#aestheticising my own exploitation

[gorseflowers]

okay wait i think in relation to that last post there’s definitely like. a strong trend of scottish people drawing that false colonisation comparison for a lot of reasons; to make us seem like the victims/good guys in contrast to england, to bolster the narrative around independence, etc etc.

and this is like utter speculation and very very influenced by my own limited life experience but i think it can also be something very attractive to latch on to when your connection to your culture is diminishing, or if it was never very strong in the first place. being able to point to the big evil empire and blame them as the reason you don’t speak scots/gaelic feels affirming. for a lot of people, the reason they don’t speak gaelic is because of the efforts england made to eradicate it -- but for a lot of other people, that’s just a more satisfying story to tell themselves.

i think because so much of what we really consider to be “scottish culture” in the past and in the modern day connects directly to rural communities and the working class, and the very street you grew up on can determine how closely connected you are, and how connected you stay, as chasing financial security often means reducing the strength of your accent and the like, there’s this disconnect between what’s marketed as scottish culture to tourists and what everyday scots are actually doing. whenever i see the picturesque, aestheticised version of scotland being advertised via blaze on this website, i think about the girl from my primary school who got to leave the inner city once on a school trip and cried looking out on the glen because she grew up in a council flat and had no idea the world could be that big. whenever i see people making fun of scottish accents, i think about how desperately i wished i could speak doric but how my mother didn’t want me to, because that’s the language of the financial hardship of her childhood and she wanted me to get somewhere in life. i think about the time when i was younger and went to see a children’s play in england, and the adults on stage made the joke “of course I cant count, i went to school in scotland!”, how scottish accents in film and tv are so often used for characters that are drunken, violent, stupid, barbaric, angry, unkempt, and this is all in good humour and not objectionable and definitely doesn’t contribute to any decline of scots language at all.

i think its hard to escape that sense of shame, and so it seems almost an easy way out to assign it to the british empire. but if you look at what we were encouraged to be proud of our nation and its people achieving, particularly in school, you get feats of invention that go hand in hand with feats of industrialisation, you get the “pristine natural landscape” that is truncated and exploited for the hunting industry, you get art and architecture bought and built with slave money. every year my primary school held a burns day celebration that never mentioned his stint as an overseer on a plantation in jamaica. my high school was founded with profits from slave labour. the biggest tourist draws in the city i grew up in were the properties of royal families past and current. my gran likes to tell me about how the oil money went straight through aberdeen and into the pockets of ceos, leaving the city a shell gutted by its own ambitions. so rarely in my own young life have i experienced any effort as a nation to celebrate our culture as it simply exists, rather than as a vehicle for profit, and once again this is utter conjecture but i think its a symptom of a different problem, one that has a lot more to do with class and culture than colonisation.

i remember once my dad telling me about the conditions his grandparents endured growing up, the squalor and starvation. i remember he said “back then aberdeen was like the third world”, and the comparison struck me, because it was shocking and it was meant to be shocking, in a way that said “that’s not meant to happen to us”. and like i don’t know exactly where this is going other than to say that the whole braveheart notion of an oppressed nation united in poetic rebellion seems like a very palatable alternative to the complicated and unsatisfying reality, of a nation containing many oppressed peoples, many of whom were and are more than ready to play a tangible and lasting role in the oppression of others if it means personal gain for them.

and i don’t really like people using the whole union of the crowns thing as a gotcha bc its not as if this was a democratic decision made by scotland as a nation rather than solely by its ruling class at the time, but the truth of it remains that it wasn’t a colonisation. it was more like a bad investment. and yeah i feel like maybe we need to put less blame on instances of violence and oppression that targeted specific groups and lauding them as the reason why any of us and all of us are disconnected from our culture and disjointed as a nation, and start looking more at our history of bad investments, with the intention to actually take responsibility for them

#yeah i hope this makes some sense #once again this is very very influenced by my own background on the east coast/inner city #so like i'm not trying to diminish the impact of the clearances and such like #i was just like. Many Thoughts Head Full after reading the previous post which is once again so well worded #scottish tag #mine

[foucaultfoucaultfoucault-blog]

The word in the beginning, the man in the middle, the meme in the end

INTRODUCTION Reading II: Design and Knowledge Amelie Scharffetter 29.9.2019

I am aware that this introduction text is not supposed to turn into a literary criticism but with Gleicks statement  in mind “Language serves as cultures first catalyst. It supersedes mere imitation, spreading knowledge by abstraction and encoding” I couldn’t help but focus on use of language and content equally when reading ‘Man in the middle’ and now writing my reaction.

In Mills text both language and content are testimony to the times of their origination. Some areas, such as the focus on men as makers and women as consumers are irritating to read but apart from this Mills’ writing style - to me highly entertaining and at times amusing, moving somewhere between polemic and poetic - offers not only material for thought processes but also a breeding ground for memes. His art is a business, but his business is art” is just one of the many statements that lend themselves to memesis.

