Hugo (2011)Hugo (2011) is the story of an orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who hides out from authorities in the superstructure of a Paris train station circa 1930. When not winding the clocks of the station, the boy spends his time attempting to bring to life an automaton piece by piece. Hugo, it seems, is convinced his father left some profound final message encoded within this mechanical man, but Hugo's efforts come to a halt when a mysterious old toy maker (Ben Kingsley) intevenes and sets him on an adventure of discovery. The more Hugo learns about the toy maker, the more their destinies intertwine, and—as a result—the more the film drifts into an overt fascination with the silent cinema.

During the course of Hugo's investigation, the essential message of Martin Scorsese’s film becomes clear when a film scholar (Michael Stuhlbarg) remarks to Hugo that “time has not been kind to old movies.” Indeed, what Scorsese’s film presents is the most explicit self-reflexivity  encountered in Hollywood cinema in recent memory—even film scholars and the most casual entertainment-seeking filmgoer are confronted here. A lingering question remains: what is the ultimate effect of framing reflexivity in this way?

In comparison to The Artist (2011), the film that, to some, “robbed” Hugo of its prize this February,  the self-reflexivity in Scorsese’s film takes him out of the proverbial three worlds of the cinema (production, distribution, exhibition) and into the lair of the archivist. And, in so doing, he stands philosophically neutral on the actual processes of the entrepreneurial industry and merely chastises the museum in its stead. The filmmaker is still adamant to prove, as if any still had doubt, that no one loves cinema as he does.

But this is not the problem. Though I have previously argued that The Artist amounts to formal and narrative mastery without a soul, an opposing force emerges here: Hugo is all soul, no mastery—a veritable two-hour infomercial for the Scorsese film foundation. This message is brought in through the back door, however, as the first act of the film meanders around the boy and his robot, only subsequently (and abruptly) changing subjects to “the movies.” Only film historians who are immediately struck with familiarity upon seeing the toy maker might experience the first section of the film otherwise. The film might actually have been better—all other things being equal—if it had been titled “Georges” rather than “Hugo”.

A difficult premise arises: ‘movies are so magical that they are worthy of intense, explicit celebration, yet this is more than most audiences will be able to handle up-front.’ While such a problematic argument might indeed warrant consideration in a critically reflexive film, its counterpart in the serenely cinephilic text is absurd. People who have paid money to sit in a theater and watch a film are doing so because something about the art of film is appealing to them; they like movies, they do not need to be tricked into accepting this notion. And if this is really your end-game goal, then perhaps there is higher striving to be done.

Cinematographer Robert Richardson, in consultation with Scorsese, certainly understands how to fully exploit deep space in conjunction with 3D technology in virtually every shot. Nevertheless, some traditional cinematographic wisdom fails them both here. For instance, racking focus, so as to draw attention to something in the extreme background, becomes ineffective when a gigantic blurry object protrudes off the screen into the faces of the audience simultaneously.

One of the most troubling conceits is the 3D conversion of several silent cinema works presented in the film’s finale. Up to this moment, the movies watched by the characters have been graciously presented in their unadulterated 2D form—is this is not, after all, the point of showing the films? That, for these films, there is something magical that needs to be preserved in its original form? In this vein, the only error more egregious than these formal alterations of the presented diegetic films is the revisionist history of filmmakers’ lives that further corrupts the cinephilic message. If the argument concerns championing a forgotten history of silent filmmakers, then the least the film can do is get the history right. Instead the historical development of early cinema is warped to better suit the tragic beats of Scorsese’s fantasy tale. 

Unfortunate is the way in which the industry elevated Hugo (in a manner that only the most stubborn apologist could resist as anything except shameful self-promotion) to the level of absolute greatness. Or, conversely, critics and insiders lowered Scorsese to the level of their usual preoccupations: typically, the most attention around Oscar time revolves around artists working ‘out of their element,’ as if that alone should suffice to warrant acclaim. Hugo is no exception to this treatise. But, in the Hollywood cinema of the last thirty years, Martin Scorsese has never tried to be Robert Zemeckis, and such an ambition should not be so disingenuously supported by the Academy. In the quest to determine whether the violent and gritty Marty can pull off a magical, enchanting, feel-good movie of the year, critics might stop to ask whether he should.

Ultimately, no one has done more for (and spent a hundred and fifty million dollars in the creation of a blockbuster motion picture simply to raise awareness of) film preservation than Scorsese. This is what makes Hugo a noble endeavor. Not its writing, acting, editing, or cinematography, but its overwhelming passion for the cinema—a passion that cannot be contained by the explosive contrivances of the film itself.

Click for Full Conference PosterConstructing Worlds: Making and Breaking Order

The Graduate Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine is pleased to present a two-day conference on constructing worlds. The conference program includes work that addresses constructed worlds in all their visual manifestations, taking into account the introduction of various technological, philosophical, and political developments in our contemporary cultural discourse which contain the power to not only construct new worlds, but also to redefine and destroy existing ones.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

LOCATION: HG 1030 (UCI)

WORLDING SHOWCASE (PechaKucha Night)

5:30pm Registration

6:30pm Opening Reception

7:00pm – 8:30pm Presentations [6 minutes, 40 seconds per presentation]

• Anna Kryczka (Visual Studies, UCI) and Robbie Kett (Anthropology, UCI) - Learning by Doing: Embodied/Material Encounters at the Farm

• Diego Costa (Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (iMap), USC) - Planeta Xuxa: Notes On The Sexuality of Brazilian Children

• Sam Close (Visual Studies, UCI) - Out of Character: Traces of the Real Spider-Man

• Meredith Goldsmith (Visual Studies, UCI) - What is a Global Body?

