#in a visual metaphor for consumption under capitalism

[governmentissuedclone]

All you 'i know he whimpers' girlies are SLEEPING on Klemens Hannigan fr fr. The man has intentionally characterized himself within Hatari as soft, effeminate, and submissive. The OPENING LYRIC to Klamstrakur is 'i whine and whimper'!!!!

[langandlitanxiety]

How do Banksy’s works affect their audience? What is their message? What are the means with which the message is conveyed?

One of the most well-known graffiti artists in the world, vandal, political activist. Banksy’s phenomenon goes much beyond the visual aspects of the art he creates. Active on the streets of Bristol since the 1990s, pursuing his creative and political work, he started gaining recognition and popularity, eventually receiving the title of one of the most influential artists of our time. The aesthetic of his work can’t be narrowed or described in a few words - Banksy seems to be open to different art styles, techniques, and media, showing a wide range of artistic abilities.

Banksy’s creative input is most often associated with controversy. This specific controversy of his works lays mainly within the usage of themes that may be widely considered inappropriate or disturbing, within profanation of religious and public symbols (“Consumer Jesus” or “Napalm)”, or explicit and violent representations of power (“Graffiti Removal”, “Girl Frisking Soldier”). Centering his works around the issues of capitalism, consumerism, war, and inequalities, the artist has remained unbothered by the harsh criticism of his works given throughout the years, staying true to both his sample stencil-based style, but also to the directiveness and unforgiveness of his pieces. What at first was widely criticized has eventually grown to become the essence of Banksy. His tendency to raise up topics prone to be swept under the rug and use harsh, unpoetic metaphors are currently the main features to make him such a recognizable artist. To promote his ideas and carry out messages in his art, he directly addresses his viewers, very often challenging instead of pleasing, asking philosophical questions and provoking self-reflection. He strives for the receivers to be personally touched with his art, trying to transcribe his own cynical approach into the minds of others. The artist relies on provocativeness: his works are not supposed to be pretty or charming, but to evoke feelings, regardless if it’s happiness, sadness, anger. He exposes truths he believes in by turning to the receiver’s conscience and sense of guilt. Though always controversial, Banksy’s works usually promote simple ideas. The majority of his turn to peace, equality, and reasonableness regarding consumption. 

What is also relevant to Banky’s creation of his artistic expression is the use of dark humor and satire; he aims to create a powerful and ironic image of today’s world. At the same time, he directs his art towards all audiences, choosing his viewers to be random passersby, creating “for the people”. His art is simple, yet meaningful, thus easily understandable and accessible to anyone.

[mindthewolves]

some thoughts, filed under: pacific rim

[this is gonna be full of spoilers. fair warning. but also curious what others thought of the storytelling in the movie.]

-the voiceover backstory was long and seemed like kind of a storytelling crutch. the thing is I don’t think the story needed to start where it did, with the onset of the kaiju attacks. it would’ve worked just as well to open at the height of the jaeger system, and cobble together the backstory from news footage (sans voiceover), the celebrity status of jaeger pilots (& specifically I would have loved for this to focus on POC pilots as an inversion of the directionality of media consumption today, which largely faces toward US/western media), and raleigh’s pov. it took quite a while for pacific rim to find its footing in terms of characterization, and introducing raleigh and his brother in this way - focusing on more of their daily routine and the sibling dynamic - could have helped the story gel sooner and heightened the emotional impact of yancy’s death.

-but one possible reason this wasn’t done is because drift compatibility and the entire premise of the jaegers is difficult to show without a narrative voiceover. potential workarounds: retrospective news footage of how the jaegers were conceived, engineered, and troubleshooted; or (and more interesting to me) a scene involving pilots who weren’t drift compatible. this is something pac rim never got to show, and given that compatibility is seen as rare and special, I’m curious what incompatibility looks like – bigotry, possibly, given the overarching theme of unity tying the film together. and assuming people are fluid & have the capacity for change, is it possible to fall in and out of drift compatibility, i.e. if the pilots discover something about each other, if the relationship becomes rocky, etc.?

-been thinking about ways the neural drift could be portrayed other than wandering through each other’s childhood memories, and I think sense8 does it more effectively in terms of how it overlaps narratives and shared experiences. in your eyes is another movie that plays with a similar telepathic bond in a very effective way. 

-it’s a movie made for the big screen visual; there’s so much detail to the kaiju and a lot of thought has gone into the monster anatomy, their evolving modes of attack, etc.

-so much so that there are more kaiju than speaking role women in this movie, more kaiju than speaking role POCs, and (subjectively; tbh I haven’t tabulated) the kaiju get more screen time than the female or POC characters. I’m also not sure why the kaiju are all nicknamed. like if you are hunting and tracking a group of things for a length of time, I understand; but for an enemy that appears singly and is dealt with immediately? why would you name it? (also the naming choice for the main jaeger...just no.)

-ok the racial politics first. I loved stacker’s portrayal, how his authority and the burden of command flows from him as easily as breathing. it’s never questioned. even when raleigh disagrees, he presses up to a point, but ultimately defers. & stacker is three-dimensional in a way that sidesteps tropes of black men in authority positions being angry or intimidating, or being sidelined or killed off for the advancement of a white character’s narrative: he has the people he wants to protect, he's willing to make the hard choices but is set up as the moral center of the story, and he has the weight of his own history behind him. the fact that he’s ostensibly drift compatible with anyone speaks to a remarkable capacity for empathy and understanding. ofc it’s found family that always gets me though, and the scene where mako very subtly gestures to herself to alert him to a nosebleed says volumes about their relationships, about the secrets she keeps for him, and the vulnerability he lets her see.

