Class Notes: 2/21/06

Intermedia Art
2/21/06

Outline:
1) Announcements:
2) Return paper topics
3) Discussion of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
4) Quick summary/check-in on "The Culture Industry"
5) Presentation on William Pope L. in relation to questions of culture/reproducibility

1) Announcements:
Jackie Spinner presentation, Wed. 7 pm, Ballroom D
"Listening Room," Wed. 7 pm, COMM 1032
Reading Response #2 due 3/9 to allow for more article choice. This is the last reading response!

2) Paper topics:
Most of them were fine, some need to be revised by Thursday to better indicate what your analytical position/orientation will be and/or to flesh out the bibliography. I still don't have them from some of you. The paper is due March 2 (2 1/2 weeks).

3) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
In this germinal 1936 essay, Benjamin considers how technologies of reproduction have dramatically altered the role of the artwork in society. While he grounds his argument on film, many of these ideas have been very influential in considering many forms of reproducible artwork, including digital media and work that draws from commodity culture.

Content questions:
a. What is "aura"?
b. How does mechanical reproduction affect an artwork's aura?
c. Does Benjamin see this as a positive or negative development? Why?
d. How does film participate in this democratization of art/communication?

Discussion questions:
a. Where in present-day discussions do we see the trace of Benjamin's thought?
b. Many artists since the 1960s (when this was first published in English) have found this article extremely influential, esp. media artists. What do you think is useful about it?
c. Do Benjamin's arguments hold up to the historical record?

4) "The Culture Industry"
This 1944 article is a scathing critique of mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno see none of the positive potentialities of the form identified by Benjamin but rather concentrate on the mechanisms by which culture is produced as a commodity.

Content questions:
a) What is Mass Culture in this view?
They see mass culture as the willful product of late capitalism that depends on alienated forms of consumption as much as on alienated forms of labor

b) What is its purpose?
To create 'amusements' which lull consumers into a false consciousness of acquiescing to their circumstances; to provide no way of addressing the emptyness of consumer culture except by participating in it

c) What is the role of individuals in the culture industry?

Discussion questions:
a) Relate this argument with what we have read of postmodern theory.
b) How does this totalizing argument about the culture industry reflect or diverge from Foucault's view of power?
c) How might you criticism Horkheimer & Adorno's perspective?
c) Do Horkheimer & Adorno's ideas stand up to the historical record?

5) Presentation on William Pope L.

Contemporary African American artist, selected because he can be read in light of both Benjamin's and Adorno/Horkheimer's views of mass culture. He appropriates from commodity culture in ways that relate to Benjamin's thesis about using new technologies to see oneself as a producer, rather than consumer, of images/representations and making familiar ideas/images that were previously far away. His work may also be a useful position from which to recognize the validity of "The Culture Industry" critique while also questioning parts of its totalizing argument.

How Much is that Nigger in the Window? (1991)

"As Bessire shows, Pope.Us materials--mayonnaise, peanut butter, newsprint, paint, dolls, his own body--are used to unhinge and destabilize ingrained racial categories. In his performance How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1990-91), the artist transformed his body into an object by spreading mayonnaise all over it. The intent was to become white. However, as the mayonnaise oxidized on his body, it lost its color: Pope.L., while white for a moment, became black (and very shiny). With such materials Pope.L's work resides in consumption, decay, and abjection, all of which serve as metaphors for the ways Americans understand (and literally consume) race and for the marginalization that occurs with racism. Class and capitalist exploitation are also vital to understanding his art. Much of it places race in a conversation with both: bodies are not just raced but classed and commodified. Ultimately, Bessire's essay gives an expansive view of Pope.L's practice, underscoring a shift in the ways in which blackness (and race more generally) figures into the work of an African American artist. He shows that Pope.L is not constructing a neat "black" identity; he is using blackness, and race more generally, as tools for a counternarrative on social and economic marginalization." from "Book Review: William Pope.L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America," African Arts, Summer, 2003 by Steven Nelson

Distributing Martin (ongoing)
http://www.distributingmartin.com/

I originally wanted to make a 10 foot by 30 foot billboard saying "This Is A Painting Of Martin Luther King's Penis From Inside My Father's Vagina," but the various sign companies I approached refused to make it, and my gallery in Harlem could not find a site willing to host it. As a result, I decided the billboard should remain purely conceptual but serve as a matrix for more dispersed activities. So the billboard text was made into thousands of postcards and flyers, rumors were spread, genetic material was inserted into supermarket fruit, and a website was created at http://distributingmartin.com. The goal of the project is to vaporize an encrusted monument called "the great black heroic father" into the wild air of everyday and everybody.
(December 18, 2002 "The Africana QA: Performance Artist William Pope.L
William Pope.L talks about his controversy inspiring performance art."
By Jascha Hoffman)

