viz. - representation

Unmarking Death

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:47:35 +0000

Death is often in the news, whether it involves major singers, local Austin celebrities, or Twitter death hoaxes. Yet when we visualize death, it’s typically in memorials, not actual pictures of dead bodies. We’ve come some ways from the Victorian memento mori photographs which attempted to render the corpse vital and to serve, as Jamie Fraser notes, “as a keepsake to remember the deceased.” While traditional burial practices, which use embalming fluids to delay putrefaction and decomposition, likewise make the corpse appear as lifelike as possible, most people don’t make hair rings or take pictures of the dead to remember them. In this way, we remember the dead as not dead—as lively. In his photography series Unmarked, Stephen Chalmers presents an alternative way to represent death.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In a recent NPR article, Chalmers discusses Unmarked’s origins in a hiking trip that went past one of Ted Bundy’s dumpsites. As he says, “[J]ust that little kernel of information really changed how I felt about what was otherwise a really fantastic early date. I was struck by how my experience of this place was so changed by knowing the history of the location.” Thus, the series features the locations in which serial killers disposed of their victims’ bodies. Each photograph is named for the victim left in the place.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In photographs like the one above, Jennifer Joseph, Chalmers uses focus to direct the viewer’s attention to the specific place where the body once lay. The placid pastoral scene contrasts dramatically with the idea of violence that murder contains, but there is no dramatic visual tension in the photograph. As Chalmers tells NPR, “I kind of like the absence of spectacle. I’m a quiet person. I like for the images I make to be quiet.” The images are quiet in their lack of subjects and their rural backgrounds. The tetherball in Debra Estes hints at a more suburban setting, but the photo’s only dynamism occurs in the contrast of the yellow tetherball set against the browns and greens. However, Chalmers also explicitly states on his website that the images are meant not only to refuse “clichés of prefabricated sentimentality,” but also to “convey the original sense of shock at arriving at these sites of trauma and also that the self-conscious refusal of information and emptiness of the images and conveys our distance from this sense of shock to demonstrate the essential inaccessibility of these traumatic events and degrading deaths.” If the Victorian image is a “prefabricated sentimentality,” Unmarked works differently.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

Unmarked represents death in this “absence of spectacle,” the still scenes set against the media circus surrounding serial killers and their victims. Because we cannot hope to either represent or fully comprehend the victims’ traumatic deaths, the only way to do so is through its visual opposite. However, while such a series seems deeply respectful of the victims, it only displays death in its lack of display. Chalmers’ visual logic suggests that the only true way to represent murder victims is by refusing to represent them—a treatment that is provocative and beautiful, but may only reinforce the victims’ absence. Where is the space in which mourners can represent the dead, between too much and too little presence? Is the only way our culture can show death is by unmarking it?

Imagining the 99%: Occupy Austin's (Visual) Self-Representation

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Screenshot from occupyaustin.org

If you couldn't tell from the past few days of viz.'s coverage, the Occupy Austin protests continue, if attendance has mildly abated from this weekend's high. This blog is not an appropriate venue for the discussion of the movement’s goals (you can find more intelligent discussion about Austin’s own version of the movement here and here). However, I am interested in the ways in which the Occupy Austin movement represents its constituents. The Occupy Wall Street / Austin brief—which aspires to represent 99% of the American (some Austin material intransigently claims “world”) populace—faces a particularly clear set of representational challenges even as social networking allows its images to proliferate in ways unimaginable even five years ago. For the rest of this post, I’ll highlight some images from Occupy Austin’s affiliated website.

One of the ways—particularly prominent on the Occupy Austin website—is to simply erase personal identity and to focus on a paramount tool of protest: the megaphone.

Images: occupyaustin.org

The megaphone, of course, literalizes the protest’s desire to make voice audible: “Come and make your voice heard” is a central talking point in various posters and placards the local movement has authorized. At their best, these kinds of images have an extraordinary symbolic power in the clean graphic design. The ideologically potent red star manages to be central to the design without being the eye’s resting point, slipping in without emphasis an inherent socialist claim (it’s worth noting that the red star doesn’t appear on any direct content on the Occupy Wall Street page that I had a chance to view).

Less successful may be the image this post leads with, which is also the main graphic on the Occupy Austin homepage. While replacing the protester’s head with a megaphone conveys the desire to be heard that’s at the center of these protests, I wonder if the substitution of a bullhorn for a brain is necessarily desirable (of course, subbing in a megaphone also allows the designers to sidestep questions of identity politics).

