MAY 20, 2012

I stumbled upon my favorite piece at this year’s Whitney Biennial in the corner of the third floor. Unassuming and haphazardly arranged, Fluid Employment by Sam Lewitt consists of a series of brownish, stained ...]]> BY ANDREW WAGNER

MAY 20, 2012

I stumbled upon my favorite piece at this year’s Whitney Biennial in the corner of the third floor. Unassuming and haphazardly arranged, Fluid Employment by Sam Lewitt consists of a series of brownish, stained tarps lying on the floor. A few small rotating electric fans sit by the tarps, behind them a group of emptied chemical bottles. The piece could easily have been mistaken for trash or the forgotten materials of a work crew (indeed, my friend and I briefly pondered whether a precariously balanced ladder in another hallway of the biennial was art or just a ladder—it was just a ladder). On closer inspection, though, the tarps were home to something magical: amorphous black shapes, sometimes smooth, sometimes spiked. They moved and vibrated like deep-sea creatures as the wind of the rotating fans moved over them. Their black sheen was both grotesque and slickly beautiful, at once resembling an oil spill and the sides of a Mercedes. They were immensely seductive; I couldn’t turn away.

A few weeks earlier, I had attended “Making it Queer: Art, Ambivalence, and Desire in the New Century,” a Yale Pride panel event on queer art. The panel still lingered in my mind as I strolled through the Whitney Museum. My own artistic practice had almost entirely eschewed any considerations of gender and sexuality, despite a deep intellectual interest in both, and I think a desire to make my art “queer” drove me to the event. What exactly is queer art? I wondered. To what extent did artwork have to engage with sexuality or gender to be considered queer? Was any art made by a queer individual, regardless of subject matter, queer? Similarly: was any art that contained depictions of gender and sexuality necessarily queer?

I did not find my answers at the panel, as any discussion of what exactly constituted queer art was avoided. The panel, composed of artists Jonathan Weinberg, Doron Langberg, Sonia Finley, Katie Koti, and Kyle Coniglio, took on the form of a slideshow, with each artist sharing their work. Judging by most of the artwork shown, queer art was understood to be any art that dealt with queer sexuality. The paintings of Doron Langberg and Jonathan Weinberg approached ideas of gay male sexuality and romance through interpretations of the male nude. Katie Koti’s stunning photographs examined a wider spectrum of gender identities, as well as depictions of lesbian relationships and families.

However, the idea that any art dealing with sexuality can be considered queer art seems too far-reaching to do justice to the complexities of the themes these pieces try to address. Some twenty-plus years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s (in)famous photographs of homoeroticism and sadomasochism sparked wide public controversy, and the photographs themselves were compelling, radical, and inventive in their newness. However, in our contemporary moment, mere depictions of the male erotic gaze don’t seem to hold the same power that they once did. Today, the definition of queer art seems to have shifted; artists exploring queer identity in their artwork must now delve deeper to take a more nuanced look at queerness in its many forms. There is, of course, still value in creating artworks that explore male or female homosexuality, but some paintings shown at the panel, such as the more explicitly sexual  work of Weinberg and Coniglio, fell flat in the context of queer art’s contemporary challenges. Their depictions of male nudes felt like shallow investigations into queer identity, failing to probe beyond surface explorations of the queer gaze.

Amongst these artists, I found Sonia Finley’s alternative perspective on queerness a refreshing expansion of the more commonly accepted definitions of queer art. Finley, a 2012 graduate of Yale’s Sculpture MFA program, began by explaining that this was the first time she had ever talked about her artwork as queer art. Her work deals with alterations of the gallery space, with sculptures changing the shape of the room in often awkward and uncomfortable ways. One sculpture, for instance, created the appearance of a slight indentation of a body on a gallery wall. Despite a lack of explicitly queer images in her work, Finley explained how her pieces still expressed queer themes. More than standalone art objects the viewer peruses from a safe distance, Finley’s sculptures invade the viewer’s space, forcing the audience to actively interact with the pieces. They make the viewer aware of their own body, incorporating the viewer into the artwork itself. In this way, Finley’s sculptures question and complicate identities, blurring the boundaries between viewer and art, between body and space, between object and human. Though her work lacks any explicit visual cues that evoke ideas of gender or sexuality, Finley felt that her work’s messiness, its inbetweenness, was queer in its own way, and I’m inclined to agree.

***

The Whitney Biennial, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, presents itself as a snapshot of American contemporary art. Such a devotion to keeping current invariably means that much of the art in the Biennial is fad-based. Not all of the pieces shown are destined to become timeless masterworks, but they are all exciting—the newness and the inevitable weirdness of much of the art inspires in its devotion to experimentation.

Much of the artwork at this year’s Biennial dealt explicitly with queer issues and themes. Notable was the artwork of Wu Tsang, a transgender artist (more precisely, he self-identifies as transfeminine and transguy). Tsang’s piece GREEN ROOM explores the idea of a safe space in the context of the struggles of the Latino transgender community. This year’s Whitney Biennial features an unprecedented amount of performance art, with the main room of the fourth floor of the museum converted into a performance art space. Behind the main room is GREEN ROOM, a room that Tsang has converted into a lounge and dressing room for the performers. When not used by performers, GREEN ROOM is opened up to visitors to the Whitney. The room looks exactly like a dressing room interior, complete with dressing room lighting, carpeting, and custom designed furniture. When opened up to Whitney visitors, the room plays a 2-channel video installation, showing footage of a transgender bar in Los Angeles, The Silver Platter, and telling the story of the dangers patrons of the bar face.

GREEN ROOM, at once a sculpture and a video piece, is a fascinating examination of the duality of safe spaces. The piece reclaims a room in the Whitney, a public institution, and turns it into a welcoming space where the Biennial’s performers can relax and change their clothing. The performers in the Biennial are shielded from the outside world just as the transgender patrons of The Silver Platter are allowed to do as they please without judgment.

