Pan-aud-icon?

A sound sculpture titled "panopticon"

I was very excited by the notion of an aural panopticon, then I realized that the title of the work has to do with the shape and not the concept.

But really, what would an aural panopticon be like?

This?

What if you are not on the phone? Hard to imagine for those born after 1990, I know, but a larger number of the world still live most hours of their days off the phone.

Watergate and X-files telling us that smoke detectors are all bugged and under your desk there's a tape recording rolling?

Frida Khalo

I was thinking a lot about Frida Khalo today and I thought to look up some graffiti inspired by her. I am not surprised - but almost all of the graffiti only includes her face! I loved everything I found, but the following is one of my favorite ones, located in Oakland, California. It is a stencil!

In light of recent events...

Osama in graffiti.

 source

source

Osama Che Laden

in light of last night.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiagocarvalho/2865468262/

(2 martyrs on one t-shirt for the price of one!)

If Hitler had been a Hippy

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.

So here they are:






Some serious "psychedelic goth", ain't it ?

Chairman who?

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?

Defacement and Graffiti

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!

Source

Source

 Source

Jewish Graffiti

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.

Artist Must Be Beautiful

Gilman mentioning Sprinkle and Orlan in the last chapter

of Making the Body Beautiful made me think of

another woman artist who has based her performances

on manipulating the face and the body:

Marina Abramovic.

I'm sure you are familiar with her work.

Here's one of her less horrifying videos

(it could even be considered funny

--in Abramovic's idiosyncratic style, of course) :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cCFDSzDnUk&feature=related

whiteness

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.

Cosmetic Procedures Groupon in my email!

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."

Live fast die old

Ever wondered what some stars who died young would look like today ?

The magazine Colors tried to answer this question

for Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Che Guevara.

And I've been trying for an hour to rotate the image so it won't be upside down,

but for some reason it seems impossible.

Well, I guess you can still get the idea.

So, here they are, the rock stars, the movie star, the fabled revolutionary...

Clinton Cackle and other Outrage

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.

Bieber Fever

I was lurking on a website devoted to Justin Bieber Fans, http://justinbieberfanclub.net/ , and thought the class might enjoy some of the commentary:

Graffiti, faces, and stardom.

This is a collection of different graffiti artists/writers play on famous stars.

Bast in NYC: Paris Hilton source

Give Up in CA: Lindsay Lohan source

Mr. BrainWash in NYC: Britney Spears (Marilyn Monroe) Source

Is that a room on your face ?

Some of George Condo's portraits seem to have a strange sort of perspective,

like an assemblage of objects set in different places,

from the foreground to the background. Also, Chuck Close speaks of

a process of constructing, building his portraits

little by little. These observations made me think of Salvador Dali

and, more precisely, his installation and his painting of a face

which looks like a room --or is it a room which looks like a face ?

It's titled "Mae West (Face of Mae West which Can Be Used as an Apartment)":


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWlLK9gGUdA&feature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq9MvKHVaY0&feature=related


(For some reason I cannot upload the videos; I'll try to re-edit this post later)

Saving Face...the movie!

IMDB link

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.

Judith Sapine : Face Recognition

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.

Darius Milhaud's "4 faces"

Smith's article reminded me of French composer Darius Milhaud's viola piece "the four faces." Milhaud was quite a bit earlier than Barthe and Sartre, so it might be stretch to impose the humanism ideas on him. This piece was supposedly written for a friend, each movement captures/portrays the face of a different woman from California, Paris, Wisconsin, and Brussel.

I am not sure where the eyes and the nose are in each movement, though I imagined Milhaud is perhaps portraying in a way that lines up with the Schopenhauerian concept of music representing the will and not the form, etc, etc. But I wonder if it is precisely because faces are thought of as representing some sort of underlying truth or character that allowed a composer to musically portray a face?

Some thoughts on Condo and how his work relates

When we were at the museum last week, I thought "Introvert" and the sequence containing Uncle Sam, the Screaming Priest, and "Client No.9" were particularly striking.

At that time, I thought "Introvert" was captivating mainly because I couldn't tell for sure what was going on. It's not quite abstract enough to just think "oh this is abstract art" but it was not definitive what was in the painting. And I couldn't stop thinking about the room that contained Uncle Sam, Client no.9, and the Screaming priest, because each painting had such cartoon-like characters in brightly colored fantasy lands that it seems like a screen shot from a Saturday morning cartoon show, but the subjects of the painting were disturbing enough to be R-rated. The blurb on the wall said that Condo is known for creating simultaneous multi-layers of contradicting emotions, and indeed paradoxes abound in many of the paintings we saw, but I thought for some reason the contrasts between happy bubbles (literally) and sinister scenarios in the Uncle Sam series was particularly jarring.