Image: occupyaustin.org

And then there's this image, which cleverly transforms the megaphone into what appears to be an appendage being crushed in a handshake. Graphically the poster is relatively impeccable in the way it quotes the visual motif of the other posters while subjecting it to a transformation. Symbolically, though? While it's hardly an act of despicable violence, it seems at odds with the general tone of peaceful civil disobedience cultivated by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I always feel the end of a post is a good time to come clean, ideologically. I stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its idealism, and even its pluralistic free-form ideological naivete, are really refreshing to me in a time when being a liberal and a leftist has seemed to be all talk and not much action. The academic in me wants to praise the movement's embrace, whether conscious or not, of a flowing, Deleuzian rhizomatics. But the praxis-oriented person in me wonders how long the movement will be able to avoid significant political and social splits and fissures. Two final examples to illustrate that:

Screenshots from occupyaustin.org

As these images make clear, for the moment that fist of solidarity can find a rapport between the stark brutality of the right hand images color-inverted fist and the eco-aware, pastoral, post-hippie consciousness of the left hand poster. But how long can these positions hang in together? The one poster is pre-dirtied, smudged with toner ink, and hand-markered. It's a callout to political propaganda the world over, as well as invested in a specific hardcore aesthetics. It's definitively urban, and it seems invested in overthrow. The other image is twilight-blue, with a heartbeat center of consciousness in the clenched fist. The Texas cornflowers have peace signs within the petals. It's expansivist, and it wants you to belong: "We are the ones," it proclaims. Fair enough. But for how long can these "ones" be the same?

An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part II)

ebfrye — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:58:01 +0000

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Wild Animals I Have Known pamplisest via Landmarks

Last week I posted Part I of my interview with Susan Somers-Willett. Today I'm excited to bring you Part II in which we continue to talk digital poetics and new uses of ekphrasis. Susan holds forth on other projects, including her work with UT's Landmarks prorgram and the Blanton Museum's poetry project. We also discuss her upcoming work that responds simultaneously to the recent Abu Ghraib photographs and early 20th-century lynching photographs.

EF: Do you think this kind of hybrid medium (poetry, photography, web content) will proliferate as we move more into digital poetics and digital modes of access? What kind of multimedia poetics do you find to be engaging?

SSW: Yes, I do. I think Kwame Dawes’s work is really exciting. He’s working in a similar mode of going into various communities, and documenting people or events within those communities, though I don’t know how much audio work he’s working on right now. His pieces have him reading the poem, so adding the element of interview footage was unique to my project and Natasha Trethewey’s project and what Erika Meitner’s project will become.

I feel like we’re on the verge, as Kwame’s, Natasha’s, and Erika’s projects will inspire people to approach this in a different way. It’s not like this is completely new mode of expression. James Agee and Walker Evans’s collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is probably the most famous example, but clearly there’s not a digital element to that. I think as far as the combination of audio and video and textual production goes, the more publishing becomes easier and more accessible through technology and our use or misuse of it, we’re going to see more of it. It’s a very specific combination. Poetry, audio, photography. Text, sound, image. I probably just need to think a little outside the box on that. Such a trinity doesn’t necessarily have to have a documentary focus.

For instance, consider what they did with the Blanton poetry project. You have the piece of artwork, the poem, and the interview with the project. There’s also the Landmarks projects at UT.

Screen Shot, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, collaboration with the Blanton poetry project

EF: Could you talk a bit more about your involvement with Landmarks?

SSW: Let me explain what I think I did, because I really don’t know what I did. I called what I did for Landmarks my “bonkers poem” because it was drawing on so many different elements at which I was surely unadept. They asked me to respond to the piece by David Ellis that he created at UT in a period over a month called Animal. What he does in terms of his process—David has a large oversized canvas, a high res. camera that’s over the piece of canvas or surface, and he paints on the floor and he paints an entire mural, and then he paints over it, and then over it, and over it again while the camera captures the entire process in time-lapse photography. In the resultant video, David’s painting starts to morph and change, and then you see elements of the old painting showing through either because the paint is translucent or he has left elements that would read as blank space but they’re not blank space. It’s just the old showing through in the new. And the final piece is a 9-minute video of him doing this process for a month. When I saw it for the first time, it blew my mind and then I thought, “How the hell will I write about this?” It’s so ephemeral and, well, bonkers. If I were to approach it in the traditional ekprhastic way, it would be like taking stills from a film and trying to describe those scenes, but that doesn’t capture the excitement or energy or beauty of what David is doing in his work. It would be textbook.

