Blog #8
Community
Butler - Bodies in Alliance
Kwon - "By Way of Conclusion: One Place After Another", One Place After Another
Kwon - "By Way of Conclusion: One Place After Another", One Place After Another
Butler:
Regardless of differing political intentions, Bodies congregate, move together, speak together, and claim spaces as public.
It’s not as simple as making a mark within public space — that assumes that public space is already given. It’s more so that the publicness of these spaces is being fought over and disputed when these demonstrations happen
When crowds and movements move outside of the public square to the home, streets, and neighborhoods, shows that politics is already present in both the public and private
It's about repurposing and reproducing the public in reaction or in accordance with whatever the material environment is: using a truck or a tank as a platform for speakers.
The need to move and assemble with others when wanting to mobilize
Political action requires the “space of appearance”
True spaces lie between the people - as much as any action takes place somewhere, there’s also a space that belongs to alliance itself.
Action has the power to create location
True spaces lie between the people - as much as any action takes place somewhere, there’s also a space that belongs to alliance itself.
Action has the power to create location
Material supports for action are not only part of action but is also what is being fought about = political struggle with food, employment, mobility, access to institutions
"The material supports for action are not only part of action, but they are also what is being fought about, especially in those cases when the political struggle is about food, employment, mobility, and access to institutions."
We must understand the bodily dimensions of action, what the body can do, what bodies require, and what holds bodies together
"Very often the claim that is being made is that the streets must be made safe from the police who are complicit in criminality, especially on those occasions when the police support criminal regimes, or when, for instance, the police commit the very crimes against sexual and gender minorities that they are supposed to stop. Demonstrations are one of the few ways that police power is overcome, especially when they become too large and too mobile to be contained by police power, and when they have the resources to regenerate themselves. Perhaps these are anarchist moments or anarchist passages, when the legitimacy of a regime is called into question, but when no new regime has yet come to take its place. This time of the interval is the time of the popular will, not a single will, not a unitary will, but one that is characterized by an alliance with the performative power to lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law, and that can never be fully codified into law." - Butler
Ardent's view is bounded by gender politics, the private and public
The public, spaces for politics, debate, war, and revenge are reserved for men, masculine and unsupported
The private, spaces for reproductive labor and domesticity are reserved for women, feminine
The public, spaces for politics, debate, war, and revenge are reserved for men, masculine and unsupported
The private, spaces for reproductive labor and domesticity are reserved for women, feminine
Bodies must appear, I must see you, you must see me
We must be heard, I must hear you, you must hear me
Being a body in a way that I cannot be for myself
My body expresses a perspective I cannot inhabit
No one body establishes the space of appearance, you need bodies - the space of appearance happens between
We must be heard, I must hear you, you must hear me
Being a body in a way that I cannot be for myself
My body expresses a perspective I cannot inhabit
No one body establishes the space of appearance, you need bodies - the space of appearance happens between
because the space of appearance only requires bodies together in speaking and action, it predates all formal constitutions of the public realm/ways it can be organized/government
Space of appearance emerging out of exclusion, who is not in this space? This already establishes power for those that are already in the space before any formal action is made.
To be deprived of the space of appearance is to be denied reality
To be deprived of the space of appearance is to be denied reality
This is a huge problem cause how do we make sense of those that are excluded? "De-animated givens of political life" & "depoliticized forms of being" implies that the dominant ways of establishing the political are right.
This controls who should remain in the public vs private sphere, this devalues and disregards all the work and agency in those domains regarded as depoliticized.
This controls who should remain in the public vs private sphere, this devalues and disregards all the work and agency in those domains regarded as depoliticized.
The concept of “bare-life” cannot articulate and describe the modes of agency and action taking place by the stateless, occupied, and disenfranchised - they are more often than not resisting and angered (something that isn’t made clear by “bare-life”.
“Those who are excluded from existing polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation may be “unreal” only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality.”
Even if the public space is defined through exclusion, the undefined act: Undocumented workers amassing illegally, populations laying claim to areas that belonged to the military, uprisings without legal protection/permits, bringing down regimes.
The body speaks politically, persistence calls legitimacy into question, exercising a right that is no right; a right contested
Alliance is not reducible to individuals, individuals don’t act
Action in alliance, interdependency, participation, and supporting itself
We must think about our bodies in ways that Arendt doesn’t.
Action in alliance, interdependency, participation, and supporting itself
We must think about our bodies in ways that Arendt doesn’t.
