Sarah G. Sussman's blog

Bringing "Rip Van Winkle to Life," Part III

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:59:37 +0000

Image credit: Joseph Jefferson as Rip harryhoudinicircumstantialevidence.com

Just as there are as many interpretations of a text as there are readers, every new adaptation of a text weaves and builds a new story. Given technological constraints, the film version of "Rip Van Winkle" is necessarily short. As such, it’s important to consider the executive decisions made in paring out a new interpretation from the bones of Washington Irving’s 1819 tale. It’s also important to note that the film version was not an adaptation of Irving’s short story alone. The film was most likely created in part because of the popularity of the Jefferson stage play. The play was co-written by Joseph Jefferson and Dion Boucicault, the same Joseph Jefferson who starred in the film and worked with Laurie Dickson and American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to help to create the film.

In order to understand the shape of the film, it’s important to understand the more fleshed out version of the tale found in the play. The original play version^{^[1]} shows a number of changes to fit with melodramatic conventions of the day. In the play, the story is altered so that it is about betrayal, loss, and love. Interestingly, these themes are explored through a narrative that is mostly about property rights:

In the play version, Rip used to own most of the town where the story is set, but the villain (a new character for the play), a money-lender and landlord Derrick, nefariously takes over during Rip’s sleep. When Rip awakes he finds that Derrick owns all except for Rip and his Wife Gretchen’s tiny cottage.
But there’s hope: It comes to Derrick’s attention that despite his efforts to trick Rip by keeping him drunk all of the time, documents which Rip signed years ago were mortgages and not loans. Because the property has become so valuable with Derrick’s developments, were Rip to merely sell a fraction of that land he would pay of all of his loans and more.
Scheming to trick the illiterate Rip, Derrick draws up a deed. The innkeeper’s son, who intends to marry Rip’s daughter is learning to read in school and translates the document to Rip, who, without a word avoids signing throughout the night’s drunken festivities.
A storm descends and Rip comes home drunk. His wife and he fight and he leaves despondent. Meanwhile the children speculate that tonight is the night that Hedrick Hudson and the ghosts go bowling.
Up in the mountains Rip meets Hedrick with whom he communicates via pantomime. He carries his barrel of drink to the other ghostly and also mute dwarfs where he delivers a monologue, partakes in the beverage and faints.
When Rip returns he finds that Gretchen, succumbing to financial ruin, has married Derrick for support. Rip’s daughter Meenie, who wanted to marry the innkeeper’s son Hedrick, is told that he has been lost at sea and will marry Cockles, Derrick’s nephew, instead. (18)
Hendrick reappears, having survived shipwreck. Though no one believes that Rip is who he says he is, he is able to produce a deed proving that the land is in fact his. Derrick and his nephew Cockles are chased off of their property, Rip and Gretchen are reunited, Meenie marries Hendrick and Rip toasts to everyone’s health.

When Dickson and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company worked with Jefferson to make the film version, this is the play that they were working from. When we read the film, it might help to see it as informed by the popularity of the play, Irving’s story, and the novel medium of cinema. The first change viewers of the film will notice is that all of this very suspenseful drama is ditched. Perhaps because it is sentimental (the double love triangles! The swindle!) and film was cutting edge – a new medium which saw itself above the drawn out, outright clichés of the play. The drasticaly shortened story line was divided into eight scenes which are as follows:^{^[2]}

1) Rip’s Toast

2) Rip Meeting the Dwarf

3) Exit of Rip and the Dwarf

4) Rip meeting Hudson and Crew

5) Rip’s Toast to Hudson and Crew

6) Rip’s Twenty Years Sleep

7) Rip’s Awakening

8) Rip’s Passing Over the Mountain

As readers can see, what does remain from the original story is a preoccupation with altered states of consciousness, and an emphasis on the miracle of change over time. Because "Rip Van Winkle" is a story about change, and was in many ways forward thinking in its own time, the film might be, in some ways, a more faithful adaptation to the themes presented in Irving’s story than the melodramatic play.

[1] From Johnson’s paraphrasing and quoting of the original Jefferson script.

[2] Loughney

Bringing "Rip Van Winkle" to Life, Part II

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:17:19 +0000

Joseph Jefferson as Young Rip Van Winkle Image Source: Wikipedia

In my last post, I began telling the story of how “Rip Van Winkle” came to be converted to film. The story is fraught with all of the workplace drama and power plays that one might expect from a nascent Hollywood industry. It’s a tale of stolen ideas, patents, and lawsuits, that led to an eventual motion picture industry monopoly. As I mentioned in my last post, most scholars credit Thomas Edison’s assistant, Laurie Dickson, with the creation of the Kinetoscope, an invention very similar to the Mutoscope on which audiences would have viewed Rip Van Winkle. The invention was essentially a peephole in a tall rectangular box with film running between two spools. Around the time of the invention’s 1892 patent, however, the relationship became rocky.

Although Mutoscopes and Kinetoscopes were very profitable, a projector which could play to a large audience would bring in higher revenue. In 1895, inventor Woodville Latham, with his sons, had created a projector called the Eidoloscope. Edison’s main assistant, Dickson, out of a seemingly genuine interest and earnest love of inventing, wittingly or unwittingly broke his contract by helping the Latham family in inventing this new projection device. Displeased that Dickson had shared his great ideas, leading to the benefit of his competitors, Edison fired him. Dickson ended up staying with the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company – the group which is credited with the making of Rip Van Winkle.[1]Curiously, or perhaps understandably, the film is often listed as a product of the more popular Edison Company, and this is because of a monopoly that Edison forced into being.

In spite of Dickson’s perceived mutiny, Edison found ways for his company to prosper. At this time, many films were “duped” or copied from other films, and so Edison Studios began to trademark their original actuality films. This, however, led to Edison constantly suing other movie studios (Lubin, Vitagraph, Essanay) over patent infringements. To try to put a stop to these costly lawsuits, the Edison Company formed the Edison Association of Licensees in 1908 which set down grounds rules over film release dates for companies. Biograph studios (the group which Stephen Johnson, Patrick Loughney and Kenneth McGowan cite as the producer of Rip Van Winkle) retaliated and formed their own group. Eventually both groups merged into the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1908. This eventually became known as “the Trust” – a motion picture monopoly. Hence, Rip Van Winkle is probably credited to Edison studios because that was the largest company, but not necessarily the studio which produced it, even if Edison may have owned the rights to it.

The Film

The actor we see in the Mutoscope film, Rip Van Winkle, is Joseph Jefferson. Jefferson’s career is an interesting one for understanding the contiguous flow of drama to cinema at this time. He actually first produced a version of “Rip Van Winkle” for the stage which was co-written with British melodrama writer Dion Boucicault. Together they changed the plot of the short story almost entirely (which I’ll discuss more in my next post). After the opening of the play in London, audiences were clearly enamored. It was, in fact, so popular that Jefferson toured with it in the U.S. for the rest of his life (Johnson 4)[2]

Further capitalizing on his success, towards the end of his career, in 1895, Jefferson published a book version of the play which contained “stage directions, complete dialogue, plus photographic and other illustrations documenting costume, make-up, scenery and other production elements” (Loughney 279). Perhaps ever thinking of new ways he could self-promote, Jefferson had been an early investor in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (Loughney 278). It’s easy to see how an actor of the stage would want to invest, and perhaps get his foot in the door to be involved, in the nascent medium of film. For Laurie Dickson, who had a lifelong goal of making a film based off of an “entire play” his partnership with AM & B and their connection to Jefferson must have seemed serendipitous.

Dickson finally arranged with Jefferson to have the play turned into a short film by Mutoscope ‘on location’ near Jefferson’s rural country home. As critics like Stephen Johnson have pointed out, the film is valuable because “It provides us with insight into Jefferson’s unique style of acting.” While scholars can read stage directions and reviews, or examine photos, so much more is revealed through observing the living motions of the actor.

Adding to confusion over who produced the film, Johnson adds that “Jefferson’s production was popular enough that, in addition to the film, he was asked to recite selections for Edison’s sound-recording cylinders.” Though the Youtube video is labeled ‘Edison,’ all sources consulted say AM & B produced Rip Van Winkle. Moreover, the Library of Congress’ site doesn’t have Rip listed among their films, though their list is not perfect either. Perhaps Johnson is referring to Edison cylinders as a brand, more than to name a company affiliation (11).

While the points of origin for the film are somewhat tenuous to track down, the content of the play itself is not. Stay tuned for my next post in which I’ll offer my own analysis of how these changes relate to the play version of the story; how the play varied from the film; how these scene selections altered the storyline; and a suggestion that “Rip Van Winkle” is a story particularly well-suited for film.

[1] Edison eventually bought the rights from an inventor to a projector which he named the Projecting Kinetoscope.

[2] Johnson, Stephen. “Joseph Jefferson's ‘Rip Van Winkle’”The Drama Review. 26.1, Historical Performance Issue (Spring, 1982): 3-20. Web. Feb 9, 2013.

Bringing "Rip Van Winkle" to Life

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 17:25:20 +0000

Gif illustrating how a Phenakistoscope works Image credit: Wikipedia

In adapting a book for film, a number of executive decisions are made: scenes are cut, metaphors are made visual, and wardrobes are custom fit to match the era or character’s personality, all to the chagrin or pleasure of the audience. While the conversation around film adaptation often happens with full-length feature films, it should be remembered that this is not solely a conversation worth having after the twentieth century. Of course, plays and even early forms of cinema have at times made more drastic and noteworthy changes when adapting a text for the stage or screen. In the early days of cinema, these changes were especially pronounced. Largely due to technological constraints, cinema couldn’t always replicate a narrative anywhere near its entirety – though in some ways it could do more. One consequence, especially visible in the sample that I use here, the short film Rip Van Winkle, is that the resulting adaptation has to tell the story in five fleeting scenes. In this post, I’ll offer an informational and technical overview of how one of the first film adaptations of a work of literature came to be, and in my follow-up posts I’ll offer more details about the Rip Van Winkle film itself, with a comparative analysis between the story and film.

