Thursday, October 28, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
TRANSITIONAL YOUTH -- week of 10/28 class readings
Hebdige’s article on subculture and style is a brilliant – near inarguable – articulation of our world and the processes that establish its position. I couldn’t help being reminded of the film, The Matrix, in that Hebdige pulls back the curtain on the secrets of how dominant forces construct and maintain our culture and how the deviance the challenges orthodoxy is inevitably managed and domesticated by the reigning system. It all makes so much sense that it reads more as description than theory.
Before getting to a discussion of subculture, Hebdige rightly feels the need to define popular culture and the ideology that underpins everything from discourse to the objects described by Genet. He writes,
“All human societies reproduce themselves in this way through a process of ‘naturalization’. It is through this process – a kind of inevitable reflex of all social life – that particular sets of social relations, particular ways of organizing the world appear to us as if they were universal and timeless.” P.14
Of course, this is not a conspiracy of a secret cabal of industrialists or politicians; it is a self-driven process that churns away at the service of a particular way of life. Genet describes it as an edifice aligned against him. And, of course, any orderly system of traditionalism would likely find itself aligned against a radical like Genet. An intelligent man in Genet’s position could not help but see the edifice and attempt to decipher. It is a revelation at the very least, regardless of your position in or outside the system, that a time-tested structure is in place to keep things in their place.
I loved the discussion of taboos and how activities – such as the Punk movement – that are outside the norm “represent symbolic challenges to the symbolic order.” Hebdige goes on to analyze at length the processes that the dominant culture uses to either eliminate or colonize “subculture” practices that gain strength.
It seems that a subculture’s successful differentiation from the dominant culture is the necessary precondition for its destruction. After all, when the traditional fashion world starts using the safety pins and razor blades of punk then those stylistic messengers will no longer maintain their distinctiveness and power. As Hebdige writes, “The cycle leading from opposition to defusion, from resistance to incorporation encloses each successive subculture.”
There’s way too much to talk about here in one blog entry, but the discussion on page 105 of the “juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities,” caught my eye for its relevance to my American Runescapes series. I use collage to juxtapose old photographic and advertising images with modern publication text to create something that challenges traditional order and placement in order to reveal something both fresh and universal.
I want to explore Max Ernst further for his insight into the ‘explosive junction’ that results from the reorganization of meaning that is collage. To my mind, they are touching on the curious truth that the combination of seemingly disconnected imagery can result in the revelatory glimpse of the perpetual or universal. The image, especially the photograph -- removed and re-contextualized from its original positioning – can create an explosive junction of meaning and emotion.
Relative to our class, Hebdige’s exploration of subculture provides a way in to explore the imagery of childhood from a more thoughtful and grounded place. Where do our images fall in this dialogue between and around culture and subculture? What do the images of children mean and what are they trying to accomplish? From my explorations of images in advertising, it is obvious that there are common threads that are attempting to show what it is to be a boy and to be a girl. *
The current identification of young people with the video-computer technology does not make them different from the straight world, it denies their ‘youthfulness’; they are better more adult – than adults. They too are implicated in a complex and contradictory historical process by which the existence of youth is being reshaped and relocated in social, cultural and material space.
Lawrence Grossberg
Grossberg’s article, The Deconstruction of Youth, though somewhat dated also reveals some rich veins for cultural mining. I think his analysis of music, movies, video games and popular culture is most relevant for consideration of modern adolescence rather than childhood. That is certainly his intent, and he effectively bridges the distance between the hierarchical teens of the pre-James Dean and Bob Dylan 1950’s to the more loose variety of 21st century teenage lifestyles. This dissolution of order is truer today than it was when Grossberg wrote his article on deconstruction.
I am reminded of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, which tapped into an unfocused but very real adolescent angst of the time. Dean’s character felt crushed by his parent’s oddity and expectations. He couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand him and that mattered deeply to him. It seems to me that the world today is much more of an atomized take it or leave it attitude for teenagers. Speaking from experience, if adults don’t get them or they don’t get adults then… so what.
The existence of youth is, indeed, being reshaped and relocated in social, cultural and material place. It is not as simple as kids getting more like adults, as Grossberg understands. It is that the era of exploration of self-definition that constitutes this period between childhood and adulthood is in flux and unsettled. There is no longer one way to be, one path to take, single role models to follow. The atomization of American popular music is a symptom of that reality. We have infinite choices, and no clear path to the cool or the right.
