Donna Haraway’s seminal piece “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985) smartly utilizes the word “manifesto,” declaring the idea of traditional feminism to be dead. Modern feminism or second wave feminism focused on identity, where women fit into society, and in a sense, living in reaction to a male dominated world. Haraway, rather, is not only suggesting a post-modern feminist construct but a posthuman construct. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg to move beyond the binary and past the standard limitations of traditional notions of gender, feminism and politics.

Let’s take a look at a visual representation of Haraway’s cyborg construct. We have an animal totem, a rejection of the Garden of Eden and the religious dogma of man’s separation from nature. According to Haraway, there are no rigid boundaries between human and animal. Nor is there a separation from human to machine. Note how there is a biological component to this connection in addition to the hands on the keyboard. Thus animal, human, and machine are all interconnected. As for the machines, Haraway notes the line is blurring. “But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.” Notice the symbolism in the phallic. She writes that the boundary between the physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. It’s all just sort of out there. The machines make it understandable. See, we’ve become cyborgs without even realizing it. “Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible.” Because of this omniscience, technology has become the new deity, and the technological determinists are her priests.

What is most fascinating for my scholarly interests is that not proposing this connection to communication systems is a positive or negative construct. She instead suggests that as women and femininity are being redefined by technology, that the postfeminist should be conscious of this technological system, which seeks to recraft the female body. Women should see the machines everywhere as empowerment and internalize those constructs by presenting and embracing themselves as cyborgs. Where once, machines framed women in a particular way, cyborgs can change the definition. Because we’re all connected, nature, human, and machine, and the boundaries are thus invisible, that women have the ability to define themselves outside of the context of a biological or culturally determined femininity. The cyborg is liberation.

Popular media, rather, often shows cyborgism assomething sinister and wholly inhuman, an important distinction from Haraway’s notions of posthumanism. The term posthuman provides a neutrality to the addition of the technological to the biological. But cybernetics on celluloid often accompany disfigurement and villainy. 

One of the first cyborgs on the silver screen may be one of the best examples of this ontological shift, Dr. No of the eponymous James Bond film from 1962. A brilliant scientist and former treasurer of the Chinese mafia, Dr. No falls victim to his experiments which cost him both of his hands, replaced with rather crude “bionic” ones, capable of great strength, crushing a metal statue as an example of their power. No exhibits characteristics of the classic mad scientist trope, popular in pulp, comics, and B-movies previously, and his grotesque metal hands (from his playing God with the evils of science, no doubt!) playing their part in his further isolation from normalcy and humanity. Ultimately, the hands prove his undoing; though imbued with crushing strength, their lack of manual dexterity cannot effectively help hime climb a ladder and he is boiled to death in the coolant of an overheating nuclear reactor. Bond in his hegemonic masculinity and heroic “humanity” escapes, saves the girl, and wins the day.

Cybernetic enhancement has so often equated with a loss of humanity (and ultimately an embrace of villainy) it has become a common trope in Hollywood. While brave Luke Skywalker of Star Wars has a cybernetic arm to replace that biological one his father has cut off, he never gives in to the same dark technological forces Darth Vader does. Vader forsook his humanity in embracing not only the dark side, but the cybernetic implants that transform him into something less than human. It’s an odd parallel, the Hollywood cyborg has augmented strength, superior intellect, and numerous advantages over his unspoiled human brethren, yet it is viewed as weak for “giving in to the technology.” Heroes such as Skywalker or Del Spooner of I, Robot can subject themselves to integration of the technology, but must reject becoming beholden to that technology. Posthumans are never seen as masters of their technology, only as slaves to it.

Being a cyborg isn’t about how many bits of silicon you have under your skin or how many prosthetics your body contains. It’s about Donna Haraway going to the gym, looking at a shelf of carbo-loaded bodybuilding foods, checking out the Nautilus machines, and realizing that she’s in a place that wouldn’t exist without the idea of the body as high-performance machine. It’s about athletic shoes. “On the other hand, if women (and men) aren’t natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed.” I argue this is the crux of Haraway’s argument. If a posthuman can be made, designed like any common machine, than we can ultimately reject gender essentialism.

Left free to my own devices, I ruminated over which artist I would examine to understand dialogic meanings and music hybridization in contemporary culture. The first to come to mind was Moby, whose lush and rich textures seduce the listener with layer upon layer of dense auditory bliss. I also considered Radiohead, mostly because I think they’re the quintessential alternative rock band and the first “real” band many kids in my generation started listening to in college cleansing themselves completely of pop and radio friendly rock.

Instead, no other artist represents this notion of hybridity dialogic meanings better than Jack White. White is best known as the enigmatic leader of The White Stripes, formed in 1997 with then-wife Meg White (Handyside, n.d.), but also as the founding member of two following bands, The Raconteurs, formed in 2006, and The Dead Weather, formed in 2009. In addition, White has released his own music to much critical acclaim. The White Stripes were at the forefront of the lo-fi indy rock movement that began in the late 90s as a reaction to mainstream rock and the post-grunge scene that formed after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley and the decline of Pearl Jam and the breakup of Soundgarden.