Three forms of “moving pictures” preceded the Kinetoscope and Mutoscope, the technology used by Edison film, the company supposedly responsble for producing Rip Van Winkle. The first was the magic lantern. These were essentially early image projectors first developed in the 17th century. Through the use of tools like levers images would appear to “move.” Developed in the nineteenth century, there was the Phenakistoscope--a disc with successive images that, when spun, appeared to be moving. An early animation device that, in principle was like a cartoon flip book. Finally, there was the Zoopraxiscope – Developed by Eadward Muybridge in 1879, this device projected image series in successive phases of movement. They were either animated glass discs (similar to Phenakistoscope) or photographs. “Moving” photographs were made by strategically positioning multiple cameras along a subject’s line of movement.

The ingenious inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge, approached Edison in 1888 with the suggestion that they collaborate, combining Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope with Edison’s Phonograph. Edison found Muybridge’s plan inspiring but impractical. That same year Edison filed a caveat with the Patent’s Office of his plan to “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” His next invention, the Kinetoscope which was finally patented in 1892 emerged at the confluence of a group effort among Edison Studios assistants William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and others, along with the fortuitous advent of celluloid film sheets. Though Edison came up with the idea, modern scholars agree that the execution was almost entirely the result of Dickson’s efforts. The Kinetoscope was a large rectangular box containing film running vertically between two spools which would spin at a continuous rate. Through a viewer at the top, a spectator could peer in and view the film. The patent for the Kinetoscope was filed in 1891 and it was completed in 1892. The first Kinetoscope Parlor opened in 1894 in New York and featured five machines showing features for 25 cents apiece.

The Mutoscope patented by Herman Casler in 1894,was a simpler and more inexpensive “peep show” viewer similar to Edison’s Kinetoscope. It contained a rolodex-like series of photographs printed onto cardboard. The images were electrically illuminated and one person at a time could watch a film through a viewer at the top. It was owned by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and is the machine viewers used to watch the Rip Van Winkle film.[1]

From 1896-1900, a large number of films (with some exceptions) were “actuality” films featuring scenes of Vaudeville performers, celebrities, railway trains, and scenic places. In his 1894 biography on Edison, Dickson wrote that they were working on means to present “an entire play.” [2]

Stay tuned for my next post in which I'll discuss the actor chosen to play Rip, the ways in which scenes were divided, and more.

[1] MacGowan, Kenneth. “The Coming of Camera and Projector: Part II.” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 9. 2. (Winter, 1954): 124-136. University of California Press. Web. Feb. 9, 2013.

[2] Loughney, Patrick. “From ‘Rip Van Winkle’ to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: Thoughts on the Origins of the AmericanScreenplay.” Film History 9. 3 Screenwriters and Screenwriting (1997): 277-289. Web. Feb 9, 2013.

The Most Democratic Selfie?

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:35:11 +0000

Image Source: eonline

"By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" -Baudelaire

After last week’s Oscar’s ceremony, a number of critics lauded Ellen DeGeneres’s performance as “warm,” "accessible,” and most interestingly, “democratic.” The gimmick, of course, which earned her the most attention was the big Oscar’s Selfie. After all, what could be more charming than everyone’s favorite celebrities acting like ordinary people; seemingly thrilled at the mere chance to be on television? Thinking about this selfie, and the comment that Ellen was so “democratic” brought to mind the oft touted expression that photography is “the great democratic medium.” In an interesting way, the Oscar’s Selfie is the perfect encapsulation of that saying.

The original reason for referring to photography as the democratic medium was because it blurred the class lines between the haves and have-nots. By today’s standards, where democratic photography means publishing photos of high stakes life and death revolutions on Facebook and other forms of social media, that might sound tame. But in the nineteenth century – the camera was a revolutionary tool in its own right, as it paved the way for a more empowered polity by contributing to the erasure between high and low culture.

By way of example of this tension, take Baudelaire’s famous polemic against photography and the plebeian masses from 1859, “In these deplorable times,” Baudelaire warned, “a new industry has developed,”

"An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah . . . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers" (Baudelaire 296).

It was also fittingly, a revolution which, from the start, was affiliated with acting. In a quote that is, by today’s standards, bemusing and irate, Baudelaire raves about ordinary people re-enacting scenes from history:

"Strange abominations manifested themselves. By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" (Baudelaire 296). For Baudelaire, re-enacting the scenes of history was best left to master painters with proper training, not any "washerwoman" with access to a camera.

In the nineteenth century, photographs were often used for the purpose Baudelaire describes: to re-create scenes from the past. Perhaps we see the same impulse in our modern cinema being used to recreate the past. But to be clear, Baudelaire’s objection is not against all acting. It’s against the democratic masses “any rascals” or “washerwomen” believing that they, too, could represent the “tragic and the charming scenes of history” without the proper training, without the proper sanctified feeling of high-class stage actors. A sanctioned high art operation like the academy is not what’s under fire here. As Baudelaire continues, the actor is still “sublime.”

"Some democratic writer must have seen in that a cheap means of spreading the dislike of history and painting amongst the masses, thus committing a double sacrilege, and insulting, at one and the same time, the divine art of painting and the sublime art of the actor. It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite[i]" (Baudelaire 296).

It’s easy to see why members of the academy want to be in league with that wily democratic writer instead of the elite stage actor; why the stereoscope, an inexpensive and popular parlor amusement which was an early form of cinema, seems the cooler, more American side of history to be on. But don’t the members of our Oscar’s Selfie (like Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, etc.) have a closer kinship to the celebrated “high culture” actors of the stage? So really, how democratic is Ellen’s performance and her Oscar’s Selfie?

The selfie wasn’t this year’s Oscar’s only attempt at seeming democratic. Nearly all of the skits and jokes from this year's ceremony showed a preoccupation with the erasure between high and low culture; an erasure most often performed through social media. Take Jimmy Fallon’s opening sketch, where he visits a “troll” tweeter who is insulting actress’s dresses. After zapping into her living room, he grabs her hand and the camera zooms to her fingers for extra effect. In a mock interrogation he asks that random everywoman with disdain: “what’s on your nails? Cheetos?” Then there’s the world’s luckiest pizza delivery guy sketch, where “one of us” gets plucked out of obscurity (and tipped graciously).

But why bother with all of these social media and everyman stand ins? Is it possible that our stars are afraid of losing fans to the more democratic enertainment forms on social media? Or do they pretend to be, so as to appear more like us? It’s a loop. Photography’s democratic promise has always been galvanized by a populist threat. With the photograph, one didn’t need a painter for a portrait, and eventually, people could make their own art. The selfie is the latest revolution in that vein: an instant portrait of the self one can take hundreds of at a moment– but could we ever be our own celebrities? And do we like the selfie because it’s that carrot at the end of the stick? It promises us that maybe, someday, we too could breathe that rarefied air.

Ellen and Jennifer Lawrence are two stars who have made a career out of this circular relationship between fame and us “ordinary people.” Midway through the show, Ellen shows that she’s a fan too (just like us!), when she fangirlishly pockets Lupita’s Nyong’o’s lip balm while collecting tips for the man who will only be known as The Pizza Guy. Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence tripped (again!) on her way in, and everyone loved her all the more for it, because it was the kind of mistake "real" people would make.

Morever, the selfie in question offers catharsis by showing gracious and glamorous people in a very ordinary scramble for affection and popularity (poor Jared Leto was cropped out). The Simpson’s Oscar Selfie spoof is humorous because of this: it shows the underdog homer, being trampled underfoot. And then there’s the playful reminders that Luptia Nyong’o’s brother, Peter Nyong’o, is “just a college kid” who got into the shot. On the Ellen show this was a cue for uproarious laughter, as Ellen notes that Lupita, the recognized Hollywood star, is left in the back, but . . wait, why is that funny? Because, like the pizza guy, Ellen is implying that Peter Nyong'o is an everyman who doesn’t belong, but celebrities welcome him anyway (just for the designated Warholian 15 minutes that social media provides). Aha, right. So again, how democratic is it, really?

Still it’s impossible to escape the elephant in the room: that the Oscar’s was sponsored by Samsung Galaxy, and that all of these selfies were intermittently interrupted by commercials for the same phone that Ellen kept waving around. There are those who will say that it’s just grandstanding to say that photography is the democratic medium in light of a celebrity photo op like this; that some can’t afford a camera. Whatever the case, it does seem nice that the re-tweets inspired Samsung to give $3 million divided evenly between St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and The Humane Society of the United States. But what I find most interesting is the charitable message of the photo: that you, too, can be famous. And if that's the case, are we a step closer to completely decentralizing the old system of celebrity culture, anyway?

[i] Charles Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvat. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1972.) Print.

A Posthuman Selfie?

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:51:38 +0000

Image credit: Wikipedia, Mars Curiosity Rover's first selfie

In my last post, I recounted a history of some of the most iconic images of space which primed my reaction to the Mars Rover’s portrait of Earth. This led me to offer a short curation of ways key figures have pathologized space, and their eco-critical views of space inflected by Earth, but all of this talk of Earth as “home” begs another question: If photos of Earth from space are photos of a shared home, are they a kind of self-portrait? More importantly, if robots are taking these images, are these self-portraits of humanity, or something posthuman? Lastly, why do those rovers have to be so darn cute?