-mako on the other hand does fall into a number of racial stereotypes: all asians know martial arts, all asian women are demure and defer to authority. from a purely storytelling perspective, she makes for a good foil to raleigh’s more impulsive character, and they’re evenly matched. but when you take into account the larger pattern of racial stereotypes in mainstream media, this particular characterization irks me to no end (see: sense8, street fighter - legend of chun li) and this trope needs to die. also it irritated me that she had so little agency; she doesn’t fight (much) for herself to become a jaeger pilot, she stands back as raleigh decks chuck on her behalf, and later she’s ejected from the jaeger when raleigh decides it’s time to go it alone. she doesn’t make a ton of choices in this story. from a gender standpoint though, I definitely appreciated the restraint in terms of not sexualizing her as a character – the jaeger uniform she wears is the same as raleigh’s, she’s not shown in various states of undress, and the romantic subplot I was sure was going to rear its head just...didn’t? kudos.

-for a story set in hong kong, there are a bunch of white people. just sayin’. and sure the apocalypse could conceivably be postracial, but that’s not what’s happening here. the asian actors are background, and it’s most notable in the scenes with newt in the bunker – he’s always centered, and the camera singles him out while everyone else is just noise. the other jaeger candidates are indistinguishable from one another and unnecessarily, poorly matched against raleigh. mako is the only asian actor with more than a token line (and is, notably, japanese rather than chinese). non sequitur but it’s also not apparent to me why raleigh magically speaks japanese, or why it’s even necessary to include that detail in their meet cute. stacker speaking japanese I can buy, given their father-daughter dynamic, but raleigh doing the same sets off red flags for me.

-as a disclaimer I tend not to like action scenes for their own sake (avengers & batman v superman, boring; wonder woman: riveting, because the emotional stakes were palpable) but these definitely felt too long because the characters and stakes weren’t sufficiently fleshed out and there was so much attention paid to the kaiju when they were fairly monotone villains.

-like there was so much characterization that could have been capitalized on here, which is why I think pac rim has such fic potential: lots of space to fill in the blanks. and that’s not a bad thing, to leave those gaps. but at the same time I think the emotional beats of the movie hit late, and maybe they could have been played up more.

-for one I didn’t realize the striker eureka pilots were father and son until they were saying their goodbyes on opposite sides of an elevator door (see there are these great moments) and therefore when stacker sizes up the son, his mention of daddy issues seemed heavy-handed and not borne out in the previous narrative. idk maybe I missed something earlier on, entirely possible. I completely missed how the dog was a surrogate for the father-son affection until the elevator scene.

-second, the jaeger pilots just kept dying in droves towards the end of the movie but for a group of people with a skill set so rare and so valued? I wanted their deaths to be played up more. I wanted a funeral or at least a tribute to the wei triplets and the kaidanovskys, possibly also dredging up the jaeger carcasses from the sea. it didn’t have to be elaborate, but it would have made sense to take a moment. (it’s been a while since I watched battlestar galactica, but something that has always stuck with me – however vaguely – was the way the raider pilots would touch the memorial wall as they filed past, the sheer emotional weight that went into those few frames.)

-but geez the shoe motif. it was a neat metaphor for the theme of togetherness lacing through the movie, as well as for the concept of drift compatibility. & I liked how the two pairs of shoes contrasted each other. stacker gives mako (what I assume to be) the second shoe, making a complete pair, and it’s a little kid’s shoe that embodies unity and family and an innocence of heart. but when hannibal gets eaten, the gold-plated Shoes of Avarice TM are separated.

-the questionable science: the striker eureka is purely electric, and goes out of commission when an EMP hits, whereas the mark-3 jaegers run on nuclear energy AND YET power off when the plug is pulled? but wait it gets better. stacker’s been warned that he’ll die from radiation poisoning if he steps foot in another jaeger, and the emotional beat when he takes herc’s spot plays off his knowing sacrifice. not sure what he thinks he’ll die from though, because he’s stepping into a solely electric-powered jaeger.

-nitpick: why is there so much shouting in the jaegers. why the need to talk if you’re in each other heads.

-also from a safety design standpoint it seems like a terrible idea to have the pilots standing, with zero support in case of impact.

-also if the kaiju are so invincible and any non-jaeger weaponry doesn’t make a dent, someone explain to me how in the stinger, hannibal cuts his way out of a kaiju GI tract with a tiny tiny knife.

-soundtrack: it always feels like I have no vocabulary to describe art or music, but I liked how the electronic/percussive elements echo the construction material of the mechas onscreen, kind of like an onomatopoeia. the orchestral undercurrent carries the heroic tone of the movie, but it’s stained too with foreboding by the foghorn blasts. & the beat idk but it reminded me of the give-and-take choreography of a fight or of a dance, possibly also the synchrony between jaeger pilots.

-way better meta about the symbolism in the changing colors of jaeger pilot armor here:

Raleigh goes from a white uniform to a black one, which is a classic Manichean Heresy. One could argue that the switch symbolizes a loss of innocence, but I would say that it goes much deeper than that (though I would also argue that this is treated by the film as a positive thing – Raleigh trades innocence for wisdom in this equation). A Manichean Heresy is an inversion of traditional symbolism. In his white uniform, which would traditionally symbolize purity and righteousness, Raleigh and Yancy make a mistake that ends in his Yancy’s death, the near destruction of G*psy Danger, and Raleigh’s fall from grace. When he returns to the world, as a savior and mentor, he wears a black uniform.

When I realized this, it took me a while to figure out what it meant. It wasn’t until I considered Stacker Pentecost’s uniform that I understood. Stacker shifts from a dark silver uniform into a black one. This transition is less extreme than Raleigh’s, though I think in a lot of ways they mirror one another. It is never stated that Stacker or his partner made a mistake that led to his partner’s death, therefore it makes sense that Raleigh and Stacker would be represented in visually unique manners, since their narratives have different trajectories. Thus Stacker’s transition into the black uniform is likely representative of his gained experience (and his eventual – spoiler alert – martyrdom), because he was presented to us (in literal messianic imagery) as a fixed moral point even from his introduction.

[maresearchdigitalandmedia]

Social Critique

A reflective view about social classes.

Since the moment we are born we are grouped and categorised in a social economical status that will have impact in our life’s pathway.

Before to enter in a study of the different generations and the marketing it is important understand how the structure of the systematic classification of this social economical groups work to understand that the symbolical tendencies and behaviour statements said about generations.

