Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for June, 2009
Citizen J.
At 11.26 my brother (40) txted me to say ‘Michael Jackson has died!’. To which I could only reply ‘What?!’. But, yes it is true the pop icon Michael Jackson (50) is dead. And we were certainly not the only ones holding a digital vigil. According to Mashable (the online Social Media Guide):
‘The death of one of the world’s greatest pop stars is having a global impact, but social media brings into sharp focus the scale of the world’s shock and sadness. Previously, we might have learned of a pop star’s passing via TV, or a friend or coworker: now knowledge is immediate, and mourning has become more public than private: a collective expression of loss.
According to the Twitter tracking tool Twist (incidentally, Twitter appears to be straining under the weight of the tributes to the star), 22.61% of Tweets currently contain the phrase “Michael Jackson”. “MJ”, meanwhile, accounts for 9% of Tweets right now. More than 25% contain the name “Michael”. In total, at least 30% of Tweets are remarking upon the star’s tragic passing, and that’s likely an underestimate.’
What with his life on display from childhood, his sheer spectacle as an artist, his conspicuous wealth (including the Neverland Ranch), and all those ‘lies and more damn lies’, it is as if a real life Citizen Kane – surrounded by the cracks of his own success – has finally come crashing down. But did he have a ‘rosebud’ moment just as his heart gave way? Like Kane, if he did utter anything as he fell under his own weight, it is sure only to have made (no) sense to himself.
On the front of The Times this morning is the typical image of Jackson: sunglasses, quasi-military detailing and tragic smile. But unusally there is the rare sight of an ungloved hand. It looks aged, if not inflamed. Jackson was indeed middle-aged, yet that Peter Pan image persisted, just as the mask never fell from the myth of Garbo’s exquisite face. Jackson’s corpus will surely continue to fascinate. He was the first real Video Star in whose body we all – whether we like it or not – now inhabit as a matter of everyday life. One just has to peek in the bounty of Primark bags that ferry about on any given Saturday afternoon to see how the man who made music visual left his mark upon our common spectacle.
We shall never know now whether or not his planned London performances would have reignited his self-professed reign as the ‘King of Pop’, or if perhaps it would have been the ‘death’ of him, his enigma if not the ‘man’ himself. But it is only when all is done, when someone is taken from us, that we realise what is our true loss. What I will mourn is his madness. Thinking he is now no more, and what my youth would have been without him, I feel only ever more cornered by the instrumental reason of a monitoring, risk society. Germaine Geer, in her article ‘Like Orpheus, Michael Jackson was destroyed by his fans‘, makes a pertinent reference to the complexity of Dionysos:
Ever since Dionysos danced ahead of his horde of bloody-footed maenads across the rocky highlands of prehistoric Greece, dance and song have been the province of boys. Like Orpheus, Jackson was destroyed by his fans, whose adulation and adoration prevented his living in any kind of normal society. The creativity ebbed away day by day. He became a parody of himself. It is time now to forget all that and salute the miraculous boy who will triumph over death as Dionysos did, becoming immortal through his art.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once urged ‘enjoy your symptom!’. Therapy is not to rid our ills, but to inhabit them. Only then can we truely know thy self. As Chris Dumas explains, Zizek, in his book ‘Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out’, demonstrates how we need to think of cinema ‘not in its tonal specificity or its status as erotic object (categories that implicitly reify humanist, pre-Lacanian notions of “subject” and “power”) but, rather, in its uncanny ability to merely illustrate Lacanian precepts – in other words, its “inherent imbecility”. Something very similar can be said of Jackson.