The biological need for social relations goes hand-in-hand with the political/social needs to address these demands.
Problematic division of labor in Arendt’s position: A public, viewed, heard, speaking, and acting body, and a private, feminine, laboring, hidden body.
“So what I accept is the following: Freedom does not come from me or from you; it can and does happen as a relation between us or, indeed, among us.” - Butler
The claim of equality is made when bodies appear together
- Is this too ideal?
Demonstrations in Tahrir, implementing equality, horizontal relations, and equal division of labor broke down Mubarak’s regime and hierarchies. “Incorporating into the social form of resistance the principles for which they were struggling on the street.”
- Is this too ideal?
Demonstrations in Tahrir, implementing equality, horizontal relations, and equal division of labor broke down Mubarak’s regime and hierarchies. “Incorporating into the social form of resistance the principles for which they were struggling on the street.”
Language working not to incite action, but to restrain action: “Silmiyya” “Peaceful, safe and sound, unharmed, secure”
“As you know many of the public demonstrations of these last months have not been against military dictatorships or tyrannical regimes. They have also been against the monopoly capitalism, neo-liberalism, and the suppression of political rights, and in the name of those who are abandoned by neo-liberal reforms that seek to dismantle forms of social democracy and socialism, that eradicate jobs, expose populations to poverty, and undermine the basic right to a public education.” - Butler
Media is both a tool to establish hegemonic control and an exercise of freedom: Dominant corporately owned media vs rogue media.
Kwon:
In art and academia, success, viability, and self-worth are defined and measured by nomadism, the calling of one’s presence around the world. Destabilizations of transience, removal or lack of home, and suffering/inconvenience are rewarded.
Constantly in the “wrong” place, or the distinction between home and elsewhere is unimportant.
Homogeneity, spatial undifferentiation and departicularization due to globalization, accommodation for a capitalist order.
In reaction to this colonial, capitalist, homogeneous domination, a new space has to accentuate differences, reconnecting with uniqueness, memory, and history.
This differential function can be and has been exploited by site-specific art = this is a symptom of that deterritorialization.
This differential function can be and has been exploited by site-specific art = this is a symptom of that deterritorialization.
Place if defined by land/town/cityscape from the inside, is essential to identity - local cultures and places. So the uprooting from that, from ‘home’ wanes our ability to locate ourselves, disconnection from history, nature.
Places aren’t neutral, they are an instrument, used to homogenize, genericize, commodify - abstracting space into non spaces.
Lippard calls for a return to non urban, small-scale spaces, face to face exchanges
- “Not that such a vision isn’t appealing. The problem may be that it is all too appealing, not only to us individually but to the machinations of capitalism itself.”
- This production of different spaces plays into capitalism as well, the desire to pay high prices for authenticity, difference, etc.
- “Not that such a vision isn’t appealing. The problem may be that it is all too appealing, not only to us individually but to the machinations of capitalism itself.”
- This production of different spaces plays into capitalism as well, the desire to pay high prices for authenticity, difference, etc.
Sense of belonging, not to any specific location but to a system of movement - Majeski felt a sense of belonging even though he was clearly on the wrong flight.
It seems that when Majesty is in the “wrong” place, rather than him losing himself, seems to set himself on a journey to find himself. The encounter with the “wrong” place can expose the instability of the “right” place (home).
- “Both liberates and shatters him.”
- “Both liberates and shatters him.”
Leaving behind the notion of a site and identity bounded by physical actuality.
- “Even an advanced theoretical position like Frampton’s critical regionalism seems dated in this regard; for it is predicated on the belief that a particular site/place, with its identity-giving or identifying properties, exists always and already prior to whatever new cultural forms might be introduced to it or emerge from it.”
- Deterritorialization, admittedly has liberating effects, not being bound, fluidity
- “Even an advanced theoretical position like Frampton’s critical regionalism seems dated in this regard; for it is predicated on the belief that a particular site/place, with its identity-giving or identifying properties, exists always and already prior to whatever new cultural forms might be introduced to it or emerge from it.”
- Deterritorialization, admittedly has liberating effects, not being bound, fluidity
“Despite the proliferation of discursive sites and fictional selves, however, the phantom of a site as an actual place remains, and our psychic, habitual attachment to places regularly returns as it continues to inform our sense of identity. This persistent, perhaps secret adherence to the actuality of places (in memory, in longing) may not be a lack of theoretical sophistication but a means of survival.” - Kwon
THAT PART ^^
Advocacy for this fluid mobility may be a delusional alibi for short attention spans, “the new”, temporary antidote for the anxiety of boredom.
