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Face/Paint

The full title of this post could be Face/Paint Kitsch/Art Look/See Now/Then Pleasure/Pain Again.  If that isn’t perfectly clear, I’m not surprised.  The story starts here:

painted-face-soccer-fan-ghana

The photograph is of a soccer fan from Ghana painted for a World Cup qualifying match.  We see the bright colors and his intense expression simultaneously.  The image is vivid, striking, both festive and elemental, and it reverberates with shock, surprise, and dismay without registering any one of those reactions with any certainty.  Whatever he actually was feeling, there is no doubt that this was a moment of intensity.  You can see why it would jump out of the thousands of thunbnail images on a photo-editor’s desktop.

For all that, the photo also is thoroughly conventional. The slide shows at the major papers are full of such images throughout the various carnival seasons–and if the news is slow otherwise, there always seems to be a carnival somewhere.  Hindu holy men, Russian street performers, Brazilian revelers, American kids at a state fair–wherever vernacular life meets art, someone’s face is going to be painted.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and journalism and art and all of culture are at bottom repetitive.  This photograph is good of kind, and I would have left it there but for one problem: Not long after I saw it, I came across this photograph:

warhold-in-drag-polaroid

This self-portrait of Andy Warhol in drag presents another painted face, and the difference between kitsch and art. I generally avoid that distinction, which I see as one of modernism’s least impressive and most overused ideas, and I don’t want to demean the first photograph, which suffers by being put into this unusual comparison. But, my God, what a difference between the two images.

As before, we see the expressive face and the artificial colors simultaneously.  Instead of the momentary frenzy of a sporting event, however, we see a lifetime of pain.  Instead of intensity (alone), here the paint (and wig) ironically evoke the powerful imprint of duration.  As in, I’ve always been this way, always had to carry this inside, always. Although still a striking incongruity, the juxtaposition of male face and female makeup fuses into something that is at once the facial mask of a social type and the naked revelation of an individual soul.

But who’s soul?  The power of Warhol’s photograph comes in part from the realization that you could be seeing one of the many gay men who have been crushed in the closet, or one of the many transgender individuals who feel trapped in their body, or one of the  many women who also have become fused to a mask of silver hair and red lips that promised happiness but is good only to put a face on their suffering.  Because the photo was taken with a Polaroid, there is a hint of pleasure betrayed (just as in the first image above), and a blurring of the line between high and low media (and so of art and kitsch) in order to evoke a common experience.  Although a remarkable work of art, the image is still a photograph, and so it reminds us that what it shows does not happen only once.  Whether the image portrays the individual artist or a social type, we are seeing pain that has occurred again and again.

Photographs by Julian Finney/FIFA-Getty and Andy Warhol/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.  The photograph is on display as part of the exhibition Polaroid: Exp. 09.10.09 at the Atlas Gallery, London.

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Sight Gag: War or Welfare … You Choose

healthcare

Credit: Oldamericancentury.org

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Photographer's Showcase: A Cinema of Possibility

This week we welcome Stefano Boscutti to NCN.  Stefano articulates photojournalism with the genre of the newsreel to create what he calls “a cinema of possibility” designed to animate our “moral imagination.”  To see him discuss his work you can click on this interview.  Otherwise, click here or on the picture below to view one of his contemporary “newsreels.”  For his daily archive  of newsreels click here.

boscutti-newsreel-11

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The 800 Yard Stare

It is generally referred to as the “1,000 Yard Stare,” the blank, “no one is home” expression on the face of a combat veteran who has simply seen and done too much. No longer capable of adapting to the stresses and utter insanity of a troglodyte world of violence, the soldier becomes emotionally detached and disaffected, his humanity apparently leached from his body which remains something of an empty shell. It is arguably as old as war itself, but it was made popular by a Tom Lea painting that appeared in Life magazine during WW II and has become something of a visual trope for the devastating psychological effects of combat ever since (here, here, and here).

I was reminded of the 1,000 Yard Stare this weekend when I came across several photographs in the NYT that accompanied a story which wondered how high a price Americans were willing to pay in order to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The article itself was characteristically balanced while failing to point out the minimum costs we have already expended since 2001, including 440 billion dollars, as well as 869 U.S. military fatalities. But the pictures themselves seem to tell – or show – a different story, posing the question in a slightly different register.

afghan-stare

The first picture was captioned with a simple and somewhat abstract legend, “Tough terrain: Americans on a break from patrolling the Korengal Valley last April.” The look on the soldier’s face is not quite the 1,000 Yard Stare, but one can see that it might not be too far into the future. We might call it the 800 Yard Stare. The photograph is shot from a low angle and with a wide aperture that visually accents his physical separation from the rest of his patrol, a visual harbinger perhaps of an impending, emotional detachment. And notice too that he shows signs of extreme fatigue while remaining tense and alert to the risks of the moment. “On break,” he can nevertheless not relax. The expression on his face makes it clear that he is “on edge.”