More often than not, those who deride him a pathetic freak miss the importance of what they are saying. Jackson was a mass symptom for our mass-media, high-spectacle age. He was both the demonic Joker in us all, as much as he kept our symptoms in check. He was our Faustian pact. But no more…
This morning Radio 4 (of all places) was playing at regular intervals a medley of Jackson hits. Whatever else we might want to say about the ‘creator’, I say the music still stands. Like a living ‘rosebud’ epiphany, I listened in some Proustian state as it all came back: my school, Neil Tilly, the moonwalk, white socks, the losing of my brother’s copy of Thriller (on cassette) and glitter everywhere…
…of course, it goes without saying, now the symptom has gone, really gone, don’t stop till you get enough…
(All of the above can usefully be read in the context of the following article from The Guardian, ‘The People’s King of Pop?‘; as well as Gary Younge’s ‘We span, shuffled and combed our hair up high – to be like the boy on Bandstand‘)
Stadium Modifications
Subject: bogota, 00.00, today
R: ‘i guess it has been rather long since my last (missed) attempt to talk with you via telephone… but anyway, swiftness has never distinguished our communication…
i barely had any time left last month, felt i had never been that busy (it seems we could never feel otherwise..) working full time at uni, and at night on a competition proposal to modify the city football stadium.. (some images attached)’
Of Life and Death: Documentary/Art
Margareta Kern's Julka (Banjica, Bosnia and Herzegovina), 2007 from Clothes for Death.
Visited the Margareta Kern ‘Clothes for Living and Dying’ exhibition today with C. at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition is of two halves, with photographs documenting two ‘rites of passage’: the graduation and the funeral. It is an obvious point, but somehow before really engaging with the images, I looked about the gallery and was struck with the sense that this genre of ‘documentary art’ bears all sorts of dilemmas. I’m not sure who may have written about such a genre (which would include, for example, the work of Nan Goldin, and there are countless others). It is certainly prevalent and very much a product of postmodernity. Perhaps it was a series of simple fly-on-wall videos playing in the corner of the exhibition that showed the making of some of the graduation dresses exhibited, but I couldn’t help thinking instead of a series of photographs in a gallery what would really have been interesting would have been a TV documentary (the sort of thing Channel 4 would show!).
Kern is a London-based artist, and a graduate of Goldsmiths, but the pictures are all taken in her homeland of Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina. On one side of the gallery were ‘Clothes for Death’, a series of images of elderly women displaying the clothes they wish to be buried in. On hearing from her mother of the custom among Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian women to prepare clothes for this purpose, Kern sought to meet and photograph these women in their homes with their chosen clothes laid out on display. As the exhibition literature suggests, ‘[h]er photographs offer an insight into the lives of women whose identities have been shaped by turbulent historical, political and cultural currents’. And the work has attracted a range of good reviews (see, for example, ‘Dress Rehearsal: Margareta Kern’s Clothes for Living & Dying‘, Selvedge Magazine, March/April ‘09).
C. and I talked at some length about the images, which relate so closely to her work on memory and cloth. Yet, we felt somewhat disappointed about the images themselves. For me, in terms of content, they echoed something of the work by John Berger and Jean Mohr, yet without any of the contextual processes they attempted. As photographs I found them rather flat, which further created distance, holding back the stories these women surely must hold. Given these were images full of trust and faith, it was such a pity not to feel a greater sense of community and narrative. For C. it was the near absence of the clothes themselves that disappointed. It was true, whilst one might almost want to see these women wear the clothes (to model them?!), which was hardly appropriate, the clothes lacked real presence. Their ‘touching’ stories untold. Instead, these were photographs of women and their bedrooms, not their clothes. C. wondered what the pictures might be like without the subjects, just their possessions. We shall never know.
Standing before these old women C. asked about my life, about ‘things’ right now. I gave some account, but all too soon had to break off, unable to hold it together. So we stood there for a moment – our eyes averted entirely from the pictures on the wall – witnessing my grief, like a simple silk thread deeply woven, yet somehow cut. I returned to discuss the pictures – that gesture again and again to fold up into representations of life (as I do here in writing), to find sanctuary there, whilst haunted by the dichotmy of art and life. Later, however, discussing things over lunch, I mentioned my interests in the Neutral and ever insightfully C. remarked how pertinent and troubling a topic given my circumstances. In full agreement, still I struggle so much to articulate how, just as documentary can be (an) art, so documenting (thinking about) my life can itself be my life. Difficult when it seems only to highlight a life unlived. What is the value of an expanded field of ethics when it seems impossible to live by? …and I hear the spectre of that same old line I trot out in numerous articles, of Derrida’s remark about the letter not arriving, ‘it’s not a misfortune, that’s life, living life’. Despite the rhetoric of fluidity, the poststructuralists offer us a philosophy of loss, of the unattenable, of mourning (epitomised by Barthes’ Camera Lucida). Where is the philosophy of life, living life? …the emphatic YES! …perhaps – in the end – it resides in all our silent stories, including the women on display in the gallery who prepare their clothes for the time they will finally be alone. (I’m reminded of that Billy Joel line again, ‘go ahead, leave me alone’ – the sense of future in ‘go ahead’, yet always at odds with one’s singular time and space. See ‘Circumstance‘)
Kern's Ana (Jennifer Lopez dress), 2006 from Graduation Dresses
Our lives are of course full of promise, often poignantly captured with the moment of graduation. Across on the other side of the gallery were images of graduation dresses ‘designed’ by Kern’s mother, who set up a made-to-measure dress-making business following the civil war. The clients – unlike those women Kern photographs approaching death – are all wealthy and style conscious, all young women recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Crucially the designs are based on dresses worn by celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez (see above) and Keira Knightly, and all produced based on images found in fashion magazines (such as Cosmopolitan, see below) and on the internet, which the young women would bring to Kern’s mother.