Mid-century space travel always carried within it a dualistic contradiction between humanism and posthumanism. The lunar landing was “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – a famous verbal flub from what should have been “One small step for a man” – the omission of that article was fitting though, as conversations with space are always attended by a complex collectivism. The lunar landing was an achievement for the human species as a whole, ironically underscored by the competition of the Space Race between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. during the Cold War. Always parallel to this myth of human collectivism was the philosophy of “Spaceship Earth." The “Spaceship Earth” philosophy suggested improved life through a decentering of the human subject. Although the concept of the “Spaceship Earth” dates back to Henry George’s 1879 Progress and Poverty, the idea gained most momentum mid-century when it was taken up by urban planners, activists, and politicians. Notable proponents of the “Spaceship Earth” worldview, like Buckminster Fuller, thought humans might have a better chance at preserving our natural resources if we conceived of ourselves as a planetary collective. In other words, “Spaceship Earth” suggests an inter-special worldview—the broadest collectivism possible.

Today, the human endeavors to reach space are often a mix of parody and tragedy that seem to come from the fallout of this posthuman philosophy. Perhaps some have privately entertained this tragicomic vision of space, but I’m interested in the public face of space travel: Nasa’s tweets, movies like Gravity, Neil De Grasse Tyson’s podcasts – which increasingly show space as an existential blend of the grim, the absurdly moving, and finally, the outright comical.

Image credit: NPR.org Yutu Rover

China’s Yutu Rover, which recently live blogged its own death, offers a striking example of this affecting absurdity. Perhaps the cutest rover in space, Yutu was named after the pet rabbit of a Chinese Goddess who lived on the moon, Chang’e (Chang’e 3 was the name of the lander who deposited the little rover on the moon). Yutu’s primary mission was meant to last three months (three or four lunar nights) but because of a mechanical malfunction, he was unable to hibernate and thus, unable to preserve enough energy to make it through the lunar night. Via the state-run Xinhua news agency, he writes,

"[Chang'e] doesn’t know about my problems yet. If I can’t be fixed, everyone please comfort her. . . This is space exploration; the danger comes with its beauty. I am but a tiny dot in the vast picture of mankind’s adventure in space . . . The sun has fallen, and the temperature is dropping so quickly… to tell you all a secret, I don’t feel that sad. I was just in my own adventure story – and like every hero, I encountered a small problem. Goodnight, Earth, Goodnight, humanity."

In space, any expression of emotion seems sentimental, and is open into the echo chamber of the internet where, in some corners, it may coalesce towards a certain gravitas of existential meaning. In this passage, Yutu pays homage to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot “I am but a tiny dot,” and also calls upon a mid-century Joseph Capbell's monomyth, or hero's journey archetype with the remark "I was just in my own adventure story - and like every hero, I encountered a small problem." It would seem that even robots from China can’t step outside the mid-century frame built by Carl Sagan, myth critics, and others. Or can they?

The Mars Curiosity Rover’s live tweets of his journey on the red planet have been equally self-aware, but far more whimsical and comical. Two days ago he posted a selfie of his own shadow with a paraphrase from the band Queen “I see a little silhouette of a rover. (Scaramouche! Scaramouche! No fandango.) Check out my new moves. ” Since taking the first selfie on another planet on September 7, 2012, Curiosity has been dubbed the “King of Selfies.” In 2013, when the Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year, Curiosity tweeted that she was “an illustration” for the word of the year. What does it mean for a machine to gaze into itself? The Curiosity rover’s self-portrait is fascinating in that it offers an infinite regress. These rovers tweets and self portraits mark an existential loneliness and are simultaneously a testament to the kind of metaphysical infinite regress we humans are trapped in, in our tendency to anthropomorphize everything.

These rovers are undeniably very funny and cute, but the suggestion that these portraits might in some way be posthuman is countered by the fact that robots are rigged by human operators, and even when these robots take snapshots of the Earth, they are always guided by human programmed algorithms or commands. The resulting images are framed by captions written by NASA. Moreover, it is important to note that these captions are calculate for maximum cuteness. Can it be any coincidence that our expanded dependence on social media is coupled with adorable Lolcats and that even Yutu is a rabbit (what cuter creature is there?). As we reach further into the disturbing vastness of space, rovers seem to become equally more charming, their creators and the public rush in to preserve the reassuring illusion of warmth. The Mars Curiosity Rover’s braggadocious swagger “Check out my moves” or, “look back in wonder!” and his many selfies, are of course calculated by human creators. The latest pathologizing of space apes our internet patois for a reason. As we make space cute, we also make it feel more like home. Still, does that make it less human, or are we merely working out our anxieties as we approach a posthuman age?

The Lolcat and other cuddly internet creatures are deceptively complex. Their humorousness derives from their simplicity – they offer relief from more serious subjects. See memes like “pomo cats,” or “The Discourse on the Otter,” on Tumblr, whose very humor function upon the exploitation of the psychoanalytic view that humor functions to relieve tension. Along those lines, one might suggest that these precocious rovers amuse because they offer a diversion from the unknown.

Before the Mars Curiosity Rover, There Was Earthrise

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 18:12:59 +0000

Image source: CNN.com

Yesterday, an image tweeted by the Mars Curiosity Rover with the message “Look back in Wonder . . . My 1^st Picture of Earth from the Surface of Mars” proliferated on the internet. As I stared into the screen, primed by half-a-century’s worth of cultural reference points, the oft-repeated excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1997) came to mind. Looking at the latest Mars Curiosity Rover images, I couldn’t help but think about how I navigate my connection to Earth through a series of more iconic images of space, and the things which have been said about those images. In this post, I’d like to briefly walk through some of the other iconic photos of Earth that inform our present viewing experience.

Image credit: Nasa.gov Mars Curiosity Rover (left), Wikipedia.org first image from space (right)

The first photo of Earth from space was actually taken in 1946 from a rocket 65 miles above the New Mexican desert, but it isn’t one which inform's how most view the Earth from space – even today few people know that the image exists. Like the Mars Curiosity Rover, the sub-orbital V-2 Rocket which captured the first image of Earth was also unmanned, at the forefront of a very new technology, and thus, this first image of Earth is of a low aesthetic quality. It’s worth acknowledging that in time, a Mars Rover may reveal a new, more paradigm-shifting image. After all, a little over two decades after the 1946 missile’s grainy photo from space, the world first saw the universally celebrated Earthrise, an image taken from the moon by William Anders in 1968 during the Apollog 8 mission. Though not the first, Earthrise, has been described as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken” -- any new visions about space photography, any cultural ideas, hearken back to what was said about this photo.

Image credit: Earthise (1968) wikipedia.org

NASA has referred to this new image of Earth taken from Mars as an “evening star.” When writing about the legacy of this image, The Atlantic’s Associate Editor, Robinson Meyer, notes that it follows in the legacy of The Blue Marble (1972), and Pale Blue Dot (1990). According to Meyer, in the 1960s, images of space “were something activists yearned for,” citing The Whole Earth Catalog whose editors called for a cohesive image of the planet, believing that merely viewing such an image could bring about humanitarian and environmental aims. Today, some might think of this view of space as part of a naïve, 1960s essentialist vision of activism. While studies of essentialism and activism in the academy are a well-traversed area of thought, this view of essentialism is still a status quo lens for most of the world outside academe and activist circles, and that tends to come out during widespread public conversations about space like the ones we’re having this week. The video "Some Strange Things are happening to Astronauts Returning to Earth" from the popular “clickbait” site, Upworthy, serves as an example of the contemporary popularity of these ideas. The message is that viewing Earth can save us, if we only let it, etc. I don’t mean to dismiss the message, only to point out that it’s interesting how a vestige of cultural and political formations of the 1960s has survived with little mutation. It’s an example which highlights the way past frames for viewing the Earth from space continue to persistently inflect our thinking about new images from the Curiosity Mars Rover.

Image credit: Pale Blue Dot (1990) NPR.org

Like “evening star,” Pale Blue Dot was also grainy, and also taken by an unmanned craft: the Voyger 1 space probe. Just as the Mars Curiosity Rover tweeted “Look back in wonder . . .My 1^st Picture of the Earth” the Voyager 1 also caught Earth after a command was sent to “turn the camera” back towards Earth. What’s interesting about Pale Blue Dot is that it is best known, not for the image itself, but for the pathos of what public intellectual Carl Sagan wrote about it. A Youtube search for Pale Blue Dot yields countless montages of iconic photos, movie clips, digitally enhanced or fabricated images of space, and even, Earthrise. These mainly iconic images and film clips in countless Youtube homages to Sagan highlight that Pale Blue Dot carries a sort of 1960s mantle. Or perhaps it’s that the general public is so influenced by Earthrise that we can’t see Pale Blue Dot without a hint of late 60’s essentialism. That Sagan’s words outweigh the actual image of Pale Blue Dot highlights that these photos of space often galvanize paradigm shifts in culture, which are registered in books, films, movies, and today, online.

Carl Sagan was 34 when Earthrise first came out, and so understandably, his ecology is a “bright” one, as eco-critics would put it. His words are inflected with what is often read as the “naïve optimism” characterized by the makers of the Whole Earth Catalog in their call for a “unifying” image. This was not entirely in spirit with the 1990s. The impact of Earthrise was so particularly strong, that it is difficult for anyone, myself included, to look at “evening star” without thinking, “Pale Blue Dot,” “Earthrise,” etc.

These new images of Mars beg the question, what will the next generation have to say about the Earth from space? From the Whole Earth Catalog, to Carl Sagan, we’ve grown to expect defining speeches and commentary to accompany these images. Today, as anyone's tweets in response to a rover’s tweets can, and do, go viral, it becomes harder to track what will be logged in our memories as a “defining” cultural frame for these photos. Neil de Grasse Tyson, protégé of Carl Sagan, is remaking the popular series Cosmos for new audiences, which is slated to come out later this year. Whether it will present a dark or bright ecology; whether it will carry the banner of Sagan’s eternal optimism, or say something entirely new, I ‘m curious to know.

