My friend (and former research subject) Crystal posted a post this morning by Jen Yamato at Deadline.com about the minor scandal at the USA Today when they used the headline “Holiday Nearly Beat Thor as Race-Themed Films Soar" to lead a story about the success of The Best Man Holiday. Certainly, there is plenty to criticize in the insidiously reductive phrase "race-themed," a phrase that suggests that the movie is actually about race. This was a no doubt unintentional but nevertheless troubling gaffe, to be sure. There is something slightly unseemly about suggesting a genre that is Black Film. Yet, I find Yamato's response troubling as well.
Yamato acknowledges that "mainstream media seems to have trouble characterizing a film like this," then she offers the suggestion that "maybe the simplest route is to call it a Romantic Comedy." Certainly, this route is simple. It has the benefit of refusing to characterize the film based only on the race of its characters. This allows us to avoid any suggestion that we might be racist, since we don't even bring race up.
This follows a typical post-race approach of trying to simply pretend that race does't exist. To do this, we must also ignore a defining characteristic of the film, since surely the choice to cast all African American characters was purposeful. To pretend that this is not the case is to disallow discussion about these artistic and political choices.
One of the salient features of films like this one is that they place African Americans is positions of economic privilege. Thus, they write African Americans into subject positions generally dominated by whites in both film and society at large. In this film, and others like it (suggesting that perhaps there is indeed an emerging genre here), African American characters are the center of the action, rather than at the periphery. Furthermore, they are characterized as wealthy, educated, well connected, and highly nuanced. Again, all subject positions typically thought of as white.
These films, therefore, create a really interesting counter-history, one that deserves serious critical attention. This hypothetical counter-history allows us to question why such portrayals are so rare in our plays and films and, more importantly, why they are so rare in society. They allow us to ask why these films seem so out of the ordinary that gaffes like the one made by USA Today are even possible. For, indeed, what is so strange about these films is that they don't portray African Americans in the way films generally have in US culture: as poor, or downtrodden, or as gang members--in other words, why they are allowed to be just like white people.
Such questions should trouble our thinking about American film art, and the modern myth that we are post-race at all. Of course, such questions are not possible if we pretend that race does not exist, if we commit an erasure by failing to note exactly what it is that makes these films so unique. While it may be inappropriate to to evaluate these films on race alone, since indeed there are other plot elements and genre conventions at work, it is also inappropriate to refuse to address it. Criticizing the USA Today for myopically referring to these films as "race-themed," does not mean that we should ignore that race is indeed one of the themes. Doing so only ensures that we continue to pretend that race is no longer a contested subject in need to sustained critical reflection. Such erasures are, therefore, just as injurious as what Yamato set out to criticize.
This year, for the first time ever, I have my own office at the institution where I teach. Having to choose things to hang on the walls and deciding which books would need to come from home to sit on the bookshelf in my office was a new experience for me. So, as I added things over the course of the first semester, I became aware of just how conscious I was about the choices I was making (I don't know why that should have been surprising to me, but it was). Mainly, I was aware of how aware I was (meta-awareness?) about what these choices would communicate about me--my preferences, philosophies, and even my teaching style. My office is, as it turns out, a rhetorical device. This, I admit, rather juvenile realization was re-enforced when a student came into my office for a conference, sat down on my hand-me-down love seat, looked around for a few seconds, and said, "I'm judging you by the things on your office." It is (and I told him so) appropriate for him to have done so. This is because my office communicates definite messages, some purposeful, some haphazard, about me as a teacher and as a person.
There are relatively obvious, and certainly purposeful messages being communicated through the things I've hung on the walls. I expected these things to be an expression of the way I see the world, the things I care about, and ultimately the ways that I wish to be viewed. These include Warhol themed nick-knacks like a calendar with a Warhol quote and Campbell's soup cans designed after the famous Warhol paintings (an interesting inversion in which the actual Campbell's soup brand drew inspiration from an artist who drew inspiration from their own graphic design). I added these art themed elements to go along with the one wall hanging in my office that I didn't go out and find, which was a poster print of a Kandinsky painting. I chose this poster out of a stack of things hanging around which had been abandoned by previous faculty. These things included a lot of classical themed stuff (Shakespeare stuff, mainly). I chose the Kandinsky piece because I prefer the modern over the classical, the pop over the cultured, the deconstructive over the refined. I added to these pieces a Dali style melting clock I bought at Hobby Lobby, so that my office is full of references to Modern art.