Inevitably, given the voyeuristic nature of Kern’s work, there was something uncomfortable about looking at these images. What kind of ‘offer’ were these women making by offering to have their photograph taken and displayed – or rather what kind of transaction does Kern create by transforming these photographs into gallery exhibits (is it so different to internet pornography)? It is easy to suggest Kern, in deliberating making a choice to photograph women from ‘wore-torn’ Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina (rather than say her domicile London), is pasing comment on an aspirant class outside of the wealthy EU nations. But what I found most uncomfortable about these images was the fact that I see them all too often, in the flesh as it were as a norm of our culture. In fact, as I stood in the gallery I had a moment of deja vu – my attempt to be thoughtful in front of these images echoed an embarrassing moment I had recently when I happened to head to my office late one night to complete the writing of an article (woefully overdue). Dressed so clearly for work – a heavy coat despite the warm night and clutching a satchel – I inadvertently walked in on the graduation ball. Desperately trying to find my way pass security to get to my office, I was confronted by a host of beautifully dressed women, all ‘celebrities’ for the night. I heard my name called, some had recognised me. Pretending I hadn’t really been spotted, I wished them an enjoyable evening but they all just smiled knowingly at my being out of place. And I suppose that is it: it is not the photographs in the gallery, nor those at the graduation ball that we need to question, it is me – my place in it all!
…fitting perhaps with a philosophy of life, living life, over in the other gallery space was ‘Born in Bradford’, an exhibition concerned with the social welfare of babies born in Bradford and in particular with the relationship of fathers to babies. The photographer, Ian Beesley, having searched through the photographic archives of the National Media Museum (across the road) was struck by two things: (1) the preponderance of romantic, idealised portraits of mother and child (heavily influenced by Christian iconography); and (2) the lack of representation of fathers in early childcare. Beesley asks: ‘Has the sheer weight of religious representation suffocated the development of an alternative or is it because the majority of painters/photographers were/are men’? Though he notes too, ‘[e]ven when I researched portraits of babies by women photographers this stereotypical/traditional depiction of mother and child was reinforced’.
Bradford has one of the highest rates of single mothers and absentee fathers in the UK. Working with the Bradford Royal Infirmary (with many of the images on display there), Beesley has sought to produce a ’series of portraits of just fathers with their newborn children. Partly as a reflection of changing practices in child care within a 21st century multicultural society … but also to provide positive images of fathering for display within the maternity units of the BRI’. Here again was the documentary art mode – to hang pictures upon the wall that document something and here even seek change. In the end, however, these are simply pictures of new fathers, their newborn child in their hands. It is undoubtedly a happy moment, but it says nothing of the complexity of lives that follow. Laudable though they are, these images are more like mirrors hanging up in the BRI, rather than challenging portraits. In the end it seemed to me both Kern and Beesley’s work lacked a subtle engagement with the preciousness of life and death – though interestingly Kern’s portraits of the reproduction of celebrity spectacle held a wild spectacle all of their own. We’re back where we started: postmodern art.
(…and R. – just before leaving I happened to spot in the gallery bookshop a slim attractive volume, Once More, With Feeling; a catalogue of a prior Impressions Gallery and Photographers’ Gallery exhibition of contemporary Colombian photographers; perhaps the trail has not quite run cold… )
Thinking the unthinkable
Frank Furedi was the guest speaker at an event at York St John University today, ‘Thinking the Unthinkable: the Loneliness of the Critical Thinker in Higher Education (Exploring the importance of Critical Thinking in Higher Education).