The White Stripes not only looked different, a two piece band dressed in Meg’s signature peppermint coding scheme, but they sounded different. Melding garage rock and blues in a raw visceral way, the band rose to prominence with a string of hit records, including the cult-favorite De Stijl (2000), White Blood Cells (2001) and Elephant (2003). Of those early albums, AllMusic wrote, “Jack White’s voice is a singular, evocative combination of punk, metal, blues, and backwoods while his guitar work is grand and banging with just enough lyrical touches of slide and subtle solo work” (Handyside, (n.d.)a.). Later in the same article, the author Handyside bemoans, “All D.I.Y. punk-country-blues-metal singer/songwriting duos should sound this good” as he clearly had difficulty in describing the band’s unique sound. Even when the band broke up, they did it differently, no lead singer marching off to soar or fail as a solo star, no tabloid level brouhaha, just a quiet end to a remarkable run. “The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on us and we are truly grateful” (Greene, 20011)

While Jack White’s haunting guitar work made a name for himself, Rolling Stone ranked him No. 17 on their list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” (Rolling Stone, 2013), it was a combination with the naiveté of Meg White’s drums that often made their work so distinct, (which he strongly defended (NME.com, 2010), and true to the lo-fi aesthetic. Jack could have probably played the drums for the Stripes as well he does for The Dead Weather, which had one critic raving “Perhaps it’s time for the hobby to become the day job” (Aizlewood, 2010).

Just as Janelle Monáe has her influences, one could say that Jack White has his “influence-ees.” White has collaborated with such music luminaries as Beck, the Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Alicia Keys, and even the legendary Bob Dylan. In 2004, White produced Loretta Lynn’s Grammy winning Van Lear Rose, and later in 2011, revived the career of the “Queen of Rockabilly” Wanda Jackson who enjoyed her first ever charting on the Billboard Hot 200 with The Party Ain’t Over after a near 60 year career in music. He even found time to produce a live comedy album for Conan O’Brien in 210.

Florida and Jackson (2010) investigated the economic geography of music, why certain places produced certain kinds of musics and what cultural and economic factors played a role in those creations. “Detroit has one of the most legendary rock music scenes around because of its status as the home of innovative and highly influential rock bands like The MC5 and The Stooges, as well as Motown, techno, and other musical styles—a robust pool of musical and business talent. White himself hails from Detroit and built the White Stripes’ sound and brand on that city’s musical legacy. The three other musicians in The Raconteurs are all originally from the Rustbelt— singer, guitarist, and songwriter Brendan Benson is White’s long-time associate from Detroit, while drummer Patrick Keeler and bass player Jack Lawrence are from a Cincinnati band, The Greenhornes. The question this article asks is: what factors and forces underpin this kind of relocation? Students of business location might say costs—perhaps Nashville offers a less expensive place to produce and distribute music” (Florida & Jackson, 2010, p. 310).

White left the confines of the Motor City for Nashville in 2005. Of the move, he said, “(Detroit) was so super-negative. It was draining me, I had to get somewhere where I could breathe again” (Associated Press, 2006). Florida and Jackson (2010) suggest “… the Detroit scene, which had fueled the emergence of the White Stripes signature stripped-down rock sound, had become too one-dimensional and constraining. It did not offer the broad range of sounds, genres, and mix of talent available to White in Nashville” (p. 319). The move did not predicate a complete overhaul of style or a complete country/bluegrass/folk buy-in. “The band dedicated an album to bluesman Blind Willie McTell and covered Son House’s classic “Death Letter” blues, but the two live in fear of having their authenticity evaluated. Says singer Jack White, “We’re white people who play the blues, and our problem was how do we do that and not be fake” (Filene, 2004, p.64).

It’s not just that White’s talent is so prodigious or prolific, with The White Stripes I witnessed him  individually play five different guitars, a piano, the mandolin, marimba, tambourine and a set of bongos. It is the fluidity of White as an artists to float seamlessly through disparate genres, styles, and sounds that will always stick with me. Just look at the first three tracks on 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan which starts with “Blue Orchid” whose unique sound is produced by playing a guitar into “a Digitech Whammy WH-4 with an octave-up setting, and an early Electro-Harmonix POG” (Rae, 2010). “The Nurse”, next, “combines marimba, lyrics evoking Dylan at his trippiest, and occasional bursts of drum wallop from Meg” (Walsh, 2005). The third track, “My Doorbell” was nominated for a Grammy, and can best be described as “a strutting piano soul number” (Murphy, 2005) and how it “marries the fizziest of pop melodies to a soulful ’60s Motown shuffle” (Walsh, 2005). Amazingly, that’s just the first three tracks.

In conclusion, White can best be described as a modern day Nikola Tesla, whom he mentions in the 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. In chapter nine, “Jack Shows Meg his Tesla Coil,” while relating the importance of Tesla’s discoveries, Jack states “He perceived the Earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance” (Jarmush, 2005).

Since I couldn’t decide which to show, I put two of my favorite videos from “Blunderbuss” below. Enjoy.

Jack White – Freedom At 21

Jack White – Sixteen Saltines

References

Associated Press. Jack White leaves “super-negative.” (2006, May 25). USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-05-25-jack-white_x.htm

Aizlewood, J. (2010, June 29). Jack White bangs the drum for mighty, meaty rock in Dead Weather. The Evening Standard. Retrieved from http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/music/jack-white-bangs-the-drum-for-mighty-meaty-rock-in-dead-weather-7420496.html

Florida, R., & Jackson, S. (2010). Sonic city: The evolving economic geography of the music industry. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29(3), 310-321.

