viz. - performance

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation

David A. Harper — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:45:27 +0000

Hacked Leviathan Frontispiece. Image Credit: David A. Harper

In the coffee shop where I ‘m writing, there are two large bulletin boards in a high-traffic area (the hallway leading to the restrooms). We all know how bulletin boards and advertising work: once a provocative image draws you in, the text informs you, proselytizes you, or sells something to you. On a well-used board layers upon layers of images vie for attention, each individual post contributing to an unintentional artistic whole. Gathered on the same bulletin board, even the most antagonistic images are put into dialog as the physical wooden frame becomes a conceptual one. We find patterns in the noise. These old-fashioned bulletin boards have been on my mind this week while I explored the high-tech virtual pinboards of Pinterest.

Our predisposition to find order when confronted with a variety of images reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the “perspective glass” metaphor in Leviathan. These quaint seventeenth-century devices made one coherent (and often surprising) image out of a variety of disparate ones. In Leviathan, Hobbes claims that “passion and self-love” act as perspective glasses in reverse, making every obligation imposed by the state seem a multitude of divergent grievances, whereas “moral and civil science” act as a perspective glass properly reducing a multitude of potential miseries into one less-obnoxious obligation to the state (XVIII.20). Similar to well-constructed perspective glass images, Pinterest invites us to make meaning from a variety of images organized by users of the social media site. Displaying a variety of images, a Pinterest user invites an audience to decipher a composite image of self. However, while the perspective glass contained a lens carefully calibrated to reveal the underlying composite image, Pinterest leaves that task to the viewer.

Image Credit: www.toutfait.com

Pinterest is the latest social media addition to an ever-more layered palimpsest of media revising older forms of authorship. Email transformed the epistolary art. The personal webpage gave individuals a bully-pulpit. Facebook and its competitors created a hybrid of webpage, text-messaging, and email to allow people to engage in an ever-evolving conversation or exhibitionist performance. Now, Pinterest has created an online commonplace or scrap book. Pinterest users fill virtual corkboards with images from the web (or from other user’s boards), using it like a visual Twitter account. It is a new, visually-centered performance space that encourages self-representation primarily through images.

Image Credit: David A. Harper via Pinterest

In 2008, E.J. Westlake noted that performances of self on Facebook are “energetic engagements with the panoptic gaze: as people offer themselves up to surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms, but always resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects.”[1] Self-representation on Pinterest is both more public and more abstract than the text-based performances of Facebook. It is more public because Pinterest doesn’t allow the same level of audience customization as other social media. Every Pinterest user can view, comment upon, and repin every post. It is more abstract because it is visual. A simple browser plug-in allows users to easily pin any image they find on the web to boards they create and title with names like “Wants,” “Yummies,” or “Books I’ve Read.” Pinboards are categorized by choosing from tags such as “Art,” “Film, Music and Books,” “Cars and Motorcycles,” and “Geek.” A user’s collection of virtual pinboards comes to represent them to the Pinterest community. However, since captions are limited to 500 characters, it is the images rather than text which must bear the interpretive weight.

Like the coffee-shop bulletin board, Pinterest boards create narratives through the juxtaposition of images. However, unlike the unintentional artistry of accretions on a public bulletin board, personal Pinterest boards (not to be confused with those run by bots) are organized by the pinner to perform for the panoptic gaze. Neither linear nor constantly in motion like the Facebook timeline and newsfeed, Pinterest encourages viewers to construct meaning by considering the entirety of a user’s board or boards. And since the majority of the images were not created by the user, the site functions like an early-modern commonplace book into which readers copied out choice quotes from books they had read.

Image Credit: University of British Columbia Press

Just as the quotes in a commonplace book are not creations of the compiler, most images on Pinterest originate from a source outher than the pinner. It is thus not the artistry of the images themselves, but the skillful choice and categorization of them that tell the pinner’s narrative, performing self-representation through appropriation. A recent Mashable Infographic reports that 80% of Pinterest images are repins from other users, compared to Twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweets. Even the 20% of pins that aren’t repins are far more likely to be captured from web pages than to be original creations. The site is designed to encourage this appropriation. When a user repins an image, they not only fit it into their own categorization scheme, but they may enter their own description, replacing previous interpretations of the image with their own.

This mechanism of appropriation by repinning makes Pinterest a formidable advertising tool. Each new pin creates another link pointing back to the original source, increasing potential click-through traffic and the source’s visibility to search-engine algorithms. A quick look at some statistics suggests other reasons marketers love it:

Pinterest ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Pinterest users are predominately female, ages 25-44, and well educated.
The fastest growing categories on Pinterest are “Food,” and “Style and Fashion.”

Image Credit: Bansky

Pinners aren’t only creating representations of self, but they are also sometimes unwittingly tailoring online catalogs driving traffic to ecommerce sites. An ecommerce company that sells home furnishings told CNBC that customers directed to their site from Pinterest spend 70% more than those from other social media. The Pinterest consumer has seen the product contextualized within another pinner’s self-representation (as a “want,” a “need,” a “lifestyle,” or perhaps as “art”) and already has a developed desire for the product. By giving product images contexts that integrate them into idealized frames, Pinterest users do the marketers’ work for them more effectively than a store catalog could.

