MITPressLog

"Our Kind of Movie"

October is LGBT History Month. Last Friday, we posted an excerpt from Louis-Georges Tin’s The Invention of Heterosexual Culture. Today’s post is an excerpt from Douglas Crimp’s “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol.

 

 

 

Just as shame is both productive and corrosive of queer identity, the switching point between stage fright and stage presence, between being a wallflower and being a diva, so too is it simultaneously productive and corrosive of queer revaluations of dignity and worth.

In his book about the banishment of sex from contemporary queer politics, The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner argues that we need to “develop an ethical response to the problem of shame.” “The difficult question is not: how do we get rid of our sexual shame?” Warner writes. “The question, rather, is this: what will we do with our shame? And the usual response is: pin it on someone else.”

How does this work, performatively? Sedgwick explains: “The absence of an explicit verb from ‘Shame on you’ records the place in which an I, in conferring shame, has effaced itself and its own agency. Of course the desire for self-effacement is the defining trait of–what else?–shame. So the very grammatical truncation of ‘Shame on you’ marks it as a product of a history out of which an I, not withdrawn is projecting shame–toward another I, an I deferred, that has yet and with difficulty to come into being, if at all, in the place of the shamed second person.

Saying “Shame on you” or “For shame” casts shame onto another that is both felt to be one’s own, and, at the same time, disavowed as one’s own. But in those already shamed, the shame-prone, the shame is not so easily shed or so simply projected: It manages also to persist as one’s own. This can lend it the capacity for articulating collectivities of the shamed. Warner explains,

"A relation to others [in queer contexts] begins in an acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be the shared condition they also know how to communicate through such comradery a moving and unexpected form of generosity. No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself on generosity but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room. Queer scenes are the true salons des refuses, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality."

The sad thing about the contemporary politics of gay and lesbian pride is that it works in precisely the opposite way: It calls for a visibility predicated on homogeneity and on excluding anyone who does not conform to norms that are taken to be the very morality we should be happy to accept as the onus of our so-called maturity. It thus sees shame as conventional indignity rather than the affective substrate necessary to the transformation of one’s distinctiveness into a queer kind of dignity. This is why the queer culture of the 1960s, made visible in Warhol’s films, is so necessary a reminder of what we need to know how.

Defining Laughter

Today’s Happiness Happens Month feature is Laughter: Notes on a Passion by Anca Parvulescu, which uncovers an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

 

 

 

The year is 1579. Having kept the manuscript in a drawer for twenty years, Laurent Joubert publishes his Treatise on Laughter. His goal: “leave nothing on the unusual topic unsounded.” The treatise is an early modern encyclopedia of laughing matters…

What is laughter? Joubert’s catalog of definitions returns us to a materialism long forgotten today. Laughter is “a trembling and a noise”; “a sound producing movement”; “a movement which stretches the muscles of the face”; “the dilating of the parts of the mouth and of the face.” In laughter, “the chest shakes, the lungs produce an interrupted sound, the mouth opens, and the lips draw back.” To the question: What does laughter look like? Joubert gives a complex answer:

Everybody sees clearly that in laughter the face is moving, the mouth widens, the eyes sparkle andtear, the cheeks redden, the breast heaves, the voice becomes interrupted; and when it goes on for a long time the veins in the throat become enlarged, the arms shake, and the legs dance about, the belly pulls in and feels considerable pain; we cough, perspire, piss, and besmirch ourselves by dint of laughing, and sometimes we even faint away because of it. This need not be proven.

Laughter is a convulsion of the face. It involves a specific constellation of functions of the face: the mouth, the eyes, the cheeks, the voice. When laughter becomes a question not of a single burst but a series of bursts (“when it goes on for a long time”), it also involves the rest of the body—arms, legs, belly, breast, veins in the throat. The body laughs. Extreme physiological changes might occur, for one can feel pain, cough, perspire, piss, besmirch oneself, faint. The body in laughter is a convulsive  assemblage, whose parts shake and dance about, refusing to form a totality. The laughing face is itself bursting, its mouth suddenly stretched, its eyes sparking, color splashing its cheeks with shades of red.

Joubert further complicates the scene of laughter:

Some men, when they laugh, sound like geese hissing, others like grumbling goslings; some recall the sigh of woodland pigeons, or doves in their widowhood; others the hoot-owl; one an Indian rooster, another a peacock; others give out a peep-peep, like chicks; for others it is like hose neighing, or an ass heehawing, or a dog that yaps or is chocking, some people call to mind the sound of dry-axled carts, others, gravel in a pail, others yet a boiling pot of cabbage; and some have still another resonance, aside from the look on their face and the grimacing, so variedly diverse that nothing parallels it.

Not only is laughter distorting the face into a grimace and shaking the body convulsively, but it also produces a certain, hard-to-define, sound. Joubert describes laughter’s sound onomatopoeically; laughter sounds “like” geese hissing, horses neighing, the peep-peep of chicks, or the hee-hawing of asses. Even when laughter sounds like a pot of boiling cabbage or gravel in a pail, the description speaks to the ear of Joubert’s reader; one is challenged to hear these sounds. 