• Ellie Harmon (Informatics, UCI) - Smartphone: Entangled Stories of Users and Technologies

• Flora Kao (MFA, UCI) - Topophilia

• Kristen Galvin (Visual Studies, UCI) - Downtown

• Janny Li (Anthropology, UCI) - Spectral Science: Into the Experimental World of Ghost Hunters

• Jennifer Gutierrez (Comparative Literature, UCI) - Rambling in the Coatlicue State

• Marcel Brousseau (Comparative Literature, UCSB) - Cowboys, Indians, Posthuman Dynamos!: Machinic (other)Worlding in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

• Jaclyn Simon (Comparative Literature, USC) - Gómez-Peña: Poetic Communities Inhabiting the Terrain of the Imagination

• Christina Spiker (Visual Studies, UCI) - "When My Clothes Came to an End I Did Without Them": Going Native in Hokkaido, Japan

• Shane Breitenstein (Visual Studies, UCI) - Cruising the Suburbs: Public Sex in Disciplined Spaces

8:30pm – 9:00pm Q&A

Friday, April 6, 2012

LOCATION: HG 1010 (UCI)

CONFERENCE: Constructing Worlds: Making and Breaking Order

9:00am Registration

9:45am Opening Remarks

10:00am - 12:00pm Panel I: Encounters

• Jessica D. Kaplan (Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara)

Entanglement and ideologies of landscape: responses to a Wari presence in Nasca, Peru

• Hannah Goodwin (Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara)

Between Maps and the Marvelous: Geographies of Outer Space in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Images

• Ksenia Fedorova (Cultural Studies Graduate Program, UC Davis)

Media Art Worlds. Strategies of Immersion

• Philip A. Lobo (Comparative Literature, University of Southern California)

Modeling Modernity: Word Building Practices in Nostromo and Tropico

Respondent: Bert Winther-Tamaki, Professor of Art History

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch Break

1:15pm – 3:00pm Panel II: Regulation

• Jennifer Grayburn (History of Art and Architecture, University of Virginia)

Constructing Power: St. Magnus Cathedral and the Medieval North Sea World 

• Nick Welcome (Cultural Anthropology, UC Riverside)

The Smell of Petroleum: Signs of Contamination and the Un/Making of Toxic Worlds

• May Ee Wong (Cultural Studies Graduate Program, UC Davis)

Targeting Theory: Criticality and the City

Respondent: Lucas Hilderbrand, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies

[15 minute coffee break]

3:15pm - 5:15pm Panel III: Breakdown

• Steven A. Malcic (Film & Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara)

Toward a Filmic Cartography of Spatial Practice: Separation and The Locative

• Steven G. Anderson (History, UC Riverside)

The Digital Ether: Deconstructing the Historical (Im)materiality of the Digital World

• Eric P. S. K. Morrill (Visual Studies, UC Irvine)

How To (Fail to) Build Meaning in Performing “Life”: Allan Kaprow’s Household (1964)

• A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz (Media Arts and Practice, School of Cinematic Arts,University of Southern California)

Minecraft Memorials: Deconstructing Virtual Worlds Through Artistic Interventions

Respondent: Peter Krapp, Professor of Film & Media Studies

[15 minute coffee break]

5:30pm – 7:00pm Keynote Address

• Lisa Parks, Professor of Film & Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

 The World from Above: Networked Visions of the US Drone War in Pakistan

Respondent: Victoria E. Johnson, Associate Professor and Chair of Film & Media Studies

7:00pm - 8:00pm Closing Reception

Gene Luen Yang is one of the most well-known graphic novel creators working in the field today.  His American Born Chinese, first published in 2006, won an Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Album and was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award and to win the American Library Association's Printz Award.  Before before and since that publication, Gene Luen Yang has been involved with a variety of comics projects, from other solo work like Prime Baby to collaborations like Level Up (with Thien Pham) to webcomics-as-commentary like this piece for the Wall Street Journal responding to Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  I had the chance to hear him speak at the Asian Americans and Graphic Narratives roundtable at the MLA Annual Conference in Seattle this past January, and he graciously agreed to talk with the Octopus about his new project, a three-part series of graphic novels with art team Gurihiru called Avatar: The Last Airbender--The Promise.

These graphic novels are set in the world of popular Nickelodeon cartoon show Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008).  Heavily influenced by Japanese anime but produced in the US by Nickelodeon, the series generated an enthusiastic fanbase and a lively critical discussion about issues ranging from its depiction of Asian cultures in a fantasy world setting to questions about the relationship of consumer culture to gender roles implicated in Mattel's failure to produce action figures for the female half of the cast.  Both within and without its fan communities, these debates hit a fever pitch with the controversial live-action film adaptation The Last Airbender (2010), directed by M. Night Shyamalan and mostly starring Caucasian actors and actresses. 

Gene Luen Yang's graphic novels begin with the events depicted in the Avatar season finale and trace the characters' attempts to deal with the aftermath of a hundred years of colonialism and conquest by the Fire Nation in a newly "peaceful" world.  They also prepare audiences for Avatar's return to television, scheduled for later in 2012, as new Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Legend of Korra.

  SC:   Readers familiar with your award-winning American Born Chinese might be surprised to see you working on graphic novels based on a popular Nickelodeon television show.  To me, particularly as a fan of both your earlier work and Avatar, this kind of highbrow-lowbrow crossover and mutual influence is one of the most fascinating parts of the comics world today.  Can you explain a little about how you ended up working on the series and your thoughts about working across the popular/artistic divide?