Screen shot, David Ellis, video still from Animal, via Landmarks

I decided to approach it from the angle of David’s process and apply that process to my own work as a writer. One thing that came to mind, one concept, was the palimpsest. I was thinking of erasure, writing under writing, a new poem that’s showing through old writing, the old painting showing through the new paint that’s on top of it . I looked for examples in literature that modeled that paradigm, and I thought of Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow where she’s taken a 19th- century novella and taken Wite-Out® and erased certain parts of it so that on each page of that book, there splays a little poem. It’s like haiku, but not syllabic. Her poems in that book are shaped by whatever words are on the page. I read that and it was so exciting, experimentally, but incredibly accessible. So with David’s piece and then with Mary Ruefle’s model in mind, I created the poem Wild Animals I Have Known. There are other pieces in the same vein such as Travis MacDonald’s "The O Mission Repo" that uses redaction as its method. Ruefle’s book and the tradition of erasure in visual art and in performance art in which artists will cut out something or burn something to create were my main inspirations.

I decided to find a source text that corresponded with David’s piece Animal, and I wanted the source to be local, because David’s text stemmed from images that he saw in Austin and included some ambient sounds associated with Austin. I did a search in the HRC [Harry Ransom Center] to see what they would have associated with animals, specifically crows or grackles. I was so haunted by the image of a grackle in David’s piece. I found a book that had to be public domain, and I came across this text Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. In that collection of nature stories, there was a story called “Silverspot the Crow,” and I got my hands on a couple of original texts of that book and decided to use redaction in the spirit of David’s piece. But, I wanted to make it read as a whole. I didn’t want it to read in just parts like other poets had done, in a one-poem-per-page, haiku-like fashion. I wanted to create a poem that would, through the process of redaction, span the entire length of the piece and tell a narrative like David’s piece. So, it became a sectioned poem, but the stanzas are created page by page, so one stanza is one page.

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Wild Animals I Have Known pamplisest via Landmarks

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, stanza 3 of Wild Animals I Have Known, via Landmarks

I gotta tell you, I met David when we premiered his piece and my poem at Art Night Austin E.A.S.T. tour last fall in Austin, and he and I became such great friends. I was really honored that he was excited about the poem, and he said that I felt like I understood his artwork and “got it”, so that was a really nice. I think my strength as a collaborator is having conversations with other arts and artists, so that’s why I found employing his process so engaging and interesting. Even though we weren’t having a literal conversation at that time, our arts were in conversation and not just in terms of image or subject matter but in terms of process.

EF: Have any of these multimedia projects impacted your teaching?

SSW: I do present these works in my classes, and I do have my students in my workshops write ekphrastic poems. However, I don’t at the moment have the capabilities to mentor students through this process, but I would like to in a perfect world with a lot of funding and time. I use technology in the classroom as much as I can as someone who works in a workshop-based environment. We have to do a lot of one-on-one face time, too. I do use media to teach. I use a lot of audio pieces and video pieces to talk about poems and to teach aspects of poetry as well as let the students hear people perform their work and get it in the mouth and in the body and in the ear. I don’t know if that’s part of my participation in these projects. I think that interest existed before I got involved with them. Maybe these projects are an extension are part of my interest in exploring various media, which is always an aspect of my teaching.

EF: What are you working on at the moment?

SSW: An ekphrastic project that has evolved a lot over the last few years. It’s been percolating for a while. I thought I would be writing about early photography until I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs. Contemplating those, which was really hard, made me start thinking about how we represent and experience images of torture. Also, I was looking through the book Without Sanctuary, which is of images of lynching in America for another class I was going to teach on race and gender and the image. I had experienced those images before but not put it together that I was having the same emotional and physical responses to those images when I was looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think with both of those kinds of photographs, one of the hardest things to deal with is how the images are hailing me as a viewer, not just the acts themselves, which are terrible and gut wrenching. They hail all of as viewers, maybe not in the same way, but for me it calls me out and, because of my race or my nationality, constructs an identity of complicity with torture that I want to but can never absolutely reject.