As is often the case with such events, there was something of preaching to the converted. Nonetheless it was a worthy talk. Without wishing to undermine the need for skills (Furedi was quite clear we need skills), the main argument was that critical thinking should not be allowed to be hijacked by the current vogue for teaching skills. Indeed, the point is that critical thinking is not a skill as such. Furedi tended to consider it a broader engagement with a subject or field. And one member of the audience suggested we consider it a disposition. There is something vague in these formulations, but the underlying point is to regard critical thinking as a culture of engagement, different to a toolkit of skills to be applied to specific situations. Two of Furedi’s remarks illustrate this point, and raise concerns about the current climate, which has seen an undermining of intellectual life in general (see his books, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism; and Wasted: Why Education Needs To Be Saved From Itself). He noted that the current propensity in schools to push hard on literacy is having the desired effect of raising standards, but does little or nothing to raise children’s appreciation of literature and books general. In effect, literacy becomes more about handling information, than anything about reading and writing.
He also remarked upon the certification of ’soft’ skills. Learning how to fix a car engine, do plumbing, or attend to a patient, are vital ‘hard’ skills we all need, or need access to. But there is a culture of offering training on pointless or overly obvious skills such as using a telephone or other so-called ‘people’ skills (as if somehow we weren’t quite a full person until trained up). As Furedi put it, what do you do on a telephone skills course, you learn how to dial and say hello? To make matters worse, at the end of these ‘courses’ you get a certificate, which he rightly pointed out is a perfect example of alienation. We are given back what we already possessed, but as if we have acquired a new skill or attribute. Should we feel grateful for this recognition? The certificate is an underhand way of disempowering us, because it gives authority to something we should have had authority over for ourselves.
Of course the problem is not simply about being controlled from on high, as if there is some group who exercise this power. The situation is far worse. We are all partaking in this system. In a seminar session following Furedi’s talk, one participant described a sign she had seen at a supermarket check-out. It asked the customer a series of questions to check up on the level of service (including asking if you have been greeted, offered bags, given a receipt and told to have a nice day etc). If anything on the ’script’ is found wanting the customer is encouraged to make a complaint, with a free batch eggs offered as compensation. So, not only is the customer encouraged to catch the member of staff out, the whole ’bad faith’ of a script being delivered is foregrounded as if a virtue. It is too simplistic to see this as the supermarket controlling its members of staff, since it is unlikely that the giving away of a batch of eggs is of any specific concern to managers. It is all just part of a vacuous process of customer service, in which we all dance however badly. The whole thing reminds me of that wonderful line Woody Allen delivers in Annie Hall about ‘needing the eggs’:
It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know … this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and uh, the doctor says, ‘well why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it…because…most of us need the eggs.
No matter how much we think about things, it is unthinkable not to want those eggs! So, how can things change? One participant asked Furedi how he felt critical thinking related to the rise in importance of the broader ’student experience’. It just so happened he has written a piece for the Times Higher Education Supplement on this question, published this week. The case is very clear:
…the ethos of consumerism directly contradicts the fundamental premise of an academic education. From the standpoint of service providers, the customer is always right. It is not the service providers’ job to question or challenge the tastes and values of potential customers. By contrast, academics are often in the business of educating their students’ tastes and encouraging them to question their values. Indeed, one of the most distinct and significant dimensions of academic and intellectual activity is that it does not often give customers what they want. Academic dialogue and instruction does not provide the customer with a clearly defined product. It does not seek to offer what the customer wants, but attempts to provide what the student needs. That is why forcing universities to prove themselves to their customers fundamentally contradicts the ethos of academic education. (Furedi, THES, Now is the age of the discontented)
A significant facet of critical thinking is that it is rarely comfortable or stabilising, as such it is never really going to become institutionalised – indeed that would generally be a contradiction in terms. Put another way, critical thinking only exists because of the difficulties and inequalities that surround us. Critical thinking’s raison d’être is to stand up to the unacceptable and the unthought-through. It is that action of ’standing up’ that is most particular to critical thinking, rather than offering up specific solutions – since solutions are only likely to need further critical attention someway along the line. Rather than asserting change (which will only ever likely be change for some and not all), it is more important we remain ever vigilant to what goes on around us.
