Culture High, Culture Low

Shame on me for not thinking of this:

2010-12-29T13:38:00.001-05:00

I used to paint with Thermochromic inks, and even made objects that changed their patterns when the viewer exhaled on them...but I never thought to make a Rorschach mask. This, even as I spent most of the last two decades as an obsessive fan of the limited comic book series Watchmen (1985).

Shame on me - this would be one of the few times in which the art-nerd in me (the "culture high") completely overwhelmed the pop-culture-geek in me (the "culture low")!

Back after a long while (and looking at photos of the subway)

2010-10-21T20:13:00.002-04:00

I'm not very keen on the Metropolitan Transit Authority of late, but one of my points of local pride is the New York City subway system. It's eco-friendly, (relatively) economical (though the MTA is working to make that less the case), and a perfect illustration of the "melting pot" concept.

Really, I think that one of the things people from outside NYC or any other urban area need to understand about us is that the average outer-borough New Yorker spends at least an hour a day sitting next to strangers as part of a daily commute (on a sidenote, it's really weird for me to realize that, due to FINALLY GETTING A TEACHING JOB AND IT'S EVEN IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD as detailed below, an unlimited Metrocard would be a waste of money for me for the first time since they were introduced).

Allora (that's "anyhoo" in italiano), here's a link to a gallery of New York Times photos from the NYC subway system over the past hundred years. Around the late 50s, you start getting archtypal "Grey Lady" images; they're a nice reminder of the old aesthetic for photos at the Times. I must admit, it took me a while to warm up to their color photography, but by now I can't imagine the paper of the last decade without its incredible color photojournalism.

In other news:

RIP Ari Up of the Slits (1962-2010) and General Johnson of the Chairmen of the Board (1943-2010). I'm sure that everyone who comes to this blog shares my love of scratchy post-punk and Carolina beach music, as well as art-education and site-specific artwork.
Yes, this time I actually assumed that there ARE people who come here. Apparently, this blog now has two followers! And I don't even know you folks!
I promise to get back into art-ed ramblings soon -- I just got hired as an art teacher at a middle school in the outer boroughs (!!!!), and need to find my footing with that age. If my principal is okay with it, I'll certainly post some images from projects as they develop, though I probably won't post the school's name or the kids' faces. Further reports as events warrant.

The Creativity Crisis (via Newsweek)

2010-07-14T21:19:00.000-04:00

Here's a great article from the newest issue of Newsweek provides food for thought for those of us with kids, or who want to teach, or who care about art, or who care about America still generating great minds. Surely at least ONE of those criteria apply to you, right?

As Eliot Eisner and many other art-education advocates and theorists have noted, art education provides students with "Habits of Mind" (Eisner's term) which are not necessarily instilled through other, more academic -- and thus more typically privileged in a curriculum -- subjects. These habits encourage flexible, creative thinking, which benefits students not only in the art class, but in other classes and for the rest of their lives as members of society.

All fine and well for theorists to talk up the arts, of course, but this Newsweek article cites several scientific studies which show that creativity exercises (such as those found in a good art classroom) literally strengthen brain functions. It also states that American schools, and thus American adults, are falling behind Chinese and Asian schools in terms of creative thinking, which is hurting our industries and our ability to deal flexibly with important left-field issues as they arise.

Perhaps these are the angles from which to push for increased art-educational opportunities, in order to get the broadest coalition of supporters: science proves it and it's for the sake of our economy.

On a related note (and no, I am not saying that this project is exactly what America needs to regain its position at the top of the creative market), here are a few pictures of sculptures made by first-graders in response to a guided visualization I led them through while working as a student-teacher this spring. In the visualization, I had them imagine flying in a spaceship to the end of the universe, landing on a planet unlike anything Earthlings had ever seen, and meeting an alien from that planet. They then used homemade play-dough (which could be reformed - changing the shape) and found materials (which could be recontextualized - changing the meaning) to create the alien.

Sure, many of the aliens used similar materials - straws and toothpicks especially - but each student used them differently, and gave different explanations as to what the materials were. On one alien, toothpicks were poisonous spikes, on another, they were wind showing movement in a direction. One alien's snorkels were made with the same bendy straws as another alien's legs and the "laser sticky arms" of another. Each student was encouraged to create his or her own solutions, and find his or her own problems. American education needs more of that, not only from me (certainly not only from me!!) but from every teacher.

This alien is pretty much my favorite piece of student artwork ever - my cooperating teacher will vouch for me that I was all but in love with it. The student found a teapot lid in the box of found materials, and quickly realized that this wouldn't work as a stable base for a clay alien. His response was to make a mobile sculpture (it rolls in circles) with toothpicks, pipe cleaners and feathers reaching out in an arc which beautifully spins as the alien rolls. This six- or seven-year-old was thinking about kinetic movement and purposing his materials as intently as Alexander Calder did when making his early circus sculptures.

Anyhow, the Newsweek article makes a really good case for giving more students more access to the arts - visual, performative, musical, etc. Here's hoping that principals and parents read the article, so that it isn't just bouncing around the creative-arts-teacher echo chamber...

"If you found ONE, they probably made a THOUSAND."

2010-07-10T21:28:00.005-04:00

Your author would have looked just as stupid in this in 1991.

Pretty much everyone I know who lived in Brooklyn in the 90s fondly remembers Domsey's, a Williamsburg-Bridge-area clothing place legendary for its by-the-pound offerings in the basement. I found many staples of my ridiculous art-school-era "look" by sifting through piles of rags, ducking the bulldozers that were shoving bales of clothing, and pulling out the most gloriously weird stuff I found.

Nothing topped the mighty GRUNGE jersey, though.

A baseball jersey with an African-tricolor motif (red and yellow front panels, green sleeves, and a black back and hood), with five-inch-tall lettering spelling out the decidedly-not-Afrocentric word GRUNGE. It was the sort of thing a computer simulacrum would wear when it appeared to the United Nations, had it learned the ways of Earthlings entirely by watching VHS tapes of MTV from 1991. I found it around late 1999 or early 2000, long after it would have been timely in its misguided squareness.

The best thing about the jersey, other than it being hilariously ugly and uncool, was that it was produced by Spike Lee's short-lived 40 Acres and a Mule stores, themselves a time capsule of that period in the 90s when independent film still felt like something...well, independent. Unless the piece was a custom (not likely, given the price point of the 40A stuff when there was a store on Dekalb Avenue by Pratt), the GRUNGE jersey was a product which had been given the green light at least a few times between the drawing board and the coat hanger. I like to think that Spike Lee himself looked at the design on paper and said "Yes - this is exactly what I need to promote my brand as a vital aspect of Brooklyn Afrocentrism. Look out, Moshood!"

My wife (a costume designer who certainly knows her way around bulk clothiers) put it well: "The chances are, this was not a custom, and if you found one, they probably made a thousand of these."

Sadly, before I was able to finally wear it to a Spike Lee signing, I realized that it had been several years since I last wore it (and that I never even wore it in a promo photo for my late hip hop project, for which it would have been a perfect statement of my "it doesn't matter if you cheer my name or hiss me" persona). I ended up selling it to Beacon's Closet in Williamsburg about six months ago, and have since kinda-sorta expected to see it worn by some yahoo on Project Runway or in a band-promo photo in L Magazine.

I wonder if, ten years from now, I'll see a piece of clothing made in 2010 that so completely got 2010 wrong. Or am I now too old, too distanced from anything resembling the cool stuff? Would I even recognize square anymore?

Push those gender roles early!

2010-07-10T20:43:00.000-04:00

Seriously, MAM?

Brooklyn Friends School “Invents the Museum”

2010-05-27T20:55:00.012-04:00

I've worked for several years as a pre-college instructor, teaching art and art history to high-school students. I've also spent the last two years working towards K-12 Art Ed certification, with the ideal goal of teaching high school students. As a true believer in teenagers' art, and a student of art education, I must say that the bar has been raised, both for high school art and for teaching high school art, courtesy of a show planned, produced and curated by the Brooklyn Friends School Art Club Cooperative and their teacher, Elizabeth Deull.

Before I go further, I should state that a) my wife is a teacher at Brooklyn Friends School; b) I've worked with several, but not all, of these students as a student teacher at BFS in the Fall 2009 semester; and c) I'm a recent graduate of the same art-education program as Ms. Deull, and have gotten to know her a bit at BFS over the past six months. As such, I'm not an unbiased observer - and I know that those few people who visit this blog expect nothing but the highest in journalistic integrity.

That said, this show of high-schoolers' work stands up aesthetically and conceptually to the majority of group shows in small commercial galleries in New York City. I'm very happy that it has been extended through June 6th, to coincide with the Atlantic Avenue Art Walk, and hope that it gets a lot of views and attention.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the art, shall we? In the words of the show's press release (here):

"In 'Invent the Museum' students chose to react to or reinvent an artwork or art idea that already existed in the world. This theme allowed students to research artworks of interest from a wide range of time periods, artists, artistic movements and media. They also learned about how artists and art movements from WWI to the present have developed new art ideas and expressions in reaction not only to the world around them, but often to the art that came before them. As a result, the student artists of The Art Club have constructed a show that presents their unique, contemporary take on both famous and more obscure artworks that span from the Renaissance to Postmodern times."

The show makes excellent use of a strange little storefront space on Hoyt Street in Brooklyn (half a block north of Atlantic Avenue) - the first thing you see walking by is a series of dolls made by the entire Art Club, each the familiar face of the Mona Lisa. It's a nice introduction to an exhibition that makes the viewer look at familiar artwork through the eyes of some of the newest acolytes to art history.

All of the work was impressively left-brainy for such young artists, and some pieces struck me as the equal of works from artists several years older and more experienced than these students. As I said above, this show stands up to most of what's up in group shows in NYC, and that's mighty impressive for a bunch of artists too young to legally vote.

Here's what's on display:

Ashley Felix's linocut self-portrait (based on Egon Schiele's Self-Portrait with Hands Folded) makes explicit the sort of stance Warhol made with Gold Marilyn - by referencing classics from art history in the process of depicting herself, she's planting a flag in the long-running conversation of art.

please click this image to see it in its proper proportion!

Becky Grenham's painting perfectly states the tongue-in-cheek reframing of this exhibition's questioning of what gets to be considered a "classic" work of art, and why. Degas' dancer takes the floor at a discotheque, enjoying the attention of club kids rather than the stodgy folks who read about her in a copy of Janson's or the hoi polloi who know her as a calendar motif. Culture high, meet culture low. I love the colored dots showing the play of light off a disco ball – it implies movement and increases the tension between the figures and the flat black background, as well as making me think of Damien Hirst's "dot paintings."

Wiley Guillot has a great hand already - he draws beautifully and idiosyncratically, and that makes his response to Kiki Smith's work feel fully independent of his art historical reference (I mean that in the best way).