"Eating the Wall Street Journal" 2000

"Social inequality is addressed more directly in Eating the Wall Street Journal, a work that the artist has reconfigured many times as a performance and as an installation. In 2000, he performed the work at New York's Sculpture Center, sitting on a toilet 10 feet in the air, naked and covered in talcum powder, atop a rickety tower made of two-by-fours. During this performance, Pope.L chewed pages of the stock market's favorite newspaper, slugged gulps of milk and spit out the resulting gray sludge on the audience below. This practice, which the artist links to voodoo shaman rituals, puts him in the position of expressing both the contempt of the "haves" for the "have-nots," as well the disgust that "have-nots" often feel in return. For "eRacism," the toilet-topped tower, sans the performer, is presented as an `installation with surveillance cameras tracking and monitors reporting viewers' reactions. In a post-Enron gesture, the tower itself is now covered in pages of the Wall Street Journal strewn with headlines announcing "Booms" and "New Highs" that are already over. While the multi-media component cannot possibly match the impact of Pope.L's performance, the work still conveys a reversal of hierarchy, with scraps of the newspaper's all-important stock reports now appearing as a poor man's toilet paper."
("The art of public disturbance: William Pope.L consistently provokes visceral responses from viewers, especially with his street performances." Art in America, May, 2003 by Barbara Pollack)

"Party Room" 2001

Pope.L's installations and objects confront class as much as race, exposing problems broadly and painfully American. Party Room, 2001, is a small chamber with shelves for walls. Row after row of Wild Irish Rose whiskey bottles, each topped with a small stuffed toy, evoke the sometimes seamless transition from childhood to alcoholism or the connection between rural boredom and alcohol abuse that Pope.L has noticed in his adopted state. It probably also refers to his own childhood, as does Pop Tart Frieze, 1998, a row of unwrapped breakfast snacks lined up on a shelf, their pink frosted fronts defaced with racist graffiti--not kitsch, but, for the artist as a child, a coveted and unaffordable treat. In many works, Pope.L interacts with white foods like mayonnaise, vanilla ice cream, milk (which he drinks, spills, and pours), and flour (with which he has ritualistically coated himself in several performances) to construct and depict whiteness as something alternately unattainable, consumable, and revolting. To make Eating the Wall Street Journal, 2000, for example, Pope.L perched on a toilet about ten feet above the gallery floor, reading, then chewing up with ketchup and milk, then spitting out the WSJ onto a pile accumulating below. Scaffolding, toilet, newspaper, milk cartons, and other residue of the performance were on view at Artists Space as a work in its own right. "ERacism" can hardly "erase" what is deeply entrenched, but that does not stop Pope.L from keeping the issues on the (breakfast) table and shaping the debate one city block at a time.

("William Pope.L: Artists space/the project/mason gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University," ArtForum, April, 2004 by Meghan Dailey)


"The Black Factory" 2002-present

Conceived and constructed to fit inside a panel truck, The Black Factory travels throughout America to bring blackness wherever it is needed. The Factory consists of three compartments that unfold to create an interactive public environment made up of a library, a workshop, and a gift shop.

Through the circulation of promotional materials and by word of mouth, The Black Factory makes contact with a range of host-communities that invite the Factory to visit their city or town. In preparation for the Factory’s arrival, the hosts spread the word to the local community and ask them to ‘get the black out.’ Whether it’s the high school football filed or the foot of the steps to City Hall, the location chosen for The Black Factory to stop and set up shop becomes the drop-site: folks arrive ready to share the objects they’ve collected, things that reference blackness for them (from copies of The Soul of Black Folk and images of Martin Luther King Jr., to the Ku Klux Klan hoods and the ashes of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy). (From Project Description on Creative Capital page)

Project Links:

Distributing Martin
The Black Factory
Online Black Factory Brochure
Black Factory Commercial (RealMedia)

Article Links:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_5_91/ai_101010684
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0438/is_2_36/ai_111847731
http://mclir.blogspot.com/2005/06/art-of-contraries-william-popel.html
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news3/news142.html