Social classes give diverse possibilities to the different structures in determinant factors such as education and opportunities of other many activities to the people englobed in the generations in order to develop and guide them in a group conformity.

Bourgeois class lifestyle is different in every area of the consumption, hobbies, and the symbolisation of these activities for appearance in the social position. ‘Taste is the heart of these symbolic struggles, which go on at all times between the fractions of the dominant class and which would be less absolute, less total, if they were not based on the primary belief which binds each agent to his life-style. A materialist reduction of preferences to their economic and social conditions of production and to the social functions of the seemingly most disinterested practices must not obscure the fact that, in matter of culture, investments are not only economic but also psychological’. (Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:36)

It is about a condition of the capitalist society behaviour that we live and learnt it until the point of categorising and labelling everything in order to make it understandable. We as civilised people added ourself a hypothetical representative value that classify each of us depending on the income of the family as a success with subsequently empiricism of possessing a place, a status, an education, and many other factors that will condition it in the contrivance of quality and opportunities.

Pierre Bourdieu said that ‘the class distribution, this description of the aesthete’s variant invites an analysis of the class variations and the invariants of the mediated, relatively abstract experience of the social world supplied by newspaper reading, for example, as a function of variations in social and spatial distance ( with at one extreme, the local items in the regional dailies—marriages, deaths, accidents— and, at the other extreme, international news or, on another scale, the royal engagements and weddings in the glossy magazines) or in political commitment ( from the detachment depicted in Proust’s text to the activist’s outrage or enthusiasm’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

In this fragment Bourdieu repudiate the invariants of the mediated “media” as a consumer choice arguing that everything it comes socially conditioned being descended from a determinate inherit of the systematic social classes that we as humans try to maintain up as a distinction of our social classes.

Only the luckiest and the ones who pushed themselves in order to acquire their goals will be the ones in the lowest system of the social scale that will [just a small percentage] have a chance of breaking up the social status already attached to them since they were born. The upper classes will have more facilities in realising anything they purpose to do with the acquisitive economical power, influences, social groups, leads, education and direction. In addition, Bourdieu states that in fact, ‘the absence of this kind of preliminary analysis of the social significance of the indicators can make the most rigorous-seeming surveys quite unsuitable for sociological reading. Because they forget that the parent constancy of the products conceals the diversity of the social uses they are put to’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

Not only the people is classified by the society we live in but it is classifying a wide range of products depending on this social status distinguishing again for the purchasing power.

As a result of the conditions of a similar lifestyle when the same conditions apply, only awarding to the bold people from the below social system constituting the dominant and dominated classes.

At this point Bourdieu show us his point of view, were I can understand, the submissive to the dominants for the known difference of activities, power and experience reflected in their day to day life creating a desire from the lower classes and giving authority to the dominants creating a distinction of the groups, social systematic fiction branding.

The book of A social critique of the judgement of taste it refers to the movement of the branding and the result of divergent requisites as ‘there are products very few that are perfectly ‘ univocal’ and it is rarely possible to deduce the social use from the thing itself.

Except for products specially designed for a particular use ( like ‘slimming bread’) or closely tied to a class, by tradition (like tea—in France) or price (like caviar), most products only derive their social value from the social use that is made of them. As a consequence, in these areas the only way to find the class variations is to introduce them from the start, by replacing worlds or things whose apparently univocal meaning creates no difficulty for the abstract classifications of the academic unconscious, with the social uses in which they become fully determined’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

Bourdieu’s analysis of consumption behaviour shows his sociological propose with examples of tastes that define aesthetic fundamental materialism and the differentiations or better say class distinctions, social and cultural examples of the consumption and our behaviour under the pressure of the social structure shared and erudite by our closes relative influenced by the most trending and educated for the instant media again conditioned by economy, politics and uncertainly by religion.

At the end of this vicious circle it all recall in appearances. Appearances are about giving impression of your aspirational perception of achievement goals to someone by the means necessaries. Usually this means are goods that others can perceive visually, as we have been pointing before.

Appearance it comes accompanied by prejudices in the perceptions acquired through the education, experiences and close social groups a person could pertain.

So through that, we are able to distinguish ourself from the others, we acquired values, knowledge and we find easier to mix with people similar to us creating a ‘generational identity’. Searching for explanatory factors we can refer to Wittgenstein that said ‘from the constancy of the substantive to the constancy of substance, it treats the properties attached to agents—occupation, age, sex, qualifications—as factors independent of the relationship within they ‘act’ ’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:22)

Bordieu it explains the power relationships saying that ‘ ‘explanatory power’ stems from the mental habits of common-sense knowledge of the social world, which aims to ‘establish a relation of well-defined concepts’, the rational principle of the effects which the statical relationship records despite everything—for example, the relationship between the titles of nobility 9 or marks of infamy) awarded by the educational system and the practices they imply, or between the disposition required by works of legitimate art and the disposition which, deliberately and consciously or not, is taught in schools’ .

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:22)

The entitlement effect called by Bourdieu that states knowing the relationship which exists between cultural capital inherited from the family and academic capital.

In a traditional point of view then and since the industrial age or even before ( medieval age and the development of the social pyramid hierachy inherited by the church and the power structure they developed, allowing the religion at the top, followed by the king (politics), bourgeois (economy and owners), marquise, duke, highworking-class (directors/workers), and working-class/poverty) (workers), we could observe that bourgeois class life-style has been transcendent as they have been curating their image to the others and comparing it with activities of their consumption.

The activities are from a perceptions like place to live, education, reading, hobbies, clothes, jewellery, spices, habits like the afternoon tea break and a large, etc… that involves almost all their daily activities, social activities, opportunities, and personal activities to reinforce the idea of social high-class guiding behaviour and norms.

As Jean explains this in short, ‘everything that is engender by the realistic (but not resigned) hedonism and sceptical (but not cynical) materialism which constitute both form of adaption to the conditions of existence and a defence against them; there is the efficacy and vivacity of a speech which, freed from the censorship and constrains of quasi-written and therefore decontextualized speech, bases, its ellipses, short cuts and metaphors on common reference to shared situations, experiences and traditions’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:394)

Everything it comes from how we have been educated through this systematic method of political, capitalist and economical human assortment.