When I last saw Staver Klitgaard, she was immersing herself in painting, learning everything she could about how the Old Masters composed and produced their imagery. Her work in the show shows this exploration heading in a different direction: digital "painting reenactments" of herself and another Art Club member as figures from Picasso, Goya and Vermeer (I wonder how Picasso would feel to know that he's considered an Old Master by the newest crop of artists...I agree wholeheartedly, and Portrait of Olga dans un Fauteui is an excellent painting for a modern young woman to reenact).

Manos Lupissakis processes "traditional" graffiti, Banksy's stencils and wheatpastes, and the general aesthetic of peeling paint in the subway system to make an Ode to the Subway that I found worth poring over inch by inch.

Samantha Rees's wall of small pen-and-ink portraits comment on the emotional content of traditional portraiture, and use the wall beautifully and evocatively, while her Self-Portrait in the Style of Van Eyck suggests an amazingly diverse group of artists: Van Eyck, Kahlo, Klimt, Redon, even Stettheimer.

(this show ismuch more impressive than my ability to successfully format this blog entry...)

Amina Ross is well on her way as an artist already: her stunning modern interpretation of an African-American mourning quilt commands attention from the viewer, and her corner installation Defective Oracle made me chuckle for a moment, then ponder it for several days.

Nina Ryser adds collage and her own drawing style to reprocess the work of Keith Haring into something much more her own. This would fit right in at a Williamsburg gallery, and I'd love to see variations on the theme. I love the head and neck that haven't been painted in at all - it sets off the wood grain and collage nicely.

Romy Smith makes a statement similar to Ashley Felix's referencing of the Egon Schiele self-portrait, only with a lot more humor – her How Botticelli's Woman Got Her Groove Back subverts the Portrait of a Young Woman by styling the sitter more like 1980 than 1480. The model's smirk makes it clear that she's in on the joke.

Allie Shyer's installations, collages and assemblages process Schwitters and Cornell with a design sense that (in my eyes, your mileage may vary) echoes the presentation of jumbled, disconnected imagery on a Google image search (or maybe mid-career Richard Prince). I've seen a lot of her work by now, and it's all quite impressive.

The Art Club Cooperative is such not just in name: several other pieces in the room were produced in collaboration. The back windows of the small space are covered in marker-on-acetate (?) reproductions of classic self-portraits…

…hung over a shelf covered in plastic animals, all painted pink. My toddler LOVED that part.

There is also a wall of artworks made in the gallery by the Art Club members, all for sale at a measly $5 apiece. I bought two, and hope to buy a few more before the show ends. Money from the sales goes towards the Michael Nill Endowment Fund for Faculty Development, which will directly benefit Brooklyn Friends School and thus its students.

If you go, you really owe it to yourself to buy a piece of artwork. I can't wait to put mine up in my apartment once the show comes down (one of the ones I bought is the white panel with mounted 3-d black ribbon, visible under the appropriated picture of Wolverine. It's that kind of show.)

If you haven't been able to tell yet by reading my glowing praise, I'm very, very impressed with the caliber of artwork in this show, and by Ms. Deull's ability to work with students of this age to produce a show this impressive. I hope to get the chance to work with high schoolers again soon and will keep this show in mind as the exemplar of what can be done with talented high school students, provided that you give them a real, meaningful project to work on and push them to challenge their own limits.

"Invent the Museum" is up through June 6^th (whether the BFS link at the top of this post says so or not) at 77B Hoyt Street between State Street and Atlantic Avenue, a space generously donated by the building owner, Nat Hendricks. Go see the show, wouldja?

B-Side wins again (Happy 73rd Birthday, Dick Dale!!)

2010-05-04T18:49:00.001-04:00

If you can explain to me how a song this awesome could have been relegated to the B-side of a single, I'll owe you one.

Everything is relative (or, at least, color symbolism sure is)

2010-04-27T14:03:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Information Is Beautiful comes this amazing diagram(?) of the different meanings colors have various cultures around the world.

Click the link I gave above (or click it here if you demand instant gratification) to see a much larger, more legible version of the image. It's the final cover design for the book Information is Beautiful by David McLandess, which you can buy with this cover in the UK or with an inferior cover and title but the same text inside in the US.

RIP: Keith "Guru" Elam (1966-2010)

2010-04-20T22:23:00.001-04:00

43 years old. Hard to believe that Guru was able to get as much done for hip hop (and, let's be fair, for the popularization of jazz among Gen-X-and-younger African-Americans) as he did in such a short life.

Embedding on this blog doesn't work all that well. Here's a video of "Mass Appeal", my favorite Gang Starr track (or, well, one of the two or three dozen of my favorite Gang Starr tracks - I might have picked a totally different one if I'd posted this tomorrow). Click it and thrill to the man's voice. His rhymes were always good, but it was his voice that he'll be remembered for most.

RIP

My first experience with "Outsider Art"

2010-04-12T12:45:00.002-04:00

Photos (circa winter 98-99) for this blog entry supplied by Jana Savanapridi of the Thunderfakers. Check out her music!

If I recall correctly, I first heard the term "outsider art" sometime in the early or mid-90s, while I was at Pratt Institute studying painting (and trying my damnedest to always be aware of "The Newest And Weirdest Shit"). It was likely around the time I first really studied Jean Debuffet -- he pretty much created the art-critical concept by coining the term "Art Brut" to describe artwork made by the institutionalized insane.

The term "Outsider Art" is essentially an Anglicization of "Art Brut," though in some people's minds it refers not only to the institutionalized but to anyone whose artwork exists outside of the standard studio-to-gallery-to-museum-with-a-general-knowledge-of-what's-going-on-in-art-history mode. That is to say, it's naive, and often a bit 'visionary' (much as I tend to avoid that term).

Aaaanyhow, when I first heard the term and had it explained to me, my reaction was "Oh. Like the Sanctuary of Love."

Pretty much anyone who grew up in Norwich, Connecticut (or the rural area around it) and graduated from high school before 2004 or so knows of the Sanctuary of Love, even if they don't know its name. It's probably been represented in the photography component of 90% of Southeastern Connecticut high-school students in who apply to art colleges. It was a project built by the hands and mind and devotion of a carpenter named Salvatore "Sal" Verdirome, who did the only logical thing after having a vision of the Virgin Mary: "It appeared to me and said something," he told the New York Times in 2000, "I couldn't quite catch it...I just started building."

By "building," Sal meant decorating the steep incline of his building's backyard with forty-seven upturned clawfooted bathtubs, each home to a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary (he poured the concrete himself). Eventually, painted concrete seahorses and butterflies filled the yard as well. Three large wooden crosses stood near a stone wall carved with the Ten Commandments. The steps on the hill were filled with mosaics -- psalms and calls to prayer, a version of the Sea of Glass from the Book of Revelation, made of old broken glass from a nearby Thermos factory -- and eventually a lovely sign was posted on the steps leading up to the yard, reading, simply:

"WELCOME TO THE SANCTUARY OF LOVE. Your Faith Has Brought You Here."

The Sanctuary had a long run as a destination for the sort of Catholic who makes visits to shrines devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe (or any statue that weeps blood, of course). In the 90s and early '00s, it became a place for those who'd lost money at the nearby casinoes to pray for luck at gambling (or for help after losing too much money). Sal never charged admission, and let needy people stay on the property for free, though there was a bucket in the back yard that people often dropped coins into.

"FOR THOSE THAT BELIEVE"

Sadly, the Sanctuary might still be here had he charged admission. Here's a link to the pages from the book Weird New England, which has a brief article on the Sanctuary of Love and a scan of the New York Times article detailing the sad end of the Sanctuary of Love: the town of Norwich took the home due to some $60,000 in overdue property taxes and $40,000 in unpaid electricity bills. Sal kept living in the building for as long as possible, eventually moving into a nursing home after foreclosure proceedings began in 2000. He died of a stroke in 2004, at the age of 84, and made the national news one last time as an obituary and human-interest story. Here's another great article on Sal from CTMuseumQuest.com.

Suffice it to say, I think that Sal might be a more appropriate recipient of the label than two of the subjects I've written about recently (Emmanuel P. Gill and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge), as he had no real interest in making art, or even being recognized for his work. He was a humble, driven man who happened to make a beautiful, and meaningful, piece of art over the course of decades' worth of work.

As these photos from Flickr user Mike Z show, the site has been dismantled (everything that could be seen as valuable -- the statues, mainly -- was sold by the town of Norwich in 2002). The bathtubs and mosaics remain, and they're still beautiful, but needless to say it isn't the same without the statues of Mary, and the frail old man who loved her so much as to devote his life to building her a shrine.

More on Outsider Art soon. In the meantime, here's hoping that Eric Gearity's documentary on Sal and the Sanctuary of Love (documenting the last few years of Sal's life and his problems with the town of Norwich), gets aired and/or distributed via independent film channels.

Jack "The King of Comics" Kirby's costume designs

2010-03-09T11:43:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Cambone on www.poe-news.com for pointing this out...

If you're reading a blog called "Culture High, Culture Low" (and let's be honest, you probably aren't), you hopefully share some of my interest in a wide range of artistic output. I don't really think there's a hard line dividing "high" and "low," and even if there is, I think it's really limiting to focus on one or the other. I'm a fan of ultra-cerebral modern and contemporary art as well as visceral pop culture like pop music, pro wrestling and, of course, comic books.

I'm also a big fan of artists working across the traditional lines of "high/low" culture and/or combining more than one form of art. A great example of this would be these costume designs for a 1969 production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, created by Jack Kirby, who is widely considered to be the most important and influential comic-book illustrator of the past 50 years at least.

The designs are classic Kirby, and are really only missing extreme foreshortening and some "Kirby Crackle" to complete the effect.

Caesar in military garb, looking a lot like one of Kirby's "New Gods"

Roman field soldier - dig that stylized camouflage pattern!

Various Roman citizenry, including a fantastic Soothsayer

A very, VERY Kirby-looking Calpurnia

Calpurnia and the Maid give you a sense of how the designs translated into actual costumes.

Like a lot of comic fans of my generation (I first started reading them in the late 70s and it wasn't til the mid-80s that I became a full-on Comic Geek), my appreciation of Kirby was slow to build. I respected his contributions to comic history, but didn't see the majesty in his artwork until I was in my 20s. At that point, though, I completely fell in love with his costume designs, his dynamic page compositions, and the over-the-top mannerisms of his characters.

It's not for nothing that the easiest way for any contemporary comic artist to make a comic look like it was published in the sixties is to ape Kirby. Heck, it's still common for Marvel and DC to create blatantly Kirby-styled costumes for new massively-powered characters from deep space, or from godly realms like Asgard or Olympus. Essentially, the Jack Kirby costume aesthetic is shorthand for "major player" in comics, sixteen years after his death.

Much more information on this project (including many more drawings, several photos and the play's program) and many other aspects of Kirby's incredible contributions to popular culture can be found at The Kirby Museum...

Fantastic diagram of Crayola color history

2010-03-02T09:51:00.003-05:00

There's a symposium that I either just missed or am about to miss (I just can't afford the ticket or time this semester) hosted by Edward R. Tufte, the author of the classic design book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I'm a big fan of the book, and once I've got a bit more free time (read: once I'm certified and have a teaching gig), I fully intend to get the follow-up books.