However, the privacy of the space Tsang presents remains  unstable, and under threat. The dressing room must be opened up to viewers if it can be called art (what’s art if it’s not viewed?), and, inevitably, its intimacy is lost. Transforming the bar into a work of art thus expresses the way in which the privacy of The Silver Platter itself is similarly fleeting. One of the videos in the installation includes a shot of security camera footage taken from outside the bar; the intrusive footage undercuts the sense of the bar as a safe haven.

Tsang’s own attempts to organize and advocate for the bar’s patrons are also unintentional encroachments on the bar’s privacy. Tsang became heavily involved with the bar community by organizing a weekly performance art event/dance party, WILDNESS, which expanded the bar’s patronage from its transgender base to the LA arts scene at large. Opening up the bar as a safe haven to any and all individuals, its rise in popularity meant less privacy for those who needed it most. Notably, an LA journalist wrote a review of the bar for LA Weekly, calling it “a place where a lady-boy can take a load off her feet and wipe a load off her skirt before getting back to business in the back of a Toyota.” The bar had been invaded by the outside world, its previous intimacy and safeness was lost.

In using the bar as subject matter for his art, Tsang only draws more attention to it by making it known amongst thousands of Whitney Museum visitors. Attempts to create an inclusive safe space, it seems, are inevitably and paradoxically linked to that safe space’s destruction.

Tsang’s GREEN ROOM explores the divides private and public space by focusing on the moments of breakage that make them nebulous. In this way, the same sense of inbetweens present in Finley’s work pervades the Biennial in an identifiably queer manner.

***

Shades of Tsang and Finley’s ideas of inbetweenness re-emerged while I stared once again at the strange, amorphous black shapes of Fluid Employment. Fluid Employment exists at the center of a series of broken divides, and this inherent messiness is part of its beauty, its magic. The piece’s amorphous black masses are created by pouring ferrofluid, a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid, over magnets. The resulting magnetic field turns the ferrofluid into a solid mass, giving it contours and shape. However, the masses retain their liquid properties, and are prone to evaporation. The fans, blowing wind on the masses, only speed the process of evaporation up. As such, the amorphous black shapes exist somewhere inbetween their solid and liquid states.

The objects initially seem to lean toward categorization as tiny sculptures, but this definition proves insufficient: the shapes are always changing, and the “sculptures” never stay quite the same. Further, the piece can hardly be understood as just sculpture: the rectangular tarps, stained in intricate ways, draw to mind the mediums of drawing and painting. Lewitt must also pour more ferrofluid onto the tarps weekly in order to maintain the artwork. The piece, then, also becomes both an ongoing performance and a quasi-science experiment. The impermanence and insustainability of the piece also means that it will eventually exist solely in photographic and video recordings. So, Fluid Employment rejects any characterization as a single artistic medium. It exists somewhere between sculpture, painting, performance, and photography, and its identity becomes defined by its impermanence, its constant flux.

It is perhaps bizarre to link artwork like Fluid Employment to broader trends and themes of queer art since I have no way of knowing whether the artist personally identifies himself or his art as queer. Regardless, I think queer themes lurk within Lewitt’s tarps and fluids. Like Finley’s work, Fluid Employment seems most concerned with a blurring of identities; its inbetweenness dialogues with other representations of queerness in art. This unexpected affinity attests to the degree to which ideas of queer theory and queerness have pervaded the art world, in which the deconstruction of binaries has led to a greater consideration of the fluidity of all identities. Over the past few years, artists have explored the queer inbetween in more explicit ways, as evidenced by Tsang’s moving investigation of the lives of those who exist between male and female, gay and straight. But there is also an emerging potential for a subtler exploration of inbetweens, where art like Finley’s (and perhaps even Lewitt’s), though not explicitly queer, can also play with ideas of queerness and probe viewers to broaden their queer worldview. These areas between binaries compose an exciting and fascinating territory, and, as much of it remains unexplored by the contemporary art world, is a realm rife with artistic potential.

Andrew Wagner is a sophomore in Yale College. He is Arts Editor for Broad Recognition.

April 29, 2012

It seems like the ghost of Fiona Apple has been haunting the music world for some time now. Since her sudden disappearance from the pop scene seven years ago, her name has resurfaced across album ...]]> BY ISABEL ORTIZ

April 29, 2012

It seems like the ghost of Fiona Apple has been haunting the music world for some time now. Since her sudden disappearance from the pop scene seven years ago, her name has resurfaced across album reviews and YouTube comments alike, popping up as a descriptor for Lana del Rey’s raspy voice, Regina Spektor’s jazzy piano ballads, and even Claire Boucher’s sullen waifishness. In a decade that brought about a slew of angst-ridden, husky-voiced female musicians, it speaks to her unique magnetism that Apple has emerged as the prototypical ’90s woman. Maybe it was her age (she was only seventeen when her demo tape caught the ear of Sony Music exec Andy Slater), or maybe it was her persuasive rendering of those cheap Lurex crop tops and knit skirts in the aesthetically prescient “Criminal” video (American Apparel, Terry Richardson and the rest of fashion’s current school of lo-fi ’90s sexy should cut her a check), but for some reason Apple has remained in our collective consciousness as music’s most convincing embodiment of the plight of disparate youth.

It’s important to note that, viewed on its own, Apple’s music has done little to impact the pop trends that followed. Today, her brand of jazzy piano pop has been relegated to Starbucks music at best, and her vision pales in comparison to that of her ’80s counterparts Kate Bush and the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, whose embrace of synth and electronica has been much more influential in the blossoming electro-pop renaissance of the 2000s. And yet, her vague imprint on so many contemporary acts that bear no musical resemblance to her (e.g. Lana del Rey and Claire Boucher) shows that Fiona Apple is bigger than her sound.