GLY:  Ha ha.  To be honest, I’ve never thought of Avatar: The Last Airbender as lowbrow.  And comics have always been seen as lowbrow.  Even with the more classy “graphic novel” moniker, a comic book is still just cartoon drawings and word balloons. I think the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is pretty blurry these days.  After all, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon worked on the movie Spider-man 2.

I got the Airbender gig in a weird way.  I was a huge fan of the original animated series, and when the live-action movie was announced, I was pretty excited.  When I heard about the casting of the live-action movie, however, I got pretty mad.  It seemed like another example of Yellowface, of Hollywood’s propensity to take leading roles that would most logically go to Asian actors and give them to white actors instead.  I did a webcomic advocating for a boycott of the movie.

That webcomic eventually got the attention of an editor at Dark Horse comics.  She’d really enjoyed American Born Chinese, so she asked if I’d be interested in writing Avatar: The Last Airbender for them.  I said yes.

SC:   In the Avatar comics, you’re not only taking off on the world created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino in the original television show but also having to move towards the world soon-to-be depicted in the new Avatar: The Legend of Korra television series.  Is it a different feeling from working on your solo comics?  How did you approach that process?

GLY:  It’s been a wonderful experience.  Mike and Bryan and their team are world-class storytellers.  I’ve learned a lot just from seeing how they approach a story.  The Avatarverse is fleshed out.  All the major historical tides of the world were already determined before I was brought on, so I had to write stories that fit with those tides.  Even so, Mike and Bryan gave me plenty of creative elbow room, which I appreciate.

It was different from working on my own comics.  With my own stuff, I have a vision that I want to express as clearly as possible.  With A:TLA, I really tried to write something that would fit well into an established world.

SC:   Questions about race and ethnicity have a complex and often troubling history in the fantasy genre as a whole, and Avatar, particularly with the movie-casting debacle, has often been a topic of debate on these grounds.  Correspondingly, one of the most exciting elements of this series is your attention to the postcolonial and introduction of the first explicitly ethnically mixed character, Kori Morishita.  What was your approach to portraying these peoples and spaces?

GLY:  The original series pulled from real-world cultures.  I only have a passing knowledge of Asian history, but I was still able to recognize their source material.  The Fire Nation, for instance, draws heavily from Meiji Era Japan.  They’re the most technologically advanced.  They’re the ones with imperial ambitions.

So to write the comics, I looked at what happened with Japan after the end of WWII.  There was quite a lot of friction in places like Taiwan and the Chinese city of Qingdao.  Many Japanese citizens had deep roots in those colonies.

Nowadays, colonialism is a dirty word, and rightfully so.  Still, one could argue that colonialism paved the way to the multicultural societies we have today.  There’s a tension there.  The character Kori is an embodiment of that tension.

SC:  Much of Avatar’s fantasy world-building is inspired by actual moments and cultural periods in Asian history.  I know you’re also working on a more explicitly historical project based on the Boxer Rebellion in China.  How did (or are!) you approaching researching the two projects and handling questions of fidelity as you construct the stories, characters, and worlds of each?

GLY:  I’ve been working on the Boxer project for years and years.  It’s been difficult.  I know I’m going to get some of it wrong, but I really just need to create a believable world for the story to inhabit. Hopefully, I’ve done that.  Some of that research has come in handy for the A:TLA project, since Ba Sing Se is loosely based on the late Q’ing Dynasty China.

SC:   Both you and the Japanese art team Gurihiru (who created the art for the books) offer fans insight into the creative process by posting scans of your pages, from the early sketches through the various stages of inking and coloring.  What prompted you to do this and how have your website visitors responded?

GLY:  I did this because as a fan, I love that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff.  Sometimes the bonus features on the DVD are even more interesting than the movie itself.  I wanted to provide our readers with the same type of material.  Gurihiru felt the same way.  Much of my own behind-the-scenes stuff is really just me bragging about Gurihiru.  They did an amazing job.  They have this perfect blend of Eastern and Western comic traditions.  Their stuff is just gorgeous, and a perfect fit for the series.

SC:  Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us!

Although SOPA and PIPA have been taken off the table, it has become increasingly important to examine digital histories of user-created content on the web, especially as that content faces the threat of censorship and moderation.  While there was a nostalgic part of me that smiled when I stumbled upon The Deleted City project, there also seems to be an immediate need to reevaluate these kinds of digital, generative spaces such as the late Geocities and other early online communities.  According to the project's website,

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage... Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders" as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars.  Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and delted.  In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down.  The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

As an exercise in media archeology, The Deleted City project visualizes the archive of personal websites cataloged immediately before the deletion of Geocities on October 27, 2009.  This installation work visualizes the data of the archive as a city map, spatially arranging the "neighborhoods" based on file quantities.  The website explains, "In full view, the map is a datavisualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighborhoods.  While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.  While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played."  In their visualization of digital space, The Deleted City simultaneously embraces the communitarian aspect of Geocities (and dated artifacts such as the MIDI sound file) alongside new touch technology that allows us to point, swipe, and pinch our way through the neighborhoods of internet past. The Deleted City visualizes Geocities in a way intended for the gallery.  Does something become truly past once it passes into the realm of the museum?

