforce (verbally or otherwise). If we apply Jacques Lacan's mirror stage to the process of racial identification--how one develops a linguistic grasp of race, a racial psyche and a racial body--it occurs on a widely varying time frame, as opposed to the original 6-18 months of age. Before a child enters racialized language she believes all races are the same, "before language returns to [the child]...its function as subject." This pre-racial awareness stage is akin to jouissance, a union with all colors just as the Lacanian child is one with his mother before he can understand his separate subjectivity. Somehow during this phase I thought I was white like my classmates and resisted any attempts to demarcate me as nonwhite (the famed experiment with psychologist Kenneth Clark still holds true as of the current decade): I once received an Asian friend-of-Barbie, Kira, and refused to play with her as surely as I refused my own nonwhiteness.

During Lacan's mirror stage whereby the child begins to develop the mental image of a virtual form of his body--we could read this virtual body’s “different size” as a different race--the alienating destiny of his future is coming into place, a disconnect between his actual image and his ideal image, or I vs. his ideal-I. The soon-to-be racialized child, then, sees, for example, her chinky, slanted eyes but does not recognize their lower status than round eyes. Like the Lacanian baby, the racialized child perceives that she has mastered her defeat--she still views herself as having the chance of normativity. However, this is an illusion just as the child in the mirror stage perceives mastery over his movement and recognizes his image, but cannot yet control his regular body functions. Once a child learns to speak of her race she has entered the Nom du Pere, or for our purposes, the Law/No of the Patriarch--she is inculcated within the Symbolic order, a racialized subject. She realizes fully her place in the caste system of race and recognizes her difference from the ruling class. She cannot (as she fantasized during the mirror stage) look chinky while being socially normative. The early embedded imago, or external self-image, of whiteness is unattainable though she strongly desires it.

Going back to Baudry, if "ultimately...the 'contents' of the [cinematic] image are of little importance as long as identification remains possible," the developing nonwhite mind, forced to identify with largely non-nonwhite characters, cannot develop any fantasy image of herself other than white. A kid exposed to or coming from a background of engrained psychical racial hierarchy--whether it seeps into her psyche from familly, education, socialization, or entertainment--will begin to racialize her own body and set up her nonwhite body as less than the ideal-I as she is bombarded with imagery of desirable, normative whiteness. She cannot rise above her race in this situation.

Racially psychoanalyzing the aforementioned artists evinces a gender split in representational strategies. Morimura and Shimomura aim to negotiate their bodily position within the Symbolic Order, the order where race rules supreme, proclaiming a large YES! to the "No"s of Patriarchy that denies their manhood and status as a person with a pronounced racial identity, while Lin and Liu’s work, with the disappearance of their bodies, evoke the late mirror stage: due to circumstances beyond their control, they are forced by outsiders and art consumers to recognize their racial position, but their art does not even reference it (not that it should). What then, does the artwork of Yayoi Kusama have to say about her racial body?

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (Floor Show), 1965-98.
Sewn stuffed fabric, board, mirror room without ceiling, 8 x 15 x 15 ft.
Check out her 1967 video Self Obliteration at the SAM through Sept. 7th!!!

It has no such concept of one. Her art, literally insane and therefore not bound to the Law of the Patriarch, refuses to recognize its “position” in any racial/sexual hierarchy. Her body appears surrounded by soft-bodied phalluses, comfortable, languid, but covered as to resist consumption or sexualization. The phallus forms are not colored to match human skin tones, rather they echo a preschooler’s color palette. Her nonsensical picture displays no distinction between race nor sex. The multiplication and all-enveloping nature of the picture plane with mirrors echo an infant’s sense of an eternal bond with the mother, as a child with other children before it gains recognition of such a thing as race. Kusama and pre-racial, pre-subjectified children are deliciously blissful.

While in some current media productions Asian-Americans appear as characters, more often than not, Asian-American actors and actresses play non-American foreigners, and sometimes, Japanese and Chinese cultures are equated as the same exotic distant backdrop (see for example Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek theorizes that the jouissance of the real, unmediated other/nonwhite person is precluded by PC refusal to fundamentalize any skin color and thereby acknowledge her specialness (see bell hooks on the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity as a denial of rac(e)ism, (Dyer, 3)). Perhaps this same impulse to remove all undesirable recognition of difference, nonwhiteness, results in the lampooned, shallow characterization of nonwhites in television and film. That is, true jouissance of the other must be contained in order to be enjoyed, therefore you get sensational orientalism, tourist exotica, popular books about the East written in the manner of Memoirs and Last Samurai. The emerging appearance of American females in films who happen to be Asian is noteworthy but decidedly some combination of subservient, fetishized, in a nondesirable/short-lived position, or completely devoid of ethnic identity (see Rushmore, American Girl, Ally McBeal, Suite life of Zack and Cody).