I hope I can use the remaining 600 words to make a connection between issues described in Mills text, the characteristics of Memes in Gleicks essay and the thoughts that kept forming in my head whilst reading regarding the mutation and devaluation of words in globalised and digitalised capitalistic systems.

Many of the points Mills is making are still applicable today. The dual involvement of the designer, the “enriched muddle of ideals they variously profess, the insecurity they often feel about their practice” are still as prevalent as what Mills terms the three obsolesces (technological, artificial, status). There are still to some extend commercial hacks and commercial stars and certainly the designer as marketeer is a principle that has not diminished since 1958.

In his writing the points above are addressed to the designer in the American capitalistic system. However, what Mills defines as an American cultural apparatus, one that is established commercially, can now be seen as a global cultural apparatus. There might be of course variations of this but I would argue that in a globalised world that runs on capitalistic systems that don’t differ much from the ones established in the US we deal in essence with the same principles as the ones Mills attributes to the economy in mid century America. Only now we are adding the dimension of digitalisation and globalisation.

According to Gleick "clichés are memes” and Mills states that “in our everyday life we experience not solid and immediate facts but stereotypes of meaning. He goes further on to say that “the world men are going to believe they understand is now, in this cultural apparatus, being defined and built, made into a slogan, a story, a diagram … a formula and presented to them.” Does this mean that the designer, who is part of the so called cultural apparatus, creates nothing more than stereotypes meaning cliches meaning memes?

Mills way out of the designers dilemma is by focusing on the values of craftsmanship. Reading this text in 2019, I cannot help but immediately frown. Not only because I do not find that he offers an actually feasible solution but because the very term has been so heavily bastardised by the industry in recent years.

“Artistic and intellectual endeavour too have now become part of society as a salesroom”. These words, Mills own, are catching up with his very own endeavours. The concepts of craftsmanship have been twisted and turned and become fashionable. There is no authority defining what craftsmanship is. We might have trademarks of quality but that doesn’t hinder large scale industries to freely use terms such as craftsmanship and sustainability for marketing purposes. Complex ideas are appropriated for commercial ambitions, are being boiled down into buzzwords, wrapped up in inspirational quotes, shared in an instant - they become memes. The purpose here is not to return to craftsmanship but to use the ideals we connect to it to elevate brands and industries to imaginative higher moral and qualitative grounds. It is not how “crafted” the actual product is but how well the craft aspect of it is sold (Mills makes a similar point about the role of the designer).

Mills idea of supporting craftsmanship is to let the public grab parts of production processes. Again, hasn’t the slow-motion, close-focus, highly aestheticised portrait film of craftspeople become another way to tell a brands “story”? Here the public can more or less participate in the making process but the message is still the same and the craftsperson has been turned into a marketeer. And has the design industry not used the idea of “craftsman lifestyle” where leisure and work are inseparable in order to verify the exploitation of interns and designers? Is the prevalent working culture we find ourselves in based on a meme?

I cannot come to any specific conclusions other than that I want to understand what the word craftsmanship entailed before it appeared on the instagram feeds of global fashion brands and fast-food chains. I have been heavily under the influence of my meme-like perception of craftsmanship while reading this text. Maybe it is time to unlearn my notion of craftsmanship, free it of its irony. Maybe there is something very valuable in Mills solution that I fail to understand.

Or maybe there isn’t. In either case, both Gleicks and Mills text sparked in me the interest in issues we are facing when it comes to the dependency on words to express knowledge, ideals and ideas and their vulnerability in relation to devaluation and appropriation by the capitalistic system. Are there other non-word depending methods and expression of knowledge that are less vulnerable? Is this linked to etymology? Artistic research? Visual communication? Should I have focused more on Johanna Druckers text?

In the beginning was the word (or information?), in the middle was the man (at least in 1958), in the end was the meme (and lots of confusion).

[madeleine-says]

On artful tragedy

Attending the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design’s Graphic Design programme has been my dream for ages. Now that I’m in Providence, it seems that I’m at a loss for what to do with the BFA I’ll be receiving in two and a bit years. 

I applied to RISD thinking that art was my Life, my Everything. The reason I take each breath every morning, desperate to pick up the paintbrush, the palette, and the canvas (okay: turn my laptop on and click on the bouncing Photoshop icon) and get to Work. I would draw for hours on end, while watching TV, while listening to music. Hell, I could even tell the time based on the show that aired while I was drawing. If my nerdy friends had math and science to be engineers, I had Art to make me an Artist. 

Now that I’m in RISD, the world’s most prestigious art and design institution (tm), I have fallen out of love with Art. Art capital “A”. 