My own history on Geocities seems like a distant memory.  After playing around with several other free website hosts, I navigated my way there in order to create an account in the digital neighborhood of SoHo (one of the "cities" dedicated to the arts).  My page started with a default template that soon became littered with tacky animated GIF files and a variety of MIDI songs that changed with my adolescent mood.  It housed poetry from junior high and artwork from my freshman year -- all before my own awareness of things like internet piracy and creative commons.  My barebones website encouraged me to experiment with HTML (first with "free layouts" offered by more experienced web masters and later by layouts created by my own hand).  However, Geocities also introduced me to new kinds of interaction through their interest-based communities and the glorious invention called the "webring" used to discover new sites of similar topics (a rudimentary StumbleUpon, if you will).  For me, Geocities and the phenomenon of the personal website so popular in the 1990s, prefaced much of my engagement with the internet as a space of creative possibility.  However, when Geocities faced its immanent deletion, I had already said my goodbyes and, like many of my peers, moved on to the thrill of domain ownership and social networking. My "homestead" stood vacant among many others when the plug was finally pulled.

Despite my nostalgic attachment to Geocities, its existence testifies to the life (and death) of a particular venue for user-created web content.  It forces us to consider the preservation of digital material, and, in some senses, digital world and community making.  There is a certain kind of utopic idealism that these spaces seem to enjoy and embrace. However permanent a fixture Geocities seemed to be during its height, it makes us cognizant of the eventual passing of other platforms and the impermanence of the content created on them.  In light of current news, it also forces us to consider the value of those spaces should they one day disappear.

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

The Artist (2011)A hit at Cannes, especially for the performance of its lead actor Jean Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicious' The Artist (2011) is a complexly reflexive film. On its surface, it tells the seemingly recycled story—à la Singin' in the Rain (1952) among others—of a silent film actor struggling to deal with the coming of sound in Hollywood circa 1927. George Valentin (Dujardin) is a man who prides himself on his refusal to do sound films even as his career disintegrates. A binary struggle ensues between the philosophy of Valentin and his main romantic interest Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who embraces the new technologies of film and, as a result, vaults over him to stardom in the new sound cinema. When asked “Why won't you talk?” Valentin's exasperated reply sets the stakes of the film: “Because I'm not a puppet, I'm an artist!”

Ultimately, it is not only Valentin who refuses to talk, but Hazanavicious who handicaps his film in this way. This is immediately apparent in the film's embrace of outmoded features such as black & white photography, a noticibly square screen ratio, and the almost wholesale rejection (almost!) of synchronized sound. These factors have undoubtedly gone a long way in propelling the film to critical attention. Especially noteworthy are the almost surrealist moments that formally indicate that sound simply does not exist in the world of Valentin—on-screen or off!

Yet these apparent details are by no means the film's most sophisticated structural references to the silent cinema: one begins to recognize visual and narrative allusions to everything from The Crowd (1928) all the way back to The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903). One might be tempted to take Valentin at his word—as a stand-in for The Artist itself—that true film artistry corresponds foremost to the silent period sadly lost to history. However, this literalist reading is complicated by the myriad of film references to a long history of sound films as well. With unmistakable invocations to Citizen Kane (1941), Grand Hotel (1932), and everything in-between, a more non-historicized, auto-reflexive critique seems to take shape. In fact, the film may well have just as much to say about recent cinema as it does the early period. Whether or not the entire narratology of The Artist can be taken as a structural allegory for a contemporary debate about film technology in the 21^st century is largely contingent upon one's take on Valentin's ultimate solution (which will not be divulged here).

It is of note, nevertheless, that by far the most conspicuous reference of all is an extended sampling of Bernard Hermann's score to Vertigo (1958), just as Valentin arrives at his most desperate moment. As the broken man gazes into a shop window, framing his own reflection perfectly into the sleeves and collar of a tuxedo on display, he imagines what happiness he once possessed. This scene eerily invokes the nostalgic despair of Scottie Ferguson in the Hitchcock film sequence to which the soundtrack alludes. Like Scottie, Valentin clings to the already long dead even as he attempts, anachronistically, to revive it. This is the most poignant and reflexive of all the borrowed moments in the film; The Artist recognizes its own place in a larger history of narratively reflexive filmmaking and celebrates this history through its cinematic nostalgia.

Among the film's chief delights, the casting of Dujardin is laudable and his histrionic maneuverings bring the film as close as it gets to silent film sublimity. Yet, the familiar supporting ensemble is where the film goes the most awry. Any time a recognizable face appears—such as John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, or, worst of all, James Cromwell (who performs admirably, but sticks out like a sore thumb in the role of Valentin's chauffeur)—the illusion is lost. One is left wondering why Goodman, for instance, is performing histrionically in juxtaposition to his well known televisual comedy style. The affect is clever intertextuality at best; awkward distraction at worst. Here, the film loses the essential pathos of the cinema of yesteryear by being a work that is—at times—recognizably outsmarting itself.

In its zeal to duplicate much of the visual iconography of the silent screen of old, The Artist fails to capture the character-driven energy of the same. What is left is a hollowed-out shell of allusions, which might inspire with its passion for the cinema itself, but falls short of capturing the mania of Valentin—the man—in an agreeable form. If he is merely being stubborn, is not the film as well?

• The construction and experience of built environments: leisure worlds such as theme parks, themed attractions, World’s Fairs and expositions, tourist destinations, malls, Spectropoli, and virtual worlds
• Distinctions and definitions of urban, suburban, and rural territories; nature and recreation preserves
• Creating order out of chaos: authority, regulation, and discipline in the construction of worlds, colonization, nation-building, the rise of the state, and biopolitics and necropolitics
• The world in binaries: public/private, representation/reality, utopia/dystopia, creation/destruction, global/local, universal/particular
• World making as art/art as world making: design practices, museum exhibitions, and cooperative collaborations which engage in world making
• Worlds constructed around social categories: ethnicity, cultural practice, socioeconomic standing, religion, political orientation, gender, and sexual orientation and practice
• Phenomenological aspects of world making
• Time and space: the evolution of worlds over time, and the establishment and revision of boundaries
• Rendering worlds: geospatial categorizations, urban planning, ancient and modern cartography, GIS, digital or virtual globes, scientific imaging, space, ocean and earth-based photography

The deadline for submissions is January 16, 2012. Please email your 200-250 word abstract to: makingworlds2012@gmail.com. Final presentation length is 20 minutes. Conference presentations will also be part of a special online issue of Octopus Journal.