Here's an example of the sort of thing Tufte talks about:

This diagram of the history of available colors in Crayola crayons just sets my left brain a-hummin'!

It's particularly interesting to look at the increased range of "skintone" colors in the late 50s...and also worth noting that the color "flesh" was renamed to "peach" in 1962. Nowadays, you can get a pack of various pinks, beiges and browns that can be used as skintones, but thankfully none of them is called "flesh," as that would pretty blatantly tell kids that that one color was the "right" color for skin.

You tell me.

2010-03-01T20:04:00.002-05:00

RZA Crossing the Delaware (or "how to introduce irony to high-schoolers")

2010-02-23T11:22:00.007-05:00

Irony is an unavoidable subject in discussion of contemporary art, but at times it's hard to explain to high schoolers in terms that they understand. My students so far have tended to love Warhol, Basquiat and Murakami, but they often don't recognize the references to art history that those artists made in much of their work. As such, an important aspect of the artists and their work is overlooked. Art teachers often just don't have the time to give full art-historical context to individual images they show their students.

Warhol's Gold Marilyn comes off as a lot gutsier when students know a little about Byzantine icons.

This isn't to say that students must have a full Janson's-textbook-worth of art historical knowledge to be able to appreciate irony and recontextualization in contemporary art. Kehinde Wiley's portraits of African-American youth in heroic poses, subvert Western tradition of representation in a way that's clear enough to adolescents. A teenager doesn't necessarily need to know about Salon painting to know that it's atypical for African-American youth to be represented on a field of fluer de lis.

Still, though - it's been over a decade since mainstream hip hop became the glammy, fashion-conscious, ultraconsumerist pop culture that it is now.

This image of Biggie Smalls is so glammy! That's completely out of character for hip hop...

Oh, wait.

As someone whose goal is to teach art history and studio art to high schoolers and/or middle schoolers, I try to keep an eye out for images of contemporary art that straddle the "high and low" divide, that use imagery so well-known to adolescents that the irony of their appropriation would be clear to everyone without needing to go back and explain what artwork the contemporary artist was riffing off of.

I've recently found a great example, which was posted online about a month and a half ago:

It's safe to assume that, at the very least, students have seen the Emanuel Leutze painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) in a social studies textbook. They've probably seen it parodied in old Bugs Bunny cartoons. It's an ubiquitous piece of American culture.

And now it's been appropriated by the art collective When Art Imitates Life:

Yes, that IS the Wu-Tang Clan crossing the Delaware River, with ninja manning the oars.

(for a bigger version, click here. )

This image is ridiculous. And it's awesome. It would be instantly recognized as the parody/appropriation/recontextualization/self-aggrandizement that it is, and could be used as a really great starting point for a discussion of other ironic appropriation of older forms (like Warhol and Wiley), or a discussion about how heroes are presented, or even about who gets to be called a hero.

My only concern is whether adolescent students consider Wu-Tang to be at all relevant anymore. These kids today, with their hippin' and their hoppin', they don't understand the classics like "Protect Yo' Neck."

Don't underestimate elementary-school art students!

2010-02-16T20:18:00.003-05:00

(click the image to see it in a more legible size)

Behold: the patron saints of snarky pop-culture-critic bloggers

2010-02-16T20:11:00.001-05:00

...as well as an early-ish example of a pop culture product beating its detractors to the punch.

"Every text creates its reader" - Umberto Eco

2010-01-18T09:08:00.000-05:00

I haven't seen Avatar yet (movies just aren't worth paying a babysitter to take care of a toddler), but am marvelling at the inevitable "otherkin" reactions to the film. Some people online are claiming that they are (spiritually and metaphysically) Na'vi, the computer-animated furry amalgam of Native American and Southeast Asian stereotypes presented as the "noble savage" in the movie. There's even someone who's trying to create a "new Native American tribe" based on the Na'vi in Florida.

I've always been interested in personal statements from the insane and delusional, and over the last decade-and-change of access to the internet have found a lot of hilarious examples of group psychology, body dysmorphism and internet anonymity combining to create groups of people whose commonality is that they are all secretly something better than human - be it elves, dragons, mystical hermaphroditic foxes with butterfly wings, or now Na'vi.

What's greatest about watching this new group of "otherkin" emerge is that they're getting no love from the people who get together online to discuss how they're all elves or vampires or whathaveyou. Because, you see, Na'vi are fictional.

If this causes a huge internet meltdown with cries of 'persecution' and offensive attempts at identity politics which coopt the legitimate claims and identities of real-world minority groups, I will take back everything bad I've said about James Cameron since halfway through The Abyss.

DIY Publishing: Zines and Comix

2010-01-04T08:54:00.006-05:00

Here's a video that I made with Lisanne McTernan for Rebecca Bourgault's Diverse Classrooms in a Visual Culture class this past semester:

(WARNING: naughty language, naughty drawings, and beer-drinking appear, so maybe you don't want to view this at work if that's an issue there)

It was a lot of fun meeting and talking to all of the interviewees, and I'm pretty happy with the final product (which took way too long to edit, but which piqued my interest in doing more video work later). One of these days, once my schedule and finances allow it, I am going to get off my ass and attend the Comic Jam again with the goal of having a beer, making obscure comic-book references and drawing goofy jokes, rather than filming people doing the same.

Vic Chesnutt, 1964-2009

2010-01-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

R.I.P., Vic, and thanks so much for all the music. I'm sorry that it got so difficult for you.

Cranky little art-icle I wrote for a great pop-culture site:

2009-12-26T17:10:00.001-05:00

The Top 10 Emerging Artists of the Decade, on Heavy.com

Enjoy - and if you do, Digg it (if you know what that means), share the link, comment away, all that stuff.

I'm hoping to write more for Heavy in the near future. It's definitely worth checking out if you haven't seen the site before.

The Native Americans (First Nations, etc) can't get a fair shake

2009-12-11T09:17:00.002-05:00

One of the issues that we've talked about a lot in Rebecca's class over the last few weeks was representations of and by the natives in North America. I'm going to post images from children's books that casually (and seemingly without malicious intent) reiterate embarrassing and damaging stereotypes about Native Americans, but in the meantime, let's head down to South America to check out this appalling Brazilian TV clip from 1989, featuring the kinderpop star Xuxa. (who was pretty much the #1 cultural icon in Brazil in the 80s, aside from perhaps the soccer player Pele).

"Playing like Indians"?

It's amazingly painful to watch for many reasons, from her feathered headdress and maracas to the bopping blonde teenagers in marching-band uniforms, and ESPECIALLY the massively condescending inclusion (and simultaneous sidelining) of "authentic" Ya̧nomamö tribesmen, who look confused and offended by the entire spectacle.

Amazonian natives are some of the most threatened tribes in the New World, what with their being based in rainforest that is disappearing at a rapid clip (due not only to expansion by the hegemonic Brazilian culture but also, of course, due in large part to Western industrial agriculture). It sort of makes me wish that the tribesmen would act like the "meanest people on Earth" stereotype levied on them by anthropoligists such as Napoleon Chagnon - whoever planned and actuated this performance might well have deserved to be beaten to death with a log and cannibalized.

The new landing page on the HEMA website

2009-12-10T20:42:00.001-05:00

...is incredible.

It plays with the "general store" concept, playing up just how broad a range of (useful and quotidian) objects HEMA sells. It makes you pay attention to each object separately, but recognize them as part of a unified whole. And it teaches me that the word for "highlighting marker" in Dutch is "neonstift."

I can only imagine that the people in charge of the websites for Target and Ikea are scrambling right now to catch up.

One problem I have, though: the word they use for a portable stereo is ghettoblaster. But then, this is the country whose version of Santa Claus is escorted to children's houses by his slaves:

Needless to say, as terrible as our country is at racial politics, this sort of Santa, and even that sort of phrasing for the portable stereo ("boom box"?) after, say, Reagan's first term, just wouldn't fly.

Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan

2009-11-29T20:28:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, as part of an assignment for one of my classes, I visited a museum to which I'd never been before and built a curriculum unit around one of the shows there. I chose the Asia Society's newest show, Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, which was an excellent place to view artwork which questions the West's assumptions about the Asian Subcontinent, and more specifically about the devout Islam found in Pakistan.

My high school (grades 11-12) lesson plan, were I able to present it to students, would be a way to get them to ask themselves why it is that they make assumptions about individuals based on their assumptions about groups (i.e. what are the stereotypes they hold, and why do they hold them to individuals).

Essentially, the project would have four distinct lessons (each of which will be listed here in the present tense, for simplicity's sake):

ONE: Students view several stock images of stereotypical people ("gay-looking" guy; African-American in what could be gang colors; white biker, posh white woman) and discuss what they assume about the person - what is the easiest way to identify the person, how do they act, what are their values, how do they get along with others, etc. After icebreaking with several of these, students see a few images of Subcontinental and Central Asian Muslim men (who basically look like what we consider the Taliban to look like) and discuss those same questions, as well as the assumptions we have about the ostensibly monolithic culture to which the men belong. Is there a difference between making assumptions about people within the U.S. and making assumptions about people outside the U.S.?

TWO: Students visit the Asia Society's show and focus written attention on works by the following artists:

Imran Qureshi

Rashid Rana

(note: this image is made up of thousands of photos of the inside of a slaughterhouse)

The students pick one artist to write about and then fill out a worksheet with questions on two sides; on the first side, they are to answer the questions based on what they assume BEFORE reading any of the museum's explanatory text. On the second side, they are to answer AFTER they've read all of the explanatory text, and reflect on how they were correct and/or incorrect.

THREE: Students look at slides of works by Qureshi and Butt, who directly work with subverting our assumptions about Pakistani Muslims (Qureshi uses traditional Persian miniature painting to show devout Muslims engaged in nonthreatening activity; Butt depicts Taliban-lookalikes in dreamy, sort of homoerotic portraits surrounded by consumer goods and sci-fi-looking guns). The students then each pick a type of person who is considered "threatening" to our mainstream American culture, and then (through a combination of photocollage and/or painting) show that person engaged in an activity which is so mundane, yet realistic for them to do, that it 'humanizes' the figure and somewhat undoes the threat. As I said in the class in which I explained my project: "Even Nazis brush their teeth."

FOUR: Students consider the ways in which they've made and tested assumptions about other groups of people, and plan out a "portrait as they see me" - this is not a self-portrait, per se, but rather a portrait of themselves as the stereotype that they feel they are seen as by people who don't know them (and wow, that's a clunky sentence!). Students will consider why they're stereotyped - it's likely not just their skin color, but also their mode of dress, their body language, their speaking volume on the train, etc. What are they projecting intentionally and unintentionally? What's being assumed about them, and what's being read accurately about them? A teenager who feels that his skin color makes people scared of him might exaggerate that skin tone, depict himself as even more threatening. The stereotyped version of him- or herself is then to be engaged in an activity that they themselves do, to show that each student has a life which is not the stereotype that they are often conveniently fit into by people who don't know them personally. That same teenager might have a baby nephew who he dotes over, or be a gardener, or like to listen to Haydn's string quartets, etc etc etc.