In addition to these, I hung a TOMS shoes flag (which the company smartly includes in the purchase of every pair, with a note encouraging buyers to take pictures with their flags in the exotic places where they where TOMS shoes. A bit of marketing brilliance). I also have a concert poster from a Cake concert, which is printed using vegetable based dyes on recycled paper, and which explicitly says so on the bottom of the poster, a Kurt Vonnegut themed piece of graphic art, and a poster sized copy of the mural at 826 Valencia, a youth literacy center in San Francisco. These all operate to give the office a sort of pseudo-hispster vibe which is in keeping with the way I see myself and wish to present myself--a hopefully unpretentious, socially aware hippy type guy, disguised in preppy clothes.
Of course, these things aren't very big and the office is actually, despite all these accoutrements, relatively sparse. I haven't changed the wall color, so the office is a drab, institutional off-white. The pictures on the wall are of relatively uniform size and are hung in a more or less straight line around the office, and I have, for a member of the English faculty, relatively few books on one rather cheap book shelf (which was already in the office when I moved in). I have only 45 of my own books in my office, all of them Comp/Rhet themed. This is compared to the many hundreds I have crowding our office at home. I also have a couple binders of research articles and some small books left on the shelf by a previous tenant. Though these decisions were not purposeful, they do communicate an understanding of my own position. I am contingent faculty, on contract for one semester at a time. Though the English department and I are happy with each other, and don't plan to break up any time soon, it is nevertheless possible that any one semester could be my last (especially since we keep getting our budget cut). And even if I remain on board, the university could hire a tenure track faculty member who needs the office, and so I could be shipped down the hall to share with another adjunct. So it would be rather presumptuous, and possibly a waste of time to pound too many holes in the walls or to haul too many books up the stairs. These decisions were not really purposeful, and so perhaps they're not strictly rhetorical, but there is a clear connection between these decisions and my own understanding of who I am. Thus, understanding my position provides a proper lens for understanding my decorating decisions.
This piece admittedly serves little particular purpose other than giving me something fun and interesting to think about. But it does provide an example that indeed there are many texts that can be analyzed outside of those we think of an technically and traditionally academic. Indeed, applying this type of analysis to other, larger forms of space commonly reveal important lessons about the politics of space, the symbology of urban/suburban design, and the assumptions that guide the way we live and move in our environments. These types of analysis, in short, teach us a great deal about ourselves.
Last week, at a training class for public officials I attended, someone brought a newspaper which had a montage of four pictures (like the one above) of James Holmes, the accused gunman in the Aurora, CO movie theater massacre. Holmes's appearance in court had been the conversation du jour for the twenty-four hours or so before. The descriptions from the media of these images and video clips included words like "strange," "detached," "bizarre," and so on. These reports seemed to lead inevitably to speculation about whether or not these images suggested that Holmes was mentally insane or if he was, perhaps, acting in order to prepare for an insanity defense.
During a break in our class, one of my fellow attendees showed me the front page, pointed out the photos, and said something like, "look at him. Do you think he's crazy?" Always one for pedantry, I said "well, I think that the editors of this paper were able to choose four photos that made him look crazy." I then added, "I think these photos say more about how the editors wish for us to see Holmes than they do about Holmes himself." I don't intend to argue about whether or not Holmes is mentally ill (to tell you the truth, I don't watch the news much and don't have any interest in engaging in those kinds of discussions anyway), but rather I want to use the conversation to discuss the reliance on imagery as evidence, and to interrogate it a bit.
What's interesting to me about the discussion in my training class, and with similar discussions in the media, is that we (viewers/discussants) were being asked to decide whether or not Holmes was mentally ill based on the evidence of how he "looks" in photos selected for us by editors, rather than on the immensely anti-social nature of the crimes of which he's accused. Our impressions about the way he "looks" seems to carry more rhetorical weight with regard to the question of his sanity than does his actual behavior.In a way, we were being asked whether or not the way he looks might serve to explain, or even excuse the way he actually behaved.