A white square.  Empty.

A white, empty square, centrally squared; national, central square.

Squarely normative, white, empty....my hometown.

Within an empty white square: isolated, suffocated, enclosed…Empty, uneasy, greedy, hungry.

(Hungry for life...for lives?)

Hunger?

(See where the memory goes, where it will lead, what will emerge…merge, merging with me; let the memory live itself.)

Swallowing Others.

(A somatic memory? A sensual memory? A muscle memory?)

Theory, Concept, Abstract:

Taking everybody into me; wanting to be everybody, anybody; swallowing others…hungry, empty.  Fill me up with pieces of you.  I am becoming myself, swallowing pieces of you, I take you into me, I become you; I am alien to myself because now I am you.

Where am I? Alien, empty, hungry.

Am I you?  Am I your lips, your legs, your gestures?

There is no invitation to join me, to join together; I swallow you and you will never know; I take you without permission, without invitation.

A ritual of Becoming?  A Cannibal?

(Salvaging my memory, a psychological resurrection, a psychic re-imaging of myself…wow am I still thinking about me?)

(“Writing as an ethnographer from memory: the frailty of excavating the memory”-Gabriele Schwab)

(How to work with a fleeting glimpse of the memory.  I look back, trying to remember or trying not to forget.  How long did this last; seems like it lasted for years.)

A self-cannibalism; I must eat another in order to become a full human being; a primitive desire to become the Other.  “The libidinal wish to suck and incorporate was combined with the destructive aim of scooping out and emptying the object.”  “Oral-Sadism (second phase): the incorporation of the object and its characteristics, identification with it, and, at the same time, greed and destructiveness.”[1]

Innate Destructive Instincts?  Lack of self-confidence?  Overabundance of the ego?

Three stories, one brown, dim hallway: it’s third grade.  Thoughts.  Proust.

Jesse:

There I stood next to my locker, staring down the dim, brown hallway.  I’m sure it smelled like crayons and hot lunch.  She was approaching, and I was ready.  I knew what to do, had time to wait until she came closer.  Her long, elegant dancer legs, her beautiful curling eyelashes, her perfectly shaped lips and teeth, I must leave enough time to get both the head and the legs.

(I don’t understand how time and distanced was measured in this act of swallowing, but it seems to be important.)

If she was walking past me, this could be a little easier.  Wait, I’m sure I already have her legs.  I must have taken them in a long time ago. [She is about ten feet away.]  Just to be safe…I focus in on the legs…Gulp, quickly look up…breathe, squeeze the sides of my tongue.  This second swallow more difficult, my body desperately attempting to produce enough saliva.  I focus on the face…dry Gulp…phew!  I got it.  My throat contracts, expands, settles back to its resting place.  I almost missed it.  Jesse speaks to me, “Katie, do you want to come play after school…go find some more of those baby frogs for the bathtub.”  I answer, “Okay!”.  If she would have said my name one second earlier…

(What is it about naming and timing?  It seems like once she engages me by my name, interpolates “Katie” [my nickname], the unconscious desire is snuffed out.  It vanishes without recognition.)

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, from the volume Swans Way:

"And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may call me 'Gilberte'; in any case I'm gong to call you by your first name. It's too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal 'vous,' and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And when I recalled, later, what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish the impression of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself, naked, without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which belonged equally to her other companions and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort that she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special value - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit which one is going to put only the pulp into one's mouth, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile." (390, Volume 1).

(Proust recalls an event from childhood where he felt, in a way, swallowed; yet, when swallowed, he was naked.  The social and historical layers that projected outward on the world were peeled away from his person, and he was stripped of what, externally, made him what he was.  The nudity he felt as he entered her mouth was described as a kind of juicy, raw essence, which brought him pleasure, even gratitude.  I wonder if Jesse ever felt any unconscious pleasure in me swallowing her.  Also, in the process of proper naming that is stripped away in Proust, I can see something similar happening in the timing and distance necessary in swallowing Jesse.  Once language and thought enters, and the exchange is no longer purely instinctual, the pleasure of taking one into oneself is much more difficult, if not impossible.  Reminder: I am giving language to a memory that was itself a more unconscious activity.)

Chris:

He came out of his classroom; I stood far enough away so that he would not notice me.  God I was so in love with him.  I adored him like reese’s pieces and popcorn at the movies.  Even the thought of him made me anxious, yet stirred an insatiable longing.

He walks across the hallway…Gulp…Gulp.  I swallow him twice before he ever makes it over to the water fountain.  He dips his mouth under the stream of water.

I’ve got to get over there before anyone else; otherwise, it’s gone.  I’ll lose it.  How many more chances will I have like this one?  But he can’t see me run over there.

As soon as he turns back towards his classroom, I look around to see if anyone will block my way.  I quickly dash over to the fountain.  Now I have it all to myself.  I can take it in slowly.  It’s all mine and no one else’s.  I bend down, all the excitement and pleasure running through my body.  I turn the water on and suck in the stream; I take him into me.

(This was the most physical experience I can remember in relation to me swallowing others.  Perhaps that is why it is still so vivid.  It almost feels something akin to a muscle memory.  I remember thinking Chris and I had basically kissed at that moment.)