Reprise of “freedom of choice”
- The choice to forget, reinvent, fictionalize
- The choice to “belong” anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere
This choice isn’t available for everyone equally; the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities is a privilege of mobility.
Reprise of “freedom of choice”
- The choice to forget, reinvent, fictionalize
- The choice to “belong” anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere
This choice isn’t available for everyone equally; the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities is a privilege of mobility.
What does it look like to sustain cultural and historical specificity in a way that isn’t a simulacral (imitating) pacifier nor a willful (deliberate) invention?
“Double meditation”, double negation, defying both:
- Optimization of advanced technology
- Tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism or the glibly (superficially) decorative
Finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity
- Optimization of advanced technology
- Tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism or the glibly (superficially) decorative
Finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity
“The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.” - Homi Bhabha
This is not a matter of choosing sides :
nomadism vs sedentariness
nomadism vs sedentariness
It’s a matter of understanding seeming oppositions as sustaining relations, relational specificity.
“Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks—so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life’s traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another.”
Blog #7
Collaboration
Lind - Complications: On Collaborations, Agency and Contemporary Art
Raqs Media Collective - Additions, Subtractions: On Collectives and Collectivities
Raqs Media Collective - Additions, Subtractions: On Collectives and Collectivities
Raqs Media Collective
Collectivities allow for a greater degree of autonomy and agency
Collectives may be more structured and hierarchical
Shared identity and conversations are essential
Ideas aren't produced out of the three individual consciousnesses, it is out of the intersection of all the communication
The real value isn't within the final product of work but the conversations and processes
It's a balance and a flux of trust.
Borrowing from personal experience, there have been all sorts of different fluctuation of autonomy and control that I have experienced from working and building relationships with different people.
There's the relationship that feels incredibly separate, boundaries are quite strict. "You do this, I'll do this"
Relationships that feel very sacrificial, "I trust you entirely for the creative process and outcome"
Relationships that feel more like a hiring, "I want you to do this"
Relationships that are truly collaborative, conceiving and conceptualizing together, conversations, no initial division of responsibility due to specializations (not that specializations won't result in the final product, but that comes naturally and will happen due to the nature of what specialization is)
Lind
As individuals we are constantly seeking for belongign and community
Even the lone artist is dependent on contributions from others, invisible support
Shared resources, excitement of working together, finding autonomy outside of corporate interests together
Liberating each other by creating a relationship that exists outside of hierarchy and commercial structures
Monte Vista Projects
Blog #6
Identity
Baldwin - selection from “Notes from a Native Son”
Cho - The Fantasy of Honorary Whiteness
Cho - The Fantasy of Honorary Whiteness
Baldwin:
A piece that focuses on the complex relationship between Baldwin and his father -- characterized by strictness, hatred, pride, and learning -- as well as a broader reflection on his navigation in white supremacist America.
"Notes from a Native Son" not just refers to his father, but also to a son of the nation, segregation, and an anti-black nation have shaped his identity, a longing for belonging - queer identity, black identity
Identity and worldview are shaped and defined by family, whether it be along the guidelines, or in resistance to -- the antithesis and contrarian behavior are still influenced.
This works inversely: worldviews and lived experiences shape or alter relationships with family. Baldwin had learned later in his life that a lot of the strict and skeptical behavior that had been expressed by his father came from an intense sense of fear.
"I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation." - Baldwin
A bitterness, a fever, and a dangerous hatred was uncovered when Baldwin is confronted by a situation where he both could've been murdered and could've committed murder.
Cho:
All based on the falsehood/fictitious concept of whiteness
"Honorary" in honorary whiteness is important, it's honorary, it can be taken away at any point, and it's not stable
Assimilation into a dominant white supremacist hierarchy
Close enough to utilize as a model/standard, but not quite white
Frustrations when looking at family members altering appearances, and seeing other minorities assimilating - however, I've learned to shift the critique from the individual to the conditions
The critique isn't on the individual that's trying to survive, it's on the conditions that force the individual into making said decisions.