Her performance last month at SXSW after a seven-year absence was the perfect example of the way in which the power of the Fiona Apple mystique subsumes and surmounts the music itself. The explosive impact of her comeback was unmarred by the fact that her drummer was kind of shitty and that she sang while banging on a twisted metal pipe whose feeble clinks and clanks must have sounded hilariously primitive alongside the dark synchronicity of Sharon von Etten and the ecstatic electronica of Dan Deacon, who both played just before her in the SXSW line-up. But as detached as she seemed from today’s musical currents, videos of her nonetheless powerful performance made it clear that Apple was harnessing a completely different type of electricity.

“Ghostly”, “nymph-like”, and “sylphic” are all adjectives that have followed Apple around for far too long now, but these alone don’t do justice to how her performances pulse, vibrate and throb in a way that’s as much holographic as it is ferocious. While the suddenness of her reappearance and the oddity of her inclusion in SXSW’s alt-pop line-up made her seem like an apparition bound to disappear at any moment, her voice wrapped itself around every syllable with the same intensity with which she curled her vise-like fingers around the mike, consistently re-asserting her existence, her relevance, her impact on a shifting public.

But then again, the mere existence of Fiona Apple has always seemed like a glitch, a strange mix-up in the code. Her 1997 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech remains a downright weird moment. Watching her walk up to the stage in a daze, grimace at the hunk of bronze in her hands, quote Maya Angelou and proclaim, “This world is bullshit,” it’s easy to understand why a generation of sullen teenage girls responded to this jolt, hanging on her every word even when we couldn’t understand exactly what she was trying to say. As the garbled spokeswoman for confused and angry teenagers everywhere, Fiona Apple seemed to get “it” even when we couldn’t all agree on what “it” was—whenever her sentences trailed off with “you know?” we nodded “yes, of course we do”; when her message was vague, we filled in the blanks; when her album titles were long and nonsensical, we chalked it up to brilliance and threw withering Fiona Apple-worthy stares at anyone who dared call them pretentious.

It’s this fundamental weirdness of the Fiona Apple persona that pervades the continuous disconnect between her eternally muddled message and her increasingly ferocious delivery. Despite the appeal of her potent voice and her tough exterior, it is her confusion, her messiness, the fact that she is just as vulnerable and fragile as we are that continually draws us to her. We have never known (and will never know) a Fiona Apple who has it all figured out; for all of her power, it’s important that at the core of her image she remain fundamentally lost, strung out, seventeen. The problem, then, is that the stronger and more persuasive she becomes as a musician, the more I wonder of what she is trying to persuade us. How might the adolescent listlessness on which she built her career remain relevant to her now grown-up fanbase, and where can she go from here?

Apple’s delicate balance between strength and intimate vulnerability was what originally set her apart from the more grown-up, self-confident counterparts of her time. In 1997, Apple entered a community of successful female musicians who had spent the decade experimenting with different expressions of strength through music. The ensuing array of emerging musical feminisms ranged from the Indigo Girls’ gently political lesbian folk, to Tracy Chapman’s musings on the challenges of adult life, to Suzanne Vega’s thoughtful homage to New York cool. Apple’s selling point, and the legacy she left behind, was her ability to celebrate and explore angst and insecurity amidst a sea of female musicians that were perhaps alienating in their cool confidence. In the late ’90s, this vulnerability was revolutionary. With Apple at the helm, the image of the female musician as attractive mess became en vogue, and the allure of her unraveling became prototypical of the empowered female musician.  For Apple, confidence no longer had to be defined by being comfortable in one’s own skin, and empowerment no longer implied self-direction; the acknowledgement of fundamental discomfort, the embrace of a loss of direction could now be deemed “confident” and “empowering” too. While the Indigo Girls’ “Power of Two” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” both feature women driving their boyfriends to set destinations, Fiona Apple’s “Fast as You Can” uses the analogy of a car crash to describe a tumultuous relationship reaching its breaking point.

Watching her return to the stage last month, however, I was struck by how the incandescence of her revolutionary ’90s identity appeared strangely dulled in today’s musical climate. Since she was last on the scene, Apple’s legacy of empowered disorder has become so ubiquitous that it is nearly impossible for a successful female musician to project empowerment without a corresponding dose of vulnerability. The curse of Fiona Apple’s legacy is evident in her offspring; watching Lana del Rey do Lolita impressions, Grimes wander through a high school with her headphones in the video for “Oblivion,” or Regina Spektor skip around toting a yellow boom box in “Dance Anthem of the 80’s,” it seems that female musicians crowned by critics as Apple’s inheritors have internalized the idea of exuding vulnerability at the expense of strength and, even more dangerously, of achieving this vulnerability through a state of prolonged adolescence. This wouldn’t be a problem per se if there were female counterweights in the pop world who had taken off where Tracy Chapman or Suzanne Vega left off, singing as adults about life’s harsher challenges. Unfortunately, today’s stars are continually egged on by patriarchal society to embrace their nostalgia for the perpetual angst of teenage girldom. While women are encouraged to relive their teenage years over and over again through pop role models that reinforce this arrested development, male musicians are pushed to grow up fast in order to be “taken seriously.” While Beyoncé’s “Countdown” video features her dancing around a high school gym at age thirty with her pregnancy obscured by clever costuming to help her pass as a teenage girl, Justin Bieber is currently undergoing an image makeover at age eighteen to reflect his deepening voice and budding maturity.

