Saturday, November 27, 2010

Stephen Leuthold's "Introduction" deals with the problematic term "aesthetics" in reference to indigenous artists and individuals.  The problem lies in the fact that indigenous aesthetics and what constitutes native art is more often than not seen from the non-native, Western perspective.  (Indigenous "refers to people who are minorities in their own homeland, who have suffered oppression in the context of colonial conquest, and who view their political situation in the context of neocolonialism".)
-  problems with definitions (aesthetics, indigenous, art, representation)
-  important to understand how indigenous aesthetics functions in intercultural context; must acknowledge that when studying "others", one is looking from within a certain socio-cultural framework that dictates certain knowledge
-  could be problematic to use the word "art" in relationship to native expression; "art" needs to be redefined to be more all encompassing before it can be applied again

Claudette Lauzon's "What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore's Memorial to Missing Women"
Rebecca Belmore's Vigil (2002)
performance as memorial to over sixty women - sex trade workers, predominantly Aboriginal - that have gone missing in the Downtown Eastside neigbourhood of Vancouver
-  sex workers are members of a marginalized social group whose discourse invariably presupposes that they should not be given a proper place in society.  Claudette Lauzon suggests that this discourse needs to be deconstructed.
-  postmodernist thinking
-  Belmore's The Named and the Unnamed offers a discussion on identity politics and representation
-  demands to make the absence present by creating material manifestations of the absent women (blood-stained clothes, torn dress, etc.)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Postmodernity and Identity: Identity Politics

Architect Charles Jencks saw the demolition and destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing complex (modernist architecture) in St. Louis, Missouri on March 16th, 1972 as the end of modernism.  Postmodernity - in the 1960s (late post-industrial capitalism) - saw the dissolution of meta-narratives (large ideological structures and comprehensive ideas that explain the world to us).  What is Post Modernity?  "In a cultural sense, post modernity is a reaction to high modernism and some of its main ideologies."
(See, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Fredric Jameson).










 The atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 marked the end of the Enlightenment Project.


1968
In 1968, student and social riots, revolting against moral degradation and social injustice happened across the West.  There was a increasing disgust with democracy, capitalism and festishization of objects.  All of these movements failed and as a result, a new generation of thinkers, who were aware of what happened before and how things could, surfaced.  Postmodernity is not interested in reaching conclusions and making logical assessments; the aim is to have an understanding of the plurality of answers and the discourses available for research.

Identity Politics
The notion of identity itself is only first put into the question in the 1980s.  Identity politics recognized the emergence of marginalized social groups and the attempts by the members of these oppressed groups to fight for equality, political power and a place in society.  Criticism:  1)  Essentializing takes priority and pressure is placed on individuals to identify themselves with a particular social group.  2)  Stereotypes and generalizations are made about social groups and thus, do not do justice to individual identities.


Films that Deal with Identity Politics


 Memento (2000)


Fight Club (1999)

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Coco Fusco's "The Other History of Intercultural Performance"
Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit... was a performance piece by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.  "Our plan was to live in a golden cage for three days, presenting ourselves as undiscovered Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico that had somehow been overlooked by Europeans for five centuries.  We called our homeland Guatinau, and ourselves Guatinauis."  The exhibition of indigenous people in Western society has a been long tradition stemming nearly five centuries ago.  With the performance, the artists had originally sought to create a "satirical commentary" on Western notions of the Other and the primitive Noble Savage.  Although they were actors playing the role of Amerindians, this was never openly declared to the public and many people never stopped to question their authenticity.  Fusco's article documents the varying responses by people who saw the show when it travelled to various museums in the world.



Thursday, November 11, 2010

Museums/Institutions and Cultural Representation

Modernity saw the public push for public institutions organized by the government.   Museums, galleries and other public institutions are public spaces (see: Michel Foucault) which organize knowledge and construct individuals and by extension, identities.  This organization of knowledge is made possible using ideological apparatuses, such as catalogues, didactic panels and manners of display, all of which serve to create a cultural identity.  In a museum or gallery, the object does not stand alone.  Rather, it acts as a signifier in conjunction with the didactic texts that are placed alongside it.


As Carol Duncan mentions in the introduction to "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship", the Louvre became the first modern art museum when it was transformed from a old royal palace into a public museum of the French Republic.  The museum, in many ways, stood for the same wealth, power and political authority that had once been attributable to the Church.  It is important to note the differences between how France and England saw the public museum.  Whilst France saw the museum, first and foremost, as equality for the masses, England saw the museum primarily as an educational museum - no different from a correctional facility.


Carol Duncan sees the museum as a public, secular ritual.  Museums, through its grand architecture - often evocative of classical Greek temples and churches - and opulent display becomes a secular ritual site.  One is overwhelmed when entering a museum and almost instantly, one's body language changes.  In a museum, objects become separated from everyday life.  This removal of objects from their original context and the natural environment in which they were created invariably means they have to be recontextualized within the pristine walls of the museum.  In museums, the focus is on visual display.


The more art becomes abstract, the more museums simplify their architecture.  Hence the neo-classical temple has over the years evolved into the pristine "white box".  Take for example the National Gallery of London (top image) and the White Cube Gallery located in East London (bottom image):




Annie E. Coombe's article, "Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities" deals with the problematic issues surrounding the display of ethographic collections in museums and the attempts made at revising the current methods.  There appears to be a dichotomy between western high art and ethnographic art - the latter more often seen as artifacts, not art.  Colonial order was supported by the development of capitalism, festishization of objects.  Objects are removed from their natural reality and thus knowledge about these objects given by museums is decontextualized.  Gayarti Spivak suggests that we need to renegotiate and reorganize the categories by which ethnographic collections are displayed in museums - often in sections of their own, thus only further reinforcing the sense of otherness and exoticness.

Exposition Universelle Paris, 1889
-organized at the height of French colonization efforts
Timothy Mitchell.
-representation of Cairo, Egypt in the exposition:  recreated a street Cairo by bringing in stones and people and donkeys from Egypt = similar to a film set, artificial world; visual displays with no sense of reality (see: Jean Baudrillard's Hyperreal)
-European organization of cultures further proves colonial order; see the world as a picture.
-feel close yet removed simultaneously/ push-pull effect  


Artists Whose Work Deals With Museums


Sophie Calle's Last Seen (1991) offers a wonderful dialogue on museum display.  Shortly after works were stolen from the Isabelle Stuart Gardener Museum in Boston, Calle took photographs of the empty spaces where the paintings once hung and asked the museum staff to describe the missing paintings to her.  Beside the photograph of these empty spaces, Calle recorded the descriptions she received of the missing work.  Last Seen is a commentary on museum display and its use of didactic panels.


 "Last Seen: Vermeer The Concert"



 Sophie's description of "The Concert" 

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Paris is Burning

Paris is Burning (1990)

Directed by Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning documents the lives of African Americans, gays and transgenders in New York City.  The documentary deals with the marginalized social groups of the United States and how the members of these socially oppressed groups struggle and deal with their identities.