Author Archives: Gabriella Andriulli

Biracial “Borrowing”

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Pinder: Pinder examines multiracial identities and representations in art, claiming that “transraciality” can be seen as a harbinger of unity and hope.

Waegner: In this piece from AfroAsian Encounters, Waegner argues that the “new” blackface/yellowface we see in art and pop culture alike constitutes a sort of polycultural borrowing and a “playful postmodernist passing”.

Though I found Waegner’s piece intellectually stimulating, I left it feeling uncomfortable and skeptical. Despite my valiant attempts to like her claims of “polycultural porousness” and of ethnicity as a Butler-esque performance, in the end I couldn’t stomach them. Even though Waegner claims that the examples she brings up are not minstrelsy, I had difficulty with some of them. She admitted that Tuff was a problematic example, but what of R. Kelly’s video? Waegner points to “an informal student survey” to claim that most students were not offended by the music video, saying, “It’s just an R. Kelly video.” But I must ask – does that make it OK? Even if these students do not find the video offensive as they view it with “a considerable amount of ironic distance”, should we simply stop there? Curious, I immediately turned to youtube to see R. Kelly’s video for Thoia Thoing, and was admittedly shocked that Waegner would defend this as “playful passing”. Despite her attempts to align this video and the other examples in her piece with postmodernist means of expression and innocent cultural swapping, I remain unconvinced. Underneath Waegner’s eloquent intellectualism, I can only see what I feel would otherwise be called cultural appropriation.

I see this not as an exemplar of ethnic porosity, but of the growing trend in contemporary pop culture towards a sometimes socially sanctioned cultural appropriation. Perhaps I simply don’t get it, but I fail to see how these examples are different from Gwen Stefani’s disturbing troupe of “Harajuku Girls” (If you are unfamiliar with Gwen Stefani’s penchant for East Asian women, you may refer refer to this video.). This piece from Racialicious entitled The Orientalism of Nicki Minaj outlines another example of what Waegner might consider “passing”. I see only the continuation of old stereotypes in these examples – Asian women as exotic, sexually available, and submissive. And while I would love to see Nikki S. Lee’s “Hip-Hop Project” as respectful porosity, it just feels like blackface to me. It makes me – along with all these other examples – feel uncomfortable and ultimately unconvinced of Waegner’s thesis. I look forward to discussing this with my classmates and perhaps deepening/changing my understanding of this work.

(In)visibility of black masculine identities

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Golden: How have contemporary black artists navigated the constructions of black masculine identities in the quest for authenticity?

Julien: Isaac Julien’s “Looking for Langston” embodies the search for a sense of “place” for the black gay male in a heterosexist and racist world.

Mercer: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a photographer by trade, uses the black male body in his work as the incarnation of an entre-deux, a living intersection.

After reading the first few sentences of Thelma Golden’s piece “My Brother”, I immediately thought of an exhibition I saw in DC of Hank Willis Thomas’s work, an artist we’ve encountered before in this course. In the series “Branded”, Thomas explicitly confronts contemporary black masculinity and its construction by (white) America. The piece that most struck me from this collection, Branded Head, is a lightjet print from 2003 (pictured below).

Branded Head 2003

 

Also in this series is the equally stunning (and discomfiting) Basketball and Chain, another lightjet print from the same year.

Basketball and Chain 2003

 

Both images, which can be found at Thomas’s site under “2011 – Branded”, speak to the continued white ownership, in some sense, of black masculinity. Here, Thomas uses the example of professional basketball and Nike’s (here, literal) branding tactics to make apparent the trap of contemporary black masculinity, which according to the artist seems to be a modern reconstruction of slavery. Ownership, of one’s own body and of masculinity and representation, is especially pertinent here and in the works of the other artists named by Golden, as they seek to navigate the loaded subject of the black male. These artists must, in a sense, unshackle the black masculine in order to find a liberating authenticity.