Despite her stunning voice and commanding presence, the Fiona Apple that reappeared before us last month bore all too strong a resemblance to the sullen teenager that spouted garbled diatribes at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1997. Throughout her set at SXSW, she paced back and forth nervously, fidgeted during songs, and often finished by collapsing onto the piano, continually emphasizing her fragility and her weakness onstage. In between songs, she echoed her MTV moment by shouting out into the crowd, “You’re imaginary, you’re all in my head” and, “You’re not real” while shielding her face from the public. Though I recognize that these kinds of stunts are a vital part of the “rawness” of her mystique, I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Apple had learned to grow up in the way that so many of her musical disciples have not yet been allowed to. As a role model for a generation of female musicians and fans alike, Apple’s influence on pop’s gender imaginaries and their cultural impact is indisputable. Whether or not she chooses to harness this power to emerge as a matured ingénue remains to be seen; however, in retooling her image to counter female pop’s Peter Pan syndrome, Apple now faces the challenge of correcting her complicated legacy.

If the fantastic single “Every Single Night” that she released last week is any indication, it seems Apple herself is attuned to and has already begun to tackle this challenge. With her voice wavering back and forth between the controlled vibrato of a ’40s cabaret singer and throaty, percussion-backed chanting, her lyrics document conflicting desires for “a double-king-sized bed” and “the little wings of white-flamed butterflies in her brain” that cause every night to be “a fight with [her] brain.” With music and lyrics that dialogue with her previous identity while introducing a new kind of voice, it seems Apple may be going through some growing pains. Though her path to maturation has been (and continues to be) a long and arduous one, I’m fostering a hope that the next couple months will reveal a Fiona Apple who has begun to sift through her internal tumult to create a new world for herself; a world in which “angst” doesn’t necessarily have to be “teenage.”

Isabel Ortiz is a sophomore at Yale College. She is an Associate Editor for Broad Recognition.

April 16, 2012

WORD is dedicated to empowerment through poetry. We perform with this goal in mind. Our focus is on the performance aspect of poetry, bringing poetry to life ...]]> By Carmen Chambers and Olivia Schwob

April 16, 2012

WORD is dedicated to empowerment through poetry. We perform with this goal in mind. Our focus is on the performance aspect of poetry, bringing poetry to life by integrating a theatrical aspect to our art. WORD performs at local venues, on Yale’s campus, and at local high schools in order to demonstrate the importance of art in expressing oneself and being heard. Look out for information about our twice-a-semester shows and check out the rest of our poets on our YouTube channel.

These performances were given on March 30, 2012 at the Yale Af-Am House.

Carmen Chambers is a senior in Yale College. Olivia Schwob is a sophomore in Yale College. Both are contributors to Broad Recognition.

April 15, 2012

After the screening, I sat in my room with an editor of Broads, trying to work out what that slim half-hour had said, and what it promised to ...]]> By Sophia Nguyen

April 15, 2012

After the screening, I sat in my room with an editor of Broads, trying to work out what that slim half-hour had said, and what it promised to tell us if we just gave the following episodes a chance.

“Is it just,” Isabel asked helplessly, “that I expect TV to entertain me?”

And—after taking some time to deliberate—the answer is yes. Yes, we do. And this is where I run into my first problem with Girls.

The lecture hall where the network and Allison Williams ’10 were hosting a special Yale screening had every seat filled. Between the critical acclaim and the literal buzz in the auditorium, it seemed that here, at least, event television was not dead—people would still gather in one place and in one time to watch something exciting together.  Like anything HBO, Girls promises a spectacle, but on a shoe-string budget and on a personal scale. Here is the spectacle of daily humiliations—sexual, professional, creative—the spectacle of on-screen vulnerability and thinly-veiled self-inserts. Girls is small, ostentatiously small, even—though larger sets would have been easier for the crews to maneuver in, Dunham reportedly insisted upon using authentically cramped spaces. Hers will be nothing if not a diminutive, truthful, enterprise.

Girls, created, produced, and starred in by Lena Dunham, tells the story of four young women starting out in New York City, armed with liberal arts degrees and the unconditional emotional/financial support of their parents. It’s not, however, to be confused with Sex and the City—a distinction reiterated ad nauseum in the press and advertised loudly during the pilot itself, when a purposefully-annoying character jabbers about her Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda “sides.” Blithely appropriating these characters as role models, she is pitiably naïve in a way that the other three aren’t. Though they may have been drawn to the big city by a similar fantasy, the fedora-donning hipster chicks are well down the path to disillusionment, and Dunham and company can reference this older show with a certain measure of smug irony.

Dunham’s honesty is a quality for which she’s been lauded ever since Tiny Furniture, her first feature film. But where that project held the attraction of actually, uncomfortably starring her real-life family members and being shot inside her childhood home, Girls crosses unsteadily into quasi-autobiographical fiction. Dunham tells the truth about overenthusiasm for overpriced apartments; about humiliating sexual encounters; about Manhattan’s bleak professional landscape. She is truthful, even, about the privilege of the Girls quartet—one of them tries and fails to order room service from her parents’ hotel room, and then steals the tip they left for housekeeping. The show notes, without quite condemning, this unreflective entitlement—naturalism is the show’s forte, not satire.

This approach is at its most interesting when Girls explores personal relationships and gender relations, especially through its deliberately unglamorous sex scenes. Hannah the tip thief has indentured herself into all kinds of thankless positions—unpaid publishing internship included—but what’s draws most attention is her non-relationship with Adam, a layabout aspiring actor. His scene is uncomfortable, even disturbing—he refuses to wear a condom, and both during and after sex, he treats her body roughly. As his fingers tug at her tattoos, Hannah tells him their provenance—her ink had been acquired in an attempt to regain control over her body during a period of weight gain in high school. Adam’s callous reply—”You know, I was fat in high school. But I didn’t draw all over myself.”—thwarts her attempt at emotional intimacy through physical exposure. This bleak brand of realism, which in the critical consensus somehow became feminism, largely withholds judgment from its female characters, and what they have done with their supposed independence and liberation. In the Girls universe, the sexual revolution was, on the whole, disappointing: the long-term boyfriends are overly sensitive, the casual hookups borderline abusive.