In my next post I’ll talk more about the pathologizing of earth from space in our contemporary moment, from the tragic demise of the Yùtù (“Jade Rabbit”) rover, to the more recent Mars Curiosity Rover’s hypermediated tweets.

Destroyed Phantasmagorias in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Inglourious Basterds

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 20:52:44 +0000

Note: contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Inglorious Basterds

Image credit: media.giphy.com

Hello viz. readers, it’s good to be back! In my last post (way back in 2013), I remarked upon the similarity between characters Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) and Shoshanna Dreyfus in Inglorious Basterds (2009). Though Catching Fire runs through a gamut of stylistic epochs, Katniss’s home in District 12 has an intentionally Hooverville 1930’s aesthetic, placing it in roughly the same period as Tarantino’s Nazi revenge flick Inglorious Basterds. Similarly, both characters are separated from their families by totalitarian regimes. Finally, both heroines are placed in a position to be simultaneously savvy yet reluctant centers of those same totalitarian regimes’ entertainment spectacles – which is what I want to talk about in this post.

As I watched Katniss fling her last arrow towards the center of the coliseum, and the lights shut down as the building went up in flames, I couldn’t help but notice an affinity with the eloquent final scene of Inglorious Basterds. In destroying the entire spectacle, Katniss had made her marginalized existence central. The last thing viewers of the fictional “Hunger Games” TV show saw was her arrow (a similar image of Katniss aiming her bow was used when marketing the film). In Inglorious Basterds, Shoshanna also martyrs herself as entertainment spectacle, although her revenge scene is more protracted, more cathartic, and more gruesome – which is the sort of revelry in vigilante justice that viewers have come to expect from Tarantino films. Both Shoshanna and Katniss are ideal commentators on the connections between media and the powers that be because they are exalted by a system they’d rather destroy. Katniss as the unwitting darling of a noxious TMZ-esque elite, and Shoshanna as the equally ironical object of affection of the Nazi party – and just as Colonel Hans Landa hints that he remembers Shoshanna and her family whom he murdered, President Snow’s civility to Katniss carries a duplicitous maliciousness, that he could kill her family at any moment, as well. Rather than give in to threats of violence, both leads show a willingness to become martyrs in order to dismantle an entertainment spectacle, a spectacle which is understood as a major governing force behind their respective systems of oppression.

Like all great cultural zeitgeists, the symbol of the destroyed phantasmagoria is a popular one. A phantasmagoria is a kind of rudimentary projector which most historians say was invented in the 18^th century, while others claim some form of phantasmagoria existed even in Ancient Greece. I’m most interested in how philosophers of the Frankfurt school use the term to discuss a host of technologies and social spectacles which function via mystification. For them, the phantasmagoric is used to describe any spectacle which is sui generis in its capacity to present an immersive and persuasive illusion. Walter Benjamin (who died fleeing the Nazis) was understandably skeptical of the phantasmagoria. Though he believed in the power of film, writing that, film had “burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second,” he saw it as a potentially dangerous tool in the hands of totalitarian regimes, like the Nazi party, or any capitalist regime, as such capitalistic cinematic productions tried “hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.” In short, he saw it as having a brainwashing effect. As he quotes Duhamel, in the cinema “I no longer can think what I want to think.” Though the phantasmagoria seems to function similarly in Catching Fire and Inglorious Basterds, I wonder if it is entirely condemned in both films. Is the destruction of the phantasmagoric spectacle a total rejection of its mystifying power, or an effort to take back an otherwise powerful medium by marginalized people? I also wonder what we are to make of the fact that these films which seem to be critical of the entertainment industry are themselves highly successful. I’ll leave that for the reader to discuss or imagine.

The Great Depression, WWII, and “The Hunger Games”

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:39:37 +0000

Contains some spoilers for The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and Inglorious Basterds

Image credit: chacha.com "how to dress like Katniss Everdeen"

In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the newly released adaptation of the sequel to Suzanne Collins’ novel and 2012 film The Hunger Games, President Snow’s cronies set out to torture and intimidate the citizens of the 12 districts. Their first step is to destroy one of the people’s few sources of pleasure, and hope-- the black markets. Soldiers clad like storm troopers file into the town eliciting screams and looks of terror, upturning chests of drawers, smashing picture frames, and attacking everyone in their path. As the camera pans the rubble, one notices a certain patina to the wood and the family photographs:they’re all roughly from the 1930s. Which begs the question, just how far into the future does The Hunger Games take place?

A hallmark of poverty is the ownership of slightly old things, but the ownerships of things at least 70 years past their prime is a sign of a carefully cultivated eclecticism. If Western civilization collapsed today, certainly our black markets would be filled with less romantic products than Katniss’ mocking-jay pin. The Hunger Games is of course a fantasy, but why is the film’s prime cultural reference point for poverty what appears to be a Hooverville?

The answer, in short, is that the “Hunger Games” gathers and exploits every terror of Western Civilization in one ambiguous tableau – it’s catharsis to the extreme. This is brought home most explicitly in the initial raffle in which Katniss famously volunteers to save her sister “as tribute.” The morning of the drawing her mother lays out a dress which has become one of the hallmark looks of the film. The style is somewhere between 1930s and 1940s, echoing the Hoover shanty aesthetic of everything else in District 12. Fashion isn't the only way in which these eras are evoked. Even Katniss's mother seems to have been selected for her physical similarity to Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," the real life migrant worker, Florence Owens Thompson.

Image credit (left to right): shorpy.com, wikia.nocookie.net

As I watch Katniss led towards the microphone, past the carefully filed and heavily guarded masses, I’m reminded of virtually every film ever made about the Holocaust. In the image above she steps up to the microphone which, like everything else in their town, is an early twentieth-century model. In this scene they seem to be playing on real and imaginary depictions of the Nazi regime. Because Quentin Tarantino’s WWII revenge flick Inglorious Basterds is a pastiche of this whole Nazi-revenge genre, I find in particular, a strong touch of Shoshanna in the construction of Katniss. Both are quiet and sarcastic masterminds who grudgingly play into a system in order to destroy it, and both show a willingness to end their own lives in order to dismantle an entertainment spectacle which is seen as the governing force behind their respective systems of oppression.

The Winter Garden Photograph and the Nine-Hundred Dollar iPhone Photo

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:30:45 +0000

Image credit (from left to right): theuglyvolvo.com and the-space-in-between.com

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and tonight is the first night of Chanukah, holidays which, for most, are all about being with family. Even in the absence of family–whether you’re making phone calls, or talking on Skype—there’s no escaping the nostalgia of the holiday season. The farther one’s family members migrate for school or career, the more important it becomes to make the pilgrimage back to that original “place” that the family once was. Maybe Austin’s recent cold snap has me in a sentimental mood, but as the Thanksgiving and Chanukah double-hitter arrives this week, the main purpose of the holidays seems to be to create an emotional snapshot of how things were, but won’t ever be again.

I am inspired, in particular, by one woman’s blog post about her own migration to introduce her son to his sick great-grandfather, titled “The Nine Hundred Dollar iPhone Photo,” which can be read here: http://theuglyvolvo.com/2013/11/25/the-nine-hundred-dollar-iphone-photo/. The posting is brief, but sincere, and probably a story that most readers can relate to. It’s about trying to capture the perfect photo, but capturing the perfect photo only because it represents a window in time when various people are able to cross each-other’s paths. In the post, the retelling of the making of the portrait becomes a kind of parable for what a family is. After imagining her perfect photo (“taken at sunset,” an image the family will remember for a lifetime, etc.) the author finds herself crestfallen – her child’s face (like all children’s faces) is perpetually dirty, she regrets her haircut, and her grandfather stares blankly ahead. After flipping through the carefully staged photographs, she realizes that none of them lived up to her expectations. None of them are suitable mementos – and how could they be? When the stakes are so high, when the goal is to capture a person’s life in a photograph, even as it’s passing away, how can you succeed?

In the end, the blogger Raquel states that the only photo to turn out from this series is one which she took first, with her iPhone,

“And yet for some reason, the more I look at the photo, the more it grows on me. It is not a perfect photo, but I am suddenly realizing that that is fine. We get so overwhelmed with everything in life being perfect that we forget that nothing is supposed to be perfect. Photos do not have to be perfect. In my sister’s ‘four-generation photo’ taken with her own son and my grandfather, my grandfather is cheerfully sporting two black eyes that he obtained while falling down the previous day. The point of most photos is to say, “I was alive and you were alive, and for a period of time our lives overlapped. This is what we looked like.”

In reading this passage about the connection between the author’s iPhone photo, her acceptance of her present state, and her relinquishing all preconceptions of how a moment is “supposed” to be, I’m reminded of what Roland Barthes’ wrote about a family photograph in Camera Lucida. In his short meditation on photography, Barthes writes that for him, every photograph is a memorial; that the essence of photography is its conjuring of death-in-life. Though he focuses on this spectral aspect of photography by looking at both high art and news photos, what seems to have launched him into this thought process is a far more personal tribulation: the recent loss of his mother. This photograph, which is at the center of Barthes’ book, is a candid snapshot of his mother referred to only as the “Winter Garden Photograph.” Like Raquel’s photo, Barthes’ is simple – not particularly successful as an art piece in and of itself. His rationale for leaving it unprinted (in a book which features many reproduced photographs) is that "It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture."