Filene, B. (2004). O Brother, What Next?: Making Sense of the Folk Fad. Southern Cultures, 10(2), 50–69. doi:10.1353/scu.2004.0025

Greene, A. (2011, Feb 2). The White Stripes announce their break-up. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-white-stripes-announce-their-break-up-20110202

Handyside, C. (n.d.). The White Stripes: Biography. AllMusic.com. Retrieved from http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-white-stripes-mn0000921710

Handyside, C. (n.d.)a. Review: The White Stripes. AllMusic.com. Retrieved from http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-white-stripes-mw0000246565

Jarmush, J. (2005). Coffee and Cigarettes [DVD]. Espanya: Araba Films.

Jurgensen, J. (2011, Jan 21). The queen of rockabilly returns. The Wall Street Journal, D8.

Murphy, M. (2005, June 5). The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan. Pitchfork Media. Retrieved from http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8653-get-behind-me-satan

NME. (2010, March 18). Jack White defends Meg’s drumming skills. NME. Retrieved from http://www.nme.com/news/the-white-stripes/50279

Rae, K. (2010). JACK WHITE of The White Stripes, Raconteurs, and Dead Weather. The Big Muff π Page. Retrieved from http://www.kitrae.net/music/big_muff_users.html

Rolling Stone. (2013, Dec 7). 100 greatest guitarists: Jack White. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitarists-20111123/jack-white-20111122

Scaggs, A. 2008. Murder ballads and southern grooves: The Racon- teurs are back. Rolling Stone. June 12. http://www.rollingstone .com/news/story/20980717/

Walsh, B. (2005, June 11). The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan. Slant. Retrieved from http://www.slantmagazine.com/music/review/the-white-stripes-get-behind-me-satan

Like the collage artists of the Pop art movement, Janelle Monáe works with materiality, using found objects to create fascinating music remix not only other artists and their particular brand of sounds, but merging and distilling genres to create something unique, arguably more innovative than its source material.

Having seen Monáe in-concert in October 2011 supporting her debut album, The ArchAndroid, it must be said that her live show is a revelation. She flew around stage with boundless energy, only gasping for breath and drowning herself in bottled water at the recess of each song. In a set that remixed much of the last 80 years of music, the woman was left physically drawn from such an exuberant performance. But what was fascinating most about Monáe’s concert was the seamless flow from a diverse musical palette with which she painted beautiful pictures. Among her sources of inspiration are legends such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Jimmy Hendrix; even elements from minstrel shows of the 1920s and singer-songwriters of the 1960s. Journalist Bernadette McNulty wrote, “I begin to worry for a moment that Monáe may not just be a humourless science-fiction nerd, but actually an android herself, created in a laboratory as a super-musical cross between James Brown, Judy Garland, André 3000 and Steve Jobs, invented to test the desperate incredulity of music journalists” (McNulty, 2010).

McNulty was certainly not the only one to heap such high praise on Monáe, nor the only one to try and box Monáe into an easily digestible bite of genre. Slant Magazine’s Huw Jones penciled her in as “a unique gray area between neo-soul, funk, and art-rock” (Jones, 2010). Monáe remains too complex and too wide-ranging to be simply stamped categorically as one thing or another, or even a mixture of the two. Perhaps it’s because Monáe herself describes he own musical inspirations as so diverse they might never be seen in the same Grooveshark playlist or Pandora stream. Monáe describes The ArchAndroid’s influences as “all the things I love, scores for films like Goldfinger mixed with albums like Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust’, along with experimental hip hop stuff like Outkast’s Stankonia” (Lewis, 2010).

A number of authors have noted the ease at which music and parts of music pass via digital transfer. Whether it’s a hook from a 70s Disco track like “Ring My Bell” or just a bass track from Swizz Beats, the circulation of samples and pieces of other musical influences circulate freely in the digital realm. Monáe’s “The ArchAndriod” uses this context as a license to play with influences and genre. Everything is game, and the entire catalog of music for the past 80 years serves as the source material, as if Monáe was writing from her own eclectic playlist. Her own references to time travel (NPR, 2010) emphasize the freedom she feels in playing with these influences, creating connections others might not see between musical genres. Replicating this approach in her timeless tuxedo, Monáe feels both like she could fit anywhere on the American music cultural timeline, and yet is distinctly of this era. Monáe’s work is made possible through this age of digital music remix. Listening to her album from start to finish feels like listening to an ipod on shuffle. While the tracks do blend together to form a cohesive whole, the mix of genres replicates this distinctly 21st century musical experience.

Critics love Janelle Monáe for all of these reasons. Not only is her work an homage to many of the musical greats of the last century, Monáe is also a lover of literature, specifically science fiction, and the intertextual nature of her work in echoing themes of Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler. While her most recent album, The Electric Lady, made a quieter debut, she has also been a commercial success. Through more commercial pop hits like “Tightrope” and “Wonderland,” Monáe brings a remixed musical future to the mainstream.

References:

Jones, H. (2010, Dec 8). Janelle Monáe (London, U.K. – December 5, 2010). Slant Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.slantmagazine.com/music/feature/janelle-monae-london-u-k-december-5-2010/243

Lewis, P. (2010, July 12). Janelle Monae: Funky sensation. Blues & Soul. Retrieved from http://www.bluesandsoul.com/feature/554/janelle_monae_funky_sensation/

McNulty, B. (2010, June 25). Janelle Monae interview: The android has landed. The Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/7854112/Janelle-Monae-interview-the-android-has-landed.html

NPR (2010, May 14). Janelle Monae: Dreaming in science fiction. NPR. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833378

Our course discussions of the simulated has struck a mental note for me, and for this week’s writing, I could think of nothing but the uncanny valley, a concept most often associated with technology and robotics, but just as informative and interesting in any conversation about representation or imitation in photography. The Uncanny Valley was first termed by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970.

