SEX OBJECTS by JENNIFER DOYLE
TRICKS OF THE TRADE: POP ART & THE RHETORIC OF PROSTITUTION
Andy Warhol: ‘making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’
The writer speaks about Andy Warhol’s work:
In Warhol’s work, a rhetoric of prostitution links sex and work to give the critic leverage to distinguish Warhol’s work from the kind of work other people do and to make the judgement that his art fails to provide a meaningful social critique. Moreover, in figuring his relationship to his work as a form of prostitution, frequently discredit his relationship to art by saying that he also has a perverse, unnatural, destructive relationship to sex. Somehow saying that his work is an abject figure.
There are many discussion about Pop Art. Some declaring that Pop is not about art but about sex and on the other hand that this sex is not about love but about money, therefore, perverse. Thomas Hess said that Pop was ‘phony’ (metaphor of drag & prostitution) because it was motivated by money.
Artists and authors came to depend more and more on the market of their livelihoods, their work of art becoming a kind of sex work.
As Doyle mentioned, figure of prostitution, sexual abjection dominate paintings, novels, and poems associated of the modern. The prostitution has been a powerful symbol of modernity and for the alienating aspects of modern life.
If we do not find prostitution, we find overlapping figures for sexual abjection and economic perversion in, for example, the recurrence of the actress (another kind of ‘painted women’), celebrity (a living commodity).
‘We experience in the nature of money itself something of the essence of prostitution. The indifference as to its use, the lack of attachment to any individual because it is unrelated to any of them, the objectivity inherent in money as a mere means which excludes any emotional relationship-all this produces an ominous analogy between money and prostitution.’ by using prostitution to describe the devastating(highly destructing) effects of money on the individual understanding of own value.
‘How sex sells art and art sells sex, how art sells itself and of how all of these things are the invisible supports for the system by which art is identifies as such.’
THE QUEER ART OF FAILURE by JUDITH HALBERSTAM
CHAPTER 3 : The Queer Art of Failure
This chapter start with a strong statement which I really like.
‘IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, FAILURE MAY BE YOUR STYLE.’ Quentin Crisp.
Looking back at my essay for CS1 about Vanessa Beecroft & Vaginal Davis, this statement is relevant for Vaginal Davis especially doing the comparison between these 2 artists.
Homosexual love & loss – given queers insight into love’s failure and impossibilities. I see the art of losing as a particularly queer art. by Heather Love
Failure – ‘the weapon of the weak.’ what looks like inaction, passivity, lack of resistance in terms of the practice of stalling the business of the dominant. Recognize failure as a ay of refusing to accept(without protest) to dominant logics of power and discipline , and as a form of critique.
Failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.
( I try to understand the article by referring to Vaginal Davis and his artworks.)
Queer studies as the existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. Jose Munoz discussed about queer failure, often makes queerness absolutely central to cultural narratives of failure, narratives that run alongside the mainstream.
Writer gives the example of Olympic games, which American audiences are not permitted to witness failures however there were a lot of failure happens behind the scene actually. Even in the photographs, there often captured the glorious part of sport, the artists Tracy Moffat suggested that she would photograph the losers rather than the winners. She mentioned that the 4th one means that you are not good enough, no place in the recorded history. ‘In order to win, someone else must failed to win.’
Quentin Crisp refers Andy Warhol as queer artist that work with failure & inhabit the darkness, and the darkness becomes a crucial part of queer aesthetic.
Darkness – failed & miserable.
He proposed that queer art has made failure its centrepiece and has cast queerness as the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility and awkwardness.
A photograph of lesbian wearing tuxedos and posing:
1. a failure of ideal masculinity,
2. a queer femininity that is invisible
‘possibility and disappointment often live side by side.’
Bamber’s depictation:
horizon as limit speaks to a queer temporality and a queer spatially that resist a notion of art as capable of seeing beyond and in fact makes art about limitation, about the narrowness of the future, the weightiness of the past, and the urgency of the present.
Writer using Judie Bamber’s photography and slowly link it to queer. Somehow turn the still life into something queer, into a limit. Especially the dead baby finch photograph, the death of the bird – framing it art and diminished it. She captured the things in its moment of decline/expiration, documenting not just death but the death of an illusion.
Queerness links up with the death drive: FAILURE of reproduction.
Writer also used mainstream films for children as example of idea of queer: The hero often has the character of opposite of success & prefect. For example shrek, the princess refuse to remain beautiful but chose to looks like Orge. Many characters were design in some way different and disabled, and mostly did not represent wealth, success, and perfection. Each film makes explicit the connection between queerness and this joining of the personal. These characters have become figurations of of exclusion, abjection. What is the beauty is that these films, the characters do not fear of failure, they do not favour success.
All the examples somehow remind us that There Is Something Powerful in being Wrong, Losing and Failing, if we practice it well, to bring down the winner.
CHAPTER 6: Animating Failure: Ending, Fleeing, Surviving
Writer Halberstam was disagree on some points that mentioned by Slavoj Zizek. This is one of it: Failure as a stopping point on the way to success, said Zizek.
Some of the animation makers used animation film do deliver politic issue, represent certain phenomenon such as Americans that standardised monotony of life under capitalism through Donald Duck cartoon.
Cartoon or animation is a good tools to attract viewer and easy transmit dense ideologies, I think most of the time satire the reality of this world.