For me, this is a testament to the power of visual evidence on our culture. We readily assume that visual evidence, in the form of photographs and especially in the form of video, is an unimpeachable and unmediated form of proof. After all, if we can see something, we can assess it's truth ourselves. If one wanted to prove a particular person broke into a store, for instance, a copy of the surveillance tape settles is. We know the actions of police in the Rodney King assault were abusive because we saw the assault on tape. And with the proliferation of cameras in modern public space in the forms of camcorders, media crews, police car dash cams, traffic light cameras, surveillance cameras, and cell phones, we have been acculturated into the understanding that anything can be recorded, and recordings tell us the truth. Seeing is, as we say, believing.
We, therefore, tend to accept visual proof of any concept, event, or phenomenon as unmediated truth. Thus, we fail to interrogate visual imagery in any significant way (except maybe to argue about whether or not an image was staged or Photoshopped). We must learn to be careful, though, when considering visual evidence, just as we would be with any other kind of evidence. We must learn to ask who recorded this image. What was their purpose in doing so; what did they include and what might they have left out; how was it edited and why was it edited this way; what is the context of this image? These kinds of questions help us to determine just what a visual image is actually evidence of. They allow us to determine how much of the truth a visual image actually shows us. It is not enough simply accept that, because we see an image, we are privy to the whole truth of any situation.
One of the readers I have used to teach composition contains an interview by textbook authors David Rosenwasser, and Jill Stephen with photographer Joseph Elliott. In this interview, Elliott makes reference to a distinction he makes between artistic photographers as "Stagers and Recorders." Recorders, like Andreas Gursky, attempt to capture reality as they see it in front of them. Their photographs are somewhat journalistic--one might say "slice of life." Stagers, such as Gregory Crewdson on the other hand, well, stage their photographs. They plan them ahead, set lighting, build sets, use posing actors, and so on.
Stagers, according to Elliott, see themselves as "more honest" than Recorders because they are willing to show their hand in their photographs. Elliott explains, "any photographer is clearly implicated by the process of taking photographs." He goes on to say, "a photographer is inevitably selecting what to shoot and thus what not to shoot, and he or she is always framing the shot in various ways." In other words, the photographer necessarily acts as a mediator between the subject and the viewer, simply by choosing what to photograph. For instance, in the examples I've provided in the hyperlinks above, Crewdson's photographs are obviously staged in order to capture his artistic vision. But even Gursky, a Recorder, has framed the photo in order to capture a certain geometry, chosen a time of day that best suited the lighting he wished to capture, chose from some number of prints that which best fit his aesthetic sense of composition, and so on. So, though his photo may provide a "slice of life," it is necessarily a carefully chosen slice.
This concept has application when considering non-artistic images (those which we may use as evidence) as well. A newspaper photographer, a crime scene detective, or a cell phone user photographing a police officer on a traffic stop all, like an photographer/artist, chooses what to photograph, and by necessary extension, what not to photograph. There is always something going on in the margins, outside the frame. The photographer is always deciding that this is the thing he wants to photograph, and this is when. Even the most objective photographer is choosing what to photograph and when to snap the shutter, and in this way mediates the "truth" that the image captures.
This holds true of video as well. This is an important point because we give video an even greater evidentiary weight than we do still images. After all, videos are real time. If I want to test whether or not the photo editor who put together the four photos of James Holmes had fairly represented his demeanor for the whole of his court appearance, I might watch watch the video of the entire proceeding.
But in video, as in still photos, mediation occurs simply in the act of pointing the camera alone. Then, the act of editing the video adds another very important level of mediation. For instance, look at the effect editing had on the video below.
This is a very chilling example of the ways in which editors of video can more or less create truth that may or may not fairly represent the "reality" that the camera filmed. Of course, most camera operators and editors are not so unfair as the editor of this video, but the process of mediation remains the same even when editors truly wish to present images fairly. She still must edit a video based on what she believes is important, based on how she interprets the event.