There is potential conflict here with Hebdige’s analysis of a self-sustaining popular culture machine. But we do still have an educational and vocational structure that pushes the atomized youth of today in the direction of the more traditional adult establishment track. The movie Social Network might be a good contemporary account of the deconstructive struggle so presciently described by Grossberg. Adolescents have indeed created their own world, and they by no means consider it inferior to the more static world of older generations. Neither good nor bad, this modern world of adolescence is undoubtedly new.
Our spaces are changing.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
TRANSGRESSION
WOW, a lot to talk about. The work of Paul McCarthy, Anna Gaskell, and Anthony Goicolea are a kick to the teeth of normal. Transgressive art messes with our comfortable world – from the literal mess of McCarthy, to the uncomfortably staged scenes of Gaskell and Goicolea. I’m sure that the “straight” world condemns this kind of work for exactly this reason. The artists wish to challenge the way we see the world, and in so doing expose realities beneath the surface of contemporary and popular culture.
For this goal alone, it looks tremendously worthy to me. Every painting or movie or art installation should not be about making us more comfortable with the world as we see it. Art should shake us up and open our minds to something new, and sometimes disturbing is necessary because what is beneath the surface may, in fact, be disturbing. If we hide from the truth, whether about images of children in popular culture or anything else, then thank goodness for artists willing to give us a kick in the pants or even the groin to facilitate some awakening.
I love how McCarthy takes Heidi and Pinocchio and messes around with their cute and comfortable Disney imaging to make us explore some ugly truths. Yes, why in the world are we so interested in Heidi? Pure little blonde pony tailed Alpine girl that she is? These stories that have become so full of ease and surface gloss, are indeed built from some darker places in our collective psyche. Like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, we have tried to scrub clean some very dark and dirty stories while maintaining some beneath the surface thrills and desires.
While McCarthy’s video projects seem sort of clunky and amateurish, they also maintain a bizarre jolt that comes from something more than mere weirdness. He and Kelley are plumbing the depths, not for outrageousness alone, but for something that attracts us. I love the idea that art can go to these places, while the Philistines miss the entire point of the investigation.
Coincidentally, I happened to be watching a documentary about Christo and Jeanne Claude’s Gates Project in New York’s Central Park last night. In a much tamer way, the Gates was meant to challenge how we see the world by doing something that on the surface appeared to make no sense. While not exactly transgressive art, the principles are similar; shake people up to see the world in a new way. Maybe we’re missing something, perhaps we need to look in different corners and from new perspectives.
Gaskell’s photographs delve into the familiar territory of Alice for the same reason we have spent so much time there ourselves. There is something very strange going on here beneath the surface that moves us, and it is something that we do not completely understand. Goicolea’s uncomfortable-cloned-adolescent-male-sexuality-and-scatology ventures into similarly disruptive territory. What is it about childhood, adolescence, sexuality and transgression that provide such a draw? Is it simply pointing out the obvious undercurrents of growing up that we try to hide and forget?
Each of these artists would likely agree that childhood and adolescence are the perfect territory to explore transgression and sexuality and darkness and things going on beneath the surface. Do we want Pinocchio tamed or do we want him to stay out of control? Do we long for the simple purity of Heidi because we long to go back to childhood or because we long to have sex with her? These questions are obviously at the heart of our class investigation, and the view is murky. It’s like Jack Nicholson screaming, “You can’t handle the truth!” Maybe not, but much is happening here. Youth is an in-process time of messy incompletion, and it moves us.
Back to more mainstream popular culture, I can’t help but mention David Lynch relative to transgression and secrets and hidden worlds. There’s Eraserhead of course and everything else that he’s ever done. But Blue Velvet is a perfect example. From his exposure of the bugs beneath the surface of the grass, to the violent criminality beneath the surface veneer of small town America, to our hero and heroine’s unexpected attraction to violent sadomasochistic behavior – Lynch tells a story and takes us to real places that we don’t typically get to, or wish to, see.
What do the images of McCarthy, Kelley, Gaskell, and Goicolea force me to see about childhood and adolescence? They make me see that all is not purity, innocence and light. They make me see that there is much hidden in our attraction to children in art and popular culture. And they show me that transgression is necessary for art to challenge the quiet of the status quo.
While there is certainly innocence and purity in our imaging of childhood, there is also much more that is hidden, dark and substantive. This is why the look from Cherry Ripe is and was so entrancing – there is much more here than meets the eye.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
http://americanrunescapes.tumblr.com/
FOR HARRY
"We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow" -Ted Bundy
CULTURAL STUDIES
“A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot”
Allan Beck quotes
Sunday, October 3, 2010
MEMORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust
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