arichardsonbbbwc-blog

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Research notes from the beginning of the project

Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, Gilles and Hollows.

  “Whites have used blacks as a screen upon which to project a montage of the primitive for at least three hundred years.”

(The vulgar) “Contemplation would give way to noise. Aristocractic taste had been trained to transcend the narrow limits of time, place, and self and to view the world from the stillness of a larger perspective. Democracy is sunk in the here and now of pantheism, and the one subject available for its art is the individual, because ‘each citizen of a democracy generally spends his time considering the interests of a very insignificant person, namely himself’. The democratic artist cannot with a straight face write about gods, myths, or traditions. These are stuff of refined, transcendent culture, and the democrat who makes these his themes must end in pretension. The poet who is true to his democratic roots must be a vulgarian… He will be loud and common… He will depict passions and ideas rather than men and deeds… Noisy, primitive, and self-centred, the democratic ideal generates a vulgar pantheism. In the American South, this pantheism moves in an orbit with Romanticism and black primitivism. All these elements fuse in rock, the music of vulgar American democracy.”

 “The source of rock is the primitive as interpretated by vulgar, democratic Romanticism, and the white man’s motive for adopting the primitive is his desire to get moved, to get real, real gone for a change.”

 “Rock’s credo of feeling leaves it open to attack as a mindless species of musical barbarism. The attack has been the more persuasive because a movement holding instinct and feeling as its central values appears confused and inarticulate and therefore unable, unwilling, or uninterested in defending itself on the battleground of rational debate selected by its opponents. But in rock, as in the pantheism from which it springs, confusion and inarticulations are virtues substained by a network of Romantic arguments about self, world and change.”

 “Pantheism need not share Whitman’s unyielding cheerfulness, but its never tragic… Tragedy demands a seemingly immensurable chasm between us and some immense power. When we cannot span it, we tumble into the intervening abyss of suffering. There is no gap in pantheism. Our suffering is whole, organic, and our own. Suffering and death are merely projections of our own self-ignorance. They are finally eradicated by blasts of self-sustaining energy. Death, tears, and defeat are the stuff of many rock lyrics, but always enveloped in an extravagance of words and music that is in the end comic… Rock has no room for the spiritual catharsis of tragedy, substituting for it the physical catharsis of the dance floor”

Because it cannot support tragedy it also cannot support heroic depictions

 “Rock’s is the aesthetic of Romanticism vulgarized… The artistic virtues of rock and Romanticism are originality, primal order, energy, honesty, and integrity. The bad critics of the zombie world consistently misread these as incoherence, lack of discipline, immorality, madness, and confusion.”

 Romanticism’s aesthetic is elitist because only few can recognise the artistic quality.

Genelle standing passively to metal because she has not been instructed to mosh

Constructed romanticism, me representing all the bad critical responses to romanticism.

   “I suggest that we ‘unsettle’ feminity by pushing it over the postfeminist edge and I put forward the term postfeminity to highlight the challenges and paradoxes of a postfeminist feminity/domesticity that can no longer be conceptualised along a sharp split between feminism and housewifery, agency and victimization, work and family life. This is to acknowledge that femininity can be changeable and can operate in a variety of ways, acquiring a range of different meanings that have come to the fore in our postfeminist present. Post-ing femininity thus involves a certain amount of re-thinking, not a reversal of well-established dualisms, but a process of resignification that threatens to reinscribe what it also transposes.”

 “Reality television uses relationships to illicit raw and spontaneous outbursts of emotion, what Laura Grindstaff (2002) refers to in relation to the talk show as the money shot… The currency placed on the unscripted emotion in ‘reality’ television can be related to the trend towards the commercialisation of feeling.”

FREUD’S NOTIONS OF THE HYSTERICAL WOMAN/

 “Oprah Winfrey, calls moral entrepreneurship: making money through the sensationalising and exploiting emotional expression.”

“The transmutations of emotional life- the move from the private realm to the public realm, the trend towards standardisation and commercialisation of emotive offerings are being recycled back into individual private lives; emotional life now appears under new management… opens the family home to a larger world of feeling rules.”

 In preparation for the slave market (“African women and men aboard he slave ships were only the intial stages of an indoctrination process… into a slave, so that (they) would be marketable as a ‘docile’ slave in American colonies.”