Monday Eye Candy: When Marina Abramović Dies

Happy Monday! Today's eye candy celebrates contemporary performance artist Marina Abramović. The "Marina Abramović The Artist is Present" documentary was just released in the UK last month, and screenings will run through mid-October. The documentary follows Abramović's preparations for The Museum of Modern Art's 2010 retrospective of her work. Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

For an in-depth read about Marina Abramović, check out James Westcott's When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography, which draws on Westcott's personal observations of "the grandmother of performance art," along with hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with the artist and the people closest to her.

Boxer

CNN recently ran a photo blog feature on Claressa Shields, a.k.a. T-Rex, the youngest-ever female Olympic boxer.

To celebrate boxing, which will include female boxers this year for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, we’re featuring Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture, published in 1996.

This catalog, packed with knockout photos, emerged from the exhibition Boxer, which was produced by the Walsall Museum & Art Gallery in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London in late 1995. Gilane Tawadros, the former director of the Institute of International Visual Arts, writes in the acknowledgments:

“[Boxer] emerged out of a conversation between John Gill, Malcolm Bacon and myself about Joyce Carol Oates’ insightful reflections on the sport in On Boxing. Oates’ ambivalence about boxing and her perspective as a working class woman who is both attracted and repelled by the sport, suggests that boxing is a discursive and representational space which lies beyond simplistic morality on the one hand or uncritical celebration on the other. The heated discussion which ensued about the ambivalence of the sport and its status as an arena in which issues of race, class, and sexuality are staged/acted out became the starting point for both the exhibition and the book.”

The texts contained in Boxer range from David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey’s perception of the “‘descent’ of boxing from its high modernist ideals and position as an ‘authentic’ cultural phenomenon into the ‘slam-bang brawls’ favored by new television audiences of the 1950s and later into  a public relations exercise, increasingly determined by corporate interests” to an essay from our very own editor, Roger Conover, on boxing and art, specifically on the “iconoclastic but elusive figure of Arthur Cravan, self-styled poet and boxer and tormentor of the Parisian art world c. 1910-17,” to an excerpt from On Boxing, where Joyce Carol Oates offers her perspective on the male-dominated sport. Boxer also contains essays by four women as well as the work of women artists. Here are a few images from the book:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Buttrick, Cottingham, Yorkshire, England, World Fly and Bantamweight Boxing Champion 1950-1960. Courtesy: Jennifer Hargreaves.

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn Davies and Forrester Joseph at a female boxing/kick boxing night at York Hall, London. Photograph: Gillian Allard, 1994. Copyright: Gillian Allard. Courtesy: Gillian Allard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kenwood UK Ltd. print advertisement, originally run with the caption: “Don’t give up the day job, Cathy. Cathy Clark, administrator, Communications division, Kenwood UK. Works in Watford. Puts her feet up in the evenings. Kenwood, it’s the people who make it.” Courtesy: James Abelson, London. Ad. Agency: Buckfield Lord & Co.

 

In Memory of Chris Marker

We are saddened to learn of the death of Chris Marker, one of French cinema's most influential artists and author of Staring Back and La Jetée (Zone Books), based on his legendary short film of the same name. As a tribute to him, here is a passage from Chris Marker: La Jetée by Janet Harbord (Afterall Books).

In a short piece of writing to accompany the digital release of La Jetée in 2003, Marker gives us a memory, a recollection of his first attempt at making a film. Inspired as a boy by a hand-wound projecting box, a Patheorama, he drew a series of pictures of his cat, glued them together and added captions. As he scrolled the images along, ‘all of a sudden, the cat belonged to the same universe as the characters in Ben Hur or Napoleon. I had gone through the looking glass.’ Cinema is at once more complex and more simple than previously imagined. It may be resourced by a complex array of materials, but it can also be reduced to the simple movement of frames through a gate. ‘Thirty years passed. Then I made La Jetée,’ he writes, as though this childhood image took its own time of return. Marker’s fondness for composing film from bits and pieces, material gleaned from unassuming aspects of everyday life, can be glimpsed in the intervening period in his documentary projects. Cartoons, drawings, posters, maps, advertisements, poems, archive footage, paintings and engravings are used, pasted in, mixed up and drawn into some sort of narration. In what appears to be a highly idiosyncratic practice, Marker also incorporates various art movements that pre-date him: the political photomontage of the 1930s, Dadaist cut-ups, Surrealist juxtaposition and the Lettriste passion for writing systems.

Going through the looking glass is to enter a place of different scales and where time may run backwards as well as forwards. Yet there is something else here to do with frames. The looking glass is, after all, a mirror, a framing device, and in La Jetée we are given the opportunity of viewing photography through the frame of cinema.