Blog #5
Class & Education
hooks - keeping close it to home: class and education
Moten and Harney - The Undercommons, Ch. 4: Debt and Study
To the privileged and affluent, the prospects of higher education are usually seen as an undisputable win, to those that are working class, poor, and black, more complications come out of such opportunities:
"I don't want to lose my child"
"What will higher education do to my child's mind"
"Any other school will do, why this one?"
Harsh critique, skepticism, and reluctance regarding academic endeavors
"No wonder our working-class parents from poor backgrounds feared our entry into such a world, intuiting perhaps that we might learn to be ashamed of where we had come from, that we might never return home, or come back only to lord it over them." - hooks
Carol Stack's All Our Kin spoke to the value systems in poor, black, southern communities which would present alternatives to the individualist and private-property-centered notions that would reinforce the white-supremacist capitalist patriarch (more so as an adaptive and reactive method of survival, as opposed to an active effort to dismantle, or set frameworks).
Strengthening our critical and analytical skills by not relying on the sharing of personal experience, but still finding value in it; stories provide meaningful examples for people to identify and connect.
Having multiple languages, patois, in use (who is to say there is one useful language in academia)
Priyanka admits to her younger self's elitist tendencies: "So what if the masses don't understand me? I'm not interested in communicating with them. I want to talk amongst other intellectuals." Challenging questions: Who are you talking to? Why shouldn't you try to talk to them? Art is a language, what are you trying to do?
Internalized anti-blackness within black professors, expectations of poor performance, lack of nurturing bonds
Through these conditions, it is clear that assimilation is the assumed and easiest way to gain acceptance.
We can expand who we are talking to, and build communities based on the imagination of radical alternatives, rather than follow the model of 'the exception', hoping that we're part of the rare few that 'make it'.
On a more personal NYU tip:
Having NYU fund/financially back spaces in which we can discuss anti-capitalist thought and critique the very same institutions that fund us.
Do they perceive this discourse, this space (revolutionary, radical, anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical thought; the undercommons) with so little danger, that not only do they allow it -- they fund it.
It's not entirely black and white - although NYU is a capitalist institution, it's also a research school. There is also a little more lenience in the fact that this discussion is occurring in a Studio Art space, in Steinhardt, an Education school, as opposed to Stern, a business school. I'm sure these discussions aren't nearly as encouraged over there.
However, there are indications that these institutions do give a fuck, and do perceive these discussions as a threat: Florida, banning critical race theory, and gender/sexuality politics.
Acknowledgment is also a method to undermine, or deflate. It's strategic: banning it or actively obstructing it would instill a sense of urgency, and importance (oh shit, this is actually something that hurts).
It's a constant tension that exists in the relationship between art and those who fund it.
Blog #4
Sekula - The Body and the Archive
i forgor 💀
Blog #3
Foucault - Of Other Spaces
Moten and Harney - The Undercommons
19th Century obsession with history
Simultaneous Living
"We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein."
Structuralism, connectivity, relations, not just focused on individual
Hierarchic nature of space in the Western World since the Middle Ages, sacred vs profane, protected vs open, urban vs rural
Emplacement
17th Century, thing's place is a point in movement, as stability is just movement slowed down
Extension replaces all of that, site is a grid, a tree, series, proximity
Not just is there enough space for people, but storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements
We still may have not reached the desanctification of space
Two Types:
Utopias are sites with no real place, unreal, either a perfected form or society turned upside down
Heterotopias, real places
In between utopias and heterotopias is a joint experience, the mirror
Mirrors make the place absolutely real and unreal
Two Types of Heterotopias:
Crisis heterotopias - privileged places meant for "adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc."
Heterotopias of deviation - places in which those who deviate to requirements or the norm are placed, prisons, retirement homes, psychiatric hospitals
Utopia has the privilege of being fantasy, unrealized, the functionality of heterotopias must be in mind
Archive, other space, other life
Comments on The Undercommons:
Although there are debts that should be paid, such as the debts that white, privileged people owe to black people, and other marginalized groups, they are the types of debts that are so irreparably deep. The damages committed under the current capitalist system cannot be resolved within the same frameworks of the now - a new approach is required. This is because this is the same system that blames the victims for the failures of its own functions, while simultaneously denying that there is an issue at all. What the new replacement system will be isn’t sure yet, as we haven’t crossed the threshold of tearing down the current system. It’s a call to tear down the world that produced the results, not just the results.