Of Bukimi no Tani Genshō (不気味の谷現象) Mori wrote, “Climbing a mountain is an example of a function that does not increase continuously: a person’s altitude y does not always increase as the distance from the summit decreases owing to the intervening hills and valleys. I have noticed that, as robots appear more humanlike, our sense of their familiarity increases until we come to a valley. I call this relation the “uncanny valley” (Mori, 1970, p. 33). Freud wrote of a similar concept in 1919, Das Unheimliche, translated as “the opposite of what is familiar.” In Freud’s concept, it is the feeling where there is something familiar, yet completely foreign at the same time, resulting in an unnerving cognitive dissonance. The mind tries to rationalize this cognitive dissonance, but ultimately, it wholly rejects the object (rejection thus being far easier and more psychologically comforting than to rationalize). Man, I love those German thinkers.

Mori’s concept can be seen in film-making as in the images below.Whether it’s robots, Mogwai, or digitally rendered dogs and flying bison, our minds rationalize these images within the realm of film, and possibly as supra-photogenic. Of 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin, critic Dana Stevens warned, “With the possible exception of the title character, the animated cast of Tintin narrowly escapes entrapment in the so-called ‘uncanny valley” (Stevens, 2011). The motion capture and life-likeness of the animation proved too unnerving. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired Magazine, was far more positive, suggesting “we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality” (Kelly, 2012). In video games such as below, much the same is true. These digital images have achieved the hyperreality of the experience of playing games. The repulsion is non-existent for a collective of gamers who get to “be” the representative life-like image.But what of photography? What of the images we consume in our print media and peruse through on internet sites? What does the digital nature of today’s photography mean for our cognitive in the uncanny valley? Does it alter the ritualized nature of our consumption?

Photoshopping has become accepted, where once it was as shameful and artificial as auto tuning in the creation of art, the practice of retouching photographs has become so engrained in the popular culture, it’s nothing but a mere afterthought. We used to assume that every model’s picture was photoshopped, now it’s as if we don’t care. In fact, we have video and memes when the digital is tasked for its retouching. Starlets routinely complain about the loss of authenticity in their glamour shots, arguing the poor message it send teen girls to the digital footprint it leave on the corporeal body. But what about those of us who live purely in the digital retouch?

Meet Kota Koti, aka Dakota Rose. 

From varied reports on the internet, she’s a 18 yr old Floridian who promotes herself online as a “living doll.” One of the ways she does so is with photos, like the one above described as “uncanny valley X high fashion” (DRESSMEMUSIC, 2012), and through her YouTube make-up tutorials and fashion blogs, even earning a contract with a Japanese fashion house. She tweets these photos regularly to her near 97,000 followers, many of whom are Japanese anime fans like herself (Hollywood Reporter). Without getting into the “Is it healthy for young girls?” (Whitelocks, 2012) or the “Does she use Adobe AfterEffects?” (Demmi, 2012) debates, I’d much rather discuss the question of it’s perceptible authenticity. It doesn’t matter to me whether Kota Koti is or isn’t digitally enhanced. It’s that for all-intensive purposes, she’s fine with that, and so are thousands or her fans. But for me, she has very much achieved a sense of the uncanny valley. I cannot look at her eyes and their plastic glaze without a shiver of cognitive dissonance. Something is off, and my brain recognizes the askew. Interestingly, in her quest for the doll like, she has in a sense, surpassed it by entering the hyperreality of a “post-photoshop” existence. Is this the future of photography, or have we been here for quite sometime, and the collective cultural cognition is just now catching up?

References

Demmi. (2012, Mar. 23). “Kota Koti.” Underyourbreath. Retrieved from http://photoshopdeficere.blogspot.com/2012/03/kota-koti.html

DRESSMEMUSIC. (2012, Apr. 15). “Enter the Uncanny Valley”. Dress Me. Retrieved from http://read.dressmemag.com/enter-the-valley/

Hollywood Reporter. “Teen Girls’ Provocative YouTube Beauty Videos a Growing Concern”. Fashion. Retrieved from http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fash-track/dakota-rose-kota-koti-venus-angelic-youtube-beauty-videos-305947

Kelly, K. (2012, Jan. 2). “Beyond the Uncanny Valley”. The Technium. Retrieved from http://kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2012/01/beyond_the_unca.php

Mori, M. (1970). The uncanny valley. Energy, 7(4), 33-35.

Stevens, D. (2011, Dec. 21). “Tintin, So So”. Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/12/adventures_of_tintin_review_spielberg_s_motion_capture_adventure_has_its_charms_but_it_s_no_raiders_.html

Whitelocks, S. (2012, Mar. 29). “Meet the real-life Barbies: Internet craze sees teenagers turn themselves into freakish living dolls”. Daily Mail. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2122177/Meet-real-life-Barbies-Internet-craze-sees-teenagers-turn-freakish-living-dolls.html

It can be argued that no other street artist speaks to vagaries of modern consumeristic life than artist Ron English. A most telling quote from him can be found during an interview in the very successful documentary Supersize Me. “The way I look at it is like, Cezanne was inspired by the mountain he saw out his window, and when I look out my window, I see no mountains I just see billboards and advertisements, so I use that as my inspiration” (Spurlock, 2004).