I was very pleased to get to present this project in my class, and the feedback was very good. It was pointed out to me that this lesson could be modified to work with other art shows (really any show of artwork which uses identity politics as a theme could work) and other grade ranges (depending on the students, of course). I'm thinking that this will definitely be a project that I try to teach once I get a job somewhere and have a sense of the school and the students.

I'm really interested in getting students to recognize how they can intentionally represent themselves, through their artwork but also through their quotidian activities and their specific composure. I'm also interested in getting them to deconstruct their own assumptions about other groups. If I get the chance to teach some form of this project, I think it will be one which is remembered for a long time by the participating students, and I think that the artwork will be heartfelt, engaged and intellectually stimulating.

It might also be really angry. So much the better.

The show at the Asia Society itself is really good, by the way, and totally worth going to (I think it's free on Friday nights, so you can go like a true New Yorker).

Whiteness in the Art Classroom (and no, I'm not talking Bristol board)

2009-11-17T12:56:00.004-05:00

Recently in Rebecca's class, I read an article entitled "Imagining Ourselves into Transcultural Spaces: Decentering Whiteness in the Classroom" by Catherine Kroll (anthologized in Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom, Virginia Lea and Erma Jean Sims, eds., 2008). I've been thinking a lot about this article and others, and agree with its central premise that "whiteness" is often considered as the norm and, as such, minority cultures and views are treated as "Others" and are marginalized in the classroom, even when the student body is composed of individuals from minority cultures. If a student is only told about their specific cultural heritage as an example of Otherness, why would they feel connected to the class and its teachings?

To some people who aren't studying art education theory and practice, it may seem as if an art class isn't as important for defining cultural and subcultural identity as, say, a social studies class. To others, it may seem that the easy solution is to make sure that an art class has (tokenist, simplistic) projects relating to African mask designs, Cinco de Mayo, Asian textile design, etc.

Kroll's article, as well as others I've read recently (most notably Olivia Gude's "Postmodern Principles") proposes that rather than ignoring multi- and interculturalism in the art classroom, or using non-hegemonic cultural manifestations as examples of the (wise, earthy) Other at specifically-demarked times, we can introduce other cultures' output by opening up what we consider art to be. This is in keeping with the benefits that I see in studying "visual culture" in an art classroom; by opening up discussion to include popular culture as well as 'canonic' high art, we also open the door for discussion of 'traditional' arts, 'underground' art and culture, art from resistance movements, etc.

Gude proposes that the standard "7+7" curriculum for art in middle and especially high school, which focuses on the 7 generally-accepted formal elements (line, shape, value, texture, form, color and space) and 7 design principles (balance, rhythm, gradation, emphasis, harmony, unity, opposition - these are less generally-accepted than the formal elements) are specific to the Western culture. They're presented as universal and foundational, however, and as such they are a perfect example of 'normative Whiteness" in the classroom.

Gude proposes a set of "postmodern principles" (appropriation, juxtaposition, recontextualization, layering, interaction of text and image, gazing, and representin') which deal with the conceptual trends in contemporary art, and allow for students to more directly deal with expressive content in their own work. She points out that most secondary art education curricula focus on what Clement Greenberg (1971) called "cold modernism" (Manet, Seurat, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso) - using these artists as springboards into discussion of the "7+7" before asking students to apply those principles to produce work which, often, is strongly guided by the images they've been shown from those "major" artists. By contrast, "hot modernism" artists (Duchamp and the Dadaists, most notably) are most commonly cited as influences among contemporary artists, especially those whose work is loaded with specific meaning and identity politics.

Those "hot modernists" may have utilized their knowledge of the "7+7" in their work, but there was more to their work than an engagement of formalism. There was content first and foremost, and that seems to be the best way to address art with teenagers in a way that makes them genuinely motivated by, and attached to, their artwork.

This semester, I've been student-teaching with a cooperating teacher whose curriculum, especially for the 9th and 10th grade 3-D class, is based strongly in the "7+7" model. The teacher's planning is solid enough that the assignments work well with the classes. I'm happy to get to teach with him, but this semester is starting to make me think of how I will teach classes when I'm in control of the curriculum - and I think that I'm starting to rethink the "7+7" model, even though I've used it for years in my pre-college classes for Pratt and SVA. At SVA over the summers of 2008 and 2009, I co-taught with a conceptual artist (Eric Doeringer) and have so far presented the students with discussions of formal elements as a way to show them slides of artwork which I feel would interest them. The projects they worked on, however, were based in concepts closer to Gude than to Arnheim. If I'm able to teach again this coming summer, I think it's time for me to move further away from straight formalism, and will spend some prep time this spring making presentations and assignments more based in conceptual themes - identity, juxtaposition, emotional content - and Gude's proposed principles.

It's been a draining, work-intensive semester, but I'm very happy to have been in the school I'm in, working with the teacher with whom I'm working, while reading the articles I'm reading. It's affected the ways I process what I see in the classroom, what I read for my graduate classes, and how I am starting to reframe my concept of what I can offer students through art education, and how. The classes I'm taking, and my student-teaching experience, have easily saved me a year of running on automatic, teaching students with a 'cold modernism' curriculum and using assignments of the sort that I had designed before entering this program.

So: Robert Wilson's QUARTETT

2009-11-17T11:44:00.006-05:00

The show was as cold as this image implies...

Last week in Rebecca Bourgault's class, we took a field trip to the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see a revival of Robert Wilson's 1987 play (play? musical? theatre piece?) Quartett. I'm sure that we're going to talk about it in class tonight, and I won't be at all surprised if a lot of my classmates really hated it, for different reasons. I heard one classmate saying a few days later "It was pretty clear that I'm not the intended audience for that show...when you looked at the audience, it was all old white people."

Maybe I'm just prepping myself for my inevitable old-white-guyness, but I really enjoyed it, even as I recognized that its story and aesthetic were, well, oppressive to the audience. The play, written by Heiner Müller, is based on the French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) and tells the story of two sexual partners in crime (Merteuil, played by Isabelle Huppart, and Valmont, played by Ariel Garcia Valdès) who use sex and seduction for destructive purposes, exacting revenge on each other and, basically, all of humanity and decency. Wives and virginal nuns are seduced, used and abandoned. Merteuil and Valmont are officially the only characters - they rant and rave and paraphrase everyone else's words, rendering their sexual conquests even more powerless.

Fine acting, attractive dancers, lots of talk about sex, absolutely no sexiness.

If you missed the show and aren't familiar with Wilson's aesthetic, imagine watching dancers made of translucent plastic, writhing in slow motion in front of a Robert Morris sculpture while someone bathed in red light yells in pitchshifted French about wanting to sodomize a nun. This makes for a stunning effect, and I mean that in an objective, not a qualitative way - the show stuns. It hurts. It's so lurid and yet its delivery is so cold. It's overwhelmingly sexual and yet it is not at all erotic.

As such, it's definitely an acquired taste. I happen to have acquired the taste in the mid-90s, when I saw Wilson's collaboration with Tom Waits, the musical The Black Rider. My wife is an absolute nut for Wilson, and I've found myself attending nearly everything that he puts on at BAM (including the execrable POEtry, which was a few interesting sets and costumes forced into an embarrassingly childish and bad musical by Lou "Wrong Decade" Reed).

Here's a quick example from Quartett:

Perhaps this doesn't contribute to our class's attempt to move outside of Western art discourse...

Most of the audience seemed to really enjoy the oppression, but that didn't strike me as any different from the people at the Throbbing Gristle show I attended in April, or any other show of art or music (God knows I've seen hundreds) which uses confrontational aesthetics to draw a line in the sand between those who are "down with it" and those who aren't.

You'll find yourself intensely disliking both of these people.

Teaching this show, or others by Wilson and/or Müller (or, for that matter, Berthold Brecht) would be difficult in most high-school art classes, not only because of its content but also because of its length and the logistics of organizing an evening field trip to a theater. However, I think it would be fair to use video clips or still photos from his productions as a way to show how formalism (and modernism and even minimalism) can be applied to modes other than gallery art. The aesthetic may be shocking to a sixteen-year-old who's starting to learn about painting, but it could certainly be used as a way to talk about formal concepts like localized color, scale, and dynamism, as well as how to use those concepts to create specific moods and convey the students' intended meanings.

Who knows? Maybe a minority teenager from Brooklyn or the Bronx would feel empowered to see images from a theatrical piece that is this severe, this angry. If an old white guy can find an audience for his weird, angry art, why can't everyone?

My favorite example of localized visual culture: MASKED LUCHADORES!

2009-11-08T16:01:00.003-05:00

Yes, I know, this is the sort of article that would have been absolutely groundbreaking fifteen years ago, but it's only in 2009 that I finally set up a blog (and it took a class assignment for me to do that). Bear with me as I give a very basic introduction to a very broad topic: the culture of masked wrestlers (luchadores) in Mexico.

(and yes, there will be a tie-in at the end to the concept of teaching art in a non-hegemonic way)

Maybe I'm just an easy mark, but acrobatic displays are much more interesting to me when they're in the context of masked superheroes pretending to beat each other up.

The first masked wrestler to perform in Mexico, El Enmascarado ("The Masked Man"), appeared in 1934 in Mexico City. Professional wrestling ("lucha libre") had only been introduced to Mexico a year or two earlier, and up until the appearance of El Enmascarado, most of the wrestlers performing there were Americans. Something about the mask clicked with the audience, and more and more masked Mexican wrestlers appeared on each wrestling event's 'card.' The masks were simple at first, but even at the beginning featured embellishments which were recognizably Aztec in their aesthetic, and which as such spoke to the majesty of Mexico's past. There is strong national and racial identity to be found in 20th-Century luchador design - costumes use motifs from jaguars, eagles, Mexican flag colors, Aztec and Mayan hieroglyphs, etc.

El Santo and Blue Demon, from one of Santo's many many action movies.

The first real star of lucha libre was almost indisputably El Santo - "The Saint" - who began wrestling under his trademark silver mask in 1942 (he'd been wrestling under other gimmicks and names since the mid-30s). Over the course of a forty-year (!) run, El Santo remained a technico (a valiant good guy - the equivalent in the English-speaking wrestling world would be a "babyface" or "face"), won the vast majority of his matches, and became a genuine folk hero, appearing in almost fifty movies, a comic book which ran for 30 years, and, recently, a posthumous TV show which appears on the Latin American version of the Cartoon Network. Typically, a masked luchador wears his mask in the ring throughout the life of the character - it's most common that a character is retired, that the wrestler moves on to another identity, once he's been unmasked (this happens most often in Mexico as a stipulation to a special match). Throughout his career, El Santo took this to the extreme; for four decades, he remained in character, and in mask, whenever he was in public.