In the end, the photographs people seem to like most (like Barthes and Raquel) are the ones that are candid. After all, if, as Sontag and Barthes say, a photograph truly is a “frozen moment,” fully “an emanation of the referent” then people probably like these moments the best because they are the ones that make it easier to imagine that they were actually lived in. In her blog post, Raquel alludes to this same idea that photos are somehow an “emanation,” a living, vibrating part of the past, when she mentions that a future equivalent of a camera might be a “time-machine.” As Raquel imagines it, her son will “stand by the door of the time machine, watching us trying to capture it on film, laughing to himself at our bumbling, awkward attempts. And then, for the rest of his life, he will remember having seen it.” If photographs capture an emanation of a moment, as Barthes and Sontag say, then to look at that photo would mean to experience those feelings again. Lastly, we’re all skeptical of a story with a moral, but ‘tis the season: this year, maybe don’t worry so much about getting the “perfect” photo. Think about Barthes and Raquel. If photos are in a sense an actual piece of the past, be happy, and if you can’t be that, at least be genuine. Maybe someday someone will invent a time machine, but even if not, photographs contain something that you can relive. If you are going to relive those “emanations” they may as well be worth your while.

“Walking in the Footsteps of Edward Sheriff Curtis”: Jimmy Nelson’s Before They Pass Away

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 21:01:57 +0000

Image credit: beforethey.com

In my last post I wrote about viral internet photo collections of people from around the world with their possessions. Perhaps because of these photos, or perhaps because of a general cultural zeitgeist, another much older genre of ethnographic portraiture has been receiving renewed attention on the web: portraiture of “tribespeople” from around the world. The most prominent series in the revival of this genre seems to be Before They Pass Away, a long-term project from British-born photographer Jimmy Nelson.

Nelson’s absolutely stunning images feature 15 million people from 29 tribes on five continents. On Nelson’s website, he describes himself as a “photographer of indigenous people,” having begun his life’s work in 1987 photographing the people of Tibet. According to the project website, Before They Pass Away is the product of a long term effort to capture the “natural authenticity” of these tribes. “The purity of humanity exists,” the website tells us. “Jimmy Nelson found the last tribesmen and observed them. He smiled and drank their mysterious brews before taking out his camera. He shared what real people share: vibrations, invisible but palpable.” Throughout Nelson’s site, one finds a rhetoric of essentialism not unlike that present in Edward Steichen’s Family of Man. (For more on that, see my previous post in which I also discuss Barthes’ critique of that same essentialism in his essay “The Great Family of Man”.)

Nelson’s ultimate goal, to create “an ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world,” brings to mind an even older body of work: Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian (1907-1930). In purporting to document a “disappearing” world, Nelson is directly engaging with the propaganda of the Vanishing Indian, which was popularized by Curtis’ work.

In the foreword to The North American Indian, Volume 1, Theodore Roosevelt writes,

“Our generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis has done. The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life has been lived under conditions through which our own race passed so many ages ago that not a vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions was not kept.”

The persistent trope of the Vanishing Indian perpetuated violence and genocide in the Americas by perpetuating the myth that the struggle over land, rights, and sovereignty was over. Today, how has the trope of the Vanishing Indian been reinterpreted and expanded by Nelson?

Both Nelson and Curtis place indigenous cultures within the folds of Western European culture. Where Roosevelt referred to American Indians as a sort of time-capsule (still in an epoch which “our own race passed”), Nelson side-steps that teleology by favoring a more general connection --“if they pass away, a part of ourselves will too,” the website says. In Curtis’ book, statements of common humanity seem deployed to infer that the consequences of modernization are tragic, but ultimately beneficent. In Nelson’s case, however, we see a pluralism of a more 21^st century variety. Nelson’s essentialism seems deployed to infer that people who rely heavily on natural resources are being “pushed out” of their way of life and their very existence by forces such as global warming. Where Curtis has been read by some as an apologist for genocide, Nelson’s “vanishing tribespeople” might be read as part of a warning against the increasing ripples of eco-catastrophes we’ve been witnessing in recent years.

The comparison of the two photographers is of course complex, and this post is only intended as a jumping off point for a more nuanced discussion.

Humanism and Global Portraiture: From Steichen’s Family of Man to Galimberte’s Toy Stories

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 19:09:25 +0000

Image Credit: Boredpanda.com

I’ve been seeing a growing trend on the internet for the past year or so: sites like Buzzfeed and Bored Panda advertising series like Gabriele Galimberte’s Toy Stories a.k.a. “Children from Around the World with Their Favorite Toys,” or, another popular one, “Families from around the World with a Month’s Worth of Food.” What is the source of our cultural compulsion to view these massive collections of human possessions? Moreover, why do we like to see all of the peoples of every nation juxtaposed alongside one another? Visual Rhetoric is not only the study of individual signs, images, and symbols, but also of the messages that images impart as a collective. In the era of the internet list and the online photo gallery, images are often presented in groups to form a broader thesis. So what exactly is the thesis behind these “People from around the World Holding X” or “Doing Y”?

In looking at these catalogues of humanity writ large, I’m reminded of an exhibit which made its debut long before the era of viral internet photo collections: Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man.

Steichen’s The Family of Man is a staggeringly huge, ambitious collection. He curated the exhibition for the New York MoMA in 1955, and it contained 503 photographs taken by 273 photographers from 68 countries. It includes lesser known photographers as well as internationally renowned and acclaimed ones like Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson, and Dorothea Lange.

The exhibition posits that all humans are unified by 26 common themes, most of which are treated as biological, and are poised towards illustrating a unifying natural order: birth, love, work, fear, joy, and death. The printed book version (which highlights a sliver of the original 503 photos) is filled with aphorisms from around the world filled with gnomic truths drawn from sources like the Bhagavad-Gita, the mystic poet Kabir, the Sioux tribe, and so on.

As Roland Barthes’ points out, in his essay “The Great Family of Man” from his collection of essays, Mythologies, these categories (birth, work, love, death, etc.), delivered as natural and universal, without any context, create an essentialist view of humanity which obscures historical realities. This, he says, is the myth of an anti-progressive humanism. “This myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the Bottom of history,” he writes. Labor, of course, is a part and parcel of history, and to confuse the colonial and Western worker, is to erase that history. He suggests, “let us also ask the North African workers of the Gouette d’Or district in Paris what they think of the Great Family of Man.” Just as The Family of Man blankets over these uncomfortable truths, I wonder if these modern portraits are doing the same, or if they are struggling to respond to a problematic essentialism.

Considering Barthes’ critique, the question remains: what is the thesis of these modern lists of humanity? Is showing toys of children all around the world highlighting disparity, or reinforcing the status quo? Moreover, is there an inherent inability for a photo to show context, what Barthes refers to as the fundamental “failure of photography”?

Another question unaddressed by Barthes in his short essay, but which seems especially worth asking in these images of children with their toys is: What about the fact that possessions in different cultures may serve different functions and hold different meanings?

In my next post, I’ll continue to examine these viral photo lists which try to offer a holistic picture of people from around the world.

Robert Frank's The Americans and Magnum's "Postcards from America"

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 06:15:20 +0000

Image credit: Postcards from America Tumblr, Mikhael Subotzky

On a recent visit to the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibition "Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos in the Digital Age” I was inspired by how often Magnum photographers turned their lenses to capture that ever elusive “representative” photo collection of the U.S., as they do in their project “Postcards from America.” The concept behind the project is that a group of acclaimed Magnum photographers work collaboratively. In order to do this, they pile into a van and travel to different cities taking snapshots and uploading them directly to their Tumblr: http://postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com/.

The “Postcards from America” official website explains that the goal of the project is “for the photographers to try to play like a band, in search of a kind of polyphonic visual sound.” With their invocation of the rock and roll ethos, and their premise of seeing America while on the road, the project brought to mind beat photographer Robert Frank. Frank’s collection, The Americans (complete with introduction by Kerouac), channeled the jazz prosody of Beat poetry into visual images. It’s probably the first and most famous instance of an effort towards the kind of “polyphonic visual sound” Magnum is talking about. In 1955 Robert Frank took off across America, often living out of his car and taking a staggering total of 28,000 photos (a kind of visual corollary to Kerouac’s Benzedrine-inspired scroll). The pictures, which feature apathetic waitresses, frantic street preachers, scenes of segregation, cowboys, drive in movies, and strip clubs, all seem propped towards a sort of thesis on America as grotesquely fanciful, and troublingly divided. The photographs could be read collectively as urging the already emergent progressivism of the 1960s. Still, they’re blended with the same old racial romanticism and sexism of the beat culture (in Kerouac’s introduction as much as the images).

There are, of course, differences between “Postcards from America” and The Americans, but the most crucial change to my mind is that the personal pleasure in the process which Kerouac and Frank document openly in their book, seems to have been replaced with a more outwardly productive angle which takes the form of letting subjects speak for themselves. One of the “Posctcards” group’s first stops was in Florida, to document the 2012 election. In one caption, for example, the subject says she doesn’t know whether she’ll bother to vote in the election. The next caption explains that the two men pictured have been stripped of their right to vote because of felony convictions. Through the juxtaposition there's an implied indictment of barring people with felonies from voting, and the apathy of most Americans -- but as there are no humans openly making any claims or taking any stakes, it feels distant.

Image credit: Postcards from America Tumblr, Bruce Gilden

Perhaps there is a corollary in trying to gauge how to best let subjects speak for themselves which explains the sometimes counterintuitive distance between lens and subject in the “Postcards from America” series. Frank’s photos are usually at comfortable distance for day to day interactions, mostly about 1-5 meters away, but in the “Postcards from America” series, portraits often feel like the aesthetically jarring godchild of Diane Arbus and Chuck Close. Take, for example, the portraits done by Bruce Gilden or Molly Candy, with harsh lighting and focus for unusual features. They could easily be critiqued as exploitative for all of the same reasons that Diane Arbus’s work was. Photos seem to be taken of people at either a few inches away, or in vulnerable situations: macho men on pink bicycles, teenagers sleeping at a state fair – personal space is documented and simultaneously disrupted to a much more radical degree than it was in The Americans. In a Slate article on the series, the reporter marvels that one man, who is curled up in bed in his portrait, let nearly perfect strangers into his home.