Even an unedited video is subject to the limitations of framing, camera angle, video quality and so on. For instance, the cameras from a police dash cam might lead to an entirely different understanding of an event when viewed from one camera angle than when viewed from another. What if you were asked to decide whether or not the shooting filmed in these hyperlinks was justified based on the first video alone? You would believe you had seen the event as it really unfolded. After all, you saw it happen--from the officers own camera. The first video seems to clearly show officers shooting a man who was simply walking away. But of course, when you watch the second video, the limitation of the first becomes clear.
It is, therefore, important when judging the value of an image to ask why this photographer took this particular image at this particular time and in this particular way. Was this taken by a journalist who wishes to sell copies? An advocate of some particular cause hoping to make a certain emotional impression? Might this photographer have left something out, and if so, what and to what effect? What context might we be missing when viewing the images alone?
By positing these questions, I don't mean to turn readers into conspiracy theorists, assuming that photographers are trying to trick us. The point is that all photographers, videographers, and editors must make decisions about what the viewer will see and how they will see it, simply by the limited nature of what they are able to show. Furthermore, the choices choices are rhetorical. They take specific images, at specific times, and for specific reasons. An image is not an unmediated and inherently subjective window into truth, but rather a limited and controlled argument. Visual images are certainly very powerful pieces of evidence, but they must be treated as what they are--pieces.
Remember this next time you're presented with an image that is said to be indisputable truth of something.
The video above is from one of my son, Aodan's, favorite DVDs. It's an Animusic DVD that Charissa, my music teacher wife, brought home for my boys to watch. The Animusic series is a collection of cartoon music videos featuring machinery of various types playing music. Some of the machines are better-mousetrap style contraptions, others are like giant wind-up toys. The one above features robots on a spaceship playing percussion instruments. As we watched the DVD yesterday (and Aodan drummed along on a toy drum), I remarked to Charissa that I was uncomfortable with the possibilities this particular video explored. I am uncomfortable with the extreme posthuman (or maybe dystopian) theme of machines playing musical instruments without apparent human involvement (this is the kind of conversation I routinely subject my poor wife to). Despite my interest in digital literacies/cultures and computer mediation of human literacy habits, I want artistic sensibility and aesthetic to belong to humans. Humans make art. They may use technology to do so (of course they do; musical staffs and symbols are a technology after all), but it is humans that control it in order to turn sound into art.
Then today, a friend and colleague of mine posted a Gizmodo article about a scholarly journal article by Imperial College-London researchers published yesterday in PNAS called Evolution of music by public choice. This study essentially studied the evolution of sound into music in order to compare it to models of evolutionary biology. In this study, researchers basically (I'm skipping important steps for the sake of space. Go read the article) started with clips of randomized noise and allowed people to rate the clips according to musical quality. The top rated clips were then combined in a semi-randomized "genetic" style creating new clips, and the process repeated itself. Over time, the clips begin to sound like recognizable beats, then melodies, then they finally become relatively complex and interesting musical strains (I listened to all the published examples. I encourage readers to at least listen to the commentary and overview offered on the Gizmodo article. It's pretty amazing).
The idea of the study was to study consumer input in the evolution of musical aesthetic by isolating it. In other words, there was no human writing the music: no experimental artistry by a person trying to play with old conventions, no producer looking for a hook, no band members wanting a solo. In removing the factors these factors so they could look at data relating only to the issue they were studying, researchers also removed the people that are typically associated with making music--that is, the composer, lyricist, and producer. Instead, these processes were automated.
Historically, music is considered a humanistic art form, not because it touches a human audience, but because it is created by a human composer. This music, then, is remarkable because it doesn't have that singular person we typically associate with musical composition. But I think the Gizmodo article oversimplifies when it says that "it's possible for digital music to evolve by itself, without creative input from a composer." It is certainly the case that there is not a single human composer. By getting rid of this figure, this experiment abolishes the concept of the genius artist, individually achieving a transcendent artistic artifact. Instead, there is something decidedly posthuman in the composition of this piece.