Dunham is right: this isn’t Sex and the City—but in some ways, Girls compares less favorably than it thinks. Its predecessor never would’ve passed the Bechdel test, and its giggly materialism could’ve only been possible in pre-recession America, but it nevertheless began a conversation that the public was interested in having: bold talk between women about sex and pleasure. In the end, the friends were the center of each other’s universes, not men. In part, the pattern repeats here, if more grittily: the depth of their connection is evidenced by how many of their conversations take place while shaving or on the toilet. But who exactly is Girls interested in talking to? Even among the already rarified world of HBO subscribers, its target demographic has to be incredibly narrow. Children can’t watch it, and I can’t imagine that real, live, working adults could muster up much interest in the travails of the twenty-something. Girls could only work for people exactly like Dunham: those who’ve just gotten their lucky breaks and can now peer below. Seen from one side, Dunham’s projects reflect very intimately on her experience; seen from another, they’re pure solipsism.

For our parts, Isabel and I were cringing too much to enjoy ourselves—and maybe that was the point. As was once said of great journalism, perhaps Girls is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But ours wasn’t just a cringe of self-recognition; it was a cringe of embarrassment, of wondering why anyone would think that these people (or rather, we) were worthy of this kind of loving attention. Despite its overtones of irony, the show sympathizes a little too much with its subject to be as ruthlessly self-examining as its premise demands. Girls opts for claustrophobic close-up rather than critical distance—it’s quite comfortable in its affliction.

Girls may offer insight into the experiences of white, liberal arts-educated, privileged, self-absorbed twenty-somethings. But that it admits its triviality doesn’t stop it from being trivial, and it can only sustain itself on novelty for so long—the mere fact of its existence will eventually cease to be transgressive. What does it mean to be truthful when that truth is so slim, when it only applies to its own hermetically-sealed world? In Girls, the boundaries between self-awareness, irony, and self-aggrandizement are peculiarly unstable, as if in the pursuit of high-handed accuracy, our generation has sacrificed honest self-reflection.

Sophia Nguyen is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 10, 2012

Chloé “BREAK SEX” Rossetti is an artist living somewhere and working in Long Island City (Queens). She thinks a lot about gender-bending, and despairing gay teens ...]]> By Chloe Rossetti

April 10, 2012

Chloé “BREAK SEX” Rossetti is an artist living somewhere and working in Long Island City (Queens). She thinks a lot about gender-bending, and despairing gay teens in Iowa (who may or may not blossom into Sharon Needles). She thinks a lot about women who have surrendered their power and glory to the undeserving, and “masculinity” bearing down on the shoulders of the unsuspecting. Patriarchy is BULLSHIT and Fabulousness is DEAD. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

Chloe Rossetti, YC ’11, is a former staff writer for Broad Recognition. Her website can be found here.

April 9, 2012

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a long and troubled history of under-representing female artists. In 1970, Yoko Ono staged a performance piece at the museum in which a man wearing a sandwich ...]]> BY ANDREW WAGNER

April 9, 2012

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a long and troubled history of under-representing female artists. In 1970, Yoko Ono staged a performance piece at the museum in which a man wearing a sandwich board interviewed people in front of MoMA about a non-existent Yoko Ono show, prompting people to enter the museum and ask where it was displayed. The piece was a protest against MoMA, which refused to show Ono’s work (and that of many other female artists). In 1985, MoMA held a show called “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” which, out of a total of 169 artists, only featured the work of 17 females. In response, an anonymous feminist protest group, the Guerrilla Girls, formed in order to raise attention to the exclusion of women from art institutions. In the 2000s MoMA has made more forays into exhibiting women, including a large retrospective of Marina Abramovic’s work. However, MoMA still has yet to make up for its lack of female representation, and, as art critic Jerry Saltz has noted, their permanent Painting and Sculpture collection (in many ways the centerpiece of the museum) is still primarily made up of male artists.

MoMA’s current Cindy Sherman exhibit, then, is an opportunity to make amends, and in many ways it’s a success. With something of a knockout exhibit, MoMA has cemented Sherman’s place in the modern art canon, asserting her position right alongside artists like Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock. It’s a welcome move, especially given the fact that so much of Sherman’s work provokes discussion of constructions of gender and femininity. I was disappointed by MoMA’s seeming refusal to discuss the possibility of misogyny in last fall’s retrospective of the work of Willem de Kooning and his famous “Woman” paintings. In contrast, the Sherman exhibit forces all viewers to consider the damaging effects of portrayals of femininity in the media and culture.

Sherman is perhaps best known as “that photographer who dresses up and takes photos of herself,” and such simplistic descriptions are, partially, true: much of Sherman’s work involves her dressing up in costume, heavy makeup, and wigs, and then photographing the character she’s portraying. It’s part of what makes Sherman’s work so fun, imbuing into her photos an irreverence and silliness that brings laughter to the normally silent, austere white galleries of MoMA. Sherman is a comedian, using humor and parody to form complex ideological critiques of society’s institutions.

One of the first galleries in the exhibit is a collection of every single print in the series “Untitled Film Stills,” produced in the late 1970s. The “Untitled Film Stills” are perhaps Sherman’s most famous body of work, and when released they helped push photography forward into the era of postmodernism. Indeed, a look at the photographers in MoMA’s “New Photography 2011” exhibition reveals that Sherman’s series looms large over contemporary photographers, who still grapple with the ideas of truth and photographic representation found in the “Untitled Film Stills.” In the series, Sherman inhabits stock female characters of 1940s and ’50s films, creating photographs that, drawing upon our general cultural consciousness, look like stills from a lost Hitchcock flick. Despite the characters’ anonymity, their archetypes are so ubiquitous that we instantly understand who they are, the story that brought them there, what’s going to happen to them, etc. With these images, Sherman chillingly reveals how ingrained within our minds these ideas of femininity are.