One significant ‘goings on’ as we sat in the lecture theatre was the country voting in the European Election. A ritual vigil, at least a media vigil over the next few days will ensue, not least as the Prime Minister’s standing is as much implicated as are the seats in the European parliament. In light of the Election Day, the event organised a ballot of its own, to nominate the most significant Critical Thinker (in up to 30 words). A grand prize was awarded by Frank Furedi for the best nomination at the end of the day. Whilst it was a secret ballot, this was my entry:
Why her? (…and not him?)
Non-theoretical / theoretical
Palpable / inteligible
Pathos / Logos
‘Once upon a time…’
Non-theoreticaltheoretical
Palpableintelligible
PathosLogos
She speaks to me without opposition
Makes ‘me’ thinkable
Hélène
———
Cixous
Needless to say I didn’t win.
(In case you are interested, the winning entry was for Hillaire Belloc with:
He inspired the critical use of honey.
‘I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes my peas taste funny
But it keeps them on my knife’
…so, there you have it.)
Bodyspacemotionplayground
The recreation of Robert Morris’ 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings at Tate Modern certainly didn’t disappoint. But inevitably it throws up questions about authenticity and/or recontextualisation. Arguably, it is easy to see how, as a review in The Telegraph put it, ‘the radical art of the 1970s has became innocuous family entertainment’. Nevertheless, there is some opportunity to see the work in its historical context, which in itself is a valuable thing.
On arrival to the Tate’s Turbine Hall there was the sound of a deep, distant thunder, which turned out to be the echoing of one of the wooden sculptures thumping to the ground from the weight of those on top. It was the kind of sound that really entered one’s body from the ground up, and so immediately on entry to the gallery the body was made a site of enquiry. Although one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the ‘fun’ on offer. So, with the aid of a little investigator (highly recommended), I walked and climbed, rolled and wobbled, as I made my way about each plywood ‘apparatus’. From the very start, from within a rolling tube, the blood in my head swelled and the laughter rang out with each physical feat, large and small. This was one of those now increasingly ‘festive’ moments in a gallery. As The Telegraph review puts it: ‘The idea that art may involve a degree of participation no longer surprises. Crowds queued at Tate Modern to whizz down Carsten Holler’s gleaming slides or to lie staring up at Olafur Eliasson’s artificially generated sunset.’
Morris’ original intention for the exhibition, back in 1971, was for ‘people to involve themselves with the work, become aware of their own bodies, gravity, effort, fatigue, their bodies under different conditions’ (Morris, Tate Modern Information Panel). The original exhibition was actually closed after just 4 days, due to what the Director at the time, Norman Reid, described as the ‘exuberant and overexcited behaviour’ of gallery visitors.
It was May 1971, and the opening of an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London; the sort of thing that one might expect to be quiet, dignified and staid – but, as it turned out, all hell broke loose.
Men started picking up some of the exhibits – weights suspended on chains – and swinging them around their heads. First aiders were occupied picking splinters out of the rear ends of the miniskirted young women hurt on wooden slides. (The Guardian)
There was nothing so ‘radical’ for this recreation of the exhibtion, which can be seen as a defeat for art:
It’s difficult to reflect on your body’s response to the experience of trying to balance on a plywood square mounted on a hemisphere, as Morris intended, when there’s a crowd of people watching, all desperate for you to get off and give them a go.
While the sight of these raw plywood structures must have seemed challenging amid the neo-classical grandeur of the old Tate, here in the Turbine Hall’s post-industrial vastness, it appeared just one side-show among many, the radical art of another era revisited as innocuous family entertainment. (The Telegraph)
But, I found pushing a huge ball in a Sisyphean circle and climbing up narrow confines to have been a true experience, however described. And on leaving, I took a moment to look at the video screens, showing footage from the original works in the 70s. My little investigator (not yet 5 years old) was delighted to see a women’s bottom come closer and closer, finally to fill the entire screen, as she rolled the very ball we both had rolled ourselves in the exhibition. This is a moment I think we will remember – it was funny, thought-provoking (at least regarding the recent history of art) and quite beautiful.
See also The Guardian’s Picture Gallery
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