El Hijo del Santo demonstrates the typical appearance of a luchador when he's in character but not in the ring. His real-life father, the original Santo, was buried in his mask when he died.

Santo's son, El Hijo del Santo, launched his own career under the same mask when Santo retired in 1982. He's an interesting example of how things have changed - an early 'heel turn' (switching sides to become a rudo) so enraged the audience in Tijuana that a genuine riot broke out in the arena and spilled out onto the streets (by now, heel turns are much more commonplace in North and South America). Not only is he a well-established luchador whose lineage is given the utmost respect - he's also an outspoken ecological activist, working with Wildcoast to protest ocean pollution and protect sea turtles.

El Hijo del Santo, Luchador, Ocean Protection Activist from 89.3 KPCC on Vimeo.

El Hijo del Santo isn't the only lucha activist - there's also Superbarrio Gómez, who organizes labor rallies and protests in Mexico City. He proclaims himself a "real-life superhero" -- and really, isn't that what every babyface/technico is to his fans?

Rudo tag team El Chivos play to the crowd

Up until recently, the characters themselves were pretty broad in lucha libre - a wrestler was either a valiant technico or a dastardly rudo - though that's changed a bit in the past fifteen years due, in part, to a syncretism between the different concepts of "face/heel" in American, Mexican and Japanese wrestling. In the 90s, American wrestling in particular almost abandoned the traditional faces and heels, pushing 'in-between' characters like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, whose in-character mannerisms and attitude - from his way of speech to his moves to his willingness to cheat - would have made him a despised heel only a few years earlier. Mexican lucha libre has reflected this change mainly in its rudos, who are now a bit 'cooler' than they used to be. The crowd still boos them, but you now see teenagers in the audience wearing the rudos' t-shirts and masks.

Rey Mysterio was born in San Diego, but obviously represents himself as part of Mexican culture (note his tattoos and the cross on his mask, which tends to feature an Aztec sunwheel design on the back.)

There's also a lot more awareness of lucha libre in the U.S., mainly due to a few wrestling promoters in the 1990s who recognized that there would be commercial appeal to including highly acrobatic guys who dress like superheroes. Most notably nowadays, there's Rey Mysterio (formerly "Rey Mysterio, Jr." in Mexico and the American indie wrestling companies, until the WWE signed him and decided that the "Jr." appellation would confuse its audience who didn't know the "Sr."). Unfortunately, WWE seems to think that one luchador is enough at any given time, or perhaps that another masked high-flyer would dilute the marketability of their star.

"All fine and well," you may ask, "but how would you use this in a classroom as a way to have students create artwork which doesn't take white culture for granted as the default?"

If you do ask that, you're already a pretty tough audience. Here goes:

It strikes me that lucha masks would be perfect for a middle school (and maybe Grade 5) art class. I'd start by showing the students some Precolumbian Mesoamerican artwork (Aztec, Maya, Olmec, etc), especially the highly-stylized heiroglyphics. Then I'd show them examples of lucha masks which intentionally use the same type of shapes and linework, and ask if any of the class knew what they were. We'd discuss the masks, and the concept and depth of mask culture in Mexico, and then the students would design their own mask for a character that would be based on them - their interests, their culture, their heritage, their identity. If the students are old enough (i.e. middle school rather than third or fourth grade), I would have each student research the traditional artwork from the culture that they consider to be their 'ancestral home' - be it Mexico, China, or Poland, there are specific aesthetics and motifs to use - and then adapt those images and motifs to be used in their mask.

Sangre Azteca keeps it real.

This would directly tie in to the way that lucha masks were first designed. Besides teaching students a little bit about costume and character design as a way to represent aspects of a character through visual means, this would both help the students understand the way in which a masked wrestler could be representin' cultural identity as a Mexican AND help them understand the ways in which their own cultural identity can be used as an opportunity for them to represent as well. Every student in a diverse classroom could produce a mask design based on their interests and their heritage.

I assume that the masks would have to be either drawn or made out of colored/painted paper - we wouldn't be likely to get to assemble them out of sewn fabric, as the patterning would be prohibitive even for me to do on my own, let alone with a few dozen students. Perhaps the students could collage or paint the masks directly onto photos of themselves?

Obviously, this sort of project would depend on the school culture, the boy/girl ratio (and type of girls) and probably the ethnic makeup of the class - I wouldn't presume to teach a class composed only (or mainly) of Mexican kids about lucha libre without looking like a clueless asshole. However, I think that this would be a good way to get students to realize that everyone comes from somewhere, and everyone's heritage is valid, while also connecting ancient and traditional art to contemporary visual culture.

The characters could maybe even be used later as protagonists in a comic-book assignment that I've been thinking about. I do love having one unit lead into the next...

They're not as comfy to wear as you might expect - like having an oven mitt strapped to your face.

Emmanuel P. Gill's "outsider art" comics

2009-11-08T15:52:00.001-05:00

All images by Emmanuel P. Gill, published by E-Lectric Comics, used with respect to the author

A few years ago a friend of mine (the cartoonist K.Thor Jensen) introduced me to one of the most amazingly out-there cartoonists whose work I've ever read: Emmanuel P. Gill. Gill's comics are obviously a labor of love - he writes, draws, letters, and even Xeroxes them himself, and apparently makes his own deliveries to the comic book shop, Jim Hanley's Universe, that sells his work on consignment (serious respect due to Hanley's for being so supportive of self-publishing cartoonists - most of the other comic shops in NYC give lip service at best to independent artists).

The comic that started it all a few years ago: WESTONE PAGE #1

Gill's comics are centered around his main book (and character), Westone Page, but there are about twenty-five characters to keep track of, ranging from heroes like Page, Adonis McIntire, Post and Post Junior, and Ushadow -- to say nothing of Sniffer the PowerMammal, a superpowered dog -- to villains with names like Telephone, Airbrush, Milkshake and Coat. The names, in general, seem almost stream-of-consciousness -- as if Gill came up with them arbitrarily by looking around for objects to use as names -- and at times it's difficult to remember that Crest and Donny Jones are in their power-human guises when they go by "Westone Page" and "Adonis McIntire," as those pseudonyms sound sort of like 'real names.'

The behavioral-engineering origin of the "Aura of Power"

The writing is fast-paced, very wordy, and, in general, bizarre. The stories mainly take place in a futuristic version of New York City and all but ignore anyone who isn't either a "Power Human" ("superhero" is a joint trademark of Marvel Comics and DC Comics) or in a Power Human's immediate biological family. The characters tend to give heavy exposition and call themselves and each other by full name, even in the middle of battles, which leads to dialogue like "JUST CALM DOWN PRICILLA ANN JONES...1) TELEPHONE IS PLANNING A FLIGHT WITH J.F.K. AIRPORT...2) REMIND PEOPLE WE'RE NOT RELATED HENCE YOUR SIR NAME." and my personal favorite, shown below:

To be fair, the superhuman characters in Chris Claremont's classic 1980s run on Uncanny X-Men often referred to each other by real names rather than 'superhero' names, and Claremont spent the first ten pages of each 22-page book giving exposition, both in dialogue and in narrative captions. Gill's version of this type of writing may be a bit more blunt than Claremont's, but he's working within a well-established and accepted format of comic writing.

Notably, every character who mentions his or her father has a problem with his or her father. Westone's father is an evil, scheming Power Human (for the first few issues, Westone is convinced that his father has murdered his mother) with a team of powered henchmen and a headquarters in Chicago called the "Empire Daddy Building."

There's also a glorious amount of gratuitous sexual content - mostly it's just making out, and no nudity is ever shown, but there's one particularly mindblowing panel that finds a way to show a two men and a woman having sex without any of their clothing removed (and with nothing 'naughty' showing).

By the way, that shiny/glowing lady with her hand down Westone's pants? She got her superpowers because her pantyhose was ripped when she fell into a vat of counterfeit-money dye after she QUITE her job.

This page introduces the new heroes "Open and Closed" and a fascinating subplot.

Emmanuel Gill can be looked at as an 'outsider artist' in that he is so clearly on the fringes of the comics world, but at the same time I wonder if he is as 'outside' as we may immediately assume. As bizarre as his comics are, they're working within an established genre and with the ultimate goal of being published and read by an audience, and I'm sure that he'd love for that audience to be as large as the fanbase for Marvel and DC Comics. Archtypal outsider artists such as Henry Darger and Francis Dec, from everything I can tell, worked without intentional recognition of an audience, or in cases like Dec, wanted an audience but had no interest in making "art." Comic books are different - they really only really function as comic books when they're published (even if by Xerox) and read by an audience. As such, Emmanuel Gill's body of work strikes me as "outsider" the same way that Genesis P-Orridge's does - it's bizarre and self-driven, but wants to be taken seriously in the long-running history of superhero comics.

Westone Page (on the motorcycle) and the rest of Teamwork For Power Humans

I don't mean it to sound like I'm making fun of Gill and his artistic output - I'm a fan, and I'm really impressed with his drive to produce and distribute his work to the best of his ability. He's clearly a hard worker (each issue features a colored-with-markers front cover and character bios, annotated and dated, on the back), his background influences obviously include many of the same superhero comics I loved most when I was growing up, and, well, I've been sitting on my thumbs planning a comic for years.

Emmanuel P. Gill's taken the plunge and DONE it, and for that, I salute him. I just hope that Hanley's has more issues available soon!

(coming up on this blog as soon as I can get copies of the reprints: Fletcher Hanks, the granddaddy of all outsider comic artists)

On violence in video games

2009-11-01T21:44:00.004-05:00

For last week's Diverse Classrooms in a Visual Culture class, Rebecca asked students to bring in some facet of pop culture that could be discussed in terms of some of the issues that we've been discussing over the semester: stereotyping, representation, identity, etc. I brought a few Tintin books and a collection of Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics, as examples of colonialist attitudes towards non-Europeans so taken for granted as to be used in children's comic books (this is more the case in Herge's Tintin than in Barks' work).

It was good to get to expose some classmates to some of the best comics in history, I must say. But Rebecca was clearly more excited about the fact that a few students took her up on her challenge and brought a PS3 into class, so as to demonstrate video games.

Far and away, the biggest event of the night was one classmate playing through the first fifteen minutes or so of a level from Call of Duty: World at War, a WWII-era first person shooter that basically had every woman (and several men) in the room lamenting the ills of modern society. The student pointed out that Nazis are pretty much the safest possible "enemy" to have in a game, in that only the absolute dregs of society would have a problem with their deaths being encouraged and celebrated. Here's footage from the level - imagine this projected on a wall, HUGE, in a dark room, with lots of people loudly bitching about how nauseated they were.

The room was pretty much split between "HOW CAN YOU PLAY SUCH A VILE THING" and "WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL PEOPLE WATCH MOVIES ABOUT WORLD WAR II," with very little recognition of shades of grey.

I guess I inhabit that shade of grey. This game was physically hard for me to watch, and I couldn't imagine wanting to play it on my own, but I'm currently (slooooowly) working my way through the next game that was discussed: Grand Theft Auto IV.