Being one of the best art students, if not the best, in my high school to just being one of the many talented artists in RISD was a severe blow to my self-esteem. However, this plight is not the reason why I had a falling out with my previous lover. I was lucky enough to be able to bounce back from this minor bump in the yellow brick road. Not a lot of people at RISD have been successful. Some of them even drop out of the school altogether, unable to handle the stress of critique (which sometimes borders unprofessional comments), a crazy workload (I had 30+ hours of homework on top of 30+ hours of class every week during my freshman year), and just the very isolating promise of dedicating your Life to your Work FOREVER. 

I’m clearly still in RISD. In the Graphic Design Programme to be exact. And I really love my department: the teachers, the classes, the work that I’m doing. And yet I still find myself unhappy with my situation. I know that I should not be, but I am. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I have found myself in such a predicament. RISD has the tendency to bombard us, the students, with questions of identity politics. I understand that it’s a response to the growing dissatisfaction students have with how faculty and staff treat works that exist beyond the European canon of art, as exemplified through this video regarding “The Room of Silence”. I have experienced this phenomenon, when I made work about Filipino culture. My classmates and teachers were just so scared about commenting on the concept of my work. I understand why they would be: I was the only student of Filipino heritage in my class. It’s so difficult to comment on cultural work outside of one’s own culture. The shortcomings of current American politics, in terms of inclusivity, only makes this situation all the more difficult. 

Due to events in my personal life that have forced me to question my sanity and position in society, I decided to stop making work about Filipino culture, about being Filipino. I don’t think that this is a break or my “evolution” as an Artist. Although my life has not been ideal, I don’t think that aestheticising my “problems” would solve any of them. Moreover, as an ethnic and racial minority in the United States, I play the role as my culture’s unofficial representative, whether I like it or not. When I make art about my culture, I am exploiting the long and drawn out history of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonialism. I am romanticising the ways Filipinos have suffered for a Western audience. I realised that I live in the United States. People from the Philippines will never get to experience my work, yet I am using their experiences. Am I exploiting them for my own artistic and academic benefit? After all, it is me who is making work for my portfolio to get a job from so-and-so company. 

Over the summer, while I was processing the aforementioned events, I read Miguel Syjuco’s “Ilustrado”. The book was a hodgepodge of narratives from different sources and was an enjoyable satire of bourgeois (or should I say “burgis”) Filipino society. More importantly, it brought up the question of who the artist makes art for. In a heated debate on the works of the fictitious author Crespin Salvador, two critics of Salvador question whether or not Salvador made works for or about Filipinos. After all, the majority of the writer’s works were about Filipinos yet written and published in English, the language of the upper classes that reinforces the view of coloniser as strong and native as weak. I looked at my own artistic practice: going to school in the world’s most prestigious art university in the United States, making work about Filipino culture, and then showing it to my American classmates. Why am I making work about the Philippines when I don’t have the opportunity to get critique from Filipinos? Why make work about Filipinos, a group of people immensely affected by American imperialism, and then hope to elicit the sympathy of the very Imperialists in question?! 

I guess my abstinence in regards to making cultural work stands as a pathetic protest to my burgeoning unhappiness with how cultural dialogue is treated here in RISD. I don’t want to make art that amplifies my voice on issues on the suffering of those less privileged than I. I don’t want to make art that reaffirms Filipinos as the victims of colonial history, to make tragedy porn. When I exploit the experiences of marginalised groups, am I better than the white girls I make fun of? Not really. In fact, I might as well start drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes instead of mango juice. 

#writing #art #risd

[katherinemacbride]

To Gloria, Gloria, Laura, with love.

The video I’m going to show you in a few minutes is called ‘you can be anything you want but you have to believe it’. Right about where feminism crashes into neoliberalism. How to maintain the possibilities of recognition, representation and redistribution all at once?

Within this question the concept — and the purposing of the concept — of self-esteem is not straightforward.

In 1965 a series of three films were made called ‘Gloria: Three Approaches to Psychotherapy’. These featured three of the most eminent north-american psychotherapists of the time demonstrating their method with the same client — a woman pseudonymously named ‘Gloria’. These films are still used today as a teaching tool. Although they were not made for TV broadcast, the fact that they were filmed with the same set of parameters had the effect of making the series a type of competitive performance by each of the participating therapists, each of whom had defined or authored his own approach to psychotherapy.

Carl Rogers. Person-centred approaches to therapy. Based on unconditional positive regard. Albert Ellis. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. One of the forerunners in the shift towards cognitive behavioural models of therapy. Fritz Perls. Gestalt therapy. Focusing on embodied experience in the here and now and the links between physical actions and felt emotions.

These three approaches move in and out of fashion depending on how they fit within prevailing socio-political-economic discourses, so these films have been read differently at different points. I’m going to describe them from my current perspective.  