At the time of making statistics and showing them into tables we have to considerate different factors in order to determine approximately numeral analysis in the case of the need of building them for the study.

Even thought, statistics are imprecise and not always the sources and exactly number of participants are not shown, although this case it is hypothetic. There are many factors to consider at the time of individualising aspects to study even though generally speaking I could the most common are sex, age and gender which are a correlation of non biological category understood by the humanity; in the study of Bourdieu’s analysis he study 2 countries (France and Algeria) and divides the “x” with the “z” coordinate of a table with classes and ages using fractions and percentages in politics and in aesthetics. 

He studied the differences between how the sexes tend to diminish both when one moves from the dominated classes to the dominant classes and when, within the dominant classes and no doubt also the petite bourgeoisie, one moves from the economically dominant fraction to the dominated fractions of the society system. ‘Everything suggests that the refusal of sexual status, in political or other matters, tends to increase with educational level, Bourdieu states’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:394)

Concisely, traditional it means that the modern hierarchy still dragging male chauvinism and woman feel the repression of the society to express themselves with their opinion about any subject. In addition, this situation it has been taught in a general society for ages until today when we can notice a change in the mind of the younger generations having inherit and go in depth with social causes.

Hence, sexuality it has been from a point of view under the power of a men command excluding the homosexual behaviours, producing discrimination of sexes, sexual orientation, races and age in educational institutions, politic, and economically in the traditional society not giving the right to speak or taking into account for their personal opinion to this people.

As this group of people have the lack of counsiousness, knowledge, or language valuable to take in consideration.

In our materialistic societies, people want to give meaning to their consumption. Only brands that add value to the product and tell a story about its buyers, or situate their consumption on a ladder of intangible values, can provide this meaning. Hence the cult of luxury brands, or other cultural champions such as Nike or Apple. We stress the need for brands to have brand content, revealing their culture. To resonate with present and future consumers, brands must realise that, apart from market share competition, there is also a values competition.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.21.)

Values competition that fulfil the meaning of the buyers in society giving a meaning more than the quality. So at the end what build and composes a branding and the argument of Pierre Bordieu it works the same way; describing of the aesthete’s variants manifesting an analysis of class variations and an abstract of a ephemeral, superficial and prejudiced society.

Today and since the internet pheromones, branding has been changing as the citizens and new generations have been progressing with the internet (media) world that leaves everything to the cope of the hand and in this way everything has gone adapting to the new technologies, for example supermarkets got online and extend their selling items, other markets have appeared like Amazon, possibility of business online without the presence of a store in a city and every business have become available from any place in the world thank you to the Web 2.0 amplifying and multiplying the chances of acquiring items from abroad or near where you are.

The Generations and media dissertation it inspired the thought that technology and it is use can not be categorised by age, as it is a sensible process of understanding and that it can be maybe categorised by new kinds of categorise as spender time in social media, i.e. people born after 2000 have grown already with the use of new technologies and they spent 24 h checking on the phone for different causes as inspecting their friend's activity, uploading pictures, searching for information of product, etc. 

It is different behaviour than people who started using technology after in their middle age for example. Other kind of categorisation it can be depending on the common application they use measured by a percentage value gathering the repetitive use of the same applications in a different groups.

We can create groups depends on the geographical area people are living in as in the market there are a wide range of diverse and common utility applications with an adaptation of this app with extensions that depend on the country people use more one than the others.

Again refining the association we can calculate the average depending on the place within the average percentage of common app as an example of usage of technologies to define and categorising the technologic generation for demographic development of humanity within the existence of technology.

Vittadini, N., Siibak, A., Carpentier Reifova, I. and Bilandzic, H. (2013). Generations and Media: The social Construction of Generational Identity and Differences

As there is not gold everything that shines, social media has brought negative repercussions to businesses and brands as it has empowered the client side thank you to the blogs that give free advice about the business, brand or product you are interested in purchasing.

It is the end for average brands. Only those that maximaze delight will survive, whether they offer extremely low prices or a rewarding experience, service or performance. It is the end of hollow brands, without identity. Retailers are also more powerful than many of the brands they distribute: all brands that do not master their channel are now in a B to B to C situation, and must never forget it.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.2.)

Nowadays we are surrounding by brand in every scope of our lives and sometimes we do not perceive that, but as you see we have become and we are consumers, and humans have taken the advantage and transform our necessities to brands, companies and values because we need them to survive, although we have converted unnecessary items in essential making us live in a consumerist stage of our lives and we are living from and by brands.

It is very interesting and true that the customer-based values of the brand are created by the brand. These additional cashflows are the result of the customers’ willingness to buy one brand more than its competitors’, even when another brand is cheaper.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.7.)

This is a response of the public after caring and showing values to the customers making bonds and after a long time this will be the people who will be loyal to your product.

Besides, this people is the one who sells the product, the people who build the brand recommending it to their friends, the mouth to mouth, the people who will recommend online your product or will do a blog about your products overselling and doing the marketing to other people who might be thinking in purchase it, this people will be dong the management of the brand and this will be the result of a good brand strategy.

Brands created assets in the minds and hearts of customers, distributors, prescribers, opinion leaders. These assets are brans awareness, beliefs of exclusivity and superiority of some valued benefit, and emotional bonding. This is what expressed the traditional definition of a bran: ‘a brand is a set of mental associations, held by the consumer, which add to the perceived value of a product or service’ (Keller 1998: 7).

It seems and there are different opinions about this, that branding before was the dominant and the public was the obedient with the exception of that today the dominant side has change to clients because of the facility of speak out about the brand, the product and the gathering of information that has made us control how, when, why and what we want the brand do for us as its costumers.

As Jean-Noel said brands have associations and this are unique meaning exclusivity, strong as such saliency and positive as desirable.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p. 6.)