The undercommons, the space, a space of revolution
The undercommons, those who inhabit it;" what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons)"
The undercommons, in academia, adjuncts, the beauty teaching radical thought with no real connection to the institution while being paid by the institution, however issues of professionalism and debt arise
Fuck recognition, this needs to be torn down
Jaded Forum / Digital Zion
Franz Ackermann, psychogeography, situationists
Ai Wei Wei & Olafur Eliasson "Moon"
Stefan Arztmann "Suspended in Time"
Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective
Hiroshi Sugimoto "U.A. Playhouse"
Gabriel Orozco "My Office II"
Thomas Struth "Pantheon Rome"
Zoe Leonard "Robert"
Janet Cardiff & George Miller, audiowalks
Panopticon:
"at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy."
The goal is to have permanence in its effects - to the point where it doesn't even need to continue to be in practice, the automation of power.
Self-snitching, citizen policing, surveillance within us.
NYC MTA "See Something, Say Something"
Optimism or naiveness in wondering if one-day actual power will be removed or take a step back--
Would we be able to identify it when that removal happens and have more radical action take place (revolution) OR would it be such a seamless transition that we would never be cognizant OR would the removal even take place?
See Artists:
Trevor Paglen "Deep Deep Dive"
Hito Steyerl "How Not to be Seen"
Ai Wei Wei, Jacques Herzog & Pierre De Meuron "Hansel & Gretel"
Jill Magid "Evidence Locker"
Sam Lavigne, Surya Mattu & Adam Harvey "Big Data Pawn Shop"
Hasan Elahi "Tracking Transience"
David Spriggs "Logic of Control"
Blog #2
Foucault - The Means of Correct Training + Panopticism
Purpose of disciplinary power is to train --> binding forces/bodies into utility
"Discipline 'makes' individuals"
Instruments of discipline:
1. Hierarchical Observation
- Coercion through observation, each individual gaze contributing to the greater functioning of power
- Hierarchical militaristic model that's present in schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.
- Constant exposure and vulnerability to surveillance
- "the slightest incompetence, if left unnoticed and therefore repeated each day, may prove fatal to the enterprise to the extent of destroying it in a very short time."
- Network of surveillance resting in each individual, anonymous power
2. Normalizing Judgement
- A penal mechanism - judgment, punishment
- Regulation and order
- Duality: gratification/punishment, there should be a desire to be rewarded
- Classification, hierarchic valuing of skills, qualities, traits
3. The Examination
- A combination of the first two; observation and judgment
A surveillance based on a system of permanent registration
"reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor."
Plague made room for more precise and individual systems of separations as opposed to the general binary divisions of before
"The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations."
"The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society."
"The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society."
Blog #1
Steyerl - Is The Museum a Battlefield?
How could such a secluded and isolated place be a battlefield?
Historically torture chambers -- cites of war crimes
Bolsheviks storming the winter palace (storming museum)
Art established by wealthy patrons and aristocrats catered to their taste
Flashy displays of oligarch wealth
Transforming a portion of the winter palace into a Guggenheim site (patterns reflected in other practices of gentrification)
Flashy displays of oligarch wealth
Transforming a portion of the winter palace into a Guggenheim site (patterns reflected in other practices of gentrification)
Battlefield - Violence in Iran, PKK (Kurdish Women’s Movement)
Remnants, clothes, missiles, bullet cases, etc.
Tracing pieces of debris back to the maker, manufacturer in western metropolises
Lockheed Martin (hellfire missile)
Remnants, clothes, missiles, bullet cases, etc.
Tracing pieces of debris back to the maker, manufacturer in western metropolises
Lockheed Martin (hellfire missile)
Bullet traced to the Art Institute of Chicago, this institution is supported by General Dynamics
Tracing origin would presumably lead to the person who fired a weapon, a picture of herself in a museum:
Tracing origin would presumably lead to the person who fired a weapon, a picture of herself in a museum:
“This is a shot”
CIRCLING BACK AROUND TO YOURSELF
SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS FUNDING THE VIOLENCE
AM I RESPONSIBLE FOR MY FRIEND'S DEATH?
Ammunition invisible in an exhibition, transformed into artwork (Who sponsored these artworks, not who fired these shells - Zorlu/Ayesasa, Siemens, Thomson)
Siemens was one of the biggest weapons manufacturers in Germany - funded and sponsored biennales and shows
This film was shown in a biennale that was primarily funded by Siemens, and she spends time criticizing them. A form of work against Siemens:
“I CRITICIZED YOU, AND YOU PAID FOR IT.”