Carl Rogers spoke with Gloria about the fact that she was a single mother who was struggling with how to tell her daughter that she was sexually active. Gloria brought this topic because she wanted to establish an openness in her relationship with her daughter in order to protect her from developing similar inhibitions and insecurities to Gloria. Rather than think about women’s roles and why it felt difficult to Gloria to have these conversations, or what it was like for her to raise her daughter without support, Carl Rogers focused on Gloria’s relationships with men — her father, her ex-husband etc.

Albert Ellis spent his time talking to Gloria about her feelings of others, mostly men, being superior to her.  

Fritz Perls did not address any of Gloria’s life experiences. In their session together the focus was kept on how Gloria’s body and gestures restricted her to roles she had been set and/or had set for herself. The impetus was to explore ways of becoming aware of this and experimenting with alternatives; they worked together to consider how women can express anger, not be subdued by feelings of insufficiency, and not be tied into little girl roles reliant on other men to come and rescue them.  

None of the three sessions considered the impact of societal norms on the subject’s emotions. This was to come later for Anglophone psychotherapies, once second and third wave feminisms, and poststructuralism and beyond’s pluralities started to intersect with therapeutic practices. It also coincided with the extension of therapeutic services and training to groups who did not fit the norms of the white bourgeois milieu from which much therapeutic theory and practice had developed. Therapy became relational, became co-.

The session between Gloria and Fritz has been much criticised, mostly by proponents of the other two approaches; the intensity of the interaction has been read as aggression on the part of Fritz. From a contemporary perspective, he seems, as do all three therapists, paternalistic. However, on viewing the three films it appeared to me as the only one in which any change occurred within the limits of the session time. Obviously there are huge issues with the power dynamics inherent in the whole set up, but it is the only session of the three where the therapist suggests the possibility of meeting the client on equal terms and allows his own role to be up for change too.  

It should be noted that Gloria herself was a schooled performer — she had attended a lot of previous therapy with one of the instigators of the experiment and was selected because of her ‘strength’ so she was not naive about how to present herself.

I have spent a lot of time with the footage and realise now, through this ongoing conversation that I have with the recording, that I identify quite strongly with some of Gloria’s struggles. I have started to feel a genuine love towards her even though I only know her as she presented in front of a camera for a few hours in 1965. I think she handles it well and presents herself quite differently with each person which undermines the ideology of competing models.  

The video I’m just about to show you grew from this sense of affinity and is part of what has become an ongoing exploration of the representation of Glorias. (I’d like to say thank you to Patti Smith for her excellent contribution to this area.) I’m not altogether sure when I switch between being an artist looking at a material, when I become a fan obsessed with it and when I lose control of my own image. In this version we will see Gloria briefly with her recorded voice and my re-filming of the original video. We’ll see some interview material that relates to the public image, performance and presentation of Laura Branigan, the 1980’s pop star who had a breakthrough hit in 1982 with Gloria.  And we’ll also see some performance by myself.  

I was born in 1982 and had a fairly uncomplicated relationship with the song until I listened to the lyrics in order to learn it for karaoke.  I found I couldn’t sing it even under many layers of irony for the lyrics of Gloria are incredibly sexist; they describe a woman living under an alias being tracked down by the men from her past that she has had sex with.  There are strong implications of violence and abuse under the catchy tune, and the whole thing is aestheticised and made sexy with a glittery disco ball and a voyeuristic opportunity to stare at Laura Branigan in the video. According to Brannigan it’s a song about a girl who got on the wrong track — she speaks about this with empathy and sadness for the character in the song.  I think it’s possible to understand her comments from a feminist perspective — Gloria was exploited by men and through this lost her potential to control her own agency. Although to do this, we unfortunately would also have to go along with the supposition that female sexuality is some form of force that cannot be used with agency by the women who posses it, and is irresistible to men who cannot control their responses to it. There is a lot to find problematic in the songs of Laura Branigan, but there is also much to find affirmative — she grew to take much more control over the production of her own music than is the norm for female pop stars today.

On watching her be interviewed by so many male interviewers I have been impressed that she managed to maintain some independence over her own image. She would do things that confused expectations of the interview situation, using her body and her voice to make these unexpected vocal interventions in interviews. She would turn to face and directly question wolf whistling audiences with a, ‘what is it?’

So this is with love, anger, and respect to the women who are appropriated, have their form fixed by the camera and survive. I’m going to quote Ru Paul speaking to Laura Branigan and the audience here with love and irony and despair. If we take conversation to be about holding more than one thing in your head at once, hopefully this quote will be understood in multiple ways — I leave it to you to figure out where the love, irony and despair might fit,

‘and guys remember, learn to love yourselves, because if you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else, can I get an amen in here please.’

https://vimeo.com/75015892