For English, the monolithic paean to consumerism, the ubiquitous billboard filled with images urging urbanites to become just another cog in the capitalist system, has become his muse. Subverting and skewering the semiotic of modern advertising which dominates the metropolitan skyline has become his life’s work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FxV49pfNsk

Most interestingly, in the interview above, English claims not Warhol and others in the pop art movement as inspiration, but the frenetic work of Pollock and De Kooning. He wants his art to be seen as the whole picture, something missing from much of street art, which seems to wish the to be considered as part and parcel to the place and time it is placed in. For English, his work needs no interpretation. Its symbolism is clear, and the semiotics are rendered somewhat unnecessary.

Take for example his famous piece Abraham Obama. “According to English, the Obama campaign wanted “street artists,” such as himself, to create supportive posters, particularly aimed at young voters, and the artist made sure to put his work up legally” (Seidman, p. 14). I sincerely doubt English would have been all that doubled by the legality, for him, his art often “acts out against society” saying “Legally, I don’t have a right to do this, but as a proponent of free speech, I have an obligation to do this” (Carvajal, 2006). As for the image to the right,  English’s piece is a remarkable remix of the 14th President with candidate Obama in 2008. “To associate a candidate with great former presidents has been a common approach that American poster designers have employed, but Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt had always been seen in the background. English’s creation was a unique exception to the rule” (p. 14). Not only the association of both Lincoln and Obama as representing Illinois ( and Obama’s oft repeated refrain that Lincoln was his favorite president), but clearly Obama’s position as the first black president connects to the issuer of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Some authors claim issue of interest with English is his relation to the internet, as his art is quite prolific, available, and recognizable. His use of the “corporate persona” as artistic subject fights back against a culture inundated with these identities, often by utilizing the very same means, methods, and subjects the consumerati uses. “The World Wide Web (the Web) gives members of the digitally connected public new capacities to evade their subject positions as mere consumers of corporate imagery by providing technological means and social and cultural conditions for consumers to take the commodity signs of mass culture and transform these into popular culture and to create a popular legal culture in the process. By mass culture we mean mass-produced texts, images, and sounds— cultural artifacts circulated to a mass of consumers by centrally controlled media industries. Such a culture is unidirectional, or in Bakhtinian terms, monologic—it speaks from a singular place with a singular voice—and it does not let you talk back, or if you do, your voice is unlikely to be widely heard. You might strategically alter billboards with graffiti, as Ron English, the Guerrilla Girls, and the Billboard Liberation Front do” (Coombe & Herman, p. 920-1).

English is emblematic of a new kind of cultural democracy one which is reactive to the message sent by corporations trying to sell the masses its wares. Ohmann (2000) frames this discussion in Baudrillardian terms, noting the unrealness of corporate billboards are impossible to discern from the real, as they are encoded with the “orchestration rituals of the media” (Baudrillard, p. 21). “Billboards are prime examples of this hyperreality that is created by simulations. By specifically hijacking billboards and presenting a new idea in the fashion of the simulated one, English successfully combats the hyperreal by subverting its illusion-making process. In one of his more successful campaigns, English went after the “supersizing” at McDonald’s. The reality is that humans only need so much food in order to survive, but McDonald’s has convinced the American public that super-sizing is better and cheaper. Culturally, Americans believe that bigger is better, but English actively worked to bring a different awareness by creating an obese Ronald McDonald. In order to confront the hyperreal successfully, the text must include an image, making street culture jamming a very unique form of narrative” (Ohmann 2000, p. 94).

It is this confrontation that English’s work is most important for, especially concerning cultural democracy, which needs to be heard or seen in order to participate the realm of ideas made possible via this free exchange of ideas. As he says in discussing his mural on the United States-Mexico border wall just outside the small town of Penitas, Texas, “The thing about a wall is that people tend to see only one side of it, the side they are on. And for those with enough distance from the wall, it’s all together out of of mind… So how do you bring a wall that’s far enough away to ignore, close enough to see both sides? For me, the answer is simple. Paint it. Make it easier to see” (Parry, 2010).

References

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press.

Carvajal, P. (Director). (2006). POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English [Motion picture]. United States: Cinema Libre Studio.

Coombe, R. J., & Herman, A. (2001). Culture wars on the net: Intellectual property and corporate propriety in digital environments. South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(4), 919-947.

English, R. (2008). Popaganda: The art and crimes of Ron English. Retrieved from http://www.popaganda.com

Ohmann, R. (2000). The function of English at the present time. Falling into Theory.  Richter, D., ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 89-95.

Parry, W. (2010). Against the wall: The art of resistance in Palestine. London: Lawrence Hill Books.

Seidman, S. A. (2010). Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for the US presidency and visual design. Journal of Visual Literacy, 29.

Spurlock, M. (Director). (2004). Super size me [Motion picture]. United States: Kathbur Pictures.

Jeff Koons presents a large conundrum to the art world. Here is an artist that has made millions from his work; in November of last year, his Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie’s $58.4 million, a record-breaking sum for a living artist sold at auction. Koons produced a series of Balloon Dogs and the orange version was among the first of these to be fabricated.

