MAP Praxis Series

Here's info on the MAP Praxis Series:
www.usc-praxis.com

Who are you really afraid of

Reading Juhasz this week, and specifically focusing at least first on the construction of the image, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop this week. I figured it was the program most likely to give me the most amount of control (while still being free as it was loaded on my computer as part of an "education" package), while still, as Juhasz describes, forcing me "to struggle with skills," which is something that I wanted to challenge myself with (299). I refused online tutorials and poked around the software, restarting the project nearly a dozen times because I could not figure out how to undo actions past the most immediate change. The exercise in repetition, in change, in failure was important. I wanted to gain skills through trial and error, and to see what I could struggle with in order to succeed. 

Looking at the ACT UP posters, I knew that part of my message would be the appropriation of particular image, a reworking of it to the original purpose, and placing a cry for a more inclusive message on top. Being that I also wanted to think about the "spreadability" of the media, and engage with concepts of whether or not my activist message could come through while still remaining comprehensible to the Popular/"Masses," I needed to pick an image that was current, and topical, while layering meaning through the appropriation of other artists. For this piece, I found one of Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays (1979-82) and one of Barbara Kruger's pieces Don't Be A Jerk (1996).  I wanted to specifically engage with the piece of "pop up art activism" that was disseminated throughout 5 major US cities in public settings by the group Indecline, titled The Emperor Has No Balls. This art piece has been picked apart by news outlets and private blogs, praised and condemned, protested. As this story unfolded, and discourses around the body that the Trump statue mocked, I was reminded of a passage from Eli Clare's introduction to their book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, that "the body as home, but only if it is understood too that language lives under the skin...the body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies, and poison, torn away from us...Some bodies are taken for good; other bodies live on, numb, abandoned, filled with self-hate. Both have been stolen" (12-13).

Sean Brody, San Francisco 2016

What does it mean when activist art alienates minority groups in the spirit of mocking a terrible, narcissistic Presidential Candidate? Who are they trying to reach with this message? With this particular installation piece, created by a mainly male, white, and seemingly cis-gendered collective of self proclaimed anarchist individuals, their message becomes blurred with the overtones of dominant hegemony, and ends up only reinforcing issues of toxic masculinity. By mocking Trump for his body, they not only reinforce stereotypes, but further place trans individuals at risk for violence. What does it mean then, when activist art inspires violence against marginalized communities?

To move back to my particular piece, in light of these questions and ideas, I wanted to push back against not only Donald Trump's particularly vile rhetoric, but to take part of the message that the original statue espoused (mocking people for their bodies, specifically their non-normative bodies, small phallus/no phallus) and obfuscating it from the viewer's gaze. The only parts of the background image that are clear to see is the hand pointing towards the blurred object, and a laughing face in the background. Donald Trump uses fear as a tactic to mobilize his constituents, but in light of the debates surrounding Trans individuals and their rights, the high murder and violence rate against them (especially trans women of color), I want to point to the viewers responsibility and how it is reflective of a culture at large that is fearful still of the non-white, non-abled, non-skinny, non-heterosexual, etc. To do so, utilizing both the text of Kruger and Holzer forces the viewer to come closer to the piece to try to see all of it, blocked by text to remind them of the culpability of them as the consumer.

Air Pollution

 The World Health Organization reported that in 2012, around 7 million people died – one in eighth of the total global deaths – as a result of air pollution. This finding more than doubles previous estimates and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk. 

Since early 1920s, air pollution has been regarded as one of the central problems that concern urban climatologists.
Shaw and Owens (1925) were pioneers in studying the phenomena of urban fog, and many have followed in their footsteps to research air pollution in cities. Britain, as the “first industrial nation”, was the first to become predominantly urban and consequently the place in which the modern idea of pollution was recognized (Thorsheim 2006). The meteorological foundation initiated the Committee for the Investigation of Atmospheric Pollution in 1912, establishing the first independent group to document the pollutant concentration in cities. The first air quality policy was established in the UK– the Clean Air Act of 1956- which was followed by the US clean air act in 1963. Under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) legislation, the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) are currently established and enforced for carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, particulate lead, and suspended particulate mass. However, more than 70 communities throughout the United States have been found to violate the NAAQS standards (Federal Register 1987) (Code of Federal Regulations 1994) (J C Chow 1993).
This image is designed to demonstrate the extend of this global yet local crisis. 