Screen shot, "Standard Operating Procedure," via salon

So, for example, when I look at the Abu Ghraib photos, I feel among many other emotions, I feel this call of “You did this. You as an American did this.” I feel that the American military under the auspices of protecting people, protecting Americans engaged in these acts, so that by seeing Americans do this, I share an identity as an American, that I am implied and complicit. It’s the same thing with the lynching photographs. One of the commonly fictionalized crimes among black men who were lynched is that they were rapists or somehow a threat to white women’s sexuality, so looking at those photographs I feel that I am somehow… middling by default of how I am socially hailed in the Althusserian sense. It’s not like I condone those acts, but that’s the weird difficult space that I want to explore in my poems. What I’m currently attempting to do is represent these images in formal pairs, have a poem about the Abu Ghraib photos and then a poem about the lynching images on facing pages. By formally pairing poems about these images, I hope they can work in a lot of different ways, work as positive negative, recto verso, and all imply the photographic process itself. Though I wouldn’t call myself a New Formalist, I think as poets, we’re all formalists, some writing in received forms and some not. Otherwise, we’re prose writers.

Screen shot, "The corpse of Clyde Johnson. August 3, 1935. Yreka, California." via Without Sanctuary

On the topic of form, I think there’s an interesting resurgence of received forms, especially in African American poetry. Patricia Smith recently gave a reading at my home institution, and I asked her “What’s up with all of these received forms?” Patricia’s “Motown Crown” is amazing because she’s talking about boogying to Motown in a crown of sonnets—funk meets formal. It’s really smart. Natasha Trethewey, who has also been doing sonnet crowns, said to me that one thing that’s interesting about African American poets using those forms is that they were never meant to use those forms in the first place. So there’s always a kind of transformation of the received form simply in its contemporary use.

EF: I’m so excited to read, hear, and watch your future projects. Thanks so much for the interview.

SSW: You’re welcome.

On representing "the city and its women": An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part I)

ebfrye — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:17:33 +0000

via "Women of Troy," In Verse on vimeo

A few months ago, I happily stumbled upon and blogged about poet, scholar, and UT alum Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s docu-poetry project “Women of Troy.” Recently, Susan kindly took a break from her busy semester of writing and teaching to have coffee with me. We talked about multimedia poetics, issues of representation, the complications of collaboration, and the role of technology in the poetry classroom. Because the transcript of our interview is rather long, you can read Part I of our conversation below. I'll post the second installment next week. After that you'll also be able to find the interview in its entirety on our "Views" page.

First, a word about the "Women of Troy" project:

In 2009, Somers-Willett teamed up with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski to represent the experiences of women living below the poverty line in Troy, New York. The collaboration aired on Public Radio International/WNYC program Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen and BBC Radio, and a print version appeared with Kenneally's photographs in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Among multiple honors, “Women of Troy” received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media in 2010.

More about Susan:

Susan is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry and a book of criticism. Her first book of poetry, Roam, won the Crab Orchard Review Award series in 2006 and was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for poetry. Her second book, Quiver, published in 2009 with the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Series in Poetry, received the 2010 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2009 and has been cited by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. Her writing has been featured by The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Our talk:

EF: Tell me a little bit about the process of putting together "Women of Troy." How did you come to the project?

SSW: I had a call from Ted Genoways, editor-in-chief of VQR. He had been talking with Lu Olkowski about doing some multimedia pieces in the vein of Kwame Dawes’s work with the Pulitzer Center. Ted was also connected with Brenda Ann Kenneally who hails from the Troy area and has been documenting women in that community for 6 -7 years now. He had known all of us in those various spheres and brought us together. Lu and Ted had been talking about putting together a series of documentary poetry projects with the multimedia elements of radio and photography. “Women of Troy” was the first of those projects.

My introduction to the project and Troy, New York was visual, through Brenda’s photographs, or some of them at least. What I saw in those photographs was stark and shocking and challenging for me as someone who identified as a white, middle class woman, and I knew that was exactly why I needed to do the project because it would and has caused me to think about class in much more conscious ways.

EF: Do you remember which photographs you saw first and which images you found to be most striking?

SSW: I saw a slideshow of Brenda’s work that someone had put together. I remember a photograph of a mother (whom I would later learn was Kayla), father, and baby. The father had a huge knife laying on his belly. I later found out it was a toy knife. I also saw an image of a woman lying on a bed holding a gun. I assumed it was real, but I don’t know. Those weapons really stuck with me the first time I saw Brenda’s work. I felt that there was a threat there.

I saw pictures of children living in only what I could describe as squalor, in these bare, crumbling backgrounds. Their environments seemed so chaotic, but later I found out they were moving all the time. That was my one trepidation when I was thinking about going into this environment, but it was never as dangerous as those photographs necessarily depict.

