This is the weekly blog of three graduate students in Professor Nina Hien's Art Worlds Topics: About Face course at NYU's Draper School. Here, we will post our weekly findings that correlate to the courses weekly readings or that spark our interest in regards to the face!
So, this is Flag, the Jasper Johns' painting I was referring to in my second question. Johns did several other versions of it, but this one was the first to be exhibited in 1957, and it looks like it startled the art world at the time: Alfred Barr of MoMA wanted to purchase it but he was afraid that it might be seen as unpatriotic by his board, so he arranged for someone else to buy it and later donate it to the museum.
As for the title of this post, it's a reference to the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman who defaced three paintings done by Adolf Hitler when he was young. These pictures initially featured gloomy landscapes, vistas of Roman Ruins and still life; the Chapmans added light, rainbows and psychedelic colors. It's an interesting case of defacement, since no one really knew about the existence of these paintings before (apparently Hitler did them when he was trying to enter art school in Vienna), nor was anyone eager to defend them as works of art that deserve respect, after the Chapmans brought them to light.
Other than the fact that I find any parodies on Mao invariably hilarious (perhaps only because the "original" Mao or Mao portraits are so serious) I also wonder if Taussig's point on Sympathetic Magic is time/place contingent.
Obviously 20 years ago in China these images will be defacement much akin to the naked statues of Australian royals, but today they were accepted as jokes. Taussig did say that jokes and unmasking work the same way. Has Mao's death and China's modernization changed how these parodies would be viewed?
What is defacement in one context, could it be a non-defacement in another, and maybe even become art?
I suppose that being that defacement is the last topic in this course, it runs really well with my weekly graffiti theme. I love when I am in subway stations and I see that people have physically played with the advertisements. Besides with magazines, these advertisements represent the rare occasions we are actually face to face with ads, that aren't mediated; we can physically touch and rip and write on these advertisements. With that said, here is poster boy!
So, while I was searching for pictures of graffiti, I came across a couple of stencils that were quite interesting especially when thinking about the 'racialized nose'.
Source -from Paris
What I thought was really interesting was that this face doesn't include a nose. The signifier for someone being identified as Jewish, in this stencil, seems to be more based out of hair style and dress.
Here are some ads for the mei bai (beautifying and whitening, notice how these two things are lumped together) products that are wildly popular in Taiwan. Notice how a face of a Caucasian supposedly says enough .
Towards these I have a very visceral and emotionally loaded reaction. My sister and I spent most of our lives resisting pressure from family and peers to also mei bei, on the ground that if we do we are just perpetuating a Western hegemony already too deeply internalized by so many (we didn't have words for it before, but that was the idea).
The first time that our unattended skin color were accepted was when the family decided that we have lived abroad for long enough that we count more as Asian Americans than Asians.
Purely coincidental, I received this groupon in my e-mail inbox a couple of days ago!
My favorite sentence: "As the human body ages, it rebels, undercutting eye contact with actual crow claws and smothering disgruntled fat cells in an ostensibly loving embrace."
This post is obviously related to the film and reading for today although for the most part inspired by Brandi's mentioning of voice in her question.
In my sound class earlier this week, we analyzed Hillary's cracked voice in this video
And how the "cracks" in her voice as well as her voice registers are carefully staged and planned to signify an involuntary vulnerability that somehow implies interiority and veracity. A strategic break from the politician character, if you well, to "show the real person" as just the same as everyone else (who eats pizza and doesn't exercise).
In class, we said that her voice here is a spectacular performance. We also looked at Hillary's cackle and how those moments framed her as losing control and potentially volatile.
Not that I am proposing to separate the sound and the sight, but I find the performances of voice and performances of the face curiously mismatched.
Majority of her public (invariably disseminated around the world) appearance features a somewhat stoic face- with eyes staring directly into the camera, relatively immobile eye brows, and a meticulously calculated smile showing precise amount of teeth while maintaining the rest of the face basically the same. It conveys a sense of composure, and many other politicians have that same face. In the crying video you see that her eye brow raised a little further than usual but if you turn off the sound, her face doesn't really do that much. Same in the cackling clip-- her voice gave away, but her face maintained.