References:

J C Chow, J G Watson, D M Ono, C V Mathai. PM10 standards and Nontraditional Particulate Source Controls. A Summary of the A&WMA/EPA International Specialty Conference, 1993. 

Thorsheim, Peter. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. 

virgin, remade.

The inspiration for this image came from a good friend of mine back home in Beirut. He and his fiancée had just broken off their engagement, and he had loaned her $800 to have a hymenoplasty. For the uninitiated, a hymenoplasty is a surgery to reconstruct the hymen, thereby "revirginizing" a woman. Hymens can be broken in a multitude of ways, from horseback riding and climbing trees to classical heterosexual penetration. In Lebanon, these surgeries are incredibly popular, second only to nose jobs (which take first place because they can be performed on both men and women). This ex-fiancée had actually lost her original virginity to the first man she was engaged to, but after the second engagement fell through her mother felt the need to test her purity -- which leads us back to the surgery.

Not to revert to tropes, but Beirut is a city torn between East and West, and Lebanese girls are caught in the crossfire. Society puts pressure on women to remain virgins until marriage, or to at least appear that way. Men have no such restrictions and are expected to have sexual experience before marriage, without specifying which women this experience comes from. This schizophrenic situation is fueled by imported popular culture from Europe and the United States, which make pre-marital sex seem so ordinary that it's taken for granted. Putting all those elements together leads to a dizzying focus on appearances above substance.

Looking at this from liberal Los Angeles, it can be hard to imagine why someone would resort to a hymenoplasty. Why not tell the truth? What does her mother have to do with her sex life? Why does she agree to a virginity test? How can somebody start their married life on a lie? While these questions are valid, the distant analyses and criticisms do not take the cultural sphere of Lebanon into account. This is a country where women are bludgeoned to death by pressure cookers at their husbands' hands, where the law is squarely on the side of the man, where adultery legislation and punishment depends entirely on one's gender. Shame is a large part of what women are made to feel all over the world, but in Lebanon, where these pressures can lead to the same woman having multiple hymenoplasties, it is especially important to make this issue part of the national conversation.

Challenging the status quo and bringing taboo subjects into the open is never easy. While doing the readings for this week's lesson, I was particularly impressed with how Gran Fury managed to boil complex issues into a few powerful words. Verbosity is easy, but snappy one-liners are far more likely to sear themselves into the public consciousness. My initial slogans were much longer ("Needle and thread do not a virgin make," or "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's surgery" for example) but I much prefer the shorter "virgin, remade." Choosing an image that conveyed the message was much more difficult than I anticipated. I stumbled across this image quite by accident, but I thought it matched the concept perfectly. For the artistically-minded, white shoes can represent purity, innocence, and virginity. This particular pair might even suggest a bride, which traditionally matches those characteristics. The blood dripping down her legs suggests a violent procedure, maybe even rape. This is all in the pursuit of a disturbing ideal. The font is simple, bold, and to the point -- as I hope people will find this poster.

When thinking about this project, I wanted to incorporate ideas from Douglas Crimp’s “The Boys in My Bedroom, ”specifically exploring the image appropriation he deemed tantamount in postmodernism and seen throughout the graphics created and released during AIDS activism, in relation to the pieces we read on the cityscape as both site and content for activism (per Jim Eigo’s “The City as Body Politic / The Body as City Unto Itself” and Esther Kaplan’s “The City Is Ours”). Birthright Israel, or more colloquially Birthright, immediately came to mind, because while not an organization dealing with only a cityscape, it is an organization that brings up notions of homeland and contested space. The physical landscape that is at the heart of Birthright can serve as both the site as well as the content for activism and, indeed, has.

I chose—or rather appropriated—a stock image that comes up many times when Googling the organization’s name, presumably used to market the 10-day trip. I came up with a simple slogan—“It’s my birthright too”—playing off the name of the organization. As the word “birthright” is inherently exclusionary, my intention with this slogan was to directly challenge this by showing that more than one group considers this landscape its “homeland.” Struck by the simplicity and, thus, effectiveness of many of the visuals used by AIDS activists, I chose to write in my slogan by hand in order to emulate their minimalist approaches. Moreover, the conscious decision to manually write in the slogan also serves to comment on the amount of funding it would take in order to offer a free 10-day international trip to a group of people.   