Though the series clocks in at 69 photographs, only a select few get reproduced frequently, and these remain quite lovely. Untitled Film Still #7, for instance, captures all the suspenseful melodrama of your favorite ’50s film, with a masterful framing that adds to the beauty of the print, all without compromising her ideological critique. In prints like Untitled Film Still #7, Sherman links idea and aesthetics to create a powerful work of art.

However, presented in their totality on the gallery wall, the “Untitled Film Stills,” for me, fell flat. Perhaps it’s because, presented together (and all in small, 8’’x10’’ prints), the visual beauty of any one photograph gets lost. Or perhaps it’s because the photographs have been reproduced so many times—in nearly every book about modern photography—that they have started to lose their appeal. However, compared with Sherman’s later works, the “Untitled Film Stills” feel somewhat shallow: the photographs come off as subordinated illustrations of an imposed idea, instead of letting the idea arise naturally from the body of work. Within them, though, one sees the seeds of greatness, and the foundation of an artistic framework that would allow her to create more complex and powerful photographs later on.

Sherman’s later series use the “Untitled Film Stills” as a jumping off point: femininity is a social construct, Sherman seems to be saying, so then what? Indeed, immediately after the “Untitled Film Stills,” Sherman began work on her “Centerfolds”, which examine not only the construction of femininity, but also the dangers and damage that such femininity can cause. Working in a wide rectangular format that references the iconic Playboy centerfold, Sherman created a series of exquisite color photographs depicting women in moments of turmoil or distress. The gaze in these photographs still feels like a male gaze, probing these young, vulnerable women in their despair. Though they are clothed, unlike the Playboy bunnies, these women are still objectified, turning the photographs into a critique of society’s insistence on sexualizing anything and everything about women. As a result, the viewer feels vaguely disturbed and becomes complicit in an exploitative and degrading act. Subtly, Sherman has turned the camera against both itself and the viewer, making us aware of our act of watching.

A theme throughout Sherman’s photographs is a fascination with the grotesque. In one gallery, a series of photographs skewer the Old Masters, with Sherman adorning herself in warts and misshapen, prosthetic breasts. However, Sherman’s best uses of the grotesque come from series which the exhibition all but skips over: the sex and disaster series (in which Sherman herself does not even appear!) and the clown series. In the sex series, Sherman puts together the body parts of various medical dolls to create obscene mutations of the human form. Untitled #263 puts together the crotches of both genders to create a rather revolting display of sex organs. The somewhat confounding clown series finds Sherman imagining an alternate universe where everyone is a clown. Judging by the fact that the curators simply split the clown photos up amongst several “thematic” galleries, and barely offered any analysis of the series on their placards, I would guess that they are just as unsure what to make of the clown photographs as I was. Yet, thinking about Sherman’s almost constant concern with the construction of identities might help to better understand the clown photographs. Sherman’s clown universe is bizarrely utopian. The clowns seem to lack any concept of race, and while some clowns are clearly male or female, the majority of them are rather sexless. This may be a stretch, but I wonder: are the clowns happy in this identity-less utopian world? No. The clowns are manic and emotionally unstable, as in Untitled #415. Sherman’s clown photographs undercut utopian fantasies of living in an egalitarian and post-race/gender/sexual orientation/etc. society: history can never be fully forgotten or ignored.

My favorite two Sherman series, though, are both from the past decade: the headshot series and the society portraits series. Both have the same postmodern awareness of the camera as her earlier works but offer a far more complex and ambiguous treatment of femininity. In an interview, Sherman said of her work, “The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.” Though Sherman is certainly aware of and invested in feminism, she is not a slave to ideology, and this is part of what makes her later work so refreshing and compelling.

In the headshot photos, Sherman poses as a variety of middle-aged women, all past their supposed prime. At first, these photos are downright hilarious: the woman’s appearance in Untitled #351, with her freckles and bizarre knit cap, is so absurd that one can’t help but laugh. Soon, though, the images become tragic. In each photograph, Sherman appears completely sincere, her expression conveying the hopes that each of these women might have. The reason we take pictures like these, after all, is to preserve ourselves in a moment of beauty: no one purposefully takes an ugly headshot. The discrepancy between these women’s desire to be pretty and the reality of their disheveled appearances is immensely sad, giving them all an endearing pathos. Despite the ostensible vanity of these women, we sympathize and feel for them. These nameless women are defined by their (lost) beauty, and they desperately yearn for it, deceiving themselves into thinking they can still be accepted as beautiful by a society that only values the young.

The society portraits are perhaps Sherman’s most cynical and scathing works. In them, Sherman dresses up as a series of high-society ladies, clothed in luxurious outfits and photographed against lavish backdrops. The photographs are printed at an immense size, so that the viewer becomes absolutely lost in their visual qualities. The size, further, is a challenge to the cult of Andreas Gursky and the male-dominated Dusseldorf School of Photography, who print monumental monographs that, by their very scale, seem to affirm their own greatness. The portraits have as much intensity and drama as a Dynasty-esque soap opera. In Untitled #469, a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills look-a-like severely stares out at you, her head superimposed onto a forest backdrop. The society portraits share a similar theme of the quest for beauty with the headshot photographs, but they lack the latter’s empathy. Photographs like Untitled #468 are far more critical, bordering on cruel. But perhaps Sherman has good reason to criticize these women. Unlike some of Sherman’s other characters, these women have an immense amount of privilege and wealth. Despite this, they refuse to use their privilege to challenge dominant ideals of femininity and beauty. The society portraits refuse to present femininity as simply a creation by men to objectify women. Instead, they see some women as being just as responsible for upholding oppressive standards of beauty and femininity as men are. It is a powerful and provocative critique that refuses to be satisfied with a simplistic understanding of gender roles.