[micaramel]

Artist: Michael E. Smith

Venue: Secession, Vienna

Date: February 21 – June 21, 2020

Curated By: Jeanette Pacher, Bettina Spörr

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Video:



Michael E. Smith at Secession, installation, 02:45

Images courtesy of Secession, Vienna

Press Release:

Michael E. Smith makes sculptures, installations, object collages, and videos; he sometimes also creates interactive sound installations, conceiving of the gallery space he is working in as an active partner in the dialogical process of producing an exhibition. His installations open up a space of experience that addresses itself to much more than just our sense of vision. Integrating immaterial components such as light, sound, and habitual procedures, he seeks to sharpen all our perceptual faculties.

The development of new pieces and exhibitions typically starts in the studio, where the artist begins by producing “material sketches”: loose arrangements in which he tests things to explore their potential as vehicles of meaning. He does not finalize his works until he installs them in the exhibition setting, and many take concrete form only during this phase or even owe their existence to a moment’s inspiration. His shows are distinguished by the economical use of his resources and his keen awareness of the expressive force of formal interrelations. Carefully orchestrating the placement of his works, he arranges tightly composed yet dynamic constellations involving the objects, the spaces around them, and— sometimes immaterial—interventions. The concentration on few objects in the room creates an impression of capaciousness and emptiness—a metaphor, perhaps, for the loneliness and precariousness of human existence at large—that enhances the significance of each work and becomes an integral part of the art.

Smith’s engagement with the given architecture, the space in which his art unfolds, merits particular attention. The works are traces of a sort, hinting at the presence of a singular human being in a specific place, making an exhibition a phenomenological—and unique—event. Simple modifications such as changes to the ordinary lighting conditions by dimming or eliminating illuminants engender minimal disruptions in the system of the familiar. Subtle interventions, like the removal of door handles, alter routines, paths, and functions and sensitize both visitors and employees to the situation. Now and then he will place objects in areas that are inaccessible to visitors: cracking open the confines of the exhibition space, at least in the imagination, these displays raise questions concerning the public (audience) as well as the limitations of art and its institutions.

The sculptures and object collages are usually composed of no more than a handful of elements or even stand for themselves in the manner of readymades. Smith works with found, used, discarded, and sometimes broken articles, the stuff of daily life: furniture, clothes, and electronics, which he often combines with organic matter, primarily prepared animals or animal parts, and bones, including human bones. The human body—or the void where it was or might be—generally occupies a central position in his work. Presence and absence, movement and stillness, heaviness and lightness alternate, complementing or blending into each other.

Whimsical and occasionally shocking, Smith’s assemblages strike a somber, almost tragic keynote. Then again, his works are replete with nuances that accommodate other tempers as well. Art itself is a complex language: each thing, each action, each place comes fraught with stories and meanings. The artist offers a very specific account of what he limns as the triangular relationship between human, object, and nature and acknowledges its complications and baffling aspects. Smith’s distinctive shrewd humor informs his aesthetic sensibility and formal wit, as when he combines a plastic armchair with a sea turtle’s cranial bone, pointing up the striking similarity between the two objects’ shapes. Aiming at concentration on the essential, he has devised a strategy of reduction and maximum focus.

Smith’s work sometimes prompts associations with environmental devastation and the disappearance of—human and animal—habitats. It touches on political and social experiences, ecological crises, consumption under capitalism, and the wasteful use of resources as well as violence, death, and social injustice. His art is informed by his roots in Detroit, a city that is ground zero for the decline of American industry and the country’s working class, but has also long been home to a thriving and diverse music and alternative culture scene.

For his exhibition at the Secession, which will extend from the upstairs Grafisches Kabinett to the Galerie on the first basement level, Smith is developing new works that he will produce or arrange, assemble, and install on the scene. Prior to this, our information was limited to the materials that we obtained at the artist’s request in preparation for his stay in Vienna or that he brought: among them are a large number of secondhand turbo fans of the kind used by construction crews to increase the air circulation in rooms and buildings and improve the effectiveness of drying equipment; rocks from a quarry; a human cranial bone from the mid-nineteenth century; rabbit furs; a scuffed sofa armchair; empty guitar cases; and dried pumpkins.

The viewer’s experience of Smith’s work and exhibitions is perhaps best compared to that of the spectator in Brecht’s epic theater. The dramatist did not propose to achieve catharsis through art; the objective of his plays was precisely not to prompt an experience of purification and redemption. Rather, he sought to jolt his audience awake, spurring them to think for themselves and then take action in real life.

Michael E. Smith was born in Detroit in 1977 and lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curators: Jeanette Pacher, Bettina Spörr.

  P.S.: It’s February 19, 2020, one day before the opening. The artist is around during the day for discussions and updates; at night, he steps into a deeply concentrated workflow and checks out a variety of options – a steady process of adding and deleting, bringing him closer to the point of his desired outcome. When the work is done, he clears away the remains of his nocturnal experiments before the employees arrive in the morning. Only few, but thoughtfully placed objects are found in the exhibition spaces. The larger part of the exhibition is situated in a succession of rooms in the basement, the so-called Galerie. At the artist’s request, all structures covering windows or doors have been removed, the ceiling lights remain switched off; only more or less faint rays of natural light fall through the few, sparse window panes into the exhibition space, as well as stray light from the general public premises. An emergency fire door between the first and second room vibrates slightly noticeable thanks to three air movers, which the artist has placed here. They make a hell of a noise and create a cool breeze that circulates throughout the gallery. The whirlwind at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz is likely to have served as a blueprint here. Bread boxes seemingly hovering halfway up doors and radiators, look as if they’d been seized by the wind and are now stuck in position, their movement frozen. Countless pumpkin stems are arranged to form a symbol or logo, strangely familiar but hard to decipher – until one realizes, it’s a Batman symbol cut in half, the cut running exactly along the middle line of the terrazzo floor.

To the left, a door opens up to another room, one that was created in the course of the 2018 renovation. Its function is still open, held in suspense, somehow floating between exhibition space, event location, and functional room. Here, Smith has removed a red velvet curtain that covered two walls (the mounting track hints at what is now missing) and here too the lights are switched off – almost; merely two LED light bars glow in the coolest of possible light temperatures. Adapting the lights, twisting the usual settings mark the very beginning of the install process. The lights in front of the Galerie, where a model of the Secession and wall charts with information on the building’s history are located, have been re- programmed and turned from a warm white tone to cold white to harmonize the artificial and natural light. A leather jacket cut in two hangs between two pilasters, not a single written sign points to Smith’s exhibition, while usually the artist’s name in vinyl lettering would give a hint to the show.