In addition to these sculptures, Koons commercial success puts his work in rarified air. In 2011, “91% of Koons’s works on auction were sold, with an average sale price of $1.6 million”; in 2013, ” 78% of Koons’s works offered were sold” (Lane, 2004), all part of trend where the demand for Koons’ work weathered the financial crisis of the last decade quite well. The conundrum of Koons is in his position within the art world, where for many, he remains a divisive figure straddling the paper-thin border between pioneer and self-aggrandizer. Some of his stronger critics have dismissed his work as “crass” and “kitsch” (Galenson, 2006). Kimmelman (1991) criticized an exhibition of Koons in SoHo with “Just when it looked as if the 80’s were finally over, Jeff Koons has provided one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the decade” Famed critic Peter Schjeldahl went so far as to write, “Jeff Koons makes me sick. He may be the definitive artist of this moment, and that makes me sickest” (Schjeldahl, 1988, p. 81).

But others like Danto (2004) argue for a less vitriolic response, noting “It is widely acknowledged that Jeff Koons is among the most important artists of the last decades of the twentieth century” (p. 27). Were art critics polled for their opinion regarding Koons, “we would encounter a fair amount of resistance to the idea that Koons is anything more than a clever opportunist who has pulled the wool over the rest of the Art World’s eyes” (Danto, 2005, p. 286-287). Danto acknowledges the acrimony towards Koons, but argues this contempt held toward him justifies his preeminence, “That by itself would be evidence of his importance” (p. 287).

Nowhere is Koons’ importance more evident than within the well-known series of Balloon Dogs discussed at the beginning of this post.

Often labeled as Post-Pop, Koons emulates Warhol’s extensive use of the materiality of pop culture, specifically in art that imitates commercial mass production, but takes the notions of materiality, consumerism, and what’s discarded to further degrees. Where Warhol used soup cans and boxed soap, Koons does giant balloon animals.

The most celebrated series is aptly called “Celebration”. These large-scale sculptures and paintings of balloon dogs, Valentine hearts and Easter eggs were conceived in 1994, but some are still being fabricated. Each of the 19 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently coloured “unique versions”. The most coveted have luminous, reflective surfaces. “The ‘Celebration’ series made Koons the number one contemporary artist and pulled up the value of the rest of his work,” says Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Europe. (Thornton, 2009)

Remarkably, Koons claims his work has no subtext. “A viewer might at first see irony in my work, but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation” (Koons & Rosenblum, 1992, p. 82). He presents his cultural refuse without interpretation, and what could be more disposable than balloon dogs? By their very nature, balloon dogs are disposable art, made by clowns and magicians for the enjoyment of children meant to attract their attention for a few minutes only to eke air slowly to die on a bedroom floor days later, or an shattering explosive death by popping soon after their fabrication. Koons’ dogs are quite the opposite, large, durable, but just as garish. Perhaps that’s the meaning in the materiality, begging the question, what if the materiality of these temporary items achieved permanence? 

Art is not without the notion of place in its materiality. Just as temporal considerations conditions the available material and methods, adding the space where the art is consumed is integral to its meaning. Amongst a number of small protests, a number of pieces from the Celebration series including Balloon Dog were on display in the Palace at Versailles.

 References

Danto, A. C. (2004). Kalliphobia in contemporary art. Art Journal, 25-35.

Danto, A. C. (2005). Unnatural wonders: essays from the gap between art and life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Galenson, D. (2006). “You Cannot be Serious: the conceptual innovator as trickster”, National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kazakina, K. & Boroff, P. (2013, Nov. 1). Koons’s Puppy Sets $58 Million Record for Living Artist.Bloomberg.

Kimmelman, M. (1991, Nov. 29). “Jeff Koons”, The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/29/arts/art-in-review-233491.html

Koons, J., & Rosenblum, R. (1992). The Jeff Koons Handbook. Thames and Hudson.

Lane, M. (2014, Feb 14). Christie’s, Sotheby’s Post Robust Sales. MarketWatch: The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.marketwatch.com/story/christies-sothebys-post-robust-sales-2014-02-14-144492256

Rychen, J. (2011). Abundance and Banality: Jeff Koons at the Palace of Versailles. Shift, Graduate Journal of Material and Visual Culture, 4, 1-11.

Schjeldahl, P. (1990). The “7 Days” Art Columns, 1988-1990. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures.

Thornton, S. (2009, Nov. 26). “Inflatable investments – The volatile art of Jeff Koons”, The Economist. Retrieved from: http://www.economist.com/node/14941205

Vogel, C. (2013, Nov. 12). At $142.4 Million, Triptych Is the Most Expensive Artwork Ever Sold at an Auction. New York Times.

As discussed in a previous post, intertextuality is a theory which is often used to describe the ways texts relate to and reference other distinct texts. Of course the theory of intertextuality would lend itself to art, as pieces are of art are simply organized pieces of separate texts. Perhaps no better era of modern art best exemplified the notions of hybridity and intertextuality than the pop art movement begun in the late 1950s.

The pop art movement can be simply described as a challenge to long held conventions of classical fine art; traditions kept sacrosanct for nearly a millennia. Pop is essential postmodernism, utilizing texts from mass culture, often incorporating found items, and subverting the materials original employment to make comment on the elitist nature of the art world, or of the culture at large. The use of materiality is most interesting in the critique so often rendered in such pieces, criticizing the commercial consumerist nature of Western culture by using throw-away items from said culture, everything from comic books to tin cans were used to make such commentary.