(and really, there are a hundred billion comparable clips on Youtube, some of them set to the Benny Hill theme - I only chose this one because it showed up on a search that involved the word "carnage")

Why is it that I've got a weak stomach for a game in which the enemies are actual Nazis, based on historical military campaigns, while I find it to be a pleasant timekiller to play a videogame in which I can fire bazooka missiles into the Holland Tunnel and drop grenades behind me as I run away?

Why is it that I'm kind of grossed out by the piles of bodies in Call of Duty but have enjoyed shooting zombies in Resident Evil 4, and am currently fairly impressed by the new 'blood' programming in the newest WWE wrestling game?

(the blood from one guy's forehead gets on the other guy's fists! That's MUCH more moral than shooting Nazis, right?)

I think the issue is that Call of Duty presents itself as a simulation, and in fact the verisimilitude is pretty astonishing/repulsive. By contrast, GTA4 is cartoonish, almost distant, and that allows for a player to casually dip in and out of ridiculously over-the-top destruction (anybody who trots out the old canard about how you can kill a hooker to get your money back hasn't played the game for very long -- there are many more interesting, even more ethically bleak things to do in the game. Often while whipping through town on a dirtbike, firing an Uzi randomly).

The wrestling game's distance from actual, real-feeling violence is no accident: no matter how 'realistic' the blood effects and physics on the figures is, a wrestling game allows the player to re-create a form of theater in which the end results are predetermined. Roland Barthes wrote in "The World of Wrestling" (1957) that "Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque." He went on to explain that wrestling was not violence so much as it was a ritualized representation of "justice" (of the "that bastard is gonna get HIS this weekend on pay-per-view" variety).

I've been a fan of pro wrestling for a long time, though lately I pretty much only watch decades-old matches or minor-league live shows. It's a strange thing to admit that I have a hard time watching boxing but really like watching guys jump around in silly costumes hitting each other with folding chairs. I couldn't watch it if it actually were 'real,' as it would not only be less dramatic, it would be less (low-)artistic, just a couple of guys getting beaten up.

So perhaps my issue with Call of Duty is that, no matter how artfully designed it is, how dramatic it is, it feels like there's no opportunity for escapism?

Am I the only person who sees this?

2009-10-18T19:31:00.001-04:00

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the obliteration of Self

2009-10-17T20:20:00.012-04:00

Both aspects of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge amalgamated as a Vitruvian "Pandrogyne"

I feel bad that I didn't get to see (or write a blog entry about) Invisible Export's show of artwork by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, entitled "30 Years of Being Cut Up," until the exhibition was literally in its final weekend. The body of work displayed on the walls was interesting not only on its own (the collages range in intent from Fluxus-inspired antagonism to magic spellcasting) but also as a facet of one of the most interesting, if at times perplexing, examples of defining and owning one's own identity.

Beauty is in the Eye, 2006.

Red Well, 1999.

Unless noted, artwork images are from the Invisible Exports show linked at the top of this article.

More are here (very much Not Safe For Work).

In talking about P-Orridge, correct use of gender-specific pronouns will get very complicated. Please bear with me -- I've tried to use the artist(s)' terminology and delineations wherever possible.

For those readers who aren't familiar with Genesis P-Orridge in the many phases of his (and now he/r) career, here's a really brief synopsis: Born as Neil Megson in 1950; formed the performance-art collective COUM Transmissions around 1969; turned COUM into the pioneering electronic-noise/industrial music act Throbbing Gristle in 1975, recording and touring with TG until the bands' dissolution in 1981; that same year, formed another music group, Psychic TV, releasing music under that band name through to the present day; introduced the subcultural "modern primitive" trends of body modification and neo-paganism to the 'alternative' audience through the 80s and 90s; as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and other musical acts, has released over 200 albums, including a Guinness-record-setting 70 in one calendar year (as Psychic TV).

But here's where it gets really interesting:

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (left) and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (right). Image from New York Magazine's great recent interview

In 2003, P-Orridge moved to Brooklyn with his second wife, Lady Jaye, née Jacqueline Breyer, and began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge". The two began this project by getting matching breast implants, then approximately $200,000 worth of plastic surgery to resemble each other. They dressed identically, copied each other's mannerisms, and both replaced the pronoun "I" with "we," "he" or "she" with "s/he," "his" or "her" with "h/er." I'm going to use these pronouns from here on, both for simplicity's sake and out of respect.

Two Into One We Go, 2003 - moving towards a single being composed of two identical individuals.

They became individual facets of a single, idealized being. They abandoned the concept of Self.

Lady Jaye died in 2007, and since then, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (a construct originally composed of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer) has existed in the body of one person. S/he ("they"?) declares in interviews and on the web that Lady Jaye still exists as a living part of the pandrogenous amalgam "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge." The surgeries and hormone therapies continue, and the past few years have been busy for Gen - Throbbing Gristle have reformed and toured, MoMA has scheduled a lecture in March, 2010, and most recently, thirty years' worth of collages have been exhibited in a well-received gallery show in the Lower East Side.

Untitled (Mail art to Robert Delford Brown), 1975. Gender fluidity is hardly new to he/r.

In many ways, the concept of Self that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is now proselytizing can be seen as an extension of the decontextualization and reframing inherent in photo collage. I'm not saying it's a 'logical' extension, but I see how spending most of one's life attempting to dismantle widely-accepted concepts - music, most notably, until now - could make one feel that the boundaries that separate people are tenuous and removable, especially when those people are in love.

A collaborative art project from an ethnically/culturally diverse group

2009-10-13T15:26:00.003-04:00

...of toddlers.

I like to think that my son is responsible for the sweeping gestures in the center third.

This is a detail shot of a long fingerpaint-on-craft-paper panel, painted by the feet of the "Hummingbirds" (1-2 years) group at the daycare center at which my son spends five days a week.

I know that this is hardly "high art," but it's the piece of visual...um, stimulus? that I've been most struck by over the past few weeks, no doubt in part because of its associations -- my child is painting!! -- but also because of its beautiful colors and 'strokes.' And considering that I'm more than willing to get visual stimulation from rust patterns and peeling paint in the subways, I think it's fair for me to post this. I'd love to get a good-quality image of the whole painting.

At some point, it may be worth posting a collection of the best peeling-paint-and/or-rust patterns that I've come across (I have hundreds of photos). Not much to talk about semiotically but, like this painting by toddlers, some of them are truly fascinating and beautiful to me. Finding beauty where I can find it has helped me stay sane living in an at-times-standoffish New York City.

Artistic cross-culturalism: hard to pull off (who'da thunk it?)

2009-10-13T11:42:00.006-04:00

In our class last week, Rebecca introduced us to a few artists via the Art:21 series. The one who most struck me was Kerry James Marshall.

Kerry James Marshall's "Watts 1963," 1995

Marshall's work deals directly with his identity as an African American, while also directly engaging his position as a figurative 'narrative images on canvas' painter, working in a tradition that is directly linked to European painters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and El Greco (along with African American artists such as Charles White and American folk artists of many ethnicities).

At the end of the 20-minute video on Marshall and his work, our class briefly discussed Marshall's use of imagery and compositions from European culture, and Rebecca asked the class why we thought it was that it's so much more common for minority artists to work within the hegemony's forms of art, rather than the other way around - Europeans looking for, and acknowledging, influence from non-Western/non-hegemonic cultures. Jackson Pollock (whose exposure to Navajo sand painting early in his life likely affected his signature period of 1947-1950 or so) and Pablo Picasso (whose break from the 19th Century makes a lot more sense if you've seen African and Oceanic masks) were brought up as rare exceptions to the rule that cultural influence trickles downward more often than upward.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the typical distinction that Western culture makes between "art" and "non-art" (which I address a bit in the first substantive post to this blog). Artists tend to want their work to be tied into that great big millenia-long conversation that traces a long, convoluted line between the cave paintings in Altamira and whatever's happening in Chelsea galleries this month. As such, it behooves them to explicitly draw from high art so as to say "My art belongs in this history."

Warhol put a Byzantine-style gold background on a modern-day icon.

This graffiti, at 5 Pointz in Queens, refers to Rembrandt to say "I'm a High Art painter, too."

By comparison, explicitly referring to folk art, popular culture and/or 'non-art' in one's work may make it harder to be taken seriously by the art establishment. Sure, the gallery scene may love you, and you may have a great couple of years of sales, but don't bet your paychecks on getting into the Art History canon.

Takeshi Murakami's pop-culture appropriations are probably not going to be in the equivalent of a Janson textbook in 100 years.

Another issue that I see deals with culture outside of the art world. When someone related to the hegemony ("The Man") appropriates aspects of a non-hegemonic culture (even Picasso), there's often a feeling of, if not paternalism, at least noblesse oblige - like a representative from High Culture is deigning to give a nod to Low Culture's masses. It's like seeing a white undergrad in a dashiki and cowry shells in his hair, whose knowledge of colonial-and-post-colonial African history comes mainly from listening to Fela Kuti records while stoned.

Maybe I'm just being grumpy, but I find Marshall's connection to The School of Athens to be much more interesting, and much gutsier as a statement of identity, than a contemporary painter in London attempting to draw a connection between his work and, say, Ellis Ruley.

Or, even worse, there's the condescending version of "acknowledging another culture," like this statue by Erastus Dow Palmer, Indian Girl, or the Dawn of Christianity, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

This is colonialist condescension at its finest: a statue of a topless, ostensibly "Indian" woman, gazing thoughtfully and lovingly at the cross in her right hand, while getting ready to drop the feathers (representing her primitive, pagan religion, of course) in her left hand. According to the Met's description, the allegorical sculpture symbolizes ""the Dawn of Christianity Upon the Aborigines … [and would] symbolize the first impression of civilization upon the native of this country."

Holy crap, wow!

And for what it's worth, I'm not so sure that Paul Simon's Graceland is free of condescension, either.

Myrtle-Broadway stained glass: a nice statement of local identity

2009-10-12T12:36:00.006-04:00

Here are some photos I took recently of the stained glass panels on the above-ground subway platform at Myrtle/Broadway (J, M, Z) in Brooklyn. They represent the rich and broad contributions of African Americans and Latin Americans to American musical culture.

Individual panels pay tribute to jazz...

...vocalists...

...drummers...

...keyboardists...

...more drummers...

...with recognition of contributions from the Islands...

...and the South's position as the birthplace of the blues...

...but none of the panels make mention of hip hop.

"Daddy, I'm a bit confused."

In all seriousness, the lack of acknowledgment of hip hop makes me assume that the artist and/or the MTA folks who commissioned the panels don't see it as worth mentioning in a monument to African American contributions to popular music. Which is odd, considering how quickly it's all but taken over the mainstream of pop music, here and abroad. I wonder if that has to do with the general outsider's belief that all hip hop is about violence, drug-dealing and misogyny, or if it's the fairly common and well-documented disdain that the jazz community holds for hip hop (not only for what it says but also for the fact that it uses samples rather than live instrumentation, and sonic assemblage rather than traditional composition).