 Camera positioned as casting call- pornography

 “As American white men idealised white womanhood, they sexually assaulted and brutalised black women.”

“As white colonisers adopted a self-righteous sexual morality for themselves, they even more eagerly labelled black people sexual heathens. Since women was designated as the originator of sexual sin, black women were naturally seen as the embodiment of female evil and sexual lust.”

"younger artists no longer feel responsible for a black- ness that is itself increasingly hypervisible in the global market of multicultural commodity fetishism.

How to rewrite/refilm history when the very model of history is so much a product of the history the group wished to refilm/rewrite?

There’s a problem with placing a person in a situation where they have to act in a musical culture that is not their own

  “The aversion to fiction, is what keeps me interested in the non-fictive, it’s what keeps me interested in questions of the historical, because they act as a powerful counterbalance ….to amnesia.” (Tate, 2015)

Genelle in her bedroom smashing things with a vinyl recorder

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJPMtsGgoQM

this video made me want to be more collaborative in my approach and also do an interview with me and Genelle.

  mlle bourgeoise noire lorraine o grady

  “Minaj’s performances do not have the anti capitalist logic that most performance art has, by on the contrary she is situated in and expertly marketed as a highly consumerable product that imbues many historical and cultural narratives that she appropriates. Capital was always a necessary component (if not foundational principle) of black performance art… especially when its practioners were so often fungible commodities themselves.” (page 206)

 “The late Stuart Hall, writing in 1992, characterised black popular cultures in exactly this way. If, as Hall argues, there are no pure forms in black popular cultures (but instead only hybridised ones), black popular cultures are also highly charged, mixed, and clashing spaces where cultural identities are imagined, stylised, theatricalised, and rendered ‘mythic’.”

…popular culture is highly mythic…”

 “If fantasy itself is a part of identity formation, as Anne Anlin Cheng argues, then Minaj’s often-hyperbloic performances can be understood as an aggressive and imaginative form of self making… this has often taken form of her transubstantiation into mythic-like selves- a process I have been terming avatar production” (page 207)

 CRITICISM- is Minaj exacerbating the angry black woman trope?

 “Forsaking authenticity, respectability, and even reality, Minaj and her mouthy avatars instead embrace (even boast about) their pointed failure to properly perform any of these attributes, suturing hip-hop’s typically masculine braggadocio to frenetic, if oddly juvenile, paeans to a plastic artificiality.” (Page 208-209)

 ‘She wields grotesque aesthetics as a skilful strategy of self-estrangement. In doing so, while Minaj is in accord with the polygot meanings the grotesque suggests- its disruption of order, challenge to notions of the normal, and strange ability to evoke both fear and desire from audiences.” (Page 213-214)

 OPTICAL DOUBLE TAKE

“The character’s operatic misbehaving is a rupture that punctures the tautly scripted understandings of proper behaviour, particularly for black women.” (page 217)

 white background white sheet- armless

 “Studies of heavy metal invariably link the preference for heavy metal among adolescents and people in their early twenties with issues such as low socio-economic position (Straw 1983), unsettled family life (Arnett 1991, 1996) and postindustrial risk and anomie (Locher 1998). Moreover, it is argued, the factors influencing a preference for heavy metal make for a ready associations on the part of disempowerd and disaffected young people with what Harrell (1994) terms the poetics of destruction in heavy metal lyrics, the latter frequently focuses on issues such as death, mutilation (Grooss 1990; Harrell 1994), physical violence and misogyny (Walser 1993; Sloat 1998).”

 “Although appearing on the surface to be an individual act of daring or exhibitionism, stagediving relies both upon the willingness of the group performing to allow members of the audience up onto the stage and coordination between relies both upon the willingness of the group performing between stagediver and crowd… Despite the risks they are always caught.”

 “… Cock rock performers are aggressive, dominating and boastful, and they constantly seek to remind the audience of their prowess, their control. Their stance is obvious in live shows; male bodies on display, plunging shirts and tight trousers, a visual emphasis on chest hair and gentials.”

 “… the way that rock music in general, and death metal in particular, places the group, the fan and the ideology in opposition to the entrenched values of society- the ‘we’ vs ‘they’ mentality… serves to elevate the metalhead to a position of moral superiority.”