In the same vein, I’d like to challenge Golden’s claim that “hip-hop culture has become the signifier of black male heterosexuality”. Golden is right to claim that hip-hop/rap have become sites of the demonstration of “fitness” as a (heterosexual!) black male, but I do not think that this territory is so flat. Not only do queer black rappers/hip-hop artists exist, but does the overwhelmingly heterosexual music of the mainstream necessarily conform to heterosexual ideals? I think this is a claim that can be played with and disproved, especially with an examination of “acceptable” white (hetero)sexuality and the “other” sexuality. In the meantime, I’d love to share some up-and-coming queer rappers with my classmates and followers of the blog. Please recall, however, that while these artists are in a way “pioneers”, as the article claims, they are in no way the ONLY queer hip-hop artists/rappers and they are certainly not the first ones. Just thought this would be an interesting read with regards to the overwhelming heterosexism inherent to constructions of black masculinity and gender!

De-colonizing the Queer Self

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“You should wear your hair down.”

“Your father likes it up.”

Pariah, a film lauded for its representation of the black lesbian community, follows protagonist Alike as she struggles to find an authentic queer identity in a conservative, black, middle-class family. Alike is alienated by her ultra-normative parents and feminine younger sister, yet even the family itself chafes at its own normativity – the desperate attempts of the mother to seduce her own husband, his only constant the beers he swills as he becomes forever more and more absent. They all recognize their individual and collective failures at (hetero)normativity. Frantically, they attempt to retain that normativity, that perfectly organized (colonized?) family unit – the mother buys Alike pink blouses, the father asserts his patriarchal authority and supposed “untouchability”. “Why you asking so many goddamn questions, girl?” He demands of Alike. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t question me.”

 “Tell him! Tell him that you’re a nasty-ass dyke!”

To escape the crushing (hetero)normativity of her home life, Alike depends on Laura, her older, butcher, working-class friend. Laura attempts to help Alike navigate queer life, taking her to the lesbian club nearby, lending her clothing and even buying her a strap-on dildo at one point. The club represents a queer “safe space” for queer black women, an opportunity to defy heteropatriarchal impositions. Yet even within this safe queer haven, they are unable to escape the colonizing forces of normativity. The lesbian club Laura and Alike frequent is strictly butch-femme, allowing only for the coupling of an AG (aggressive) like Laura and the submissive femmes she picks up. Alike feels this pressure to adhere to this binary within the queer community, overhearing one feminine-presenting straight girl at school say that she might be attracted to her if “… maybe if she was a little bit harder…” Despite Alike’s valiant attempts at an AG presentation, it seems that she is still not quite masculine enough to be acceptable in this dichotomous world. She hates the strap-on Laura buys her, claiming it chafes, and throws it away. She feels uncomfortable at the club, seemingly uninterested in or unwilling to play the butch-femme game to pick up women. Even Laura, the model AG, appears to recognize the limits of this so-called “freedom”. When talking Alike about her (Alike’s) new love interest, she says in a melancholy tone, “I really am happy for you… Because I love you.” After uttering those words, Laura turns away, taking the acceptably femme partner she had picked up at the club with her, leaving Alike open-mouthed with her femme counterpart. Did Laura desire Alike all along, unwilling to take action because of the forbidden nature of a butch-butch coupling? Regardless of the nature of her desire, one cannot argue that Laura is not one of the most (if not the most, in my mind!) faithful, most loving characters in Alike’s life. She cares for Alike when she leaves home after her mother beats her when she is forced to come out despite the fact that she and her sister are struggling to make ends meet, stroking her arm softly to comfort her in one touching scene. Laura undoubtedly loves Alike – could it be that in another context she would express that love differently?

“I am not broken, I am free.”

After a violent and emotional confrontation with her parents, Alike leaves home, claiming that she is “not running, I’m choosing”. She knows that she can no longer bear the yoke of “acceptable” black womanhood, and that she must, as Thompson suggests, de-colonize her own queer self in order to find true freedom – outside of her oppressive household, outside of the false freedoms of the club. It must be brought to attention that Alike’s wardrobe changes towards the end of the film – something that is not at all insignificant. She is perhaps still more masculine-of-center, but no longer attempts the hyper-masculinity of Laura or other AGs. She wears hoodies and jeans, but she occasionally wears pink, she keeps her earrings in – she is no longer forced to choose between the hyper-femininity of her mother or the extreme AG masculinity of Laura. Alike introduces herself to the outskirts, a truly queer world, where she does not have to fit norms of any origin. Through extreme pain, she is able to graduate early with her perseverance, talent, and intelligence and go into an early college writing program. She forgives her mother, telling her that she loves her, though her mother is not able to repeat those words back to her. Ultimately, on the bus ride to college, despite the incredible loss she has experienced, Alike appears happy. She knows that she is not broken, she is free.