So, when I think about my first impressions of looking at those photographs, it’s actually kind of funny to me, knowing what I know now about Troy. In a lot of ways, these women are just like you or me, loving their families fiercely and trying to get by with what they have, and often I identified with them more than I felt an economic or social divide. At other times, the economic divide was very sharp, but the social divide still felt distant and I never felt threatened. I think my experience of that environment and the very specific vision that Brenda is promoting or trying to get across in her photographs is different. She sees herself as someone who got out of that community. She has a different perspective on how she wants those women to be represented. She wants them to get out and educate themselves and still be tough and mean and still have their street cred. but not be trapped in that cycle of poverty and gossip and all of the she said/she said that’s there. My main goal was to observe, and to do my best not to paternalize or exploit. It’s not that Brenda’s and my goals are mutually exclusive; I just think we had different processes and agendas.

Photograph, Brenda Ann Keneally, from Upstate Girls

What was your writing process like? How did it dovetail with Brenda Ann Kenneally’s process?

SSW: Brenda was shooting the entire time that we were there. I was there for a week in May and then I left for a month and wrote 24/7. Then went back in early June for another ten days and then wrote for another month. My time in Troy wasn’t like sitting down have and having coffee over an interview. It was real fieldwork. We were staying up until 3:00 in the morning at times. I was staying up with Billie Jean partying with her friends and then getting up to ride with D.J. to drop her kids off at school at 7:00 a.m. The schedule was grueling and I got really sick at the end.

When I was in Troy, I was with Brenda who was already accepted as a member of that community. She hails from that area. She talks like the gals in Troy and has their swagger. So who knows what I would have experienced if we hadn’t worked as a team, but I feel that Brenda gave us the credentials to be in that community and for those subjects to accept us. I feel that we would not have been as able to get as deep and entangled in their lives if it had not been for her inviting us in, and I am very grateful for that.

EF: For how many of the photographs were you present? How did that change your writing process?

SSW: I don’t know if I can give you a number because there were so many different productions. I think the majority of photographs were taken before.

One of the things that I learned in my time there watching Brenda photograph is that she directs her subjects not to smile. I remember being very vividly being in a house documenting a teenage girl and Brenda kept saying, “No smiles! No smiles!” It was like seeing the man behind the curtain, or the woman behind the curtain in this case, in the production of that image because it underscored the constructed-ness of documentary images, but I think she does it in a very powerful way that has no equal. She says what she wants to say with those images.

EF: Were you involved in the editing process? Did you know what photographs would be paired with your poems? In what order?

SSW: I was not involved in the editing at all, and it’s probably a good thing. That was Lu’s doing, and she hired filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar to edit it together. The input that I did have—I had written “Women of Troy,” and I had seen a show Brenda had done at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, a non-profit, in an old converted church in Troy. They fund and sponsor community projects, and their building is right across the street from the main house where all of the gossip and stuff goes on, where Kayla lives with her family, where everybody goes and talks, gathers. That stoop is always crowded. Roseanne, Billie Jean’s mother, lived in the unfinished basement of that house at the time. But, the Sanctuary supports Brenda’s work quite a bit. They had a show called Upstate Girls, which is Brenda’s continuing project, a show of all of her photographs, D.J.’s photographs, Dana’s photographs. They were able to open it up to the community, and the women could write on the wall around the photographs and have a conversation with those images.

I had seen that show and there were a few key specific photographs that I reference in the poems. The last image of “Women of Troy” is of this young girl holding a sparkler. I knew that would go well with the last stanza of the poem, “You are the city and its women/ wailing darkly and bright to bless/ your city as it burns, this city/made of your light.” So, although I gave one or two suggestions about what images might correspond to the poem, most of the images spring from their own contexts rather than being literal referents.

In another poem, “A Call to Arms,” the very last image in that poem stems from a photograph of Billie Jean. The last few lines are about a women going down the block to take the beating someone says she deserves and the photograph is Billie Jean receiving a pocketknife from a friend of hers as she is preparing to go down the block and take the beating. That was one of the few literal referents I included.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: How were issues of representation involved for you as a poet and as a collaborator?

SSW: I don’t really know how these women would choose to represent themselves [visually]. The dialogic aspect of this project really attracted me because I knew that through the radio and the audio aspect that we would be able to hear their voices.