 The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel.

Among the aspects of the romantic movement in England may be listed: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; romanticism criticism; and a reaction against whatever characterized neoclassicism . . . The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes (the expressive theory of criticism) and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences, however fragmentary and incomplete, more than it values adherence to completeness, unity, or the demands of genre. Although romanticism tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in the scientific laws the undergird the actual. (Harmon, 6th. Edition).

 Gothic horror functions as an extension of the Romantic notion of literary pleasure, that literature should inspire deeply felt emotional responses. Gothic horror sought to instill a pleasing sort of terror and thrill from its emphasis on taboo subjects, such as satanism and matters of the occult, that both fascinated and repelled polite English society. The Romantic, Byronic hero equates to the brooding gothic villain in that both figures are tortured souls placed at the center of action.

 William Wordsworth, the father of British Romanticism, gave us. He said that poetry is the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility"

One of the most complex developments during this period is the transformation of religion into a subject for artistic treatment far removed from traditional religious art. The Enlightenment had weakened, but hardly uprooted, established religion in Europe. As time passed, sophisticated writers and artists were less and less likely to be conventionally pious; but during the Romantic era many of them were drawn to religious imagery in the same way they were drawn to Arthurian or other ancient traditions in which they no longer believed. Religion was estheticized, and writers felt free to draw on Biblical themes with the same freedom as their predecessors had drawn on classical mythology, and with as little reverence.

Fake emotion versus real emotion

Being true to the romantic spirit by being true to yourself, a romantic reaction to romanticism.

 Neoclassical works (paintings and sculptures) were serious, unemotional, and sternly heroic.

  INSPIRATION

Mikhail and Sonia Boyce

John Akomfrah

Simone Leigh’s Breakdown

Yinka Shonibare Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

Lis Rhodes Whose History

Ana Menedieta

Centre Jenny

Nicki Minaj

 PLAN

 SCENES Genelle with dripping green paint over her body, disappearing into the background

Falling into the stage dive

Ana Menedieta

Silence

Action Language Genelle at the desk looking at pictures of water and pours from out the screen

Slowly getting faster to ridiculous levels- never gonna give you up

Depictions of the primitive in romantic art

Black feminism

She takes the camera from me and films me

Selfie

Find her at home listening to her music Her snapchat In a gallery next to romantic artwork- by placing her next to the paintings, she becomes part of the history in modes of representation

Filming her eyes with my camera on her camera phone Metal sounds slowed down Flashes of light to light up the dark room

Chantel Ackerman- Jeanne Dielman- 23 quai du commerce

Sally Potter’s Thriller

Found footage

Film camera

Record metal sounds, growling

Drawings to overlay, Ed Pool

Lighting from only phone screens

Narcissism- compensation for lack of phallus, Freud, Otherness

Film her getting ready

Projection on the wall

Create vintage borders with subtitles for lyrics- bad music video

Good music video of Genelle singing

Rnb moves to  metal, metal moves to rnb (dance) NO

‘I want you to do this” ‘why’ Re-creating an authentic scene- deconstruction of a music video, behind the scenes

Emotional labour

Poses= femininity/performance

Romanticism of death

Genelle in artificial nature- technology Psychology of listening to different kinds of music

Past ‘feminine’, present not ‘feminine’

Genelle holding things walking down a tunnel The camera lowers and gives her respect for doing work Project in bedroom

Black women ‘s portrayal in media

A narrative in a narrative, a deconstructed music scene

Black panther

Gang violence

Colonislism, imperialism

Genelle going crazy and smashing domestic items (bad)

Totalitatarism

Active/Passive

Breaking the fourth wall Grace Kelly

Metal music- death associations

Devil horn sign

The Emporium- 88 London Road

Marwoods- coffee shop

The Marlobrough pub.

Textured walls- bricks

Green scene- coffee shops

Costa/Starbucks décor

Semotics of coffee shops

Korakrit Arunondchai- deconstruction of large social narratives music videos, rnb

Camera always circling round, various voiceovers- Trinh T Minh Ha- Reasssemblage, writer. The frame by frame.

Jump cut, silence vs noise

Genelle reads out the iron maiden songs slowly

Stages of grief

 First scene- Genelle in normal clothes- comes into the studio, seeming happy.