One of the most influential of the artists of this period was Scotsman Eduardo Paolozzi, and as the focus of this post, three of his more iconic collages will be discussed. Paolozzi was an earlier forerunner of the postmodern art movement, and a prominent surrealist who worked in a wide variety of mediums including screen printing, found object, ceramics, and perhaps best known for his intricate sculptures. Writes Toiani (2000), “Impressed by the Surrealists experimentation with ‘readymade metaphors’ using objet trouve or found objects, Paolozzi used images found in American magazines to create his collages” (p. 3). Paolozzi became well known as a founder of the Independent Group (IG) in 1952, whose members included such luminaries as artist Richard Hamilton, sculptor William Turnbull, photographer Nigel Henderson, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critic Lawrence Alloway. It was here where he first exhibited what can be argued a seminal piece of pop art canon, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything (1947).

“Eduardo Paolozzi presented to this assembly a chaotic collection of clippings and collages that he called Bunk!, which involved a number of theoretical proposals, among them that the hierarchy between high art and popular culture-industrial design” (Myers, 2000, p. 65).

I was a Rich Man’s Plaything was composed of images mostly from a number of magazines given to Paolozzi from American ex-servicemen. (Tate, 2012), and that the use of such “advertising images from American magazines was formative and fed into a general collaborative interest in such material” (Stonard, 2007, p. 609). Amongst the artists affiliated with the IG tear sheets of advertising images were readily available in homes and studios and frequently shared.

Myers (2000) writes that two conventions regarding the collage are incorrect “illustration in pulp magazines-was a false one” and “collection and curation were a species of art practice,” noting “the first two have been the governing assumptions of much art since, though they were clearly charged and polemic claims in the early 1950s” (p. 65). Instead he argues, it is “that erotics and irrationality inhabited even the most innocuous of mass-cultural representations” (p. 65) that merits further investigation.

“The collage traffics in a hokey, lowbrow polysemy-pop gun, poppa, popping cherries, soda-pop, not to mention popular. These words are made into a handful of caricatures in the collage: the bottle of Coca-Cola, the gun, the ‘rich man.’ This polysemy, nonsensical except in its repetition-pop, pop, pop-extends to a series of formal rhymes between red-brown circles: from the stained red badge of the Coca-Cola advertisement, to the Real Gold fruit juice insignia, to the bulging fetish cherry near the center of the collage, to the round curves of the woman’s posterior, breast, and thigh. Each hums with a fetishistic appeal, the appeal of the ‘idealized’ feminine form on the left, and the appeal of the constellation of commodities on the right” (Myers, 2000, p.70).

While some credit the imagery to Paolozzi’s fascination with “the glamour of American consumerism” (Tate, 2012), it should be argued that ultimately, Bunk! and its series of collages speak to viewer of Paolozzi’s understanding that his work not only found value and reflection of the current reality, but that it acted as a critique in a response to the very contemporary culture which created it. In a very literal sense, Paolozzi ensured that his art was understood as a product of his environment. To do so, Paolozzi stuck new ground in using the found objects of pop culture in collage. “The projection of a heterogeneity of messages generated from SF magazine covers, car ads, animated film clips, and military images appears to have had a bewildering impact. No one had taken mass media imagery that seriously before” (Robbins, 1990, p. 94).

He also expressed a desire to exhibit these objet trouve as the artist and the viewer’s bodies, in other words, the body as commodity. No better example of this in Paolozzi’s oeuvre than Evadne in Green Dimension (1972) “explicitly stamped with ‘male’ power: its diagram of an erect phallus, superimposed with the curves of a glamour girl, graphically embodies the association between possession of goods and of women” (Spencer, 2012, p. 332). Paolozzi used the male body to criticize a mass media, dependent on “overt construction of gendered stereotypes in order to sell goods.” Spencer deftly dissects the Bunk! critique which “presents the male subject – the American strong man Charles Atlas, his modesty preserved by a leopard-print loincloth – as defined in relation to objects offered up for literal and metaphoric consumption. The glistening slice of strawberry pie, the car and the glamour girl establish a set of coordinates for male identity, constituting an anthropological study of stereotypically masculine self-construction in capitalist society. At the same time, the image insinuates that the mass media can itself be navigated anthropologically, as a set of signs and symbols to be understood and arranged to achieve a specific cultural construct, predicated in this instance on the pursuit of social mobility and sexual conquest” (p. 332).

Ultimately, pop art owes its existence to this materiality, which fed the collective worldview of the IG who were “united in their conviction that multiple visual phenomena demanded the same degree of scrutiny awarded to ‘high’ art” (Spencer 2012, p. 316).

References

Myers, J. (2000). The future as fetish. October, 94, 63-88.

Livingstone, M., Pop Art: A Continuing History, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990

Paolozzi, E. (1947). I was a rich man’s plaything. Tate. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-i-was-a-rich-mans-plaything-t01462

Paolozzi, E. (1972). Evadne in Green Dimension. Tate. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-1-evadne-in-green-dimension-p02020

Robbins, D. (ed.) 1990, The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, M.I.T Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Spencer, C. (2012).  The Independent Group’s ‘Anthropology of Ourselves’. Art history. ,  35 (2), p. 314-335.

Stonard, J. P. (2007). Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s’ Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?’. The Burlington Magazine, 607-620.

Troiani, I. (2000). There’s nothing Wrong with being “Ordinary”: Beauty in the architectural campaigns of the Smithsons and Venturi, Scott Brown. In Habitus conference proceedings, Perth.