When I speak of the posthuman here (a term which involves a kind of spectrum of thought), I'm thinking along the lines of Donna Haraway's "cyborg." This involves the idea that the separation between our selves and the objects we make/use is, as it turns out, rather blurry. As we evolve our instruments, those instruments evolve us as well (this
idea of "man as ongoing process" is the central theme of posthumanist
theories). It is this interplay between our selves and our technology that make us "natural born cyborgs" (Clark). We are, by our nature, part human, part tool.
The DarwinTunes are composed through the interplay between tool (a computer designed by humans running an algorithm programmed by human researchers) and active human beings (the people voting on which clips move on).
Not only is the music produced by DarwinTunes posthuman, but it is also an example of another important element of digital culture in that the human half of the composition process is completely collaborative. Just as the singular artistic genius is replaced by a computer program, so also is he replaced by, not one musician, but thousands of consumers, all of which bring to the process their own cultural histories (in the form of chord progressions, dissonances etc. which seem "natural"), personal aesthetic sensibilities, and so on.
Perhaps, then, the most surprising thing about the DarwinTunes is that, after about 500 generations, they start to sound pretty good. Pieces of music composed, not by an individual or small collaboration of talented artists, but by a process of negotiation between a piece of technology and collective intelligence may, after enough generations, turn out to be as complex and sophisticated as any experimental piece by Philip Glass. This brings into focus one of the fundamental questions we begin to ask when studying digital culture: Just how important is the "expert/genius/author" after all?
It rained all night in Oklahoma City the night after Thanksgiving. This was bad news to me because my partner and I had agreed to do a ride-along for Ben Hall and Mike Waugh, two local actors performing in Carpenter Square's production of "A Steady Rain," a play about two Chicago cops. We regretfully warned Ben and Mike that rain usually slows us down. I had hoped we would spend the shift beating the bushes, talking to the prostitutes and pimps who frequent our sector, and looking into the dilapidated low-rent housing of the inner city (in neighborhoods remarkably similar to south Chicago). Along the way, I thought we would have plenty of time to tell Mike and Ben about the both the triumphs and the frustrations of big city police work. So I was disappointed that the rain threatened to derail that.
We did manage to show the guys a few things. Mike (who rode with me) got to talk to a couple of meth addicts and, through talking about then hearing reference to a notable ghetto figure called "Mama K," he got a picture of the interesting close-knit networking of the city's underbelly. He also watched a creative arrest. Perhaps most importantly, since the play takes place in a summer when it rained non-stop in Chicago, the guys got to think about what unrelenting rain might be like to guys who spend entire nights in a car.
I don't know how much the ride-alongs helped Ben and Mike. But I hope they were able to take away some lessons about how cops live, think, and act in a world defined by grey. I've always thought that the hallmark of inner-city police work is the often fuzzy lines between the good guys and bad guys, legal and illegal, aggressive and abusive. The officer's primary struggle comes in negotiating this grey. And whether one ends up as a good cop or a bad one depends in large part on where he ends up when he's passed through a grey deeper than the rainiest Chicago twilight.
It is capturing this grey that Keith Huff did so well in crafting this very rich script. Both characters, Joey and Denny, are both quite good and also very bad. As Linda McDonald, the director and my former teacher, mentor, and friend, explained to me after I saw the show last Friday, "both characters are likable in their own way. But one of them loses his soul and the other finds it."
Indeed, as a city cop myself (a good one, I hope), I saw myself in both these characters. I appreciated Joey's (Ben Hall) heart. He is a cop who wants to do it right, despite a crippling addiction. And when Denny (Mike Waugh) railed against the seemingly illogical unfairness of the police department, I found it hard to keep from shouting out loud, "damn right!" even when I knew that he had brought his situation on himself. These character were both good cops, and bad cops--they were also both incredibly human characters whose stories were tragic and heartfelt. Of course, as anyone would when watching a play about their profession, I thought the script got some things wrong. But it rose well above the typical cop-movie stereotypes that Huff intentionally subverts.
Mike and Ben handled these characters with remarkable aplomb. Ben's narrative delivery is often lyrical and always empathetic. Mike (who I had seen in The Goat: or Who is Sylvia) was superb playing Denny, a character who can be hateful, but who the audience must ultimately love. They work well together as well, a difficult task when one considers that they must play characters who have been "best friends since kindergarten."