I discovered that there’s a thin line on appropriating voices, and the line always seems to be moving. I kept asking myself, “What’s the right way to represent the women? Should I be representing them at all?” At AWP, Erika Meitner was talking about trying to avoid “ruin porn” in writing about photographs of Detroit. The bottom line is you don’t want to fetishize the aspect of of a subject’s experience simply because it’s edgy or shocking for a particular readership, even though that response is probably inevitable for some folks.

Lu and I got to know these women as women and as friends, and we got to know their families. Nothing’s ever easy in the field of documentary studies, but that was an aspect that attracted me to the project. I knew that through the audio tracks that we would hear their voices, too. I knew that it wouldn’t just be me speaking or representing their voices, and I hoped that it would turn into a conversation.

Something that I found was really interesting was that some audiences had heard only the radio pieces, which had some interviews with the women introducing the poems that I had read and an interview the Brenda. The poems were intercut with interview and audio, so it was an interesting use of multimedia. Of the women that we had profiled, all identified as white, but there were a number of people who assumed that they were black because of their idioms and accents. One of my colleagues asked, “How does it feel as a white person documenting black women?”—a question that’s very valid, but that also revealed that my colleage had made some assumptions linking class, race, and language in very specific ways. We had a great discussion about it, actually.

The appropriation of voice is something that I am very conscious of in writing these pieces. I felt like I had to be very conscious of staying true to what Dana, Billie Jean, and D.J. would say and be sensitive about how they might want to be represented. The feedback that we’ve gotten from them is pretty much “Yeah, that’s about right.” I’m hoping that we did a good, sensitive job, but it’s something that we all worry about. When you’re doing something with people who are in a relatively less empowered position than you are, you have to think about those questions or you’re not doing your job.

I think that we were women profiling with women in a community where there is a profound absence of men (because the men were in prison or had just skidaddled) was important to the project. Now, that’s not to say that I think a male could not engage with this work but that it would be somewhat different.

EF: So does the poet have an obligation to the subject? How is this similar or different from the photographer’s?

SSW: Of course, but the kind of obligationdepends on the poet and the photographer. One of the things that we discovered through this project—this project was really hard to do because so many different moving parts—we discovered we had different creative projects and ways to get work done. Personally, I learned a lot about audio production. I learned a lot about Brenda’s visual and technical processes and different approaches that have to do with the kinds of artists that we are. I needed more reflection and time to observe in a silent manner. I knew that I needed more time than I had to hole up and write. Lu’s process is about seducing you to say the right thing to get the radio piece to work in a coherent way. It’s about being around people, and talking, talking, talking, pulling it out of the interviewee. Brenda--her process is different. She crosses more lines than most documenters would cross by giving somebody five dollars for gas or a ride here and there because she’s a member of that community, because she’s an insider and that determines how anyone would approach it. And I think that’s OK too. The question of insider/outsider may be the more important question about how to approach the documentary work than whether you are a poet or photographer.

EF: So how is it different for the insider versus the outsider?

SSW: I’m thinking of Brenda getting embroiled in all the drama, their fistfights and all of their mama drama. There’s a lot of baby mama drama, or, as Billie Jean would say, “baby mother and baby father drama.” She’s very proper about that, which ended up being part of my poem. Billie Jean called it that, so that’s why it’s in there.

I’m thinking about [the insider/outsider question] in contrast to Brenda’s photographs, which are very stark and tell a specific message. I wanted to complement that vision, but I wanted to represent moments where these women did feel empowered. My goal is not to contradict but to enrich and complicate the singular vision of the photograph. I think the piece of Billy Jean at the Flag Day parade, the “Just a Girl” poem, is a step in that direction. There was one night we piled into D.J.’s minivan and went to Schenectady, NY and they got all dressed up in their tight pants and g-strings. We had a good time. We had a girl’s night out. Brenda photographed that, and it made it into the poem, photos of that evening when we went out to the club. There’s a picture of D.J. dancing, and my back’s to the camera.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: Do you consider these pieces to be ekphrastic? You’ve made ekphrasis part of your work elsewhere. How does this process compare with other ekphrastics you’ve done, ex. for the Landmarks program and the Blanton Museum's Poetry Project?