Melanie Magrel:

I want Melanie’s dimples and Dana’s hair.  They walk in a single file line towards the hallway’s back exit; it’s recess time.  We are still waiting in the doorway of our classroom.   I see Melanie and Dana approaching, Melanie in front of Dana (Magrel before Mastandrea). 

(Why is it that I need the proper names to retrieve and articulate the memory?  Is this the result of adulthood and language?  Am I so submerged in proper naming and language that it is impossible to think without it?)

I have to wait just a few seconds longer until they are close enough.  Melanie is smiling, as she always did, her dimples deeply impressed into her chubby cheeks…Gulp…breathe, tighten my teeth, hurry Dana is right behind her (my swallow reflex giving me a hard time due to the anxiety of missing her, knowing this would not be an easy task)…Gulp… Oh no!  Dana has already passed, I was too late, I swallowed Allissa Perry…not Allissa!  She is so big.  She is the strongest kid in third grade, and she has big boobs already!  I cannot afford to get any bigger myself; I’m already so muscular from gymnastics.  I am worried, threatened, anxious.  I need to immediately find smaller arms, smaller legs, smaller breasts!...Gulp…Christy Negeri’s legs, not the best but better than Allissa’s.  I’m distressed.  I just know now that I will really need to concentrate on finding the skinniest, little bodies to counter the large, muscular body that is now in me! 

Here comes the next line of children, Mrs. Cup’s class, Jegima Brown leads the pack.  She is even bigger than Allissa.  She’s even as tall as the teachers!  And, she is black; the only black kid in the entire school.  Good thing I did not accidentally swallow her.  I wouldn’t know how to resolve that one.

White empty square; centrally, normatively squared

National, central square

Normative, white, empty…my hometown.

[1] Rabin, Jean-Francois. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.  Enotes.com Dec 2 (2011) www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/oral-sadistic-stage

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Throughout Catherine Liu’s seminar, I found myself consistently interested in tracing a publications history of the 1980s. So much of what has come to be the canon of critical or postmodern theory was either translated or published during this decade. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus in 1987 to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in 1984 to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto of 1985 and many more. These texts and numerous others attempt to assess that state of theory, culture, and resistance in the decades since 1968. Rather than recapitulate the reception of these texts, I will examine yet another touchstone publication of the 1980s, one that speaks to the diverse themes and tendencies delineated in those academic publications: Martha Stewart’s debut book, Entertaining of 1982.  

Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Entertaining offers a luxurious vision of late capitalist, do-it-yourself, domestic display.  This oversized and lavishly illustrated book contains anecdotes, recipes, and instructions for events such as a “Midnight Omelet Party for Thirty” or a “Russian Buffet for Twenty–four.”  These opulent propositions for domestic entertainment and leisure activities fill this three hundred page aspirational and pseudo-instructional tome. The interplay of text and image, anecdote and recipe enact a form of imaginary class consolidation and aggregate an appropriate visual vocabulary around an ideal form of elite domestic display. Through a scale of overabundance and the re-enchantment of material culture, Stewart conquers the domestic with an elite bricolage, thick with neoliberal “values,” such as self-sufficiency, ceaseless work, and self-expressivity. 
In the introduction to Entertaining she details the transformation of her self-sufficient home into her nascent corporate headquarters.  She writes: “My own kitchen has grown wild with detail. I think it is very beautiful because it is expressive. The other rooms in the farmhouse are ordered and formal, with few truly comfortable places to sit down—for, in fact, we don’t sit down very much.” Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1980)Stewart’s embrace of gratuitous elite display is matched by her inflated and demonstrative work ethic. Further, her assertion that her kitchen is “expressive” relates to discourses of personalization and “Martha Stewart” individualism and neo-Emersonian perfectionism reiterated throughout the book.

While Stewart does not explicitly condemn or even hail progressive modernist design or food cultures, her willful anachronism and promotion of individualism, cultivation, and self-sufficiency can be seen in some ways as a rejection of the rhetoric of access to modernity and efficiency through mass consumption. The notion that all Americans can buy good taste or that good taste can be mass produced is the tacit target of Stewart’s rusticated and antiquated mode of domestic display. By circumventing this rhetoric of industrially or mass produced taste, expertise, access, and leveling, Stewart espouses the primacy of self-sufficiency, distinction, and cultivation over the promotion of good living through good citizenship, conformity, and consumption.

Throughout Entertaining, Stewart also works hard to differentiate her own recommendations for throwing the perfect social engagement from the long history of etiquette and the tight, top-down regulation of special events. Her brand of elite bricolage smoothly sutures together a highly selective family history, a résumé-like account of her various high end catering feats, all on a luxuriant scale, with recourse to homespun expertise, appeals to modesty, and a highly attuned form of spatial production. These aspects are stitched together and evened out by the overall thematic of style and through her consistent presence throughout the images that illustrate the book. Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Indeed, Stewart’s home, house wares, food arrangements or body populate every page of the book. Further, the spatial proximity of the nonspecific “Oriental” cocktail party, a splash of Victorian whimsy, the “Russian” Banquet, the ahistorical “Country” style produces, through pastiche, a non-hierarchical form of stylistic pluralism. Stewart obliterates difference across culture and history for the sake of class distinction and transgressive deviation from fussy traditions. Further, Stewart’s dismissal of enervating or stifling traditions associated with etiquette manuals works to position her intervention into the advice world as well-versed in past thought, permissive, and anti-authoritarian.