Ai Weiwei on the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony

We’re excited for London’s Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, so in eager anticipation, we’ve been checking out reactions to Beijing’s iconic 2008 Opening Ceremony to tide us over. Although the Beijing Opening Ceremony garnered an overwhelming number of positive reactions from around the world, Ai Weiwei, Chinese dissident artist, architect, activist, and outspoken social critic, and a designer of the 2008 Olympics’ famous Bird’s Nest stadium, provided a completely different perspective on his blog. Chinese authorities shut down the blog in 2009, but his posts have been published in Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, translated into English by Lee Ambrozy—the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language. 

Here’s Ai Weiwei’s post regarding the 2008 Opening Ceremony.

 

Closing the Opening Ceremony

POSTED ON AUGUST 8, 2008

Those incompetent tools perverted the Olympic opening ceremony into the archetypal example of bogus “traditional” rubbish, a blasphemous “spirit of liberty,” a visual crap pile of phony affection and hypocritical unction. Offensive noise pollution and a monarchical mentality have been revived as a vaudeville variety show. It was the ultimate rendering of a culture under centralized state power, an encyclopedia of spiritual subjugation. Before we can stand up straight, we are heavily bent over once again.

We sacrificed the cheer and good will of the entire population in exchange for a worthless fantasy, a soulless political whitewash, and a hopelessly humorless display of puffery and helpless bravado. It was a phony scene of cultural prosperity, one that runs counter to reality…

As for the performance of those directors and their undermined sense of public morals, I’ve said it before: it’s like savoring the flavor of a fly—a complete, aggressive, and overbearing housefly, from head to tail.

Such is your fate, and you must own up to it. That’s your face bearing the revolting smile, and you will be remembered for leaving your shameful mark.

 

Yayoi Kusama Fever

It's been a big week for Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Not only has the Whitney Museum of American Art unveiled its retrospective exhibition of her work, but Yayoi Kusama's collaboration with Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs was also launched this week to coincide with the Whitney exhibition's opening. We've put together a roundup of this week's media coverage surrounding the Whitney exhibit and Kusama-Vuitton launch. Why, you ask?  Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli’s Field by Jo Applin (Afterall Books) comes out this November. Be sure to check our website for more details and to preorder this book. And now, for the roundup:

 

The Whitney Exhibition:

Holland Cotter reviews the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in The New York Times.  

Eric Wilson talks about how “melding  art with fashion” is not a new idea on The New York Times’ "On the Runway" blog.

The Wall Street Journal’s "Scene Asia" blog discusses how Yayoi Kusama benefits from the exhibition.

Flavorwire provides a slideshow preview of the exhibition’s highlights. 

The UK's Telegraph posted a slideshow of the various celebrities who paid tribute to Yayoi Kusama at the Whitney Museum on July 10th.

 

The Kusama-Vuitton Collaboration:

The Nation discusses how Vuitton has gone “positively dotty.” 

From Artinfo: Kyle Chayka reviews the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art and there’s also a video called “Yayoi Kusama Doppelgangers Preside Over Her Louis Vuitton Debut on Fifth Avenue.”

New York magazine provides some great snapshots in a couple of slideshows: one contains a few pictures  of Yayoi Kusama and the Louis Vuitton store window displays in “Street Style From the Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton Launch,” and the other reveals the “Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton Lookbook.”

Children’s Awareness Month Roundup

June is Children’s Awareness Month in the United States. To celebrate, here are a few titles that talk about children—where they live, how they are raised, what they play--and why (or why not) we have them.

 

Children Without a State, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, is the first book to address children’s statelessness and lack of legal status as a human rights issue.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert, Companions in Wonder is an anthology of adventures with children in the natural world, from capturing fireflies to encountering a grizzly bear.

 

 

 

 

 

Engineering Play by Mizuko Ito explains how the influential industry that produced such popular games as Oregon Trail and KidPix emerged from experimental efforts to use computers as tools in child-centered learning.

 

 

 

 

Parentonomics by Joshua Gans talks about what every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting.

 

 

 

 

Christine Overall’s Why Have Children is a wide-ranging exploration of whether or not choosing to procreate can be morally justified--and if so, how.

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: Ai Weiwei's Blog

Today's eye candy is from Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 by Ai Weiwei; edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy. This book is culled from the blog that Chinese authorities shut down in 2009 and offers a collection of Ai's online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language. It contains 58 b&w illustrations. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: America Starts Here

Happy Memorial Day! In honor of this patriotic holiday, today’s Monday Eye Candy features the cover of America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning. This book contains descriptions and images of Ericson’s and Ziegler’s works, which conceptualized America’s history in art. One example is the cover image—a house camouflaged in the municipally-approved “authentic colors” of Charleston, South Carolina, with the historically-related names of the commercial paints written on the patches. The title of the book comes from another piece of art done by the duo—old windows taken from a factory in Philadelphia, arranged in their original placement, cracked in honor of the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, and named after a slogan used to promote Philadelphia tourism in the 1980s. To see more of their eye-catching work, take a look at this truly American book.