In the Grafisches Kabinett, one comes across a sculpture reminiscent of the visual language of cartoons. Two dried gourds protrude from the eye sockets of a human skull, creating the cited comic-effect, commonly referred to as “eyes popping out of one’s head”. In addition, the vegetables used here attest to collaborations Smith has entered. For one, he hired a farmer to collect, cut off and dry the stems of a year’s whole pumpkin crop. He had the idea for this more or less by chance, when the stem of one of his kids’ (Haloween) pumpkins broke of and he realized that the stem is a symbol for the absence of an object. Also the exceptionally long-necked gourds were specially grown for the artist, hanging on a rack to let the necks grow long and slim. With collaborations like these, Michael E. Smith connects worlds that usually have little in common in a peaceable way.

A final remark: What has been described above is merely speculation. Possibly tomorrow, for the opening, things will be different.

Link: Michael E. Smith at Secession

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3cwKRjq

[liv--andletlive]

viva viva: beginning a contextual report

viva script [revisited] ZAO acts as a prologue. Its trajectory serves as an early iteration of what I now understand to be the intricacies and nuances of both my process and practise. ZAO established four fundamental themes; 1. Collaborations / Collectives             2. Language as Object                      3. Experimental Research Methods                               4. Narrative

The nature of briefs often demands engagement with spaces that are deliciously rich, yet equally knotty and complex. The weight of navigating these spaces individually can be incapacitating. Yet working as a collective established a culture in which humour and play are the toolkit to toy with muddy social, political and cultural ecologies. The collective is a negotiation of four individuals agency, ego and ownership to exist, think and intervene as one body. Although I present this as a surrendering of sorts, in retrospect, I think it was a kind of self-medication. I bore easily, I am easily distracted. The collective became more of a group of friends trying to make each other laugh but weirdly, this was where I found myself most productive, engaged and excited.

ZAO itself began with a deconstruction of language and narrative. The lecture series contextualising ZAO established a narrative of a particular tone. Its defined ZAO could be identified by the dehumanised presentations of social groups. However, the lectures failed to consider the opposite of this, ‘othering’ through a process of elevation, fetishisation or glorification. It was the unpicking of this subtlety within the presented narrative which formed the conceptual site for intervention.

24HR CULT:  AN ODE TO MY HUMMUS FETISH:  ELEPHANT AND CASTLE TIL I D1E: HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sarnoff Mednicks articulation is useful when trying to explain what experimental research methods actually are. Mednicks suggests ‘creativity is an associative memory that works exceptionally well.’ Experimental methodologies exploit this ‘associative memory’ of language and its material culture comprised of practices, politics, behaviours, norms, materials, processes and cultural narratives. They are a physical articulation of the subject matter and an unpicking of the ecology they inhabit. 

Around week three we encountered what Dom described as a ‘wobble’, although this felt unproductive and uncomfortable, in retrospect this was one of the most telling moments of the project. Maxine Naylor and Ralph Ball discuss the ‘biological rivalry between the eye and the vocal chords’ in ‘Form Follows Idea’, articulating how language can pose problematic in design contexts. Design itself a visual language and discourse stating:

  ‘words allow us to live in our heads where we can always remain mentally pregnant with ideas, ideas are safe and protected in the deliciously speculative womb. Giving birth is a much more painful reality’. This is useful when attempting to understand the realities of executing these methodologies. ‘The 24hr Cult’ was a kind of labour, disjointed, frantic and ridiculous, soon the body of ’The Channel’ lay in our arms but we were all blind to what it demanded nor what it even was. Experimental research methods are physical explorations of the ecology of a subject, but the disparity between our linguistic and visual language results in a psychodrama. The ‘wobble’ draining and gruelling, but it was a translation process, it was a stretching of our associative memory. It wasn’t until we happened upon a meme that visually and linguistically articulated that which we were trying to say all along that we could decipher that which our project was missing, narrative. THE CHANNEL: 

If language was our object, our design is narrative. This is how Exercise Easy came to be. When we realised our ambition was to manufacture the extravagant facade of truth, toeing to line between the ridiculous and incomprehensible, establishing the scenario was relatively easy. GET MOIST - EXERCISE EASY: 

“Narrative is one of the large categories or systems of understanding that we use in negotiations with reality.” I feel this is critical when considering the tone of these films, they’re playful, light hearted and funny, I suppose, and comedy has been paramount to engage both myself as the designer and the audience as the ‘user’ in the subject. I think its useful to note a few things that were touched upon in ‘Critical Design in Context’ (Matt Malpass) in regards to the function of satire in design and discourse.

Horatian satire: ‘optimistic, less political, humorous [but] identifies folly […] through techniques of antithesis, burlesque and metaphor’. This is what Exercise Easy crystallised, using satire as an instrument to execute this narrative, ‘we are extending our understanding of function and our understanding of agency.(Matt Malpass)’ A joke operates by establishing a preconceived notion and its the abrupt swerve of the expected  evokes laughter, in the disparity between the expected conclusion and the punchline lies an opportunity to highlight, subvert, challenge and critique. However, my practise does so through physical objects and design poetics, when language is comedically clumsy or linguistically restrictive, design poetics can afford a sensitive kind of audience engagement. Satire acts as the mechanics and provoking laughter is its function, ultimately this serves to underscore my design practise as a discourse and a mode of critical reflection of our inherited cultural narratives.

ZAO was productive and ridiculous and fun, but reestablished anxieties that the summer had long numbed me to.