Stewart’s form of opulent, home entertaining espouses a kind of self-made expertise derived from endless labor that banishes drudgery because of its “higher calling” to Emersonian self-sufficiency.  Stewart tells her own story of self-overcoming from her humble family background to her entrepreneurial development, as a marker of her own embodiment of self-reliance.  Through the compression of time and space accomplished through the elision of difference between labor and leisure public and private, Stewart’s home is offered as a microcosm of the greater neoliberal imaginary. The renovated farmhouse, transformed from abandoned agricultural relic into self-styled hybrid working and living space, manifests Stewart’s self-transformation. Stewart, too, utilizes this language of growth and personalization and uses the event and the home as metonymic stand-ins or signifiers for the self. The everyday activities of cooking and household management find their extreme and fantastic form in Stewart’s banquets and dinners. These instances of domestic hyperbole are packaged as expressive emblems of the self, while also serving as markers of class distinction and, therefore, mastery of emergent neoliberal subject positions. Stewart’s book, published in 1982, was well positioned as a manual for a newly minted financial elite eager for the appearance of cultural fluency.

Indeed, Stewart’s homestead and vision of entertaining seems to cobble together a diversity of pasts—agricultural, geographic, economic, literary, personal, and historical—made manifest through and for decoration and display.Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982) Stewart’s practice is both spatial and fiscal; she fills her home space with this ahistorical, elite bricolage through a foreclosure of separable spheres of public and private and the elision of labor and leisure for the purposes of developing her domestic empire. Stewart’s fabricated rituals and “tactical” labors manifest through the colonization of domestic space and time with form of labor that is at once ordinary, performative, and entrepreneurial. Stewart works to codify an elite eclecticism, stemming from her proposition of “Martha Stewart individualism” as a new or invented domestic tradition. Stewart turns away from novel or technocratic solutions with regard to domestic labor and promotes performative individualism, care, and craft as the route to better living.

In closing, Martha Stewart’s wholesale revolution of the domestic advice industry traces back to this early 80s moment, when she so skillfully harnessed and met the cultural capital needs of a newly configured financial elite. Stewart was well prepared for the eventual fall of the hyperactive market activities that produced this intended elite audience. In 1987, the same year the massive stock market crash shocked the finance world with the largest single day drop, Stewart cut a deal with Kmart to carry a line of affordable house wares.  Since then, her entrepreneurial DIY ethos has become fairly ubiquitous, from Stewart’s own multi-media, multi-platform, and multi-product domestic empire to online marketplaces such as Etsy. The politics of entrepreneurial domestic labor and craft production would make for a fascinating conference in itself. Further, Stewart’s home-based enterprise anticipates the ubiquity of the home-office or the “work from home” freelance labor model. Her spatial and entrepreneurial practices inflect contemporary understandings of work and leisure—in and out of the domestic context. Stewart’s eventual imprisonment for insider trading has not tempered the popularity of her myriad domestic products and musings. Her role as a corporate scapegoat, her time in prison, and her post-incarceration resurgence together form a fascinating cycle of entrepreneurial bust, reform, and renewal.

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This digitally-rendered 3D tour of Picasso’s landmark work was created by Lena Gieseke, a visual effects artist who was once married to the filmmaker Tim Burton. It takes you through the artwork, literally puffing the 2D images like cut-out balloons as you meander through the space. Guernica, of course, needs less of an introduction as Picasso’s famous mural memorializing the 1937 bombing of the remote Spanish town by Nazi supported fascist, Francisco Franco. The mural was first on display at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair and has since become an anti-war icon.

What is perhaps more fascinating than the artwork’s three minute 3D treatment are the reactions it has garnered. Comments on YouTube, while dubious in origin (note the 110 age below), are none-the-less instructive to comprehend common perspectives on the new wave of digital artwork imaging.

Positive responses argue for the clarity that digital imaging can give to the abstract painting: “This is a truly moving video: the painting has now been brought into the light” (Malaysia, age 110); “Amazing. This is the first time I've ever been able to see the elements of this painting clearly. Up to now, it was just a huge slab of noise and horror, which of course is the whole point of the picture. But seeing each bit clearly adds so much to it” (United States, age 47).

Negative comments reflect on the artist’s intentionality, questioning whether it is right to see an intentionally flattened artwork reworked into 3D: “Wasn't Picasso's work like this one meant to show 3 dimensions in 2 dimensions? Playing with perspective? If so, a 3d depiction of it would be reality...not this” (United States, age 36).

Other remarks completely embrace this new technology, but encourage more interactive uses of it: “This should be interactive. Not just a video of a set path, but a virtual sculpture you could control the view of yourself” (Denmark, age 31).

While Picasso’s artistic legacy was ushering in the shift to flattened picture planes, we can question whether in the case of "Guernica 3D," the digital “making of space” actually changes the painting’s meaning. By virtually “walking through” Picasso’s wrecked buildings and the suffering of humans and animals alike, one could argue the viewer is getting a better sense of the painting’s narrative and perhaps even taking more time to consider these realities.

Writing on the Huffington Post in November 2010, art historian James Elkins compiled some telling statistics about how long people actually look at art in a museum:

There have been a number of surveys of how visitors interact with paintings in museums. One found that an average viewer goes up to a painting, looks at it for less than two seconds, reads the wall text for another 10 seconds, glances at the painting to verify something in the text, and moves on. Another survey concluded people looked for a median time of 17 seconds. The Louvre found that people looked at the Mona Lisa an average of 15 seconds, which makes you wonder how long they spend on the other 35,000 works in the collection. A survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art supposedly found that people look at artworks for an average of 32.5 seconds each, but they must not have counted the ones people glance at.

Undoubtedly, digital technology is changing the way we consume culture and engage with art. In three minutes, not only can this painting be “visited” by a more far reaching audience, but if the viewer stays in front of their screen, it may actually provide a better engagement with the images than one might have in a museum.