That the photograph is identified as having been taken in April might at first seem insignificant, a comment that functions little more perhaps than to mark the image as a file photo that has been hauled out of the archive to depict a somewhat ordinary and regular event. The real significance of that fact only becomes clear when we see the second photograph.

afghan-grief

The caption here reads “Grief: Eight days after he died in the patrol depicted at the top of the page, Pfc. Richard Dewter’s patrol held a memorial service for him.” It is not clear if the soldier featured in the top image is Pfc. Deweter or not, but in one sense at least it really doesn’t matter as the caption to the second image directs us to the pronounced, tragic pathos of the first image that now has the quality of an “about to die” photograph. But more than that, the second image repeats—and in repeating regularizes—the affect of the first. Once again we see a soldier somewhat physically detached from his patrol, with them and yet apart from them. Note too that while the expression on his face is not quite yet the 1000 Yard Stare, neither is it the “grief” towards which the caption directs our attention and which is clearly expressed by others in the image. And once again we see a soldier whose body is apparently incapable of responding to the natural demands of the moment as he gazes off into what would seem to be an almost certain future. The visual analogy between the two photographs, invoking another 800 Yard Stare, suggests the inevitable, tragic conclusion: here too is a soldier about to die.

And the question remains. What price are we willing to pay in order to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT

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China: Marching into the Twentieth Century

Like the recent Olympics, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China has supplied spectacular images of brightly colored, state-sponsored performance art on a grand scale.  Many of the photographs are of military troops marching on parade.

chinese-woman-entrained-60th-anniversary

Something seems to be lost in translation, however, as what we see here is a far cry from the amateurism and informality of a typical Fourth of July parade in the U.S.  A better comparison would be with an Army drill team–if the U.S. Army drill teams had 10,000 troops.

These massive formations of perfectly entrained, tightly choreographed, visually striking troops embody design principles seen throughout Chinese public arts–again, think of the many displays of common movement at the Olympics.  Given the work that goes into it, the performers must take great pride in what they do, and from comments at photo blogs it seems that Chinese spectators around the world really like what they see.

But what do you see if you are not Chinese?  I confess to being somewhat baffled by these images, not least because I can’t help but see them as the latest iteration of the Victory Day parades in Moscow during the Soviet era.  That is, I have the ideological reaction that I was supposed to have when being shown these images in the U.S. press at the time: I see the totalitarian state revealing itself all too clearly in its supposed show of force.  Where the Soviets or the Chinese want us to see massed might, we see the state using enforced conformity to crush freedom and individual expression.

LIFE, Time, and other media outlets loved to shoot the Victory Day/May Day parades, and no wonder.

soviet-may-day-marching

Today, it looks shabby, perhaps even comical, but at the time it was seen as the work of a state using all its resources to mold Mass Man. The USSR is gone, but the Cold War interpretive framework is maintained by shots of marching troops in North Korea and elsewhere.  (Russia continues the tradition as well, but coverage now is more varied.)  And if that isn’t enough, there still are movies of goose-stepping Nazis, which probably is where the visual convention started.

But are the Chinese formations living monuments to conformity?  Is the authoritarian reality behind Chinese capitalism being revealed–worse, is it being made appealing through their production of the visual spectacle?

60th-anniversary-parade-women-entrained

I think the answer probably is, in a word, “no.”  Public art does not have one style, different nations share some conventions but also draw on unique cultural traditions, and in any case times change.  The ideological categories of the cold war are not completely out of date, but they are about as good as cars from the same era.  Rather than hazard a reading, I’d rather ask others what they see, whether they like the images, and  why.  Even so, I can’t shake my basic reaction and think that, for all the progress that China is making economically, they still are experiencing something like culture lag when it comes to fashioning civic performances to articulate their version of modern development.

Of course, one of the characteristics of the new China is that they can set their own fashions, thank you very much.

Photographs by Joe Chan/Reuters, Howard Sochurek/Life, Sipa Press/Rex Features.

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Sight Gags: American Vice – The Seven Deadly Sins


The folks at Wired Magazine have reported on a team from Kansas State that has generated a national map of the seven deadly sins by plotting per-capita status on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust). They note that Christian clergy, no doubt concerned about the way in which the maps locate “Wrath Central” in the heart of the Bible Belt,  question the “science.” You decide.

7-sins

pride

Credit: Wired Magazine, 17.09

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

 0 Comments