Žižek suggests an implosion rather than the (impossible) destruction of stereotypes. Regarding the role of desire in racial limitations, he states that "desire is absence while libido-drive is presence." That is to say that a person who is being desired needs to be absent in order to be desired, while the incongruous, flawed, and sometimes ugly "whole package" of a real person, (a libido-drive) presents itself warts and all. Considering the absence of Japanese in the writing of Last Samurai or Memoirs, or in the aforementioned list of productions limited to one Asian each, clearly, any Asian or Asian American agency or libido-drive is saliently obscured. Žižek proposes that rather than erasing the possibility of racial difference, and thereby assuming everyone is white by default--or should be--that we can present the fallacy of the fantasy and the reality in their contradictory nature--to undermine the artifice of race altogether. This means that entertaining and moneymaking fairytales of race will continue, but taken with knowledge of versions such as Morimura's or Lin's-that upset the idea of the foreign exotic Asian, untouched by the West, but existing to be fantasized about by it.

Repeatedly recognizing one’s own non-normativity within a framework of the “ideal vision” of cinema, then, sets up the ideal-I as unattainable, as well as precluding a regression to a jouissance state of pre-racial nexus. Asians, Asian Americans, and nonwhites may internalize their position in the hierarchy if not nurtured to cherish their own ethnic background as beyond very shallow sidekick characters.

While we may be almost invisible in media productions or ignored/lumped together for entertainment purposes, this is not always how we see ourselves. Gene Yang, for example, displays the stereotype of a Yellow Peril type alongside the reality; Derek Kirk Kim’s graphic novels and Michael Kang’s 2005 film Motel, deftly depict the desire to be loved and accepted by whites and each other: while the Asian girl dreams of a white boy, the Asian boy dreams of her. These media thus answer Žižek’s call for an ethical artist who recognizes the disjointed fantasies of race. Despite our relative invisibility there are tiny openings (chinks) of resistance being created and shown. Asian roles may have been internalized and are continually consumed by nonwhites and whites alike, as indicators of our racial identities, but should one choose to question these stereotypes and look for truthful self-representations, instead of being caught up within the Symbolic Order of “No”s and impossibilities, we can transgress constructed but not constructive boundaries à la Morimura, or regress to a deliriously race-free insanity à la Kusama.

Sources:

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 355-365. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Butler, Judith. "Giving an Account of Oneself." Diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001):22-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566427.

Dyer, Richard. "The matter of whiteness." In White, 1-14. London: Routledge, 1997.

Guerrero, Ed. "The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation." In Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, 69-111. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Hansen, Kjell. "Lost in the West." 2005.

Lacan, Jacques. "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalystic experience." http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts/week5/mirror.html.

The Last Samurai. Directed by Edward Zwick. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD.

Wu, Frank. Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Žižek, Lacan. "Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!" In The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Christopher Lane, 154-175. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

In the End Nothing Else Really Matters..or Does It?

2009-07-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

Heidegger’s World Picture
Martin Heidegger argues: “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”

What does Heidegger mean by the modern age and the notion of the world as picture? What are the consequences of the world as picture? And why do research, technology and ordering play such a dominant role in Heidegger’s thought?