In an earlier post on Magnum documentarian Elliott Erwitt’s work, I remarked that the unmediated nature of the film left me on my own to form conclusions, and even to conduct research to understand the basic premise. With these photographs though, there are so many obvious interventions, nuanced tools for expression, that I wonder, does it make sense to say that these photographers upload their work "'live'--and unmediated" as the project website says they do?

Texans as Ethnographic Subjects

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 15:33:21 +0000

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

Recently one of my students came to class carrying a large mass of ribbons. With a central bow the size of a large sunflower, and gold and white strands trailing for several feet, it resembled a festive octopus. “I’m making fonts for my design class out of mums,” she explained, as she pulled out a chair for her artwork. The class then conferred the knowledge of the Texas tradition that is mum giving.

Mums are a homecoming dance tradition. The term originates from Chrysanthemum, but the mums worn by young Texans are all prize-winning-chrysanthemum big -- about the diameter of a basketball or larger. They can become very elaborate: some are filled with LED lights, others play music, and they can retail for several hundred dollars. The men’s much more modest version is called a garter. That night, another friend of mine who had also been schooled by their students on mums serendipitously posted an article to Facebook which featured internationally acclaimed photographer Nancy Newberry’s photo series, MUM – and my education on mum giving continued.

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

Newberry, who is a Texan, describes herself as someone “interested in the strange rituals of everyday life,” she is fascinated in particular by the lore of her home state. Reinforcing her ethos as the art-world savvy Texan, she playfully says she can be found “chasing tumbleweeds between Dallas and Marfa.” MUM, a tableau centered on the custom of mum giving, has been featured in international publications like The Guardian and Raw magazine. In an interview for Raw magazine, Newberry says, “viewing the photograph encourages a certain amount of discourse adding to the broader discussion on gift exchange.” With her talk of “the broader discussion of gift exchange” Newberry implies that rather than the cultures, which the Boasian model of anthropology gave scholars in the 1890s, we have Culture, in the monolithic sense – that all cultures may be measured equally, that all gift-giving is somehow the same – perhaps Newberry views mum giving as part of a global economy, as globalization theorists might. Nevertheless, her use of a camera to answer these questions, and her description of them as “strange,” puts her in the alienated station of an outside observer; as a part of an older ethnographic tradition.

From the project and interviews, it seems pretty transparent: Newberry’s Mum is a study of Texans as ethnographic subjects. Since my class is currently studying ethnography and photography, I brought the series in to find out exactly what rural Texans (I’d say that generally 1/3 of my students are from small towns, and 2/3 are from suburbs of Dallas or Houston) had to say about this ethnographic study of their own peer group. Flipping through the images, the students looked like they were being put on. Some laughed uncomfortably. Others cringingly added, “Oh, that’s just awful.” When asked if they would like to be photographed in this way, 100% of them agreed, they would not.

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

The photos have something of The Virgin Suicides about them. In one, a young man waits with bad posture, slumped on a hotel bed, a torn, shiny, cheap curtain behind him. He is seemingly waiting for that anti-climactic, post-dance de-flowering moment that so much of Coppola’s film revolves around. In another, a girl stands staring into a swimming pool fully clothed – it’s pretty transparent code for “verge of a nervous breakdown.” I get it, I guess. Being a teenager is difficult and weird, and far more psychologically complex than anyone acknowledges. But ethnographic depictions of rural people and ethnographic depictions of teenagers share a problem: even if the artist came from Texas, or was once a teenager, they have forgotten both, or the experience has crystallized in such a way as to make any sort of objective study impossible, and Newberry does claim to be capturing their culture, not her own memories of youth, or her own memories of Texas.

The images are haunting and beautiful, but I can’t shake the sense that they are all carefully curated to exude an (at this point clichéd) sense of desolation and depression. There seems an opportunity lost in posing subjects in the shape of such a narrative, when one might instead try to experience that narrative with them, or offer them a platform for expressing it themselves.

In a follow up post to this one, I will step further into the history of rural Americans as ethnographic subjects.

On Being an Observer of Elliott Erwitt's "Beauty Knows No Pain" (1971)

Sarah G. Sussman — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 03:07:47 +0000

Image credit: videos.videopress.com

The Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibit “Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age” poses interesting questions about the ambiguity of the photographic medium in our present time, while simultaneously calling into question the status of the photographer as objective.

On my first trip to the exhibit, I am slowly working my way from the exterior towards the interior when I notice a persistent noise in the background – it seems to be the sound of women screaming, and what emotion they signify seems inflected by whatever photographs I look at.

When I first notice the screams I’m looking at Raymond Depardon’s gelatin silver prints from the 1978 series Afghanistan, which documents the lives of the Mujahideen in the Nouristan Mountains of the Badakhstan region. The most visually striking image is “Gathering of Mujahideen.” In steep mountains, by a large stream, men stand wearing hats in a close-knit circle around two men in the center. It evokes feelings of peace. It’s simply titled “Gathering of Mujahideen.” In another image, the same Mujahideen rebels move about in the rubble of a house. The caption states that it has been bombed by the Afghan army.

Still the screams continue. Following associational logic, I imagine that they’re the screams of the people whose house was bombed. After Depardon’s series, however, come celebrities. Magnum is an agency, and photographers live varied lives. Magnum photographer Robert Capa served as a wartime photographer, but later gained many important connections in Hollywood, arranging for the Magnum agency to cover publicity events, including the set of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable’s 1960 film, The Misfits. In an effort to make photography competitive with the rising popularity of film, Capa even launched a special documentary unit, Magnum films, which ran from 1964 to 1970.

Moving a few feet to the right, one sees more of these celebrity photos: David Hurn’s images from the series he did on the Beatles, Hard Day’s Night (1964). An image of young women pressed against the windows of Paul McCartney’s train window as he placidly eats breakfast. Suddenly the screams seem reminiscent of “Beatlemania.”I hear two women talking to each other on the other side of the wall “she deserved it,” one says.

I turned the corner and find the voices: two women inside the alcove, watching. The video, a plaque on the wall says, is titled “Beauty Knows No pain.” It’s a 1971 film by Elliott Erwitt, a French-born American member of Magnum. One of the women casts a conspiratorial look, smiles at me while nodding towards the screen and says “painful.” They seem to sense I’m observing them, and maybe want me to know: watching does not indicate endorsing. I walk away and come back later. This time younger girls are in the alcove; they seem more invested. “What are they called? Flag team?” Another girl authoritatively tells her “color guard.” I make a note to myself that maybe these girls are in color guard.

A work of art like this, delivered so matter-of-factly alongside images of famine, and warfare, and disease, makes them seem somehow hyper-trivial at best, and insidious, at worst. But who is making that connection? I accept that it’s me.

I find out, eventually, that the women are actually Kilgore Rangerettes, a world-renowned drill team which began in Texas in 1940. Though the first group of viewers reasonably found the outdated attitudes in the film humorous, the goal of the Rangerettes was originally to provide a physical education that would be of equal quality to men’s, something universities across the globe have yet to achieve – so, how outdated is it really? Because of the total lack of narration, I arrive at the piece of art from multiple angles, always with loose threads to follow up on – also always contingent upon the crowd I am with.

The Magnum collection is in many ways about what fraught cross-purposes photographers are at: juggling their roles as detached observers on the one hand, and members of specific ideological and cultural communities, on the other. I think of the first two women who wanted me to know that observation didn’t imply complicity. A conversation about objectivity and the participation of viewer and photographer in the art experience runs throughout the Magnum exhibit. Projects like Magnum’s “Postcards from America,” also featured in the gallery space, explore this tension between observing and narrating. To this end, the Magnum collection is a meditation on what it means to make photos, but also, to be a viewer of them.

Tragicomedy and the Aesthetics of a Finale

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 23:32:14 +0000

[Warning: This post contains spoilers]

Image credit: Amctv.com

In my last post I defined “Breaking Bad” as a tragicomedy. Though the series was suspenseful, it maintained its comedic touch through visual elements. Successful tragicomedies are ones which constantly maintain their equilibrium: neither becoming too humorous, nor too dramatic. Because of this balance, there is something to the tragicomic work that gives it a certain fullness, a sense of having lived a complete life. To this end, there are a few visual scenes from “Breaking Bad” which I would suggest are representative anecdotes; images which serve as microcosmic summations for the series at large.

The first is the longest running visual gag of the show: the home on the range. Time and again, Walt and Jesse are paired as a couple – two men making their home in a Winnebago meth lab. In the show, both run through the usual clichés of domestic couples on television: Walt yells at Jesse not to smoke in the trailer, Jesse mocks Walt for his eccentric attention to detail. In the midst of the humor of the scene, though, there is real pathos. The intensity of Walt’s love for Jesse is balanced by the wry humor provided by the setting. Take, for example, the domestic space of the couch in the photo above. They could be romantic partners, or a family. Still, a dramatic tenderness is just as important as comedy. The fumigation materials and the meth equipment, coupled with that knowing look, solidify them as inhabiting the trope of the untamed outlaw.

The other main tragicomic visual juxtaposition is one I hinted at in my first post: anything which shows the scope of the human and emphasizes its frailty. The classic question of who is at the helm, and whether this vast universe is calculated or uncalculated is at the center of “Breaking Bad.” Nussbaum, like many critics, said “Felina” was too coincidental and unrealistic, but nearly every episode of “Breaking Bad” relied heavily upon butterfly-effect-style tragedy or cosmic-luck comedy. Consider the tragic scene where Walt lets Jane O.D. Later, mirroring this act, her own father “stands by” and passively murders hundreds by allowing two planes to crash into each other. And the representative image of that? An absurdly small and fragile sign of life -- a hauntingly pink teddy bear. The question of human agency and cosmic order emerges again in the episodes which center on the fly. With intense Chaplin-esque physical humor Walt tries again and again to kill the fly -- all to keep Gustavo Fring’s meth lab (and his batch of meth) immaculate. It is, perhaps at this time, in coming to peace with the fly, that the tides turn towards a view of submission to a cosmic order for Walt: as here is where Walt Whitman, “Breaking Bad”’s poet laureate makes his appearance. As if we needed any more signs of the show’s tragicomic propensities: Whitman is nothing if not tragicomic. Ever fixated on death with simultaneous levity: he’s the poet of body odor and the stars.