Que(e)rying Queer Discourse

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Taylor: Contemporary artists outside of the West have used a variety of media to grapple with the oppressions they face in a post-colonial context.

Shakhsari: Despite the fact that the new inclusion and the visibility of the Iranian queer in cyberspace is positive, one must be extremely wary of the nature of this “acceptance” and critique the hegemonic and homonationalist discourses to which this “tolerance” adheres.

Shakhsari deftly tackles the subject of the Iranian queer, suddenly made hypervisible through the powers of cyberspace. Naturally, queer visibility and a move towards the acceptance and even celebration of queer people is a positive thing… But is it so thoroughly positive? Much of the Iranian diaspora, it seems, embraces a pseudo-inclusive mind-set, a bizarre sort of homophobic non-homophobia that seems all too familiar for queers anywhere. It’s the sort of irritating “I’m fine with gays, as long as they don’t hit on me” mentality, the “not in my backyard” thinking that feigns acceptance and really only whitewashes the homophobia just beneath the surface. Queerness, like “diaspora”, has become chic in the blogosphere, a trendy way of positioning yourself against the Iranian state, now with queers added! More disturbing than this “add queers and stir” method that Shakhsari identifies, in my mind, is the homonationalist discourse that dominates the queer Iranian blogosphere. While queer activists like Parsi are instrumental and have certainly done a lot for gay and lesbian Iranians, they have also left many of their queer siblings behind. When queer became chic, only the homonormative became chic, only certain Iranian queers were deemed “representable subjects” in this strategic inclusion. Much like the queer community in a national or even international perspective, it is the most privileged or most “normative” members of the community who are made visible, who are accepted, who are given agency. As Fraser has shown us (us here being ARTH/AFR 316, of course!), we must critique even the structures that give us (limited) power, we occasionally have to bite the proverbial hand that feeds if we wish to seek more satisfying sustenance later on. Shakhsari understands this, and chooses not to comply with homonormative and homonationalist discourses, instead remaining skeptical and attempting to queer the dominant queer discourse in a quest for an even better future.

All the Guts, Without the Glory

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Taylor: Performance art, utilized by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Marina Abramovic, placed the (gendered) body at the center, allowing for a means of expression or critique with no separation between art and artist.

Fraser: In her writings and her performances, Andrea Fraser asks her audience to consider the absurd contradictions of the art museum as an institution, a space that claims to serve the “public” but more often than not serves only the elite few.

Wilson and Corrin: Installation artist Fred Wilson critiques the museum’s overwhelming paucity of representations of people of color (specifically of people of Black or American Indian descent) and seeks to “de-neutralize” the public perception of the museum.

Andrea Fraser’s smart critiques of the institution that is the art museum thrilled me. I found the scripts from her performances amusing but, more than that, refreshing. Admittedly, I speak as an outsider from the “art world”, but Fraser’s playful but politically-charged work seems to me to fill a desperate void. In this “art world”, if I may indeed be so bold as to use such a homogenous image, I have the distinct impression that art and the artist take themselves too seriously. Fraser’s work admits and then critiques that nearly ubiquitous attitude, and the lack of brave, sharp-tongued individuals criticizing their own works or worlds. As an artist, she critiques the existing discourses surrounding art and, more specifically, the art museum… And the most wonderful part is that she does it quite literally within the museum itself! This, for me, is the proverbial cherry on top. She performs this critique from within the structure she is critiquing, speaking to the difficulty of a divorce between art/artist and the museum. She is able to deliver this critique, yes, but only within this sanctioned context. The “over-identification” observed in her work is endlessly fascinating, drawing on social tensions through the brilliant use of raciaized and class-based clichés and familiar “us” vs. “them” rhetoric. Fraser becomes Jane Castleton, the incarnation of the problematic nature of the art museum, the very thing she is fighting against.

Enjoyable and enlightening as these texts were for me, I was, like Fraser, disappointed to read about the “Sensation” controversy at the Brooklyn Museum and the relative silence of the museum. Art and the artist are not defended by what is arguably the most important part of the art world, the museum. Instead, questions of the exhibition of art/artist are chalked up to “consumerism”, and some bland desires to appropriate “pop culture” or “subculture” (which, as Fraser points out, raises even more questions on power dynamics within the museum). One must wonder if critiques of the institution itself, critiques like those from the likes of Fraser  or Fred Wilson, have been heard at all.