SELF CARE SLOW DEATH

To be entirely honest, this image didn't necessarily come together as I wanted it to. The techniques I used to attain a certain aesthetic simply don't entirely allow the meaning to cohere in the "obvious" way that I might have wanted it to (on the one hand, as the readings have suggested, the relative openness or slipperyness of the image within its fields of signification was a strategy used by ACT UP and other activist organizations; on the other, I'm not sure my image uses this as intentionally or provocatively as ACT UP). So even if, in my appraisal, the image isn't so successful, it warrants explaining what I was trying to do technically and otherwise.

Like Jennifer, I was interested in using the .gif image format. The technical requirements and cultural norms around GIFs allow for a different kind of (re)production, circulation, and reception than, say, a print or even video container formats. For instance, they appear in social media (like Facebook) differently, always and already playing before your eyes (admittedly, Facebook, for instance, allows videos to auto-play now as well). In their jitteriness, it could also be said that they call attention to themselves and their self-production in ways different than video. I'm sure more could be said about GIFs in these respects.

I'm also personally interested in glitch aesthetics/ethics, particularly in the random outcomes that occur. Reductively, glitches occur when software and technology are asked or ask themselves to be used in ways that their makers disallowed or never imagined. For this project, I was particularly interested in playing with the hexcode and iFrames of the videos. iFrames contain the image data of a video file, whereas pFrames are predictive frames that cue a video player to the motion of pixels across the screen. With the deletion of iFrames, all that's left is pFrames--or the abstract movement of the image without any record of the image itself. In this case, what it allowed (and what is, unfortunately, difficult to see) is how in the cut to the cigarettes, the/my body remains mapped onto the cigarette itself and is burned with it. The play with hexcode allowed for the effect of what is known as a pixel sort (it can be seen as the flickering horizontal streaks across the screen that causes the 'disintegration' of the image). Aesthetically, it allows for an already there disintegration that precedes the complete disintegration of the cigarette and the pixel sort of the image more generally.

As for the content of the image, I was interested in providing an intervention into 'liberal' or 'mainstream' notions of 'self care' and the 'self,' 'selves,' and 'care' that it circumscribes. Self care seems like an idea and practice that's floating around all kinds of places, whether in activism (radical self care) or in work places (take care of yourself so that you can produce more), among other spaces. Its an image that was provoked by statistics on the disproportionate rate of smoking among people who identify as LGBT, by as much as 70%. It's an image that might ask you to think about the gendering, sexualization, and racialization of care and 'feminine labor'; the relationship of (self) care and consumption; (self) care and (self) destruction, both personal, and social, political, and strategic; the histories of tobacco and what is required of human and nonhuman laborers to produce it; and others.

(Not too awful for something that came out of free photo-editing software and Microsoft Paint, I hope).

I made this simple image to tackle the issue of sweatshop labor, specifically the poor wages that sweatshop workers make. Since I had extremely limited resources for making this image, I approached this as a design challenge. The image overall is supposed to look bleak and depressing, generally attaching a sort of “presence” of a labor problem behind a product that consumers may normally not associate with anything outside of their own lives. I placed the “You pay…” text near the top of the image because that part of the image is slightly brighter before fading into darker colors. Placing that text in the brighter/before darkness area reflects the presumed but not actual separation between consumption and modes of production, a separation which may be imagined by the consumer. The bottom of the sweater blends with the background to indicate a “blurring together” of the product and the work environment as oppressive forces used against laborers. I placed the “She takes home…” text close to this blurring to indicate the sweatshop worker’s position in the blurring of oppressive forces. The numbers are loosely based on what I was able to recall from a documentary called Made in L.A. (if you haven’t seen it, y’all should definitely check it out). I also wanted the numbers to look similar just to get the message across. I identified the sweatshop worker as a “she” because sweatshop workers are usually poor immigrant women of color (you can read more about this labor problem in a book called Behind the Label by Bonacich and Appelbaum, if y’all are interested – it’s a little dated, but it still has some good info). Finally, I attempted to make the producer label on the sweater very bright and noticeable to draw the viewer/consumer’s attention to it. I wanted to bring the viewer’s focus to the label in the image to reflect that looking at the label is something that consumers should be doing normally. Not all clothing producers use sweatshops, so it’s important to look at the label to see what manufacturer made the product, and decide from there whether some kind of “consumer protest” should happen by not purchasing the product.