I am a former professional actor, failed playwright, and professional police officer and, thus, likely the most difficult audience this play could have had. And I was very impressed. I empathized and commiserated with these characters, and I have spent the last three days since thinking about the script. And that's what I like in a play.
"A Steady Rain" runs at CST through February 4th. Go see it.
I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.
When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.
European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.
Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote
The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.
The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.
So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?
I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.
Actor and Audience: In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.
Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.
Space: The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.
In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.
Un-Alienation This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.
The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.
In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.
The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."
Today was date day for Charissa and me, the gloriously rare day when we leave our kids somewhere and spend the day running around doing things. Not having gotten many chances to go since the boys were born, we decided on a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, one of our favorite and most frequented places before the boys came.
The museum has re-arranged since we were there last as it has some new collections, and seeing some of the new items, along with my criticism of some of the old has led me to some of the open theoretical questions concerning art, what it is, and who gets to make it.
These are famous modern questions of which art students and critical consumers of art will already be familiar. Indeed, as I suggested in my recent post regarding Duchamp, much of the work of modern artists has been to ask these questions as a way of critiquing their own artistic traditions. This has been a modern and post-modern concern in all the arts. Theatre has Grotowski, Brecht, and Artaud who played with theatre conventions by disentegrating the fourth wall, deconstructing the spoken word, and aboloshing elaborate sets in favor wharehouses and street corners. Literature has Pynchon who broke the conventions of space-time, Vonnegut who destroyed any illusion of the death of the author, and Saporta who destroyed the convention of linearity altogether. And visual art had of course Duchamp, Pollock, and so on. So the questions that I ask here are not new, but I am asking them anyway, in response to my own confrontation with these questions in my little hometown museum.
The centerpiece of the OKC-MOA is it's large Dale Chihuly exhibit. Chihuly began his career in stained glass and accidentally discovered the ancient art of glass blowing while fooling around with some of his glass. Henceforth, he has become world renowned for his work in blown glass. The reason Chihuly fits into my questions here is that many years ago, just as his work was getting larger and more complex, he was involved in an accident which rendered him blind in one eye. Having lost his depth perception, he gave up entirely doing the hands-on work involved in creating his own work. Instead, his sculptures are actually formed by a large number of apprentices, based on rather abstract paintings that Chihuly paints. The paintings are not schematic at all, and therefore do not serve as any type of blueprint for the actual glass sculptures, Instead, they seem to act more as inspiration for the apprentices who will make the sculptures as Chihuly stands behind them pleasantly shouting orders.
For years I've thought of this as an interesting extension of the work of other 20th century artists. Modern artists have asked the question of "who is the artist" in interesting ways. Duchamp critiqued the notion of an inspired genius when he began arranging things found in everyday life and calling them found art sculptures. Others have done similar things in their art. But in each of these cases, artists put their hands on objects not typically considered artistic and asked, "does it make it art that I, an artist, touched it." Chihuly extends this questioning even further because he doesn't touch anything. Instead, in his work, he is not the artist because he crafted the actual piece, but because it came from his mind. The actual building of the sculptures is performed by apprentices who are, we pressume, craftsmen and not artists.
Of course, as I've grown more sympathetic to the Marxist complaint, this definition of the artist has come to bother me. Chihuly hires an extraordinary number of young artists, they create magnificent sculptures, and he gets to put his name on the work. And so, with little physical input of his own, he has grown to world renown on the backs of people we've never heard of. In this system, the artist is the one who gets credit as the "idea man," while his workers, the artistic proletariat if you will, languish in obscurity and in the heat of the glass kiln.
I continue this question of who gets to be called artist as I move on to the work of Alfonso Ossorio. His bizarre collage sculpture INXIT is the centerpiece of a new collection of his work at the OKC-MOA. The piece is a door and door frame with an extraordinary Hodge-podge of strange stuff glued to it including animal bones, plastic birds, and a human skull, all of it creepily encrusted with glass eyeballs. The interesting thing about it is that it looks like every road-side oddity created by any local crazy man who ever donned greasy overalls. Upon seeing this piece, I turned to Charissa and asked, "do you suppose that artists sometimes trick us by saying 'I'm going to throw some bull-crap together and you have to take it seriously because I have an MFA.'"