For those who can’t make it to the museum, MoMA has made the wonderful decision to place the entirety of the Cindy Sherman exhibition on their website, complete with high-quality reproductions of every photograph on display and all of the exhibition information. The site is not a replacement, of course, for actually seeing the show in person—a reproduction of an artwork can never compare with the artwork itself, even with photography—but it is a fantastic means of allowing more people to acquaint themselves with Cindy Sherman. It’s a bold move by MoMA, and one that particularly befits an artist as provocative as Sherman. Always divisive, always critical, and always changing, Sherman has earned her place amongst the artistic greats.

Andrew Wagner is a freshman in Yale College.  He is the Arts Editor of Broad Recognition.

April 1, 2012

Sure, go see The Hunger Games. There’s a singular, thrilling pleasure to a solidly executed blockbuster, and this one’s pretty ...]]> By SOPHIA NGUYEN

April 1, 2012

Sure, go see The Hunger Games. There’s a singular, thrilling pleasure to a solidly executed blockbuster, and this one’s pretty good—a popcorn movie with just enough darkness and Pennsylvania coal-mining grit to keep things interesting. It also happens to have made movie history: opening at $214.3 million, it has the third-highest box office debut of all time. Surpassed only by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II and The Dark Knight, it is also distinguished by the fact that women are at its helm: created by Suzanne Collins, centered on a tough heroine, Katniss, and starring the incredible Jennifer Lawrence.

Fans and newcomers alike will be pleased to know that the adaptation plays well. With the collaboration of Gary Ross and Billy Ray, Collins (a television writer by trade) world-builds for the silver screen with far more success than she does on the page. Though their script may occasionally falter on pacing—a particular strength of the books—it swiftly patches up any plot holes. All of the book’s labored, lukewarm explanations for the Hunger Games’ invention are rendered unnecessary in the movie. Visuals are economical. The costumed parade of contestants down a red carpet, the wide expanse of public viewing screens, the ponderous music of the Games’ promos—we recognize this vocabulary instantly. These are the features of fandom in the digital age. Cinema has the leg-up in this regard; it’s very good at critiquing other media, and here, the hypnotic, anesthetizing power of television and celebrity culture is more directly on-trial.

Not everything transfers as smoothly. But that gap between page and screen is what reels in moviegoers, investing projects with the urgency and vitality that make them franchises. The Hunger Games, like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings before it, is made or broken by the anticipation of its fans. This particular kind of energy explains the midnight showings, and the steep drop-off in ticket sales after opening weekend—it’s the frenzied desire to recapture the excitement they felt when first paging through the book. They are fiercely protective of the universe in their heads even as they salivate to see it re-created on film.

The problems in The Hunger Games have largely to do with tone. Tasteful shaky camera is deployed to keep the ratings kid-friendly, and as a result, the story—which is really just a chain of children’s deaths, one after another—loses a lot of its raw urgency. Several of the key relationships, notably between Katniss, Gale, and Peeta, come off as a little wan on the screen. No matter how talented an actor Jennifer Lawrence is, she can’t quite convey the deep confusion and inner conflict that Collins can simply type out in the first person.

Being a female franchise means being met with a set of problems that other adaptations don’t have to face. Casting decisions are particularly fraught, laden with regressive ugliness in a way that the Daniel Craig-as-blond-Bond discussion isn’t. We’ll leave aside the Twitter dust-up over Rue and Thresh’s race, which stemmed from poor reading comprehension and led to some disturbing revelations about the users’ latent racism. Before shooting could even begin, Lawrence was subjected to absurd scrutiny when the studio announced that she would play Katniss Everdeen. Some interesting controversy was sparked over whether the casting call should have been open to non-white actors, given that the book describes an olive-skinned, dark-haired girl. [That the advertisement explicitly called for Caucasian women exposed Hollywood’s natural default towards white actors, even when possibly contradicted by the source material.] Later, some deeply uninteresting controversy was sparked over (of course) her weight and attractiveness. Never mind that Lawrence had basically played Katniss before—in her Oscar-nominated performance in Winter’s Bone as Ree Dolly, a squirrel-shooting heroine from a desperately poor town, complete with dead dad, catatonic mother, and adorable blond siblings in need of protection. She was too thin or not thin enough, too pretty or not pretty enough.

Though I’ve been using “female franchise” fairly liberally throughout, this should not be confused with feminist franchise. It’s encouraging to see women achieve such wild success in a difficult industry. If Katniss replaces Bella as a YA heroine, no one here could complain. There’s also something to be said about the vacant prettiness of the two love interests, and what it says about the film’s switch from the male gaze to the female one. Peeta’s bland lack of distinguishing characteristics other than his devotion to Katniss—and maybe his hobby, painting—is worth noting. And if nothing else, the publishing success that sparked this movie proves that contrary to publishing convention, men will pick up a novel with a woman’s name on the cover, narrated by a teenage girl.

Yet the series has some deep internal inconsistencies. It wants to have it both ways: to condemn the excesses of the 1%, but to take vicarious pleasure in that luxury; to tell the story of a Diana-like folk heroine but also a Cinderella story. Even if she’s good with a bow, the essence of it is that a rough-handed young woman gets whisked off to the city and, in mind-numbing detail, is shaved, scrubbed, plucked, and of course, dressed by a cadre of twittering fairy godmothers. Later, Katniss’ mentor explicitly tells her that it is of the utmost importance that she be perceived as desirable, and goes on to say that she has only been made interesting by Peeta’s public declaration of his love for her; when this line, duplicated in the movie script, is delivered to Lawrence, she looks suitably indignant.

