Choose Your Own Identity (for the night)

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

 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

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

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")

 (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.