SSW: I’ve automatically assumed that they are but not in the traditional way, as in, “Here’s a piece of visual art. I’m going to represent it in my poem.” It’s a different kind of take because we were working collaboratively and we were creating our respective works of art at the same time. So, some of it is ekphrastic. Some of it, yes, in the more traditional sense. For instance, there were three or four images, that I had already seen. Some of them ended up in the poem or references to them. Lu tends to represent this approach as a new way of storytelling, but it’s a new take on ekphrasis, too. The visual art pre-exists the poems, but some of them are being created at the same time. Some of the photos are taken afterwards. I think the possibility to call it ekphrasis is definitely there but not wholly in the traditional sense. I am interested in pushing the envelope in what the process of ekphrasis means.

Plato talks about ekphrasis as involving one representation in art and then a second ideal representation of that representation in literature, and then a third ideal representation, ad infinitum--basically an infinite regress of mirrors. But here we’re asking, “What happens when those representations are parallel, when they are being created in parallel forms in parallel time? What prism of ekphrastic perspective can emerge through collaboration? And can it be more than merely mimetic?”

One of the ways that I want to complicate and trouble ekphrasis is to add reflection on process—on creation as well as representation. Thinking about that parallelism between poetry and photograph rather than having a linear distance between them helps to do that. “Women of Troy” is as much about photography and representation as it is about these particular women. The last few lines, “You are the city and its women/wailing darkly and bright to bless/your city as it burns, this city/made of your light” is of course Troy burning--but it is also the city being populated by Brenda’s photographs, the light and dark of her film and its reproduction.

The way that poem is organized—it’s a litany. It’s image after image. Not all of the lines correspond one to one to a photograph, but it’s like being in a gallery of photographs. I wanted the effect of walking through a gallery and to emphasize the way the city speaks to a viewer through this collection of images.

And that’s what I think poetry and photography share, the language of image, and that’s why there’s such a venerable tradition of the two working together. At the same time, there are a lot of unexplored avenues in working in those two artistic genres. With ekphrasis, I feel like I’ve stumbled upon the great metaphor that will inform most of my writing. I could write a lifetime of work about image and representation.

Screen shot, "Women of Troy" via vimeo

EF: Aside from ekphrasis, these pieces seem to touch the borders of other forms. I’m thinking elegy, ode. They also form a sort of archive.

SSW: We definitely took it as a documentary project and certainly what Brenda is doing is archiving these women’s lives. A big goal of her Upstate Girls project is to basically follow these women and their daughters through growing up as children and then becoming mothers themselves. She wants to see one generational turn, and she’s not that far away from it, actually.

EF: You’ve probably noticed that many of my questions deal with characterizing the form of this piece. I find that the complicated form pays tribute to the lives of these women, in a way. Did you find that, in order to pay full tribute to these women’s experiences, it was necessary to use multiple forms?

SSW: I don’t think it’s necessary. I think you can pay tribute in whatever genre, whatever artistic mode. However, I think the fact that we did undertake a multifaceted, complex mode that reached many artistic modes and genres, we made it a better documentary project because you could have a conversation of women on the radio that you couldn’t have anywhere else. You could have my poem and Billie Jean talking right back to each other. I could add a counter-anchor to Brenda’s photos to show empowerment as well as moments of strife and struggle.

I don’t think my poems would be as strong as they are if they were not running alongside the work of my collaborators, Lu and Brenda. Can you pay tribute in single genres? Of course, and they do. But, they speak so much more powerfully in concert.

EF: I know you’re also interested in orality, aurality, and the role of the performance. Do you view these videos or photograph/ video combos as a kind of performance?

SSW: Oh lordy! Well, let me tell you a story. I was living in Austin the summer I was writing these poems, and so Lu arranged for me to go to the KUT studio on the UT campus to record my poems. We spent a four-hour, marathon session recording four or five poems that she would then edit down. I have a background in doing performance poetry on slam stages, so I got ready for it. I rehearsed and practiced reading the poems aloud and got it so that they would sound good on the radio. Then I got into the studio, and Lu had hired an audio editor, Emily Botein, to help her with the project. She and Emily were on the phone, and I would say three lines, and then they would say, “Make this sound less like poetry. You’re reading this too much like a poet.” It was so frustrating! But, in a good way. We had this marathon session, trying to get me to sound less like a poet. It was pretty hilarious, and it was frustrating at the time, but looking back on it, it was really funny. It was because they were approaching it from a very expert position of being producers creating a radio narrative that worked from start to finish. I didn’t know at the time that Lu was thinking of inter-splicing women’s interviews with my own voice. It had to be a very specific delivery. I think they were trying to erase my voice of any affect, which is hard for a poet, even someone as down-to-earth as me. When you have a certain line break or slant rhyme, you have an unconscious desire as a poet to highlight it, I guess.