Of course, there are parallel moments of failed facial performances:
In some ways I think the discussion on face parallel's the discussion on voices: they are both thought of as bearing paralinguistic functions and are communicative in a semiotic way, and both are thought of as indexing some sort of veracious interiority. Both seem to have their roots in the involuntary body, so the words can lie but the face or the voice might have no choice but to reveal the truth.
We can critique all we want these ways of thinking about the face (or the voice) in the seminar room, but when Hillary cries or cackles, or when she makes an ugly face and is caught on camera, the signification of her lost-control voices and faces still register. And sometimes the politicians themselves manipulate that seemingly truthful paralinguistic communication power of the faces and the voice (like Hillary's crying or the perpetually composed faces) and some other times media (that disseminates her ugly face) put that same mechanism to work to achieve their goals.
I just realized that this is exactly what Barthe and Sartre are talking about.
But my re
al question has to do with Hilary's well-composed faces when her voices "lose control"-- Does that just reinforce the truthful impression of her voice? As in, "even though she's strong enough to maintain composure on the surface, but inside she's vulnerable," thus creating a selling point that she is a real person, without challenging her politician's composure? Or does it work the opposite way, as in "her face hardly twitched when she talked about something so emotional" and render it unconvincing?
Side note: here are some formulaic Obama faces, and if you browse through Jimmy Fallon's Obama Facial Expression explained it becomes really obvious how formulaic Obama's politician face is.
This tongue-in-chick movie explores Chinese-American face-losing and face-saving, not in the immediate social interactions that Goffman describes, but nonetheless transgressions of social grains in the Chinese-American community. The movie centers around Wil, a young female surgeon (add to the mianzi) who is secretly a lesbian (big time losing face). Her mother who lived a role of traditional good wife (lots of mianzi) but got pregnant with an illegitimate lover Wil's age (definitely losing face).
In the movie, both Wil and her mother dealt with various strategies to minimize face-losing within the community as they fell from their well-respected positions, while trying to not lose face in front of each other.
In the optimistic end, they both decided and helped each other to pursue their love without worrying about the face, a move that actually lead to the community's acceptance and they reestablished their faces. At the end of the movie shows the newborn baby, the lesbian couple, and prominent figures of the Chinese-American community in New York all gathering joyfully at a party. Wil's girlfriend's father made a remark that sums up the face-saving: "well, at least she's with a surgeon."
Other than wildly entertaining, I found this movie portraying a more nuanced and long-term sequence of face-losing and face-saving of how a community maintains its (perhaps we can call) social equilibrium. Every small talk or brief conversation is loaded with potentials to lose face or to save face and with considerations of the facework in the bigger picture. For example, in the trailer where Wil's father asked "you are not also pregnant, are you?" was simultaneously a derision towards Wil's mother and a way out for Wil, as the implication is "well, at least you are not pregnant out of wedlock."
This movie also explores other aspects of inter-cultural facework that are subtly contested. For example, when Wil's mother asked Wil with a derisively surprised tone "Since when do you drink beer?" highlights the tension between generations and between one who grew up in New York and one who was a transplant. The act of drinking beer might be gaining face for Wil but losing face for Wil's mother, complicating her facework.
Turning corners in the city is amazing because there is seriously graffiti every where. One artist I noticed several years back was Judith Supine. I thought their work was related to this week's reading because of face recognition. I feel like when I look at their work, I have an internal conversation of "where is that from? who is that? i feel like i know that person!". I think it is because these faces are complex mixes of different elements of different faces. Similar to Chuck Close, i feel like the end product is always a portrait with different approaches for each time.
So, this is Flag, the Jasper Johns' painting I was referring to in my second question. Johns did several other versions of it, but this one was the first to be exhibited in 1957, and it looks like it startled the art world at the time: Alfred Barr of MoMA wanted to purchase it but he was afraid that it might be seen as unpatriotic by his board, so he arranged for someone else to buy it and later donate it to the museum.