-What Heidegger meant by the modern age and the notion of the world as picture is central to his argument that a break with the tendency in the history of ideas to define each period by their “world view” or zeitgeist. Heidegger suggests that this should be taken as a symptom of the modern period’s tendency to reduce Being (Dasein) to a picture or image. The argument is related with the thesis found in The Question Concerning Technology that technology, as developed in the modern west, turns nature into a “standing reserve.” (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 19) Heidegger’s influential argument about the centrality of visualization for the definition of truth in the modern era that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (Heidegger, handout, p. 9) explains that “the word “picture” (Bild) now means the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.” (Heidegger, p9)
-The consequences of the world as picture is that the symptoms of transforming all that is into an object apprehend as representation or as picture: science and mathematical physical science, the machine technology that rises out of physical science, art’s moving into the horizon of aesthetics so that the art work becomes the object of mere subjective experience of what is good taste, human activity is conceived and consummated as culture, and the loss of gods and atheism, so Christian doctrine becomes a “world view.” Heidegger stated that “this objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainly of representation.” (Heidegger, p6) The subject arises through a process of representation of Being as a world picture. Heidegger argues that “the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. We must understand this word subjectum, however, as the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon. The word names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has first of all no special relationship to and none at all to the I.” (Heidegger, handout, p. 6-7) But in the modern period man became the relative core of that which is, and this is only possible when that which is has been translated into a “world picture.” But what does this mean? “World” is a word for “what is in its entirety.” (Heidegger, handout, p.7) Picture is not simply a double, copy of simulation. Instead it sounds forth in the expression “We get the picture” or “to get into the picture” “(literally, to put oneself into the picture) with respect to what something means to position whatever is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it.” (Heidegger,p7)
-Research, technology, and ordering plays a dominant role in Heidegger’s thought because in order to regulate the methodology, an applicable model needs to be able to work itself out systematically. “The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These rather than cultivating of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness.” (Heidegger, p5) The previous statement by Heidegger indicates this notion that the organization and structure of research, technology, and ordering heavily applies to metaphysics, ontology, cosmology and epistemology. But in addition, through this representation, “what is stands before us---in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it---as a system.” (Heidegger, p.7) “Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” (Heidegger, p. 7) “Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.” (Heidegger, p. 7) Science (research) becomes an important shift: the modern age scholar (research) becomes a scientist. There is also a shift to technology (the device) as a totalizing and organizing form. It codifies how we see and establishes a hierarchy. Everything becomes a machine, a function of process. Research becomes limited by its own process.

The sooner we fail boys, the sooner we can go home.

2009-06-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

The accidental sinking of Mike Bouchet's floating suburban home literalizes the collapse of the American economy. What really is to be learned from this is that the Biennale remains as much of an exhibition of American megalomania as it did when American Pop Artists first arrived in Venice in 1964.

The controversial 1964 "Biennale of Pop Art" had many critics, among them De Chirco who stated "Pop-art cannot be judged because it has nothing to do with art." French critics weren't nearly as kind as they prophetically claimed it a "cultural colonization". Alan R. Solomon, the exhibition's commissioner, rushed to the defense of Pop Art stating that Pop Artists "evolve a new aesthetic not out of protest, irony or revolt, but out of an affirmative desire to search the truth of the present reality ... in response to the wonder and delight of the contemporary American environment."

This time around, the Biennale, along with the rest of the world seems to be in the same sinking boat that is the contemporary American environment.

What Really Grinds My Gears

2009-05-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas is supposed to be the place where you get to misbehave and act outside of the limits of everyday respectability, without punishment. But do you really have all the freedom that you are promised as a tourist to Sin City? Just a brief look at its advertising and visual culture - - brochures, websites, billboards, commercials, tourist photos - -

reveals that the kind of entertainment Las Vegas endorses is specifically created to adhere to conventional notions of appropriate behavior for men and women. The idea that Las Vegas is truly the liminal space it's advertised as is highly suspect: it is merely an extension of normal, socially-constrictive space. As in everyday life, females are encouraged to become images devoid of content, a spectacle or sight to behold, while men are expected to consume these pedestalled images.

Popular images of women have become embedded in the collective social consciousness both in their consistency throughout time and within various media. The ubiquity of such images attests to their long-term staying power, even if the general public does not actively agree with what the images signify. In his epic theorization of a media-based social life, Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes that all human and social life become appearance, and we are told repeatedly that what appears is good: “simple images become motivations of hypnotic behavior.” Hence, stereotypical images work on the human conscious at some level, whether it's encouraging impressionable youth to re-enact the images, or to continue sexist notions. Debord writes that the real world becomes superceded by imagery, and this process is closely related to the market-driven need to consume and want: "the fetishism of the commodity - the domination of society by 'intangible as well as tangible things' - attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality." Therefore Vegas is an exemplary microcosm of our spectacular society and its official tourism website, Visitlasvegas.com, is a microcosm of Las Vegas itself.

Consistent with Debord's idea of social life becoming subsumed by images, the site presents enticing appearances rather than the complexities of reality. The result of this spectacular approach is the continued cementing of gendered roles. Each reiteration of a stereotype makes it that much more lasting. Specifically, Vegas advertisements encourage women to perform as a spectacle. In Las Vegas as elsewhere, a woman is obliged to become a desirable object for visual and physical consumption. Gender theorist Judith Butler explains that the site of performance, the body, becomes the battleground for ideological and gendered behavior: “the formulation of the body as a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted.” Thus the body becomes a stage on which we play out the cultural dramas that society dictates.