The simultaneous shock of tragedy, mingled with the absurd, puts a halo around the tragicomic event. As Nussbaum notes, “So many moments felt peculiarly underlined: we see the ricin stirred into Lydia’s tea in a dream-like closeup.” In John Dewey’s Art as Experience, he explains that there are everyday dull experiences, and then there is having an experience – these are the events which stand out in one's memory in stark relief. A truly significant experience, an experience proper, is one which “is so rounded out that its consummation is not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.” Walt Whitman might have said something similar, and maybe the writers of "Breaking Bad" as well – because writers of the tragicomic strive towards representation of a more total experience, one which is rounded out because it is balanced. Life is full of false starts, pauses, lulls – and life may not be forever depending on your views, but the moments in life most like art are, curiously, the ones which make us feel most completed. They’re the representative anecdotes, memories which speak to the nature of our lives at large. This, I would finally suggest, is why the tragicomedy is the genre that is always in some way about finales, because tragecomedies are forever gesturing towards endings, and yet, because of their fullness, there is no cessation of the total experience which they represent. R.I.P. “Breaking Bad”, 2008-2013.

The Tragicomic Aesthetics of “Breaking Bad”

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:30:14 +0000

[Note: This post contains spoilers, please click on the title to proceed]

Image credit: mbmg-media.com

In her New Yorker piece, “The Closure-Happy ‘Breaking Bad’ finale,” Emily Nussbaum writes, “It’s not that Walt needed to suffer, necessarily, for the show’s finale to be challenging, or original, or meaningful: but Walt succeeded with so little true friction . . . that it felt quite unlike the destabilizing series that I’d been watching for years.”

Nussbaum’s is perhaps the single most concise articulation of a broader theory floating around the internet: that the “happy” ending of “Felina” was a poor fit for the show, which should have otherwise concluded on the same grim note we saw in the second-to-last episode, “Granite State.” And I would beg to differ. It’s not that I disagree that the final episode “Felina” wasn’t “closure happy” – it most certainly was-- but that I think that Nussbaum (though very insightful), and those who take a similar stance, miss the mark in presuming that the finale was somehow incongruous with the rest of the series.

For me, the series has always had a strongly humorous and absurd element (it is, after all, about a high school chemistry teacher turned global meth manufacturer and distributor). That the show ended on a semi-victorious note is perfect, because, as far as I’m concerned, the show is a tragicomedy – a duality strongly reflected in the show’s aesthetics. In T.V. shows, the most common problem tragicomedies run into is that they’re perceived as a bait and switch. You come in for the comedy, and end with a sappy drama. This seems to be what Nussbaum is referring to: a sense that she began watching the show for an edge-of-your-seat nail-biting-ride that should have ended all doom and gloom, but instead got an absurd, perfectly-synchronized ending.

It’s hard to create a successful tragicomedy – the trick seems to be maintaining consistency with the drama without ever losing sight of the comedy. The main way the show kept in touch with its comedic side, even in the midst of serious trauma and dread, was to make the visual elements comic.

The most obvious and iconic tragicomic shot of the entire series was in the show’s pilot (and used in much of its subsequent advertising). I’m referring, of course, to the image of Walt in his underwear in the Santa Fe desert. To recap: the pilot opens with Walt careening his meth-lab trailer towards a ditch. In a state of animal terror, in his tidy whities, he records a goodbye note to his family via camcorder. It is thanks largely to wardrobe choices, that, despite the panic and violence, there is always a sense of how utterly ridiculous it all is.

In a segment from “Inside “Breaking Bad” which ran on AMC, Vince Gilligan explains that they chose briefs over boxers for this particular scene. “He [Bryan Cranston, the actor playing Walter White] looked more vulnerable wearing them . . .You kind of hope it’ll be one of those iconic images that kind of sums up the show. This kind of everyman character in his suede Wallabe shoes in his underpants and a .45 in his hand ready to take on whatever comes over the rise.”

In other words, a humorous outlet was never waiting in the wings but always embedded, front and center. By calling Walt an “everyman” with a .45 waiting for that thing “over the rise,” Gilligan verbalizes what the picture already shows: Walt as cowboy outlaw. The thing that makes this cowboy aesthetic iconic and interesting is its juxtapositions with the supposedly less macho accoutrement: Wallabes and tidy whities. In my next post I’ll delve deeper into these juxtapositions between the Western desert and the domestic elements, and the relation of the tragicomedy to a sense of completeness. In other words, the aesthetics of finales themselves.

What a 21st-Century Western Looks Like

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 17:59:41 +0000

Like many of you, I am still mourning the loss of “Breaking Bad.” I’m not going to spoil it for you. So whether you’re one episode in, zero episodes in, or on the verge of completion…read on without trepidation. Also, this is going to be the first of two posts on our dearly departed “B.B.,” because I’m just that into it right now.

One of the first things about “Breaking Bad” that hooked me (and I have a feeling many of its viewers) was that the desert landscape in the show was so overwhelmingly beautiful. Nothing I say will do it justice, or to cop the style of “B.B.”’s reigning poet W.W., one might say “New Mexico, what is this I see in your landscape of saguaros and meth labs that is beyond all compare?” So here, bask in the glow of your computer screen reflecting this image:

Image credit: pri.org

My experience with Westerns (films and regionalist fiction alike) is admittedly limited. My main touchstone for Western sensibilities is Willa Cather’s 1927 western novel, Death comes for the Archbishop. Set in the expanses of Santa Fe during the mid-nineteenth century, when New Mexico had just become a U.S. territory. As I watched "B.B."—I found myself deriving the usual sense of escapist and nostalgic pleasure I associate with regionalist novels. The nostalgic aesthetic is one the show has worked into an art like nothing on television has ever done before. Recall (or look for) scenes in Mexico shot in a heavily saturated tobacco filter (a move suggestive enough to offer material for its own post). The aesthetics of "B.B." are artfully rendered primarily through attention to color. As Vince Gilligan notes in an interview with GQ, there was a whole color scheme to portray the evolution of each character. Fans of infographics rejoice:

Image credit: GQ Magazine

From reading interviews with Vince Gilligan, I learned that the primo Westerns to start out with for understanding “B.B.” are Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns (Westerns filmed by Sergio Leone in the 1960s, usually around Spain and Italy). The only one I’ve seen in this genre is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) and perhaps I can fill the “Breaking Bad”-sized void in my heart by watching more. These Westerns looks so authentic in part because they’re set in the same Mediterranean climate. You could effectively trick an audience into believing any Mediterranean climate (from Southern Australia to central coastal Chile) was the “Wild West” for that matter.

But what makes this a uniquely 21^st century Western is that the show reveals beauty in the mundane. Where Westerns of the '60s occasionally featured trains and saloons, “B.B.” features tacky strip malls, chain restaurants, a giant laundry processing facility, even the insides of a meth lab -- places that are beauteous because of their otherwise seemingly obvious lack of beauty.

What do we make of some of these scenes which tug at the heartstrings in the same way as the New Mexico desert? How troubling that places so polluted, or places so violent, can be so aesthetically pleasing. To that end, some of the shots from “B.B.” remind me of Richard Misrach’s work in Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1987). Both draw the outlaw cowboy aesthetic of westerns to new conclusions that reflect the blending of our current cultural and geographic climate. From corporate crimes, to the collective effects of global warming, to the new school outlaws one finds in “Breaking Bad.”

Image credit: nosebean.com

A scene from Misrach's book. Image credit: espaifotografic.cat

Once you have finished Breaking Bad, for your consideration I offer Emily Nussbaum’s piece from The New Yorker on the final episode, “Felina.” In my next post I’ll be in conversation with Nussbaum’s piece as I share my take of how the Western elements of the show and the backdrop of Santa Fe perfectly fit the hotly contested conclusion of “B.B.” Also, fair warning that that this next post will contain some necessary spoilers. (Don’t worry “B.B.” latecomers, I’ll insert a page break to preserve the sanctity of your viewing pleasure).

Part III on Political (In)action and Memes: Preserving History

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:56:58 +0000

Image credit: Know Your Meme

In my last two posts, I suggested that internet memes carry a precarious relationship to history because a general principle of most internet memes is their detachment from an original setting (see: Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop and Nina Gouvea em Desastres). In this post, however, I’ll explore an instance in which an internet meme became one of very few access points to a nation’s history.

In China, what has been referred to as the "Great Firewall” prevents the country’s citizens from learning about historical and global events online. On this year’s anniversary of the Tianamen Square Protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident, Chinese search engines blocked the words “today,” “tonight,” “June 4,” and, curiously, “Big Yellow Duck.” Though the Chinese government has done their best to censor history, knowledge of the June 1989 massacre of protestors is still spread through covert means. In the first week of June of this year, the anniversary of the protests and subsequent massacre, fliers were dispersed from a bus passing through Tianamen square and Beijing-based AIDS activist Hu Jia called for the coordinated donning of a black t-shirt. The most highly-discussed battle to preserve Chinese history, however, was waged through internet memes. Throughout the first week of June (when the 1989 massacres and protests occurred) a number of memes imitating the iconic Tank Man photo were featured on various Chinese web sites. On June 1 (the day the Tianamen Square massacre began) the Chinese site Netease featured an image of a Lego man facing down three Lego tanks. Another internet meme featured an image derived from “Angry Birds” giving three tanks the middle feather. The most popular incarnation of the Tank Man meme of all was the Big Yellow Duck meme, which appeared on the Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo.