This is a shame, as the panels are a really important esteem-booster in an otherwise dank subway station (and neighborhood), but leaving out the past 30 years of musical innovation keeps these from being as broad a statement of identity and pride as they could be.

As an educator (-in-training), I try to remember that whatever my students' ethnicity or race, they're a member of many cultures and subcultures - and so I feel that giving a nod not only to the neighborhood's race, but also to the youth culture, would make this even more relevant to more people.

Subtle, guys.

2009-10-12T11:15:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, I went into a Chase ATM on Myrtle Avenue on the Bushwick/Ridgewood border and saw about two dozen flyers for "ANACONDA Underwear."

Blatant in so many ways. Let's give a quick list:

Sexual:

The oiled, well-muscled man has a sexy woman hanging off of him. She's making eye contact with the camera (acting as the interlocutor acted in Renaissance paintings), as if she's flirting with the viewer rather than the muscleman.
The "ANACONDA" brandname and logo, to say nothing of the slogan "NOT FOR THE AVERAGE MAN," make it pretty clear that this underwear is being pitched as "only for real men" (more specifically, men with larger-than-average penises).

Cultural:

Both models appear to be of minority ethnicities (a label so broad as to be meaningless, I know) and look like they're on the 'young, cool and sexy' end of the spectrum of people that you'd see on the street in Bushwick or parts of the Bronx. She doesn't have a generic 'model' face (her facial features aren't leaning towards Caucasian, as is the case with a lot of non-Caucasian models). He's got two or three distinct and different tattoos visible: over his pectoral muscles, a handlettered slogan (LIVE NOW, DIE LATER") and the outline of fire; around his neck and down his chest, a set of Rosary beads and cross. This implies a 'tough but pious' persona and makes explicit reference to a Catholic background that's typical of Latino/as in America.
Back to that "NOT FOR THE AVERAGE MAN" slogan: this could also be read as a statement that the target audience for Anaconda Underwear (Latinos and African-Americans, from the website's photos) has bigger penises than the target audience for other underwear (whites). This alludes to the longstanding stereotype of more "animal" sexuality (and less intellectualism) which was ascribed by whites to minorities long ago, and which has in some ways been used against the hegemony which came up with the stereotype in the first place (once most people decided that there wasn't anything wrong with being sexual).

Graphic:

Black, red and yellow is pretty much the easiest, most basic, most high-impact color scheme to use in an advertisement or design. Red and black is often associated with fascism, and yellow and black is an aposematic color scheme in nature - think of honeybees, snakes, poison-arrow frogs. Perhaps the waistband, peeking up through a pair of loose jeans, would serve as a 'warning' that what's in the jeans is more than some women can handle?

More info about ANACONDA Underwear (marketing images, photos from the launch party, and ordering information) here.

On the other side of the flyer was this image:

Another ad which uses a pretty, sexualized Latina to sell a product that she wouldn't (necessarily) use: "cigar wraps" (which are used to roll marijuana much more often than tobacco). I'll give the copywriter the benefit of the doubt and assume that no connection was intended between the bikini-clad woman and the phrase "PASS IT AROUND."

The blog for this product is pretty remarkable, with such posts as "The slowest burning cigar is the wrap king cigar wrap. Its the best cigar used to roll a blunt. It burns the slowest compared to other cigars. Slowest burning. " and "If John and Kate plus 8 goes on a date and smokes 3 wrap king cigar wraps that they bought in a local store. With 3 packs of wrap king 3 everybody rolls one"

Reasons I Still Love NYC #290: The Sukkah Mobile

2009-10-10T19:36:00.002-04:00

Or is that a "mobile sukkah"? I saw this on the Thursday of Sukkot in Fulton Mall (which, if aren't familiar with it, is a huge, delapidated shopping district in downtown Brooklyn that is mainly catered to African-American shoppers). Hebrew-language disco was blaring out of the SUV which towed the sukkah.

It's worth noting that this particular sukkah is wrapped in an image of the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who some Chabad Lubavicher Hasidim believe to be Moschiach, aka "The Messiah" (and as such not really dead). These followers of Schneerson are a subset of Hasidic Judaism, itself a subset of Orthodox Judaism in America. As such, it makes a strong statement of identity -- of faith, of culture -- to drive through town towing his image behind your car. There's a building in my neighborhood, on the border between mainly-African-and-Puerto-Rican Bushwick (Brooklyn) and mainly-Eastern-European-Catholic Ridgewood (Queens), that has a photo of Schneerson on a bumper sticker on its door, with the words MOSCHIACH IS COMING in English. There's also a sign on the door advertising YOUR 1-STOP FOR ALL THINGS JEWISH. The Chabad Lubavichers are mostly based in Crown Heights, miles away. I've wonder if it's located so far from the Hasidic neighborhoods in Williamsburg (on the same subway line) because it needs to be distanced from the more prevalent Hasidic community.

On that same note, I wonder if the Sukkah Mobile drives through the Hasidic neighborhoods in Williamsburg (and now Bedford-Stuyvesant)? It might be more tense to do that than to drive through Fulton Mall, because Hasidim who aren't Chabad, who don't agree that Rebbe Schneerson was the Moschiach/Messiah, will know a lot more about, and quite possibly be more offended by, the yellow flags that flew on the back of the sukkah:

Willoughby Windows: There goes the neighborhood, here comes the art

2009-10-09T20:10:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, I walked out of my cooperating school and towards Flatbush Avenue Extension, and found this interesting group exhibition installed on a to-be-demolished abandoned block of storefronts on Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn (in the Metrotech Center). The project was set up by the Metrotech BID and a group calling itself AdHoc Art - it includes works by:

Cannonball Press, Chris Stain, Cycle, Dennis McNett, Ellis G, Gaia, Greg Lamarche, John Ahearn, Josh MacPhee, Lady Pink, Logan Hicks, Michael De Feo, Morning Breath, and Tom Beale.

While it's sort of overwhelming and disturbing to see that yet another block of downtown Brooklyn is being torn down (for condos?), it's good that someone realized that, at the very least, putting some artwork in the windows would be less depressing than just leaving the storefronts empty (as with elsewhere in the nearby Fulton Mall).

The show's only up until November 5th (note - it's been extended through March 2010), but hopefully that's enough time for the students I'm working with now to check it out at least a few times. It's always nice to discover this sort of thing in your neighborhood, and the project is only a block away from one of their two school buildings.

The view from one corner...

...and the other.

The bakery's window displays were filled by the always-enjoyable Ellis G, who will probably end up getting an entry on this blog soon.

Woven displays by Michael DeFeo

Collage/assemblage by Greg La Marche

Cycle's storefront forces me to yet again wonder if it really counts as "graffiti" when it's produced with the permission of an institutionalized space (even if that institutionalized space is only temporary).

Logan Hicks produced this evocative stencil image; I recommended it to one of my 12th-grade students who's spent most of the past month working on a finely-detailed stencil image of Biggie Smalls, Eazy-E, Bob Marley and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

More (and better) photos here.

Another case of diminished signifiers:

2009-10-08T20:29:00.000-04:00

This is a commercial hair-braiding salon in downtown Brooklyn, by the school at which I'm currently student-teaching. When I was in junior high school, I read an article somewhere that mentioned that braid patterns on African girls and women allowed researchers to trace the matrilineal heritage of a bloodline all the way back to individual tribes in Africa. This blew my mind.

I assume that that is less the case now that women can get their hair braided in any one of several braid patterns, by paying someone rather than getting braided by their mother or another woman in the family.

Baseball caps used to SIGNIFY (one particular) something

2009-10-08T20:10:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking about this topic, and adding to it, since basically the first class this semester. Please bear with me if it wanders...

The thing is, baseball caps have undergone a significant shift in their significance (in the Saussurean sense, as in "what they signify, how they act as signifiers") over the last fifteen or so years. I'll demonstrate mostly using a Yankees cap, though it pains me to do so as a Red Sox fan, because of the historical significance of the Yankees (or their logo, at least) in this particular story.

This is your basic Yankees cap (it's 'on-field,' meaning it's what the team members wear). For a century, with some minor variation on the logo and fabric weight, this was likely to be the Yankees cap you'd see on someone. And it was a very simple signifier: "I like the Yankees. They're my team, and this is the hat they wear."

This started to change in the early-to-mid-90s, when Spike Lee approached New Era Caps (the company that makes mass-market caps for Major League Baseball teams), asking if he could commission a Yankees cap in red. This became a signature clothing item for Lee, and showed New Era that they could make much, much more money by decodifying what makes a Yankees cap a Yankees cap (and thus decodifying what a Yankees cap means, as I'll explain in a moment).

With the speed of anything marketed to and by the "urban" and "youth" markets, the change was immediate and highly visible: baseball caps no longer were locked to their 'regulation' colors, and a person who wanted his (or her) outfit to match the Yankees cap no longer needed to plan the outfit around the cap. Now it just takes buying a cap that matches the outfit.

As a result, the signifying aspect of the Yankees cap begins to chip away. That plaid Yankees cap could be a sign that you're a big fan of the team who is of Scottish heritage; it could also be a sign that you felt an item of clothing, ideally a cap, with those colors would best complete your 'look.' The baseball cap becomes about as significant as sneakers, which also have a community of collectors who are obsessed with acquiring the most outlandish, exclusive colors and patterns.

There's also a new submarket for "girl" caps, with any team's logo in white on a pink cap. We certainly couldn't have a woman wearing a plain Yankees cap, could we? How would we be able to tell she was female if she wasn't wearing a feminized version?

On a side note, there have been two mindsets with baseball caps for a long time; the 'urban' market (which is strongly correlated to, but not exclusive to, African- and Latino-descended people) often keeps their caps as clean and new-looking as possible, whereas the more hegemonic (white, mostly) portion of society tends to be a bit more comfortable with wearing "broken in" clothing (faded jeans, for example). This has led to pre-faded caps on one end of the spectrum, and flat-brim caps (with a different-sized brim, made to stay flat) on the other.

Those who buy the flat-brim caps do their best to keep them immaculate -- to the point that they're almost always worn with the stickers still attached. This serves two purposes, as far as signification goes: it says "I will only wear this hat so long as it is still brand-new" and also "this is a brand-name, authentic item for which the standard retail price is widely known." It's conspicuous consumption at its most basic.

By comparison, the 'broken-in' caps have bent brims, are colored with dye that fades quickly, and sometimes even come with pre-fab fraying on the seams. Affluent folks (and white folks in general, if I may perpetuate another stereotype) are more comfortable with dressing like they don't have any money.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I wear a more faded (mostly by being several years old) version of the Red Sox cap below, with the alternate logo rather than the standard "B" - I love the team (they were my hometeam when I grew up in New England) but much prefer NYC to Boston, and my hat sort of signifies that, I think.

Not particularly meticulous. Very Caucasian.