Perhaps it is my relative ignorance of art and the “art world” to which I keep referring, but it seems that while many artists rightly criticize the socio-political issues of their time, few seem to have critiqued one of the primary means by which they are able to critique, which is to say, the museum. I am left with the impression that the gaze of the artist rarely turns inward, so artists like Fraser, while they demonstrate incredible courage, are left quite alone in their bravery.

Fears of the Feminine

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Latorre: How can we correct the lack of scholarship on Chican@ and Latin@ art, especially when the little scholarship that exists is male-dominated?

Lopez: La Virgen de Guadalupe serves as a unifying cultural symbol for Latina/@ and Chicana/@ communities because of her ubiquity and her embodiment of Anzaldúa’s famed “borderlands”.

As I was lucky enough to have the chance to take a class on the Virgin Mary with Sharon Elkins in the religion department, I was already familiar with the works and writings of the brilliant Alma Lopez. I was given the opportunity to read her collection Our Lady of Controversy, which contained the Cisneros piece she alludes to in “Silencing Our Lady: La Respuesta de Alma”, as well as see beautiful reproductions of her work and the work of her fellow Chicana artists. Lopez boldly reclaims La Virgen, interprets her in her own way and unapologetically shares that interpretation with us. She sees La Virgen in herself and in her fellow Latinas/Chicanas. As Cisneros ponders in her essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess, doesn’t La Virgen have dark nipples and a dark vulva like her? Is La Virgen not a mirror of Chicana/Latina identity, characterized by multiplicity, located on Anzaldúa’s fronteras? It is the tension caused by a history of racism, colonialism, and sexism, a complicated mélange reincarnated in la Virgen, whose body is a familiar “brown and round” as pointed out by one of Lopez’s supporters.

La Virgen suffered in her life, and Lopez draws a parallel between her suffering and the suffering of the multiply marginalized Chicana/Latina. She is, however, not complacent or weak in her suffering. She is instead interpreted by Lopez as empowering, as a strong woman like all the strong, unsung women heros of Lopez’s own life. It is this strength, this resilience, it seems, that terrifies the male viewer. The very body of the young Chicana depicted in Lopez’s work is denounced, seen as sinful, derogatory to Our Lady. But why? For its very femininity? I am brought back to an astute comment made by our classmate Camylle, who suggested the last time we met that the female body is seen as inherently sexual and, by extension, sinful and wrong. This fear of the feminine is in itself terrifying to me – for when will we, the feminine and the women of the world, ever be seen as anything but one side of a dichotomy? Will women be forever denied a sexuality or classified as hypersexual? How can women artists like Lopez rid us of this nonsensical double-standard?

 

The Conundrum of Feminist Art (joint post)

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Nochlin: Nochlin answers the inflammatory question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” with an analysis of the sociocultural structures that privileged white middle-class masculinity and blocked the “Other” from excelling as an artist.

Wark: Despite its denigration of the individual, conceptual art provided an ironic inspiration for feminist artists such as Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson.

“The Artist is Present”: Abramovic boldly makes herself vulnerable in pieces like her most recent work “The Artist is Present” as she transforms her own bodily presence into art.

Taylor: Through new and different media, artists were able to rebel against the overwhelmingly male modernist culture and tackle issues such as race and gender.

Many feminist artists provide us with works which might seem cryptic to the audience when taken at face value. Why is it that those who ascribe to a movement meant to exhibit or even explain their identities present their artwork in a way that is less approachable for the viewer?

Feminist art created in the 1960s and 1970s emerged as a response to the ongoing feminist movement in America. Like many social and political movements at the time, the feminist movement ascribed to explain and support the identity of its cause, in this case women, for more progress in the nation. Although feminist artists created their works in response to the movement, the strategy that they use creates a challenge, rather than an easy way, for their audience to understand their identities. Their use of abstract, conceptual art in opposition to the male-dominated modernist movement creates a divide between their audience and their work of art. The mediums which the feminist artists use – installation, film, performance, and etc.- and the abstract way in which they apply them can prove isolating for many viewers.