Digital memes transcend time and space, as each meme carries a multitude of meanings, timestamps, and geo-locations. Every time a meme is consumed, each one lies “pregnant with all past and future specifications” (Barthes, 1957, p. 58). Authorship is lost in part due to the fact that for every successful meme, thousands more fail in other iterations. By constantly jockeying for position as the most successful variation, these memes partake in a survival of the fittest, ensuring its own survival chiefly through connecting to people on more than simply a cultural level, resulting in an easily digestible image or macro to be consumed by as many people as possible.

It is this discussion of authorship that enters a Baudrillard-ian sense of hyperreality, the author reasserts ownership of digital images that are experienced in ways and places far different from the original ontology. That is to say, that despite assertion of provinciality, the very nature of the digital meme fundamentally breaks apart the limited interpretations considered by the author.

Witness the example of Sad Keanu. In 2010, the image below (Asadorian, 2010) was posted by redditor rockon4life underscored with “I really enjoy acting…Because when I act, I’m no longer me.” The thread entitled “Keanu. More sadness in comments” was moved to the website’s frontpage, quickly exploded to over 281,000 page views (Keanu is sad / Sad Keanu, 2010).

The “paparazzi shot of a seemingly dejected-looking Keanu Reeves” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2012, p. 51-2) is most interesting for the purposes of this post not for its memetic qualities of spread, growth and recognition, but for its contested authorship. Shortly after the image gained traction on Reddit, a number of pop culture sites including Urlesque, BuzzFeed, and TheDailyWhat covered Sad Keanu as the next big meme. (Keanu is sad / Sad Keanu, 2010). For much of the resulting month, photoshopped images of Sad Keanu in other contexts flowed across social media including its own Tumbler, SadKeanu.com. It was this repository of Sad Keanu images that received a Digital Media Copyright Agreement (DMCA) “takedown notice.” Splash News, a celebrity and entertainment news outlet online, claimed ownership of the images, and demanded any site showing the images immediately remove them from those servers.

According to Dan, a blogger on SadKeanu, over 270 posts were to be taken down despite their contention “that it can fall under ‘fair use’,” but that “both myself and my partner don’t have any time or resources to fight it” (Keanu is sad / Sad Keanu, 2010). This stems from the misapplications and misconceptions of fair use and DMCA as much as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” and essentially, “don’t care,” nature of today’s memetic and remix culture. Roth and Flegel (2013) note this incongruence, “When fans with little or no legal expertise invoke and interpret copyright, they reveal that copyright does not attend to the complex realities of creative production, nor the very active consumption, engagement with, and re-articulation of cultural artefacts and texts in society to effectively police at the grassroots level” (p. 216-17). Copyright has not kept pace with the advance of of technology nor the speed at which images and memes are transmitted, and has ultimately lost the “hearts and minds” of users in its war on transgressors of fair use. Lankshear and Knobel argue the manipulation of digital imagery is part of the new literacies. “Provided with a proper toolkit of digital affordances that even a person who lacked artistic talent could “create a collage of images and text to contribute to a popular online meme, such as the Sad Keanu meme” (p. 51).

In addition, in using these affordances, multiple hyperrealities are created, as meaning is added and subverted to be experienced by viewers in vastly different ways. A viewer experienced with The Simpsons will interpret the inclusion of Sad Keanu in a markedly distinct way as compared to someone unfamiliar with the Simpsons or Keanu Reeves for that matter. At the moment of experience, the application of the various cultural values at work are transformed into a new hyperreality.

It should be understood that Splash News suffered no direct damage here; they weren’t impugned or denigrated by the Sad Keanu macros and remixes, although in some cases, some rights holders use copyright as suppression beyond commercial purposes. As Goldman (2012) points out, takedown orders unnecessarily “provide(s) a protocol for folks trying to suppress truthful negative information–acquire the copyrights to the content containing the unwanted information, and then use the newly created threat of copyright infringement to force that information off the Internet” and that this protocol is much easier to enforce given “visual/aural content than purely textual content because (a) people need to see/hear some things with their own eyes/ears, and (b) it’s much easier for others to extract and repeat textual information without running afoul of copyrights” (Goldman, 2012).

Individual users simply making a macro for a snide reply to a friend, or even in the subversion of the image for political commentary should not expect cease and desist letters marking them as delinquents. The genie is out of the bottle, and the efforts of Splash News to stuff it back into a container so limiting and unavailable to those with affordances described above only serve to harden resolve against copyright. What could be seen as a benefit to these burgeoning artists simply remains as a boon upon their shoulders, weighing down their creativity and limiting any chance of creating and subverting meaning through digital remix.

References

Asadorian, R. (2010). Sad Keanu. Image. People. Retrieved from http://www.people.com/people/package/gallery/0,,20442843_20446944_20883614,00.html

Barthes, R. (1977), On the death of the author: Image, Music, Text: Essays, Second Edition, HarperCollins UK

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press

Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Goldman, E. (2012, May 14). The dangerous meme that won’t go away: Using copyright assignments to suppress unwanted content—Scott v. WorldStarHipHop. Eric Goldman Tech. & L. Blog.  Retrieved from http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2012/05/the_meme_that_w.htm

Keanu is sad / Sad Keanu. (2010). Know Your Meme. Retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keanu-is-sad-sad-keanu#fn1

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2012). ‘New’literacies: technologies and values. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 9(1), 45-71.

Roth, J., & Flegel, M. (2013). ‘I’m not a lawyer but…’: Fan disclaimers and claims against copyright law. The Journal of Fandom Studies, 1(2), 201-218.