Second scene- Genelle putting on makeup clothes and changing- eye from phone

Second scene- reading out the lyrics for Iron Maiden (CLOSE UP )Genelle criticises the song because it’s about native American Indians not black people- I respond ignorantly

Third scene- putting on fake tears (CLOSE UP) Fourth scene- anger- moshing Fifth scene- PTSD- shaking Sixth scene- Metal sounds Two cameras- non objective, objective

Seventh scene- Long shot of her reading out the lyrics slowly

Eighth scene- Moshing

Ninth scene- Lunch break- her being quiet looking at her phone.

Last scene- she walks out, (LONG SHOT)

Tenth scene- playing dead (MID SHOT)

Eleveth scene- running to the hills

Twelth scene- reading out the lyrics (LONG SHOT) native criticism, well you’re all minorities

Stomping foot

 Criticises the violence of the song and imagery

Green screen could have paintings from the romanticism era

 Why metal and what song-

The romanticism of death and how we come to use it to come to terms with the horror of death and contemplating our own mortality and expressing that contemplation helps alleviate the anxiety around it. and hyper masculine performance – what the director intends to portray as satricial

The way that metal talks about important horrific issues such as war as an outlet for expression.

Talks about death with Genelle- make up a narrative about a racial issue.

Don’t use the green screen to project at all. Have the metal songs on laptop in the background off set.

Have Genelle putting on makeup offset

The atrocities of world war- The (emotional?) reactions against/by war

LOCATIONS Church/Graveyard

Somewhere where it is priviledge white male dominated

Coffeeshop

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Final Video

Here is a link to my final video, overall I am pleased with the result. Some things that I would change is perhaps making the racism in the video more convert by subtly chasing the editing style, by making some parts faster, for instance I liked the speed when I was making Genelle run I think that worked well. However as the editor and director of the film, I didn’t want the editor to be ignorant towards race as much as I did as me being the foolish director. I think keeping the green screen as just a green screen gives a good reference to the fact that the video is meant to be more on the unedited side as well. I am also glad that in the end Genelle argues her point about race and it’s depiction rather than leaving that bit out because I feel it’s important for black people to be given a voice for their thoughts. Now that I’ve had more time to consider where to place the video I think by presenting the work rather that next to the admission office, but rather placing it perhaps as part of the student’s union under the culture section. This would ideally be shown during the society’s faye that happens every year for new students to see when going round the faye, so that it opens up a discussion for the culture society’s the work with and by perhaps having the music society adjacent to theirs so that both societies consider the video and what culture and music means to them, historically and culturally.

https://youtu.be/xegKYdLxHtY

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BBBWC

In order to go beyond the black box while cube, I decided that instead of placing my video originally in a coffee shop ( a local hangout area where me and Genelle would usually go) it would be more appropriate and politically conscious of me to show my film inside next to the admission office, in the Grand Parade campus. This is because I feel there is a lack of representation of black and ethic minorities within the moving image department, despite their always having a ‘token’ ethnic minority person represented on the website and the brochures. I’m putting this lack of representation down to some fault with the admissions, and a general ignorance to how black people should be fairly represented by having my video side to side with this to highlight those issues, rather than contrast.

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Artist Inspiration

https://vimeo.com/34002478

I am inspired by Simone Leigh’s ‘Breakdown’ because of how emotionally laborious the scenes were in the video, as I am interested in how the media depicts women as ‘hysterical’ in particular how black women have been put into narrowly defined boxes because of people’s lack of understanding of their history and culture and how this impacts them as people and the way they are depicted. I would argue that a lot of black women are aware of the multiple roles that society impedes on them and as a consequence “black popular cultures are also highly charged, mixed, and clashing spaces where cultural identities are imagined, stylised, theatricalised, and rendered ‘mythic’.”

“The character’s operatic misbehaving is a rupture that punctures the tautly scripted understandings of proper behaviour, particularly for black women.” 

Performance art is one way I think that black women can step out of these narrowly defined boxes that society expects of them, for example I think of the work of Nicki Minaj and the way she performs scenes of the grotesque ‘forsaking authenticity, respectability and reality’ to challenge notions of what is normal for black women, by making herself into a ‘highly consumable product within the capitalist market by appropriating different aspects of her own history and culture (history and culture that has been written by those who do not belong to her own) and re-writing it to highlight the artificiality of these histories.