Performances pieces created by the likes of Abramovic and Schneeman, which the average audience might take at face value as weird and unapproachable, can be a barrier to understanding, rather than providing a window into the experience of the “Other”. Such art can prove difficult to relate to, regardless of shared identities. If feminism truly is for everybody, as bell hooks asserts, then why provide the public with oft-cryptic, even bizarre works? Why not meet the audience halfway, so to speak, so as to bring the message to a greater number of people? Would doing so necessarily have to mean sacrificing the work?

– Tanekwah and Gabriella

Audience, Accessibility, and African-American Art

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A brief summation of works read this week:

A) Raiford: The Black Panther movement used photography to both deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of the African-American body in order to tailor their public image.

B) Jones: Artists of African descent in Southern California, even with virtually no help from the (white) art establishment, created a flourishing community that translated their lived experiences into art that challenged social injustices.

C) Johnson: African-American artists risk alienating with a single-minded focus on “black solidarity”, something that can prove divisive for the viewers.

Art critic Ken Johnson’s piece on “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” is now infamous for the bizarre analysis of the “divisive” nature of African-American art that it contains. Johnson seems to be unable to critique any form of art without comparing it to the work of white male artists. African-American art, it seems, has no intrinsic value – it only has value by its relationship to the art of white men. This de-legitimizes not only African-American art but the artists themselves, people who contribute more than simply race to their work (though race and ethnicity are obviously important parts of their work). Johnson refuses to see “Now Dig This!” as a varied collection of the works of many different artists, stunningly different in their backgrounds and their work alike. For lack of a better phrase, these artists are literally colored by their collective blackness, and Johnson is rendered blind to all else. Furthermore, the incredibly diverse artistic makeup of “Now Dig This!” appears to be ranked by supposed accessibility. Ken Johnson, a white man, feels alienated by the work of these artists (not all of whom are black, yet another point he misses!), claiming that the work “divides viewers between those who, because of their life experiences, will identify with the struggle for black empowerment, and others for whom the black experience remains more a matter of conjecture…those viewing from a more distanced perspective may regard as social realist clichés, like the defiant fist” (Johnson).  One must suppose that not only is the work of these artists divisive according to Johnson, but it is actually clichéd! Not to discredit the entirety of the African-American artist community, Johnson does single out a few artists that he feels have succeeded – those who “complicate how we think about prejudice and stereotyping” (Johnson). Such a statement is significantly less inflammatory, yet it is followed by the absurd proclamation that the “art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity” (Johnson). Somehow, solidarity has become passé, or is not nuanced enough in African-American art. Perhaps, following Johnson’s advice, artists of African descent should be less “obvious”, adhere less frequently to “clichés” of social justice and solidarity. Maybe African-American artists and artists of all other backgrounds involved in “Now Dig This!” and similar projects will provide more accessible and less “clichéd” works hinged on issues of racism, oppression, and solidarity, when racism, oppression, and solidarity are no longer a problem, Mr. Johnson.

 

The Problematic of Reading the Japanese American body in WWII Photography

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In “Camp Life”, Howard reads an ironic liberation in the tragedy of Japanese internment camps in 1940s America. The Japanese American family was torn apart, at times even physically separated, which disturbed the normal patriarchal structure that had dominated family life. Women were allotted paid positions just like their male counterparts, allowing for the much-needed possibility of female and Japanese American role models. Unexpectedly, these internment camps also provided a space for queer Japanese Americans, people who would be otherwise shut out of a white (and male)-dominated LGBTQ community. However, one is still left with the problem of reading – more specifically reading the imprisoned Japanese American body passed down to us through photography, one of our most valuable resources from this time. Both Wendy Kozol and Elena Creef tackle the complex visibility/invisibility games of the camera lens and the de/construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the search for authenticity in these photographs. Creef discusses the white gaze upon the Asian body, and the manipulation of the Asian body based on the bias of the photographer and/or the presumed audience. Internment constituted a “visual and psychic colonization of the Japanese American body”, states Creef, a colonization made immortal in the photographs of Adams, Lange, and Miyatake. Similarly, Kozol claims that the gaze of the camera is inseparable from notions of authenticity and a certain “realism” that dominates these multiple discourses: what is the “real” story? who can attest to the “authentic” experience of the dehumanization of the interment camps? Under the constant threat of romanticism; citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality are questioned and constructed at once through the lens.