This theme continued when we watched a film introducing the MOA's temporary exhibit of the constructivist sculptures of Jill Downen. In the film, she discusses how she became obsessed with texture while being placed in time-out by her mother. She notice a crack on the wall and became so excited by it that her mother no longer used time out as a punishment, making her wash dishes instead. The film then goes on to show her walking around an empty New York apartment with a small video camera gushing over the textures of the interesting apartment. The film shows a clip of one of these videos, which she uses as inspiration. The shot is zoomed in unnaturally closely and the video is shaky, and the whole thing is dubbed over by Downen as she said odd, artsy things. It's strangely reminiscent of "the Blair Witch Project."
It occurred to me that, in both the cases of Downen and Ossorio, this art is being produced by people who, if they were anything but artists, would be taken as mentally ill. I told Charissa at this point that the only difference between an artist and a lunatic is which side of the river the person went to school. If she is studying at MIT, she is a maniac. If he is at Harvard, he is an artist.
This is, of course, a joke, but it makes a serious point. That is, the label of "artist" is perhaps a great deal more arbitrary than we have often assumed. The difference between Ossorio and the goofball in Memphis who painted his house pink and glued bizarre stuff to it is a Harvard degree. The difference between Downen and a troubled kid with a penchant for taking strange videos is a Danforth Scholarship at Washington. In the case of Duchamp's "Fountaine," the difference between a urinal and a sculpture is where in the art gallery is stands.
This is not to say that these are not talented artists. They are, without a doubt. This is to say that who gets to become an artist and who goes unnoticed forever has as much to do with the relatively arbitrary forces of access and educational opportunity as it does with artistic "genius." It bears repeating here that this idea is not new to me. Many artists themselves feel this tension and play with these concerns in their own work. But, having been confronted with these truths, I had to make something of them.
In 1917, while in New York, French artist Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from an iron works company, signed it "R. Mutt" and called it "Fountain." The piece (if indeed it is one) has been considered a practical joke, but has also been taken quite seriously. Duchamp added the piece to his collection of found art objects which he had titled "Readymades." In 1915, Duchamp began displaying every day objects in artful ways in order to critique the adoration of art and the artist. Though there is as much playfulness in his movement as there is philosophy, his concept of found art, and his statements behind it pre-figured important post-modern ideas, a few decades before post-modernism became all the rage in Europe.
With his found art movement, Duchamp intended to question what defines art. Where does craftsmanship or utility end and where does art begin? What makes one piece of white earthenware featuring graceful geometric curves art, and what makes another a urinal?
Duchamp, who was critical of artist worship, played with the notion that by signing something and putting it in a gallery, one elevates it as art. This is particularly true if the signature is that of a well-respected artist. In fact, what allowed many 20th century artists to experiment with deconstructive styles was that they were already accomplished artists. Picasso's cubism might never have been accepted if not for his more traditional early work, his almost Classical Rose Period, and the aesthetically pleasing Blue Period. But, because he was who he was, he was able to experiment. People would expect the sometimes childish looking work of cubism because it had his name on it.
Duchamp seemed to recognize this ability, and he purposefully questioned this by simply signing every day objects, and placing them in galleries, knowing that folks would therefore call this work art.
This suggests then that the label "art" is arbitrary. The fact that "Fountain" was critically received as art (it was, in fact, named the most influential art work of the 20th century in 2004), suggests this. It's acclaim clearly had nothing to do with the graceful, arching lines of the urinal, or the pure white color, or the perfect classical geometry of its shape. If this were so, it would have been the original craftsman who made the first of these who would deserve credit as "artist." Instead, Duchamp signed a pseudonym on it, included it in a gallery show, and it was art, simply because the right person (Duchamp) put it in the right place (a gallery).
This attack on the arbitrary nature of art is decidedly post-modern. Duchamp questions to what extent art is art because it has some intrinsic quality, or to what extent is art art simply because someone decided that it was. In this way Duchamp is, in 1917, already doing what post-modern thought would do just after World War II, decades later.