TAKEAWAY:
Being more conscious of where your work comes from and what it contributes to.
Your work will be bought, auctioned, and interacted by and with people that you will not like (character, politics, systems, etc.) but the solution isn’t to shut down and stop producing art, but hopefully to fight these issues within the process of art making.
Your work will be bought, auctioned, and interacted by and with people that you will not like (character, politics, systems, etc.) but the solution isn’t to shut down and stop producing art, but hopefully to fight these issues within the process of art making.
Interdisciplinary Art Practice I F22
Blog #9
Piper - Passing for White. Passing for Black
Conflict of racial passing
White member of faculty tells Piper:
"Miss Piper, you're about as black as I am."
Accusation of shame, ridicule
You didn't do wrong, you ARE wrong.
Once accused/exposed, you can never be legitimized, never be taken seriously.
"You sure look white! You sure act white!"
Suffering test: seeing if you've felt as much pain as I have, usually ends in invalidating real pain; sometimes you pass though.
Equal feelings of alienation from upper-class white people and working-class black people.
'Detectable blackness'
Accusations of utilizing blackness for supposed benefits:
"It's an extraordinary idea, when you think about it: as though someone would willingly shoulder the stigma of being black in a racist society for the sake of a little extra professional consideration that guarantees nothing but suspicions of foul play
and accusations of cheating."
and accusations of cheating."
Relations with relatives and their decisions to accept white-passing identities.
Rejection of black identity? Rejection of black identification that brings too much pain?
Blog #8
Lacan - The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function
The psychology of a child: can recognize their own image in a mirror.
Child explores the relationship between movements/actions and the reflected outcome/reactions.
The mirror stage is a form of identification.
Dissasociation of self and other through the association of the reflection as a separate being, but also a complete being.
To be honest, I am finding it pretty difficult to try to dissect what the text is really trying to say. There are a lot of terminologies that aren't the most familiar to me.
Michael David - The Mirror Stage
Blog 7
Synthesized Nostalgia
Throughout my childhood, I guess due to a lack of representation in media and whatnot, I've felt like I had to discuss and view my identity solely in proximity to others -- other identities that might be familiar to some, more digestible, easier to consume.
Oh, what's Gimbap? It's like Korean Sushi.
"You look like an anime character."
"Are you Chinese or Japanese?"
The option for Korean as a possible choice would slowly be introduced as familiarity with K-Pop or other forms of Korean culture grew but for then the answer was:
"Neither."
'Synthesized Nostalgia' is a piece made digitally through Adobe Photoshop.
Its process reflects its composition:
Initially, the piece was a pretty honest attempt at a digital portrait in the style of Japanese anime, a form of media I enjoyed thoroughly growing up. (The bottom image of the piece is similar to the original, just with no distortion at all) However, the complicated questions about the paradoxical relations I've had with such imagery started to come in. There is a conflict of having a genuine love for the very same media that's been feeling like an active reference point to pigeonhole your identity. I disrupt the image. I glitch it, distort it, and strip it of its nostalgic worth. The upper image is vapid and cold, and the bottom image is fighting for a place in the frame.
I want the audience to feel the frustration and duality of this dilemma. It is deformed and in constant tension with itself because the issue at hand has not been resolved.
Blog #6
Wolfgang Tillmans - To Look Without Fear
Great range of work: traditional photography, video projections, magazines, photocopies, and newspapers.
I found the exhibition to be a great reflection of the past forty years or so.
Held a mirror to society, cultural events/icons, and broader political movements/events while also narrowing the scope and showing intimate moments as well.
He will showcase newspapers or articles about racism, HIV/AIDS, war, space exploration, the introduction of the internet, and other big cultural/health/political phenomenons/issues, on the glass-covered tables, but also shoot a silhouette, or a portrait, or a video of peas boiling.
It was interesting comparing and contrasting some of these captured moments of history that he's collected to my lived experiences.
Blog 5
Hall - Cultural Identity and Diaspora
Thinking of identity not as a transparent and unproblematic matter-of-fact thing, but as a 'production' -- more of a process, an ongoing development.
2 ways of looking at cultural identity:
1. One, shared, culture, a collective one true self that a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Unchanging cultural codes, frames of reference meaning.
"Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form. and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it." - Fanon
This leads us to the question:
What should the new forms of visual representation look like? The unearthing of what colonialism has buried, or a production of identity? Not archaeology, but the retelling of the past? 'Hidden histories' played a critical role in social movements -- feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonial.