The writer analysed few animations and find out the objective and the message behind these animation, for example questions of exploitation, servitude, entrapment, forced labor in the analyses of Chicken Run animation.
She also explained how the stop-motion technique was used to mark the unreal, the queer, animation opposes the natural.
Animation allows viewer to enter into other world and other formulations of this world, which somehow means to be queer in our way of thinking and imagination. Allows ourself to step out from normative.
Most animated films for children are anti humanist, anti normative, multigendered, full of wild forms of sociality.
Freud theory of uncanny was applied in this discussion.
Explaining Uncanny: “This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression”
Queer animated teaches us and ask us to believe in something that is not real, not normal that most people (normative people) rejected.
Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life, but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise.
Using animation to give the moral value of what/how to live in a world created by mean, greedy and violent adults.
‘To live is to fail, to disappoint, ultimately to die.’
The queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, embrace of the absorb, revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failure.
My though about failure for myself: the meaning of failure, it to find the meaning in the failure. However it is a failure but try to seek for the valuable things in that failure, which we can/might found something that surprise us.
Manifesto For Failure Dancing:
Break the beauty aesthetic,
Forget the techniques,
Throw away your mindset about what is dance.
Don’t dance like Alvin Alley,
Don’t choreograph movements like Pina Bausch,
Don’t even act like a dance critic.
Think dance with the brain of an animal.
The challenge for me is that is was hard to break and forget complete about the technique and ways of improvise movements because they are all my kinaesthetic memories. I keep try to imagine I dance like those ugly dancing that I have seen before but I don’t think I has copy them well. It is hard to dance uglily on purpose. It is hard to dance like a failure dancer. As I mentioned in my manifesto that try to think like an animal while dancing, I tried it while I was dancing for this video recording. What I realised was that is not easy to maintain that way of thinking but I was able to do it for few times I think. My objective is to try change our ways of thinking (as human) into an animal and see how it changes our ways of moving, so that it might breaks the normative beauty aesthetic of dancing and our dance techniques.
We often have an idol while we dance or choreograph. For myself, I always wish to be a choreographer like Pina Bausch (successful choreographer) and sometimes try to follow her style in choreography. I was getting more afraid of choreographing trash after I have some good achievement as an emerging choreographer in my country, afraid of falling down/degradation. After reading the articles for these 2 submission, I try to think back some sucks choreography that I have watch before and start questioning: what if we push the lousy choreography into more lousy and ugly? what will happen? since it’s already a failed choreography, why don’t make it more worse and fail to the maximum?
FEEDBACK FROM LAUREN:
I think you’re doing a great job with the readings, and it seems you’re really getting something out of them, which is great to see. In response to your new videos: It seems that while you are certainly connecting with the readings in your written responses, your performance work isn’t quite working with those concepts quite yet. I wonder how you might integrate what you are responding so intelligently to in the readings into your performance work. For example, you speak about the breaking plates- what a great example. How might you utilize the affect you discovered in that performance in a new piece? I also think it might be a good idea to allow all the pieces I’ve asked you to watch to really impact your aesthetic choices. What happens if you just copy something I’ve showed you? That could be a really useful exercise for you.
In regards to the difficulty of making ‘ugly’ dancing… I completely know where you are in that struggle! I have been through this exact struggle. Here is what I’ve thought about, and what I suggest: I’ve actually decided that it is impossible to make ugly dance. Dance is the form of the body making connections, moving – it might be completely impossible for bodily connections, bodily movements, to be ugly, by its very nature (of being about connections). There is a virtuosity inherent in any kind of movement. So here is where I ask you, what else can the body do? What else does the body do? The body does more than move- explore these other options. Think about the pieces you’ve watched.
The other difficulty I think exists is the fact that dance cannot escape its abstract quality. Dance is always representative, metaphorical, descriptive – it can never actually be the thing, it can only describe it, it can only represent it. (Think back to Ridout’s distinctions between theatre and performance.) At the moment, your videos are also functioning within this paradigm- they are attempts to show failure, to represent it. How can you break out of that restriction? How can you move away from metaphor/representation/description and move towards action, task, risk, the doing?
The other problem I’ve encountered with working with dance is that, because of its abstract quality, it seems to ignore the material conditions of the body. For example, my body is young, it is white, it is ‘imperfect’ according to normative standards, it is on stage (being watched), it is female, it has breasts, a vagina– these things carry weight and carry meaning. We cannot ignore the meanings that come with our own identity, and the meanings created by placing that body on view (on stage.) How can you utilize these conditions, rather than ignore them?
I hope this is all helpful! Keep pushing it Vivan. Find the risk, find the ‘realness’, find the doing.
~Lauren xx
one more idea i had for you…
What I often do in my work is find a way to strategically undermine the virtuosic moments. For example, in How to Become a Cupcake, which you’ve watched, I do that silly dance while being sprayed with whipped cream, making it nearly impossible to stand up. In an older show, How 2 Become 1, I undermine myself in a few different ways. In one part of the show, I attempt to do a pas de deux from swan lake by myself, and i’ve also put eggs all over the floor to make it exceptionally difficult. In another part of the show, I have to follow the lead of someone doing a dance in front of me, so I don’t know it yet, but I’m also wearing stripper shoes and dancing in a pile of feathers. I wonder if it might be a good experiment for you to find a similar strategy of undermining yourself doing a pretty dance.