When Lu put together the multimedia piece, I had already recorded “Women of Troy.” She tried and tried to make my audio work, but something wasn’t clicking. So Lu asked Brenda--who hails from that area and sounds like those women--to read and record the poem. When you hear the piece, it’s Brenda’s voice you hear, and I think it works. I didn’t quite know how to feel about it at first. I felt a little bit of ownership of the piece, but once I played it and sat with it, I realized it was the right choice. I think poets and really all of us have an attachment—maybe it’s the cult of the author era that we are in—to the idea that the author has some ultimate authority over the work. You think you know what it’s supposed to sound like or mean, and this was an instance where that boundary was crossed and challenged for the better.

I learned that—surprise!--someone else can do a better job than me with my own work. The collaboration opened me up to more possibilities for how the poem can sound--the way I think about it may not be the best way. It was a very, very good lesson to learn.

An American Tale

EmilyBloom — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:41:13 +0000

Image Credit: Empire Movies

There has been some controversy—though less than might be expected—about the racial politics of the new Twilight movie, New Moon. I went to see the film the other night and while I was prepared for smoldering gazes, repressed embraces, and some retrograde gender relations, I was not prepared for its representations of race. While several critics have protested the casting of predominately non-Native American actors in Native American roles, far less comment has been made about the portrayal of Native American characters as bare-chested pack animals that morph into wolves when they become angry. The main character in this storyline is Jacob Black who falls in love with Bella Swan and then comes down with puberty-induced werewolfism. He and the other wolves are all members of the Quileute tribe, which long ago signed a territorial treaty with the vampires. Sound familiar?

Image Credit: www.newmoonmovie.org

The storyline reminds me of a 19^th century Irish genre called the “national tale” in which national identity is allegorized as the choice between an English and an Irish mate. The heroine or hero’s choice becomes an allegory for national identity: should the nation embrace its indigenous roots or reach outwards towards Englishness? In New Moon, Bella is seemingly rejected by her urbane vampire beau Edward Cullen and becomes increasingly attracted to Jacob. While the story is simple, or simply formulaic, enough, I wondered how allegorically we are meant to read Bella’s choice between the vampiric cosmopolitans and the animalized locals? To further complicate and more firmly allegorize this love plot, the final scenes of the novel take Bella to Europe, which appears to be the origin point of vampire culture and home to the Volturi vampires. Compared to the blood-sucking European monsters, the American Cullen vampires seem models of restraint and compassion. Wedged between the Volturi and the Quileute, Edward and Bella seem to articulate a particularly American version of the national tale.

Image Credit: Screen Shot IMDB

In Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s blog post, “The Politics of Wizards and Vampires,” she argues that Stephanie Myers’ Twilight books represent a particularly right-wing fantasy world. While Valdes-Rodriguez clearly articulates the religious components of conservativism in the novel, I would add that the story also demonstrates conservative values in its representation of national identity. As an American national tale that rejects both European and Native-American identities, the Edward-Bella romance is also a romance of American exceptionalism.

Miss Landmine Angola

John Jones — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:11:59 +0000

Miss Landmine Angola is an art project by Morten Traavik designed to raise awareness for Angolan landmine survivors. Here’s the Miss Landmine Manifesto:

* Female pride and empowerment.
* Disabled pride and empowerment.
* Global and local landmine awareness and information.
* Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity-historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.
* Question established concepts of physical perfection.
* Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.
* Celebrate true beauty.
* Replace the passive term ‘Victim’ with the active term ‘Survivor’

And have a good time for all involved while doing so!

The project is complicated, seeing as it is based on the controversial beauty-contest model, but it might serve as a useful classroom example for talking about the body and the ways it can be represented.

via: Boing Boing

1 film=6 Bob Dylans

Justin Tremel — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:02:55 +0000

Director Tod Haynes has a new movie opening that has been described as a biopic on Bob Dylan. Unlike traditional biopics, however, Dylan is played by six, yes that's right six different actors. This film is intriguing in a number of ways, as explored in a lengthy New York Time Magazine Artilce, but it is especially interesting considering its unique visual aspects:

"Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand....And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan."

This film which construes Dylan as a six-actor-composite and shifts through a coterie of directorial modes and homages from Fellini to Pennebaker will surely be rich ground for studying the visual rhetoric of public persona, celebrity, popular artistry, etc...