I do bore

 I am easily distracted

   I am highly self-critical

     I have in the past had incapacitating fear of failure

       I am damningly competitive

         and most of all, I am annoyingly self-aware

but I am far from a rarity, I am product of my time. My language choice here is critical. During this reflection of my practise I’ve touched upon notions of my perceived ‘productivity’ a handful of times and I think it’s important to note the presence of the language of capital and capitalism. Collective agency really is my self-medication to the anaesthesia of individualism. This struck me during the project itself as I’d noticed the absence of a certain weight in my chest, and resultantly, my behaviours and choices felt unapologetic, undiluted versions of myself. Before ‘escape’ there were talks of trying to work with new people in alternative ways. After a few disparaging comments rang through the studios about everything being done before, I suppose a large portion of us were in a state of reflexive impotence. Our value, productivity felt invalid as our contribution to our creative market was redundant. CorpDes was a tantrum, a reactionary fit of frustration.

Although language did not seemingly play as poignant a role in ‘escape’, its use did draw parallels to both 2.1 and 2.4. When we begin to build fictions, these fictions develop a kind of logic, in turn, words begin to ascertain new meaning. From ‘ultimate consumption’, ‘disposable cults’, ‘decentralised film’ to ‘charity work’ to ‘Alfonso Jack’, an evolving language is imperative to embellishing these narratives and broader fictions, as it allows for them to grow into their own living kind of ecology.

PT 1: Narrative  Build    Graphics.

Narrative: write brief company history. establish timelines, frameworks and rules within to begin ficitionalising. E.g All personnel to be randomly assigned a department, each person to write self a CV.   [OLIVIA FITZPATRICK: A VER GD AND COOL DESIGNER, A CV]

Build: responsible for props, set. Each ‘employee’ to have standardised cubicle space. 

Graphics: Establishing company ID. 

PT 2: Thinking through performance. Each ‘department’ responsible for group activity.   Design - Charity event      Logistics(?) - PR vid         Human Resources - ‘Faking it’ workshop. 

2.2 established experimental research methods which sought to appropriate the mundane and exaggerate, toy with and parody its material culture. These methodologies were established through organising ourselves into smaller groups and departments of around six or seven. These smaller collaborations were a continuous negotiation of concept working towards a series of micro-deadlines. These restrictions and rules were the intrinsic fabric of our process, stimulating alternative modes of thinking and problem solving. Micro-deadlines drove our productivity to construct the physical space of CorpDes. “invention now lies more in reconnecting, and building authentic, narrative layers of meaning back into objects that have lost meaningful sig- ni cance, rationale and value under the shear proliferation of bad copies.”

Thus, “it is important to re-establish visual contemplation and communication [...] Its time to provide critical, ironic and playful commentary on our condition and our cultures of consumption of both material and in- formation.”. In turn, physicalising our narrative in such away was just as integral to our process. It established a space into which we could think through not just making but equally, performance.

THE BBBC: A mockumentary seeking to uncover the illegal activities of CorpDes, its CEO and untrustworthy employees. Filmed over two days, broken down into a timeline by narrative during week one.

Timeline:

The central concept of CorpDes itself wasn’t an attempt to be a knock off version of the office, but rather utilising a large enough framework to encompass 36 practitioners. The nuances of this were conceived through a series of defined rules and performances. Although the narrative itself I wouldn’t say was particularly original, its wider narrative as a kind of protest in the context of an art school education is one I think epitomises my responsibilities as a practitioner. The pervading narrative of our increasingly marketised education system (especially in the context of neoliberalism) is one machiavellian competition, both on a micro and macro level. CorpDes as a vehicle to allow 36 practitioners to collaborate allowed for us to reclaim the learning space as our own, not a space of which we have bought and so must conform to the bureaucracies and rigid limitations of. Ultimately, CorpDes acts as institutional critique. Its full context allows for the reframing of our thinking of educational spaces. But herein lies a paradox. The limitations of an art school education imposed the very restrictions which provoked and allowed for CorpDes to exist.

CorpDes’s conclusion did not satisfy my yearning for collective agency. Decentralised was a collective of ten.

Acted as the bridge between our immaterial subject matter, blockchain for example, and orchestrating the physical metaphors that acted as a means of understanding their mechanics. Like 2.1, language was the initial area of interrogation in order to establish experimental research methods. BLOCKCHAIN PIZZA, BLOCKCHAIN SANDWICHES: 

The research methods deployed in the live brief echoed characteristics seen in 2.1 and 2.4. Our process was constructed through a continuous use of limitations and restrictions. We had to work as a body of ten. We could not impose our will over the decision making process, but rather this was down to chance and timing. However, the face of these research methods changed as our mode of conceptualising them changed. As we dealt with immaterial subject matters of abstract systems and structures, drawing became integral to understanding. In turn, we used drawings to restructure ourselves as a collective, in turn changing the fundamental configuration of our experimental research methods. This further serves to echo Ball and Naylor’s meditations on language in design as a discourse. As a collective of most likely visual thinkers, drawing became our most effective was of communication. This laid the foundations of our development. FRESH WITHIN, THEREFORE A FATHER:  ALSO, BRUTALIST MAYHEM: 

Decentralised film attempted to restructure the film making process to relinquish our individual agency, control and ego over its outcome. In turn, we wanted to establish a framework of which would facilitate this. As a means of doing so we began to build a body of film footage comprised of varying sorts of shots. Our ambition was for this to act as a library from which anyone could construct a narrative.

Ultimately, our narrative was a provocation of enquiry to speculate on a kind of alternative future, to consider how decentralised systems will impact our cultural ones. To conclude, this exemplifies my purpose as a practitioner. Designing as a method, design allows for speculation, interrogation and enquiry. As epitomised in Fiction as Method, ‘fictioning can be thought instead as an invitation that we strategically extend to the radical unknowability of the future’

viva viva ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- feedback:  evidence/detail processes in explicit detail to make critiques accessible to ppl unfamiliar w projects

[industriousmind]

How Beyonce's 'Lemonade' Exposes Inner Lives of Black Women

By Zandria F. Robinson

Lemonade continues Beyoncé Knowles' longstanding engagement with black Southern regionalism. The video album writes black women back into national, regional and diasporic histories by making them the progenitors and rightful inheritors of the Southern gothic tradition. Beyond "strong" and "magic," Lemonade asserts that black women are alchemists and metaphysicians who are at once of the past, present and future, changing and healing the physical, chemical and spiritual world around them. Rihanna uses her "glitter to make [your shit] gold," Erykah Badu compels men to "change jobs and change gods" and Janelle Monáe's Cindi Mayweather is secretly leading the Android Revolution. But Beyoncé accounts for the method behind black women's alchemy. Traversing genre and space, she fundamentally transforms the Southern platitude about what one should do when life hands her lemons.