The image features Tank Man facing down the People’s Liberation Army on June 5, 1985 (though it is called The June Fourth Incident protestors were active and under attack for several days before and after June 4). Instead of tanks, a row of three Photoshopped yellow ducks appear. The exact ducks we see Photoshopped into the image are from a popular sculpture in China, the six-story high "Rubber Duck" sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hoffman which hovers in the waters of Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, the Chinese government has approved the presence of the Rubber Duck sculpture -- it is, after all, a harmlessly blithe tribute to childhood. The placement of the sanctioned whimsical toy which looms over the city superimposed over the iconic Tank Man image places the horrific absurdity of censorship in relief. Here's to the spirited nature of Chinese netizen's brilliant resistance efforts, the "Big Yellow Duck" is one internet meme which truly does justice to history.

Most of the information from this post was drawn from the New York Times article “Censored in China: ‘Today,’ ‘Tonight’ and ‘Big Yellow Duck’” which can be found here: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/censored-in-china-today-tonight-and-big-yellow-duck/?_r=0

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Sarah G. Sussman — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 19:03:03 +0000

Image credit: Flickriver

Daniel Johnston’s “Jeremiah the Innocent,” also known as the “Hi, How Are You” frog, is arguably the single-most iconic piece of street art in Austin. Though many who pass it by everyday assume that it is graffiti which has been preserved, Austin news station KXAN reports that the “Hi, How Are you” frog is actually a commissioned mural for which Johnston was reportedly paid a sum of $100 by Sound Exchange, a popular music store. To the dismay of Austinites, Sound Exchange closed down in 2004 and was replaced by a Baja Fresh. At the time of Sound Exchange’s closing, customers rallied to protect the mural, and won. “Jeremiah the Innocent” was the cover of Daniel Johnston’s 1983 album Hi, How Are You: the unfinished album. Throughout the years, various vandals have tried to deface the mural, but time and again it has been salvaged by popular demand.

Most often, the term "iconic" is the province of photographs like Alfred Eisenstadt’s “The V-J Day Kiss” or Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” These are the kinds of photos which appear on t-shirts, tote bags, advertisements, and other unexpected and sometimes ill-fitting places. It’s so rare to think of art created with spray paint as iconic, but if any place pays homage to a select few vagabond artists and artworks -- it’s Austin. Along the lines of Jenn Shapland’s post about graffiti and advertising, one reason we memorialize these select murals is because they are a part of Austin’s unique “Keep Austin Weird” franchise.

The 1990s, when the iconizing of Jeremiah began, was characterized by an exaltation of the underdog celebrity. Wielded as a symbol of subcultural coolness, “Jeremiah the Innocent” was first introduced to the mainstream through Kurt Cobain, who frequently wore the image on a t-shirt during the 1991 promotion of Nirvana's album, Nevermind.

Image credit: collapseboard.com

In many ways, “Jeremiah the Innocent” encapsulates everything the ironically elite of the grunge era came to hate about their own fame. Originally designed as an artifact of the underground music scene, by the oughts the iconic Austin graffiti could be seen worn by sorority sisters, babies in onesies, soccer moms, and soccer dads.

Image credit: austinrockstexas.com

The latest addition to the “Hi, How Are You” wall is perhaps, the most ill-fitting and puzzling yet: St. Austin's Catholic Church has aped the style of Jeremiah to spawn a new creature. The tadpole-esque cartoon is on a vinyl poster (can a vinyl poster be graffiti?) across the street from the iconic frog, in order to capitalize on the cultural cache of Johnston’s icon, thus making the church seem a little more hip. This seems the ultimate twist of irony. What was once a record cover and mural associated with the indie music scene has been appropriated to tell students to come to Jesus.

Photo credit: Stellatex's Instagram, with permission

As with internet memes, and all images truly iconic, “Jeremiah the Innocent” has been unmoored from his context. My impulse was to preserve and protect this context. Searching for more information, however, I found that Daniel Johnston’s own site hihowareyou.com actually sells a number of their own “Hi, How Are You” onesies and other products. I’m uncertain of copyright laws here, but it seems best that if someone is going to profit off of “Jeremiah the Innocent,” that it should be Johnston himself. Whether Johnston would have opted to sell the onesies on his own, or simply needed the income and saw no reason for the Weird Austin franchise opportunists to be the only ones profiting off of his art is unclear. I emailed Daniel Johnston’s brother who manages questions from the press, specifically about the Catholic Church’s poster, but have had no response so far. Still, as far as Jeremiah’s new Catholic neighbor is involved, I’d love to know: What Would Daniel Johnston do?

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti? I'll know it when I see it. Or not.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Part II on Memes and Political (In)action: Satire and Empathy

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:39:19 +0000

In November 2011 student protestors at UC Davis were holding a peaceful demonstration on their campus when former Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed them at close range. In the days that followed, my Facebook newsfeed became a log of collective outrage. One day, an image of former Lt. John Pike Photoshopped into Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” appeared, and the “Casual Pepper Spray Everything Cop" meme was born.

Image Credit: Knowyourmeme.com

Reactions to the meme were varied. Some, like a friend of mine who is a UC Davis alum, worried the humor would become detached from the message of the protest. After all, in the world of internet memes detachment is somewhat of a governing principle. Even databases like knowyourmeme.com refer to the UC Davis Cop as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” -- emphasizing the disjuncture of his body language with his actions in a nonspecific time and place, over his place in UC Davis’s institutional history, and in the history of the Occupy movement. I would argue that some subjects seem riper for meme-making than others because their engagement with their surroundings already suggests the kind of disconnect between an individual and his or her environment that we usually associate with the chaotic and Photoshopped world of the Internet.

The highly controversial portraits taken of Brazilian model Nana Gouvêa in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy provide another example of this disjuncture. The photos featured Gouvêa in a variety of postures and attitudes in which she appears completely oblivious to the effects of the disaster that claimed hundreds of lives and cost billions of dollars in damages. Perhaps creators of the Gouvêa meme were able to identify Gouvêa as a specimen prime for meme making because her portraits amidst the wreckage mingle the absurdity one finds on awkwardfamilyphotos.com with the kind of morally reprehensible obliviousness that led to the creation of the Casual Pepper Spray Cop meme.

Image Credit: knowyourmeme.com

What both Gouvêa and Pike have in common is that they were completely disconnected in a way that occluded any empathy or attention to the crisis at hand and any ability to fathom the effects that their personal actions would have on the people surrounding them. Satire can be an excellent outlet for outrage, as we see in the case of some users of the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme, but it can also be a tool rendering history absurd to the point of erasing it. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ” What happens to a meme is of course anyone’s guess, but one would hope that purveyors of memes will be able to steel themselves with humor without losing sight of the original crises that sparked the controversy: a complete numbness to the suffering of others.

Look for more on memes and the process of erasing vs. preserving history in the next post.

For more on memes, check out fellow viz. blogger Laura Thain’s previous posts: http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-1

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-2

Political (In)action in the Meme Generation?

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 21:04:54 +0000

Dawkins playing a midi breath controller in Saatchi video. Image Credit: Saatchi.com

This will be the first post in a three-part series in which I will explore the relationship between memes and civic discourse.

What is an internet meme? Though most young people can instantly recognize a picture of Philosoraptor, Feminist Ryan Gosling, or a Lolcat, few know the history of this ubiquitous term. Nevertheless, show a room full of undergraduates an image of Nyan Cat, and you'll immediately elicit laughter and a sense of camaraderie. In that moment of laughter, however, it seems worth asking: what exactly is bringing consumers of memes together? From UC Davis’s “Pepper Spray Cop Meme,” to China’s “Big Yellow Duck” meme, how are memes shaping their viewer’s and creator’s understanding of activism and history? Is a comical form treated with such levity an effective means of communicating about more serious matters?

The term “meme” was first articulated by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in order to describe the way some ideas are spread through society in a pattern that is similar to the transmission of genes. At the time of writing The Selfish Gene how could Dawkins have predicted that within a few decades, his words would be used to describe a unique by-product of the digital age, one which has mutated and grown to such an extent that even the proudest luddites are hip to Lolcats? Check out this video of Dawkins for a fun (and highly visual) overview in which Dawkins links his theory of the meme with the other life it has taken on online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GFn-ixX9edg (for more background on the video, click here: : http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/20/new-directors-showcase) In the video he appears bemused, the unwitting but delighted progenitor of a term “hijacked” by internet culture.

Playfully embracing the term’s fluidity he says, “In the hijacked version, mutations are designed, not random. . . In some cases this can take the form of genuinely creative art, but now that I think about it, mightn’t somebody argue that all creative art comes about through something like a mutation in the mind?” These last words echo before a projector displays layered, brightly-colored collage imagery. At one point an owl shoots lazer beams at a cartoon rendering of a purple brain emerging from Dawkin’s head and then he begins playing a riff on an air midi. Hello Pied Piper of the web, here to whisk our generation away to Nyan Cat land. Eventually the screen is left only with the fluorescent hues of spilled oil. Is this a commentary on the enticing but polluted nature of the internet? Dawkins himself said that memes could be “Good ideas, good poems, as well as driveling mantras.” How do we, as consumers of culture, define the value of internet memes? In next week’s post I’ll look at several popular memes in the context of activist movements and large scale catastrophes and ask whether these are “driveling mantras,” rallying cries, or something in between.

For more on memes, check out this interview with Dr. Simone Sessolo on DWRL’s podcast, Zeugma http://dwrlpodcast.libsyn.com/simone-sessolo-interview-mp3