Do the 3D digital techniques applied to Guernica make you uncomfortable?

In the 1960s and 1970s, large ethnic minority communities from the Commonwealth immigrated to England to perform low-paid work. When Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected in 1979, it instituted more widespread powers for the police, under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, to stop and search people based only on “reasonable suspicion” of the commission of a crime—commonly referred to as “sus laws.” These laws were applied disproportionately to the black community, and caused deep resentment amongst young, urban minorities—the majority of whom were the British-born children of the previous generation of immigrants.

Thatcher’s monetarist policies, which included the closure of inefficient factories and shipyards, reduced inflation (then a serious problem in the global recession at the turn of the 1980s), but they also caused the highest rate of unemployment since the 1930s—particularly among these same ethnic minorities. In early April 1981, the police enacted “Operation Swamp 81,” in which plain-clothes officers swarmed into the south London district of Brixton, and heavily employed the “sus laws” upon the city’s residents.

"Under Fire" Oil on Linen by Kimathi Donkor (2005)Tensions boiled over on the night of April 10^th, and into the next day, when the police dispersed the growing number of protesters in England’s first modern urban riot. After the smoke cleared, Thatcher and her administration denied the significance of high unemployment, and the existence of “institutionalized racism” within the police force; she rejected increased inner-city investment, even as further riots arose in sections of Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and elsewhere. A public inquiry, called the Scarman report, recommended addressing the problems of racial disadvantage and urban decline; these recommendations were not implemented, and Brixton erupted in riots again in 1985, along with Tottenham.

The urban character of the riots reflects a worldwide shift in demographic trends, particularly in the United States and Britain, since the late 1950s. The rapid decline of industrial power, and the explosion of suburbanization as a locus of escape for what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “professional middle class,” created a universal alienation (one might say willful ignorance) among a certain class of people from the specter of poverty, always-already situated “over there.” The urban riot reappropriates the city-as-space to micropolitical ends: the city itself becomes a node of resistance.

Photo of riot police on April 11th, 1981 by Kim AldisUnsurprisingly, such riots receive significant media coverage, usually painting the rioters wholesale as hooligans and anarchists. Thatcher’s appeals to the “homegrown” white middle-class reflect a great (but to this point mostly tacit) societal fear, one demarcated along racial, economic, and generational lines, and now made palpable and physical by the events of Brixton and subsequent coverage in news media—in print, on the radio, and, exponentially since the early 1980s, on television.

At 5:00 EST on June 1^st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first newscast, featuring an interview with then-President Jimmy Carter. It was the first all-news television network in the United States, and the first station to provide 24-hour news coverage. Although local and national news programs, both in America and Britain, aired (and were watched by many eyeballs) before CNN’s inception, the cable news network idealized its viewer as part of a mobile, global generation, always “in tune” to the world-at-large: the first generation to grow up with television as a necessity, a near-fact of life in industrialized societies, rather than as a luxury novelty. CNN presented news as permanent record and artifact; news as mediated, edited image, shorn of external context; news as disembodied sound-bite.

The combination of an upwardly-mobile middle class with purchasing power and the desire for new kinds of everyday goods; technological progress in the field of telecommunications, and; the nascent shift of the financial and cultural paradigm to the neoliberal version of McLuhan’s “global village,” led to a condition under which news could and would be beamed across the (industrialized) world—if not instantaneously, then at least with the ostensible appearance of “liveness.” CNN founder Ted Turner, in his introductory message to viewers, stated: “we won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.” Time Magazine (November 1982)What, then, would qualify as “news,” and who would have the right to name events as such? In the birth of what grew to be called the “information society,” to whom would “access” be granted, and what would the viewer be allowed to access? What forms of rhetoric could this new, global “culture industry” utilize to produce a receptive, politicized (and political) viewer, and who would benefit most from the manufacturing of this model audience member? 

Herman and Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, analyses news media as corporate enterprise. The authors present the “propaganda model” by which public consent is manufactured: private media, like any other business, sell a particular “product”—the audience—to advertisers, by which process the actual content of the “news” delivers systemic bias. The authors describe five “filters” that determine the type of news presented to the public, of which the first three are the most important: ownership of the medium, the medium’s funding sources, sourcing (placing resources where news stories are likely to happen), flak (negative public responses), and anti-Communist ideology (after the Cold War, Chomsky revised this to “War on Terror” discourse). After laying their theoretical groundwork, the authors apply empirical evidence to test their claims. Why was the legality of the Vietnam War left unquestioned by American news outlets, while the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was considered an act of aggression? Which acts (in which locations) constitute genocide, and why?

Taking these three seemingly disparate texts together—the Brixton riots, cable news, and Manufacturing Consent—we may attempt to determine how the application and reception of mass media within the neoliberal paradigm became altered significantly in the 1980s, even while the institutional structures Chomsky and Herman illuminate had been in place throughout. Manufacturing Consent (1988)The role of mass media fashioned a general view among the British television viewer, of the urban rioters in England as “the enemy at home.” It is remarkable, too, to consider how news media evolved even in the four-year interim between the 1981 and 1985 riots, the latter of which was covered in action by documentarians and users of home-video recording devices, belying the government’s official story.

As a final note, I’d like to draw parallels between the rhetorical situation in 1981 and 1985—that of (mediated) text, rhetors, and audience—and a contemporary event with which many in the audience will be familiar, the 2011 riots in London. More broadly, also, note the use of technologies from the neoliberal regime of financial and cultural globalization, for purposes of resistance—mobile phones, the Internet, and so on—in demonstrations from Tahrir Square to “Occupy Wall Street.” Much has changed in the last thirty years, yet much has remained exactly the same.

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