And inevitably, when there’s a lot of money on the line, you wonder whether the whole thing will manage to keep its soul. The Hunger Games wears class commentary on its sleeve. It has so much disgust for the materialism and vanity of the Capitol, that there is something particularly off-putting about releasing a line of twelve District-themed nail polishes. Taylor Swift, arguably the antithesis of Katniss—if a very interesting female franchise in herself—appears prominently on the soundtrack. Most egregious of all, Mattel has announced its Katniss Barbie, which really can’t be rescued by an “ironic” marketing ploy. Legs stretched to unreal lengths, face frozen in a smile, factory-assembled by the thousands, at Katniss doll is everything that the character of Katniss would hate: faddishness, the appropriation of her identity, the bastardization of her values, and ultimately, her transformation into a plaything, to be manipulated by others.

Sophia Nguyen is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

MARCH 29, 2012

Samuel Huber is a junior in Yale College. He is the Executive Editor of Broad Recognition.

March 11, 2012

The timing of the Women’s Center’s screening of Miss Representation couldn’t have been more appropriate given its proximity to the Academy Awards, our annual reminder of Hollywood’s male hegemony. A recent LA Times article ...]]> By ISABEL ORTIZ

March 11, 2012

The timing of the Women’s Center’s screening of Miss Representation couldn’t have been more appropriate given its proximity to the Academy Awards, our annual reminder of Hollywood’s male hegemony. A recent LA Times article revealing statistics on the Academy’s voting members (77% male, 94% white) made for a particularly painful Oscar viewing experience this year. Though Miss Representation doesn’t address the Oscars specifically, these kind of wince-inducing moments are the film’s forte. Director Jennifer Newsom (an ex-Hollywood actress) lays out compelling evidence in such a way that after fifty minutes of women parading in string bikinis, toddlers in tiaras, Sex and the City lunches and clips of Katherine Heigl gawking at guys/tripping on things, you’d have to be blind for there to remain a shadow of a doubt that there is, in fact, a problem with the way women are depicted in the media. Newsom’s focus on media attitudes toward female politicians and newscasters is particularly deft: coverage of the atrocities committed on national news towards Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and other female politicians was horrifying. Despite its reliance on clichéd techniques (corny power ballads during the montages, Newsom’s voiceovers of “I wondered if…” laid over footage of her best “wondering” face, inane interviews with high school students repeatedly stating the obvious), the documentary presents enough flabbergasting material to incite frustration even in its most reticent viewers. Over the course of the screening, the chorus of gasps, scoffs, a few “this can’t be for real” laughs, and even the occasional shriek became the film’s unofficial second soundtrack.

Though Miss Representation does an excellent job of telling us what the problem is and how we got there, its cursory analysis and trite suggestions for possible solutions make for a rather frustrating second half. Interviews with Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Caroline Heldman, Jennifer Pozner, and even Catherine Hardwicke are enlightening and nuanced, but their ideas are too often shoved out of the spotlight to make way for a parade of “actor slash activists” whose messages are so carefully manicured and diluted that I almost would’ve rather endured fifteen more minutes of middle school students telling me that stereotypes exist. Indeed, the film’s overzealous devotion to appeal to a wide range of viewers comes at the expense of exploring more controversial territory. Too often the film skirts around issues that are begging to be brought to the table: every interview with Rachel Maddow always cut her off as she was beginning to talk in depth about the challenges of being gay on TV, god forbid she might use the word “lesbian.”

However, the discussion (or lack thereof) of race and class issues was one of the film’s greater oversights. While the almost exclusively upper middle class white women Newsom chose to feature in interviews (Fonda, Steinem, Pozner, Heldman etc.) were obviously kickass, it’s difficult for me to believe that more of an effort couldn’t have been made to add in some cool women of other backgrounds. Though women of color exist in the film, their role as interviewees is slim; just as in the Hollywood empire Newsom decries, they play the ethnic sidekicks to white protagonists, more often positioned as comic relief or as a quick agreement with a previous comment. If Condoleeza Rice and Rosario Dawson (who, both obviously concerned with upholding an image, always took extra care not to offend anyone by sticking to strictly feel-good feminism) are the only prominent minority “feminists” that could be assembled, then we definitely have a problem. Even more alarmingly, the majority of the film’s African American and Latina women were too often relegated to the media montages as bikini clad sexpots or loud-mouthed reality TV show stars.

These concerns come back to haunt us at the film’s ending, in which Katie Couric veers uncomfortably close to victim blaming by smilingly suggesting that “if women stopped worrying about their weight and started thinking about helping out a neighbor then all the world’s problems could be solved”. Closing montages of leadership workshops depict happy blonde teenagers nibbling on mini quiches in posh conference rooms while female CEOs tell them to “believe in themselves” and “do what they love”, which would be a really cute idea for empowering America’s women if we could all afford the workshop/hors d’oeuvres. These closing suggestions, though well meaning, are completely insensitive towards women who may not have the resources to clink wine glasses with Nancy Pelosi, not to mention towards those who may have forgotten to make chicken soup for their neighbor due to the challenges of raising a family in troubled socioeconomic conditions (not just because they’d been sitting at home all day reading up on the South Beach Diet.)

In another strange directorial choice, the film closes with hospital footage of Newsom’s childbirth while her husband looks on adoringly: Newsom wants us to know that she just wants a better life for her daughter. The sudden emphasis on her husband, her child etc. seemed forced, as if Newsom felt the need to once again take her message down a peg, reinforcing traditional family values lest anyone consider the film too militant. Where at this point in the documentary I was begging for petitions to sign, people to write to, impassioned pleas to “turn off the TV!”, Newsom’s “call to arms” left me a little disappointed. The film’s closing Gandhi quote was the last straw: “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. For that scintillating advice, I might as well have asked the cap of my Snapple how to approach gender discrimination in the media. Ultimately, I walked away thinking that this would have been a great movie for my junior high class to have seen; insofar as teaching you that Lara Croft is not in fact an empowered woman and that feminism is actually cool/not evil, the film does beautifully. For the slightly older and wiser feminist, Newsom’s approach remains disappointing: a well intentioned but ultimately “miss guided” flick.

Isabel Ortiz is a sophomore in Yale College.  She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.