With so many other statements signified now, the team-specific signification of baseball caps is remarkably diluted, to the point where the caps are essentially decoration before they're a statement of team allegiance. They no longer only say "I like the team that wears this cap" - they also say "I like this color more than the color the team wears," "I have this relationship with consumerism," "I come from this ethnic background and identify myself as part of this social community," etc.

With that being the case, is it any wonder that the flat-brim caps of teams outside the region are starting to show up on teenagers as the finishing touch on obsessively color-coordinated outfits? If you like a particular color more than the colors of your hometeam, why not wear the cap of a team whose "on-field" colors match your outfit?

I can't imagine that the high-school-aged guy on my subway car last week, who was wearing a purple shirt, purple shoes, and a pristine, stickered Colorado Rockies cap, was wearing the cap because he was a Rockies fan. Certain teams other than the Mets and Yankees have fans in NYC -- the Red Sox are a notable example, as are some of the old teams based in Southern and Midwestern cities (the Braves, the Cardinals).

However, when I see several guys standing together on the L train late at night, all of them wearing Kansas City Royals caps which match the royal blue elsewhere in their outfits, I can't help but wonder if perhaps the cap is being used as a gang signifier. Perhaps it's urban legend that "KC" is used sometimes to signify "Killer Crip," but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that there are more gang members in Brooklyn than there are fans of the Royals outside of Kansas and Missouri nowadays.

"They're like self-portraits that we didn't get to draw"

2009-10-08T15:33:00.002-04:00

The most recent project for the 11th-grade class that I'm student-teaching was, in my mind, a really interesting group exercise, both in terms of the physical works it produced and in terms of the issues of representation it raised with the students.

The project was both simple and complex: each student posed for a headshot photo, which was then printed and cut into six equal squares (the 11th Grade art class has two sections of 6 students each). The squares were shuffled and handed out to all six students in each section - so that each student had a chance of there being some fragments of his or her own face, but a much bigger chance of fragments of others' faces. Each of the squares was to be reproduced on much larger (around 18x18) pieces of paper (using any black-and-white material - charcoal, pencil, ink, etc).

When all of the individual drawings were completed, they would be correlated, arranged and taped together so that the original photos would have been reproduced by up to six different artists.

Here are some of the results:

(I absolutely love the one on the right, for what it's worth - the eyes are a remarkable combination)

The students loved making the drawings, and their exploration of materials and imagery was a lot of fun to watch and encourage. They were very supportive of each other while working - talking up each other's skill and in general sounding like they really loved the assignment.

Then it came time to put the images together.

At that point, several of the students (all of them girls) voiced frustration with "how I look." They weren't complaining about the individual drawings, or even pointing out the fairly obvious points in the assembled portraits in which one student's rendering was less exact than another's. To do so, after all, would break up the bonhamie they'd been enjoying for the last two weeks of studio time. Instead, they just complained about the whole "assembled" drawing. Strangely, they would say what they thought the drawing looked like other than them ("I look like a devilspawn," "I look like some kind of alien dog or something"), but they never said "this doesn't look like me."

One of the students explained to me "this is rough, especially for, you know, teenage girls, who are all self-conscious about everything in the first place. It's like a self-portrait that we didn't get to draw."

That last sentence is key: these drawings feel, due to their roughness, their basic materials, their scale, like the sort of identity statement that a high-school student would make in a piece of art. The identity, however, is removed from the hand of the artist(s).

It's a fine example of the tension that can result when someone recognizes that they aren't in control of their own representation.

Choose Your Own Identity (for the night)

2009-10-07T10:54:00.003-04:00

I saw this poster wheatpasted to a construction wall at Jay Street and Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. The party's attendants are given a color code, so that what they wear that night will broadcast their intent to the other partiers. The colored outfits essentially would work as costumes, and it's my observation that when people wear costumes (like around Halloween), they drop some of their inhibitions (because they aren't being represented as much as the costume is?).

There's a Dead Kennedys song ("Halloween") which directly addresses this phenomenon, and then calls the listener a coward for not dressing up and acting out the rest of the year.

It's safe to assume that some of those who aren't part of the target audience would look past the intentional signifiers and tar all of the partiers with the same Other brush: promiscuous, drunken, irresponsible. It's also interesting to me to see that there is no information on the time and place; those who are interested have to declare their intent via text message to be brought into the loop. This makes the whole thing feel both more exclusive (to the participants) and more illicit (to the hegemony).

I wonder how many of the people wearing black would have any interest in the people wearing red.

Two different playgrounds

2009-10-07T10:30:00.001-04:00

Real quick: have a look at these images of a city-run playground by the Chelsea Piers in Manhattan (West End Highway, around 23rd Street)...

...then at these photos of a city-run playground in downtown Brooklyn (Tillary and Jay Street):

It strikes me that the one in Brooklyn, which is a lot closer to an actual residential neighborhood, presents a pretty grim representation of the people who live nearby. The children in the nearby housing projects can't feel particularly proud or respected when playing on cinderblocks.

Alejandro El Grande

2009-10-07T10:13:00.008-04:00

It's a New York City cliche (which probably exists elsewhere in the country) that every greasy-spoon diner in the city represents itself as a direct descendent of Ancient Greek culture - photos of the Parthenon and plaster casts of the Discus Thrower are about as common as those powdery after-dinner mints by the cash register.

The diner closest to my apartment in Ridgewood (Queens) has gone through several ownerships in the eight years I've lived here. A few years ago, a Mexican couple took over, and, at first, they kept the same menu as before, and didn't do much to change the look of the diner itself.

At this point, the only immediate clue that you were in a Mexican-run establishment was the presence of Jarritos in the fridge by the Coke and Pepsi.

But over the past year and a half or so, they finally started making it reflect their identity: it's a Mexican restaurant now, though it still has some of the officially listed items like souvlaki and corned-beef hash on the wall (I doubt that they ever get a request for that sort of thing, although there are a lot of Europeans in their 70s who might be sticklers).

Note the Mexican-flag motif in the banner. Even now that its menu is almost entirely Mexican dishes, the restaurant has kept the name "Fresh Pond Coffee Shop."

I can't think of a better shorthand image to demonstrate New York City (and Queens in particular)'s strange form of interculturalism.

A few on-the-subway observations

2009-10-07T09:57:00.004-04:00

Advertisements do their best to be inclusive (it makes good business sense to not alienate potential customers), and in general it's hard to find mass-market advertising images as blatantly racist as the sort of images in American print 75 years ago.

But there are points where, looking at several ads together, interesting patterns emerge. And there really isn't a better place for looking at the juxtaposition of ads than in the subway. For example:

Minorities (women of African, Asian, and Latino heritage) are encouraged to finish their GED...

...go to trade school...

...maybe even take night classes.

Even with the broad spectrum of races on display here, there isn't a "white" (read: Western European) person in any of the ads. Where are the white people?

Ah, here's one - she's so busy with her career (notice her work outfit) that she doesn't have time to cook, so she's going to order food from her office phone!

Another ad that's confused me for a long time for is a liability-and-accident law firm (Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald). It basically lists the amounts of money that were awarded to various clients they've had, then puts this at the bottom of the ad:

Irish lawyers identifying themselves as such by showing a leprechaun with his dukes up. You can't make this stuff up.

The standard leprechaun image itself is a pretty remarkable stereotype - a short, miserly, violence-prone redhead. That some Irish people hold onto it amazes me.

And finally, a point that I can't really post images for (maybe I could show it with a sound clip?):

The automated voices on the new subway trains use a female voice to tell riders where they are ("This is...Brooklyn Bridge,City Hall...transfer here for the...4,5,6 train") and a male voice to tell riders what to do ("STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS, PLEASE!").

"Culture high AND low?" (or "the Whats and Whys of Visual Culture")

2009-10-03T19:28:00.005-04:00

(author's note: I'm going to add some images to this post soon)

Let's get this out in the open early (not just for the sake of the class that prompted the creation of this blog):

I'm not the sort of person who makes a hard distinction between "high art" and "low art," or even between "art" and "not art."

I think it's fine to look at, for example, H.W. Janson's 101-level definition of art as (paraphased) "work of human production which is to be appreciated aesthetically rather than for its utilitarian value."

By that definition, it's easy to see that a painting by Rembrandt is a work of art - what possible utilitarian function could it serve? It would make a lousy wall insulation, and Duchamp was only being an iconoclast when he proposed using one as an ironing board.

What about Greek pottery? When we admire a vase at the Met and call it a work of art, we aren't interested in its original function as a vessel used to mix wine and water. We look at the painted figures, at the nonessential aspects of the form. We look at, and for, the art in the object.

I'm fine with that. I just think that we ought to be willing to do that with a more expansive range of culture. There are nonfunctional aesthetic/formal aspects to the Coca-Cola logo, to my loud shirts, to the graffiti on the freight trains that pass by my neighborhood.

Does this mean that that logo, those shirts, that graffiti are art? Depends on who you ask. I don't think so. But it means that they have aspects which can be looked at as art, in the ways in which we look at art (formally, semiotically, etc). The colors and patterns on the shirts don't make the fabric more durable, don't make the shirts warmer. They're nonfunctional aesthetic aspects, and as such I think it's valid to give them the consideration that we give the figures on the Greek pottery. That consideration should also be given to African pottery and dance costumes and such, but often isn't. More on that in a bit.)

I've been interested in using the same eye to look at "high culture" and "low culture" for a long time by now. This interest has seen me painting using found patterns, recording hip hop while doing graduate coursework in critical theory and modern art at Columbia, and more recently teaching pre-college Visual and Critical Studies art classes to students who knew more about web design and recent manga than they did about modern/contemporary art. And yet I think that it was only this semester, in Rebecca Bourgault's class, that I learned that the mindset I've had for so long has a name: Visual Culture.

Teaching art using visual culture allows for the teacher to use art forms familiar to students - comic books, advertising, graphic design, traditional arts, etc. This allows not only for art to be immediately accessible to students, but also for the students' personal and cultural experiences to be much more directly acknowledged and integrated into the class lessons.

Sure, it may mean that we teachers have to give some level of lip-service to Spongebob and other visual culture to which we don't particularly groove, but it's sure to make art a more vibrant, meaningful, accessible subject for more students. It will also make the subject more relevant in a school with a diverse student body, especially one with students whose cultural heritage and home life might not be at all reflected in the version of "art history" that is based mainly on Western European tradition. Those who wish to "rise above" the tide of popular culture and instead base their artwork on Rembrandt and Greek pottery (and Stravinsky and De Kooning) are certainly free to continue to do so, but those who see art as something that exists all around us, in different ways, might find a visual-culture-based art course to be much more satisfying.

The course in visual culture and classroom diversity is quite engaging, and I'm certain that it will flavor my educational mindset and technique as my career develops. Again, it's not so much that I've discovered a new mode of thinking about art and art education as that I've finally found the name for the mode I've been using.

This will definitely help me more fully bake my own ideas. Hopefully that will show up in the next few months' worth of observations, posted here in notes which won't be anywhere near as longwinded as this one.