2. Along with similarity, there is a deep and important sense of difference which reveal "what we are/what we have become".
It comes from somewhere, a time, has history, and is not just something that transcends time. Undergoes transformation, not stagnant. A sense of becoming and being.
Instead of a concern for recovering the past, identities in this sense are the ways we name our positioning and the way we are positioned within a greater historical context.
Blog 4
Said - Orientalism
The Orient is a western European invention.
A disappearing sense of the Orient from a European visitor's perspective of a European representation.
Americans' perspective on the Orient is more likely to be very differently associated with the far east (China, Japan, Korea), much less dense.
Home to Europe's greatest, richest, and oldest colonies.
Source of civilizations, language (cultural contestant).
3 types of meanings to orientalism: imaginative, academic, and a corporate institution, as a western style for imperialist/colonialist thought, dominating, restructuring, and having authority.
"European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self."
To talk about Orientalism is to talk about a British and French cultural enterprise (India, Levant, biblical texts/lands, spice trade, colonial armies).
No clear-cut meaning of the word: a general sense of exoticism, and otherness - both a deep desire and repulsion.
Multiculturalism comes w/ flaws: "celebrates the differences" but is often celebrated within recognizable parameters, opening the gates for cultural appropriation, and stereotype reinforcement.
Politics is inseparable from art, life.
Not unfortunate, make friends with the politics of yourself.
Blog 3
Barthes - Mythologies + Myth of Whiteness
Myth is a Type of Speech:
- part of a system of communication
- is a message
- historical foundation; created and conditioned by culture
Myth as a Semiological Sign:
- is both a formal and historical science. endowing form with substance
- in semiology - the signifier is empty while the sign is full (with meaning)
- in language, the signifier is the meaning, in myth, it is the form
The Form and the Concept:
- the form of myth is not a symbol. it is an accomplice of concept. once used, it becomes artificial
- there is nothing fixed in mythical concepts. they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear, etc.
- history can easily suppress them
Myth as Stolen Language:
- is language robbery
- can reach everything, corrupt everything
- poetic language resists myth
- poetry occupies a position in reverse to that of myth
- (myth is a semiological system that pretends to transform itself into a factual system)
- (poetry is a semiological system that pretends to contract itself into an essential system)
- (poetry is a semiological system that pretends to contract itself into an essential system)
- best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it and produce an artificial myth (rob myth)
Myth on the Left/Right:
- revolutionary language cannot be mythical
- revolution is a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world
- revolution announces itself openly and abolishes myth
(the left is not revolution)
- when revolution changes to the left, it dons a mask to generate an innocent metalanguage and distort itself into nature
- left-wing myth is always an artificial myth, a reconstituted myth: hence its clumsiness
Statistically, myth is on the right.
the oppressed makes the world; the oppressor conserves it
Myth of Whiteness
Roman and Greek Statues in Color
'Chroma' at the Met
Blog 2
Barthes - Semiology / Berger - Suit and Photograph
Blog 1
The Problem with Apu / SNL Black Stereotype Sketch
These two videos address a similar problem: the normalization of racial/ethnic/identity-based stereotypes. "The Problem with Apu" directly talks about The Simpsons' only Indian character, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Apu is an immigrant and a store owner, known for his one-note, shallow, catchphrase, "Thank you, come again!" Hari Kondabolu who starred in the documentary argued that the lack of real representation of brown people limited the most common portrayals in the media to fabricated accents done by white people and dangerous terrorist threats. Similarly, SNL's "Black Stereotype Sketch" which starred Louis Gossett Jr. and Eddie Murphy commented on, as the title suggests, the stereotypes that are attached to black people. The sketch starts off with a serious tone, more reminiscent of a drama, than a comedy. Eddie, who was supposed to be Louis' son gets into it with his father, with his father citing drug use, and getting people pregnant as reasons for Eddie's lateness. This sketch seems to be reinforcing a negative stereotype about the relationship between a black father and his son, and it knows that it is. The sketch flips on itself when Eddie jokingly interrupts the scene to confront the supposed (white) writer of the scene for reinforcing negative stereotypes. Eddie also hilariously opens up a closet, which featured indigenous African musicians, who had been playing the background music the whole time, and yells at them to "Shut up!" How could Eddie resent his father, when his real father is watching him right there in the audience?