Part of black women's magic, born of necessity, has been the ability to dissemble: to perform an outward forthrightness while protecting our inner, private lives and obscuring our full selves. We have drawn on this culture of dissemblance, as Northwestern University historian Darlene Clark Hine has called it, to deflect physical and discursive violence, cultivating rich inner lives that play out behind the enduring walls of Jim Crow. Beyoncé rejects any magic predicated on constraint with Lemonade, a meditation on the process of becoming a black woman in a society in which black women matter the least, are "the mule of the world" and are the most disrespected, neglected, and unprotected. Through the metaphor of lemonade — the South's other cold drink, sweet tea's antithesis and sometimes nemesis, but perhaps its best collaborator — Beyoncé insists on alternative forms of inner magic that demand emotional disclosure for healing, wholeness and a freer kind of freedom.

Lemonade is an extended introduction to "Formation," the song, visual and live performance that transformed our collective 2016 Super Bowl weekends. As the culmination of a different kind of Great Migration story, "Formation" foreshadowed the movements between space (rural and urban) and time that Lemonade takes up. But "Formation" tells us little of the physical, emotional and social labor — the trans-formation, as it were — it took to get in-formation. We learn from Lemonade that "Formation," the last track on the audio album, is the result of a dissembling and silenced black womanhood, broken, baptized, forged in fire and resurrected through the strength of intergenerational mother wit to sing and signify resilience and resistance.

Black women's expression of emotion can be discursively and physically dangerous for us, and sometimes telling our truth leads to violence or death. But on screen and in our minds, Lemonade provides a risk-free emotional space that sonically and visually highlights what we all miss when we dismiss and neglect black women's emotional lives. In a musical landscape replete with black men's emoting — Kanye West's misogynist breakup screed, Drake's perpetual hurt from the good girls who get dressed and go out too much, Kendrick Lamar's struggles against a depression-inducing capitalism — Lemonade takes up a bittersweet space to explore how it feels, and how it has felt for so long, for black women to be so black and blue.

Lemonade is a womanist sonic meditation that spans from the spiritual to the trap, with stops at country soul and rock & roll in between. Its visual landscape is packed tightly with a consistent iconography of black Southern women's history and movement through the rural and urban Souths of the past and present. The film signifies on Eve's Bayou and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, centers sacred Nigerian body art practices, draws on the words of Warsan Shire and grandmothers' reflections and returns again and again to Louisiana plantation spaces where black women become both the hoodoo man and the conjure woman, setting things ablaze from their very depths and surviving and healing. This rich, multilayered backdrop is not the canvas for the revelation of trite tabloid tidbits.

Although there are some underlying tensions between verisimilitude and reality in Lemonade, Beyoncé invites us to the work as a memoir, a meditation and a celebration. Like much work that has emerged in the age of Black Lives Matter, we are to read the literal relationship turmoil as a metaphor for black women's relationship to modern systems of oppression. By offering up a prayer first, Lemonade spurns from the outset the unrelenting hate-consumption of black women's hurt and anger that other media, notably reality television, encourage. Instead, with Beyoncé's account of her black girl alchemist journey as only a starting point, Lemonade concerns itself with legitimating and creating space for a range of black women's emotions, pushing back against the generational curse of hurt patriarchs and unrelenting state actors who refuse to stop hurting the women and girls who sacrifice the most and love them best.

In still and quiet formation, black women, donning white, watch us from plantation porches, returning the gaze to remind us that they are people who are feeling. Serena looks at us. Leah Chase's eyes smile at us. Quvenzhané watches us. Beyoncé meets and holds our eyes. Lesley McSpadden, Sybrina Fulton and Gwen Carr, mothers of the slain Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, look at us, asking us to look at them and the pictures they hold of their murdered sons. Southern black women, their hair freshly Marcel-curled, look and smile. We are to be seen, they say, not just watched and consumed.

The film's thesis is made evident in the transition from "Pray You Catch Me" to "Hold Up." Diving from atop a building into herself, the transition finds Beyoncé's true self under water, slumbering, while she outwardly tries to dissemble, to bracket the hurt and anxiety of a potentially cheating partner. What follows is an emergence from baptismal waters. Donning the saffron garb associated with Yoruba Orisha Oshun, whose presence endures in black Southern religious practice, Beyoncé emerges from the water un-dissembled. As such, she is both joy and rage, bringing forth more water in which the street's children can play, busting out windows with her bat Hot Sauce, and relishing a theretofore unrealized freedom to be emotionally human.

Lemonade's multiple chapters — intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, redemption — are at once about one couple; many couples; the sometimes complicated relationships between black women, men, fathers and daughters; and black women's relationship to an unequal America. In their number, the chapters deliberately obscure alternative organizations of the work, like those deployed by Erykah Badu's "Denial," "Acceptance" and "Relapse" on "Green Eyes" or Coltrane's "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm" on A Love Supreme. This refusal to group emotions into larger categories compels us to experience a broader spectrum of black women's emotional lives.

Lemonade is Beyoncé's intimate look into the multigenerational making and magic of black womanhood. In its moves through genre, space, place and time, it offers new tools to see black women, to listen to us, and to say our names. To black women, it offers up a saffron-tinged blueprint for love and salvation through love — of ourselves, of our significant others, of our children, of our spiritual lives — when we are so often treated as fundamentally unloveable. And though it is for certain a work of black girl alchemy, it contains infinite lessons for our fraught political moment, teaching us to register a range of emotion so we might begin our own collective journeys of transformation.

Beyoncé's tour kickoff show in Miami featured powerful 'Lemonade' tracks and hits from her Destiny's Child days.