This is clear in advertisements for Las Vegas. Under a pretense of tourist freedom of choice, Visitlasvegas.com essentializes woman to concepts such as pink, narcissistic, sexualized, or wearers of high-heels. This becomes problematic for a tourist or society member when she is punished for not conforming in the manner of Foucault's biopolitics, whereby the body can only perform certain behaviors within accepted societal conventions. The essentialization of identity, therefore, affects individual behavior, limiting possibilities to a few constructed gender fictions so that individuals become no longer individuals but stereotypes, actors playing the same role.

Visitlasvegas.com's game feature, “Be Anyone in Las Vegas,” presents a spectacular performance space for tourists. It depicts a dark black and blue background featuring glimmering gold, blue, and rainbow speckles, maybe to evoke the club scene or dance floor.

Recurring throughout this well-designed advertisement, gold tones represent wealth and power, and aesthetically complement the blue background. This feature's facile distillation of identity creates an easy escape route to a new-and-improved You; "Be Anyone" simplifies images such that, as Debord writes, "they become motivations of hypnotic behavior." According to the website, you can “Be Anyone” by allocating 100 points to five attributes: smoothness, style, bravery, attitude, and creativity. The front page highlights “BE ANYONE” and “CREATE YOUR IDENTITY” the most, emphasizing viewer control and giving the user apparent power and the motivation to proceed.

The site's system for naming your identity provides sexualized stage names. Names such as Ginger or Thor reveal a media-inflected performative aspect to the process, since the name Ginger recalls Gilligan’s Island’s sexy movie star, and the name Thor recalls the pagan god of thunder as well as a superhero character. These characters align with existing gender roles - - woman praised for appearance and performance, man praised for muscle and force. The game experience allows the user to pretend she is the character of her dreams.

One such alluring identity the “Be Anyone” feature produces is the Underwear Model; its results page presents a slinky pair of silver heels below a bathrobe; these appear regardless of your selected gender.
This association of femininity with a scantily-clad body underscores the concept that women, not men, are supposed to be commodities and a spectacle. Although the website proclaims that this and other scripted characters are only for entertainment, at the same time, “Be Anyone” provides “everything you need” to perform your new identity - - including printable business cards and a certificate of achievement, a sheet outlining how you should act, and even a 1-800 number that plays your false company’s pre-recorded message. No disclaimer appears on the business cards, cheat sheet, or certificate, meaning you could hand these out in Las Vegas and people might believe you are the Underwear Model you claim to be.

Perhaps the adopting of alternate identities is so appealing that a person will be inspired to come to Vegas and role-play as the site suggests. One interpretation is that the website game is a rehearsal for the performance in Las Vegas. For example, the 1-800 phone message encourages potential models to go out to the clubs because the imaginary modeling agency is out there watching. With this monitoring in mind, we act as though we are being watched/we play to the camera in case it's there/we perform under the glare of society's panopticon.

According to Butler, the collective set of acts that our bodies perform maintain binary genders as cultural fictions. The process of performing these roles further reifies their supposed existence. She also reminds us that acts and conditions are linked, and while individual acts cannot institute real change, changing the hegemonic conditions can. Therefore, this website’s reification of roles for women as desirable, consumable objects, contributes to the existing acceptable discourse of female behavior and limits the possibilities for autonomy from these roles.

Visitlasvegas.com and the marketing of Las Vegas present the notion that a tourist can completely recreate her personality, but the gendered and limited identities that advertisements present prove otherwise. This post was inspired by my 2005 Las Vegas trip with a friend who wanted to perform her gender as a spectacular commodity. A few years before the “Be Anyone” campaign came out, this friend already knew “The Look” of the Underwear Model: hands on hips, pouting, and occasional poses. While the social patterning of female spectacular performance exists prior to Visitlasvegas.com and its features, by advertising that anyone can become their fantasy in Las Vegas, the advertisement creates a false illusion of freedom and contributes to the further limiting of gender possibilities.

Sources:

http://www.marketing.fm/wp-content/diet-pepsi.jpg.
http://image16.webshots.com/17/5/25/40/2443525400064709164aHCDye_fs.jpg.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 392-402. London: Routledge, 2003.
Debord, Guy. "Society of the Spectacle." http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “Las Vegas – Features -- Be Anyone.” http://www.visitlasvegas.com/vegas/features/be-anyone.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “Las Vegas – Official Las Vegas Tourism Web Site.” http://www.visitlasvegas.com.

Doing Something Real

2009-05-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

"It never occured to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theatre, dance, carnival - in other words, a dream."

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 100.