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."