After we left the museum, as I looked up more of Condo's works and rethinking the ones in the museum, it occurred to me that the paintings that were particularly intriguing to me are the ones where the paintings sits on a mid-point between social critique through parody and irreverent dark humor. Paintings in the Melancholy series such as Jesus, the Secretary, and the Sitting Women were so effective in capturing the melancholy that I thought the paradoxically comical caricature faces was over-powered and thus did not create enough tension.

My two thoughts are that

1. I did not realize when I was at the museum, but the faces in each painting plays a really important role in maintaining this paradox that I found so compelling. For example, in Uncle Sam and Client No.9, my first response was that I was intrigued by the juxtaposition between the smiley-face bubbles and the bright colors with what the characters are doing. But later I realized that what the characters are doing is a little odd, but my immediate perception of sinister came large from their facial expressions. If these paintings had characters with smiley faces, the irony would be of a different sort. Similarly, I thought the melancholy paintings portrayed a particularly lugubrious atmosphere, but afterwards I realized that there wasn't really very much about what the characters were doing that was melancholic. Instead, their faces were all kind of bland, to the point where the cartoony caricature of their faces only seem like a mockery at their blandness/melancholy.

I thought a lot of what we've read in this class has to do with how we read faces and what faces is supposed to represent and what messages a face is supposed to send by making an expression, and it was interesting how much I couldn't help myself but to do exactly the reading into the faces that all these authors have been debating about. It also surprised me how easy it was to see past the exaggerated facial features, and the degree to which I responded to these faces without ever consciously thinking that I am going to read the facial expressions.

2. The other thought was that these faces are kind of becoming the face of Condo's artworks as they thread together the exhibition. I found that quite interesting-- as he obliterates a face he creates a face in another sense.

Kanye West and George Condo

So, on the latest Kanye West album, George Condo did the art work for it.
Apparently, the first cover was banned in several stores and they didn't use it in the final run, yet it was included with the album art work. This was the first cover:

source
This is the cover he ended up using, also created by George Condo:

source

Graffiti artist: Fafi

I have been trying to post graffiti artists that paint faces every week, and this graffiti artist Fafi, does paint faces but she also paints bodies as well, a lot. The photos here focus more on the face. I think most of the graffiti artists faces really correspond well to Condo's work that we saw in the New Museum. Most of these faces are portraits of imaginary people - and often they have interesting characteristics. What I think connects more with Condo, in Fafi's work, is that she usually, if not all of the time, paints these characters with acrylic paint and a paint brush - which is something that will separate her from other graffiti writers. She also deals with this specific archetypes at times!  Enjoy.

in Toulouse, France. Source

in Barcelona, Spain Source

Face as landscape

Second Life/ First Life

Watch this for what second life is.

And here are some juxtapositions of real life images and avatars. But I think my biggest question is-- is representation the same as mediation? Is the disorientation of wearing an avatar an issue of representation, of mediation, both, or something else?

....And here is an image of second life conference-- a face-to-face initiated, at first, by terminal-to-terminal.

Jaber profile

The only stuff I have seen on Jaber's were theses profile streaks - but after some research he also does some filled in characters as well. Enjoy!

(source)

 

(source)

Philadelphia Face!

I was in Philadelphia this past weekend and my boyfriend and I came across this gem:

So, you are thinking, 'ok, it is a face. i got it'. But, really - it is Lionel Richie's face and all of the pieces of paper you can rip off the bottom are the lyrics to "hello" by him. The lyrics speak a lot about the communication that goes on in between faces, "i can see it in your eyes..", "i can see it in your smile..". I am left to wonder, what are you seeing Mr. Richie?

Aural Face?

The readings this week seems to converge to a theme that faces represents not only the "coherent whole" but serves also as an interface through which power is negotiated. Calvino's piece in particular spoke to a dialogic relation between the way he sees IL Duce and his understand of the rise and fall of Mussolini's power.

I found The Kings Speech providing an interesting parallel in the auditory realm-- well, King George VI did, but it's more fun to watch an oscar-winning movie. The film also captures people's facial expressions upon hearing a stuttering Prince Albert-- a mixture of shame and embarrassment-- that portrays aptly how Albert's voice has made him, and by extension the England that he represented, lose face. Also the scene where King George V tells Albert that he could have been a much better king than his brother David, but simply can't be taken anywhere with his stutter.

Hitler in animated cartoon form.

How has the Hitler image been visually represented in different animated cartoons?

Hitler on The Simpsons "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times" episode in 2007

Hitler and Eva attempt to commit suicide Season 4, Episode 8 on The Family Guy

Cartman as Hitler on South Park from the Passion of the Jew episode, Season 8, episode 4


Then, I also found Donald Duck as Hitler from a film titled "Der Fuehrer's Face" from 1943.