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Artist Statement

This project is an attempt to open up a discussion about how to be intersectional in my approach to filmmaking and how to fairly represent and treat people within film. I will be focusing on the problems that arise when you use people in film and ask them to perform in a way that disregards their history and culture.

I began this project by observing Romanticism in music, I was interested in particular the genre of metal, and how the lyrics in such songs can be used as an outlet to articulate our repressed feelings in relation to death and the way it links to Freud’s idea of the death drive. I was going to make a music video, and film women performing to the music, as a way of contradicting Mulvey’s notions of women as depicted in films, as the passive object, versus the active male. Also because the idea of filming raw emotional scenes is typical to reality television shows “what Laura Grindstaff refers to as the money shot… The currency placed on the unscripted emotion… can be related to the trend towards the commercialisation of feeling.” [1] This is flawed because the camera can create, any subject into a sexualised object, no matter the performance, and also you could argue that by showing women being ‘active’, this switch to a male-like act, could become fetishized. In Freudian terms, the androgynous woman takes on the guise, of obtaining a phallus, therefore transforming her into a sexual object for men to gaze at. It is also flawed because by filming scenes of raw emotion, I am not changing anything about the currency of emotion, I would be adding to it, in fact.

I planned on making a Trecartin style video that showed the absurdity of this spectacle seeking media that we live in, filmed in a frantically paced way, with heavy metal dance moves, e.g. moshing, headbanging. I wanted to film my friend Genelle, because she is one of the best actresses I know and a good friend to me. Then I realised that metal has its roots from rock music, and from rock music is has it’s roots in rhythm and blues. Upon further research into the origins of rock music in the book Triumph of Vulgarity by Robert Pattison, he says that ““Whites have used blacks as a screen upon which to project a montage of the primitive for at least three hundred years.”[2]

I then realised that, by using Genelle who is black, to depict scenes of vulgarity and of the primitive, is not only extremely insensitive and ignorant on my part but it’s also cultural appropriation, it is also, extremely degrading to use a person whose history and culture is based off the exploitation of slavery and colonisation. Especially when the scenes that I want to film surrounds such issues of death, emotional/ physical labour and the depiction of the primitive. John Akomfrah talks about how to deal with these issues when making art in his interview with the Tate: “The ideal way of working, for me, if you want to occupy these multiple zones, is to be aware that each of the zones has its own demands, ethical, poltical, cultural, historic…” [3] With this in mind, I decided that I wanted to change my idea for the project, to problems that arise when it comes to using people for a means to an end, and what are the implications of choosing to disregard someone’s culture and history in the quest for your own self-interests. 

In her book ‘Ain’t I a Woman, by Bell Hooks, she discussing how feminism can sometimes serve only white, middle class feminism because some feminists forget their privileges and consequently, marginalises women of colour. “But I became disillusioned as I saw various groups of women appropriating feminism to serve their own opportunistic ends. Whether it was women university professor crying sexist oppression (rather than sexist discrimination) to attract attention to their efforts to gain promotion; or women writers superficially exploring feminist themes to advance their own careers, it was evident that eliminating sexist oppression was not the primary concern… They were primarily interested in making feminism a forum for the expression of their own self-centred needs and desires.”[4]

This made me consider my own slanted view of feminism into a kind that is more inclusive and to brings to light the issues of only regarding, white, middle-class women as the standard for feminism. Is my feminism the same as Genelle’s ideals of feminism, if she even believes in feminism at all?

I was thinking of deliberately filming a deconstructed music video, with me as the director forcing my input onto Genelle, to highlight some of the issues I mentioned. After going to David Blandy’s artist talk, I was inspired by work in particular his pieces ‘Biters’, ‘Finding Fanon 2’ and ‘Soul of New York’, because I was interested in the way he explores his love for rap music in a way that still pays homage to the source, and the collaborative aspect that he has with his friend, Larry Achiampong. I’m wondering whether Genelle would like to make this openly collaborative, because even though I want to make this piece satirical, I’m still concerned about misrepresenting Genelle, and black women.

[1] (Gillis and Hollows, 2009)

[2] (Pattison, 1987)

[3] (Tate, 2015)

[4] (Hooks, 1982)