Recently, Pinterest has been in the news because they joined with other social media to discourage content encouraging anorexia or other forms of self-harm. The move was sparked by the alarming number of “thinspiration” posts on the site. But because Pinterest encourages wide-scale appropriation, once an image is pinned it takes on a life of its own. Whatever contextualization was granted the image by its original caption and categorization may be obliterated or reversed by the first repin. Images that were pinned as part of an “anti-thinspiration” board may be re-categorized by the next pinner as “thinspiration” itself. Context may be everything, but on Pinterest it is transient at best, as the images themselves quickly become orphaned texts uprooted from any single, fixed context.

Image Credit: GrandForksHerald.com

In Leviathan, Hobbes defined “wit” as the ability to observe similitude and combine disparate things, while “judgment” was the ability to differentiate (VIII.3). Pinterest provides a rich field where we can exercise these faculties, both while gathering images and whether we are viewing a friend’s board or Barack Obama’s. Ultimately, meaning becomes a collaboration between the gatherer and the viewer; however, as the viewer becomes the gatherer, images that once formed part of our composite self-image drift across the landscape of Pinterest and the web, providing someone else raw material to use as they fashion their own self.

Works Cited

[1] Westlake, E.J. "Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance." Drama Review. 52.4 (2008), 23.

Horsing Around: Inside and Out

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:49:48 +0000

Image credit Unknown via f*** yeah, wild horses

Last week I wrote about the curious dual-natured relationship we seem to have with horses. In books and film and popular media horses are situated as both friend, companion, partner and as disposable beast, object, mere chattel. Last week, too, I teased the case of Jasha Lottin and the relationship she had with a horse. Her story is surprisingly simple at first blush. Lottin and her friend bought a 32-year-old, near-dead horse already scheduled to be euthanized. They shot it in the head with a high powered rifle—apparently killing it instantly and painlessly. Then Lottin, a nudist and Star Wars fan, staged a photo shoot featuring her and the now-dead horse. Throughout the following post I’ll be discussing her pictures with the horse. They are excessively gory; there is some nudity. Discretion advised. Not safe for work content after the break.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin is tucked into the now emptied out horse—Skywalker style. Its organs and blood are splayed out on the ground; she has replaced them. Her smiling face pokes out near its back legs. There’s no certainty of the horse’s sex, but in either case she takes the place of its genitals. These photos, especially those with Lottin tucked inside, trend towards neither horse nor human but instead a combination of the two. They’re, together, an inverted centaur composed upon and within the body of a horse. The combination is, as we must be sure to remember, not equal. Even though she has positioned herself within the horse, in its belly, its Lottin that consumed the horse both figuratively and literally.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

There is something strange about these images of her eating some bit of the horse. Last week I wrote about Daenerys’ ritualistic consumption of the horse heart. She was glistening and bloody, and while she and the heart were prominent there was no horse to be seen. Lottin’s consumption, though, doesn’t have nearly the same pop, the same flare. Her bloody hands look like they were dipped in red corn syrup; the piece of horse she tugs on seems small and insignificant. The banality of her representation forces the viewer to actively recall the embodied reality of her act. These photos point toward an actual woman and an actual horse and actual death.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Throughout almost all of the photos Lottin wears a broad grin. Here Lottin and her unnamed friend are posing with the horse’s heart. Both grinning, they hold the heart up in what must be a pretty common hunter’s-fresh-kill-trophy pose (I’ve taken any number of such pictures while fishing). Her constant grin is one of the most intriguing aspects of these pictures. There’s no sense of gravity, no notion of sadness or remorse or really any hint that this entire event is anything but lark. It should be noted that after posting these photos Lottin was reported to the authorities; after investigating they found that she broke no laws. What I think people found so shocking, though, was her smile. Because of that smile—a fixed photo smile, unconscious, reflexive, ubiquitous—there isn’t any real room for anything but the snap acknowledgement of these photos as simple snap shots of (what many saw to be) grotesque activity.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin stands naked and covered in blood, perhaps having just emerged from inside the dead horse. This photo, though, subverts any sense of hybridization or actual relationship between Lottin and the horse. She has killed the animal and eaten it and played within it, but still there’s nothing but a facile connection. The blood remains on the surface as she looks down at the dead horse as nothing more than a hollowed out prop. What is there here to separate her from the spectacle of the films written about last week? Her horse, though specifically killed in order to make the photos, is little more than a prop.

Image credit Ars Electronica 2011 via New Scientist

Next week I’ll be looking at a different kind of horsey performance. In 2011 Marion Laval-Jeantet undertook a piece of performance art that explored the possibilities of a more substantial, embodied, relationship with a horse.

Sensual Suicide and Ironic Intent - Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth's "Freeze! Revisited"

Cate Blouke — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:42:01 +0000

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

H/T to Ben Koch

Since the 1950s, the pop art movement has been challenging our ideas about mass-produced images and objects. Particularly by manipulating context, pop artists identify and exploit cultural trends. In a recent exhibition, two German artists explored the intersections of art, violence, and mistaken identities.

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

The “guns” in these images are actually just gun-shaped popsicles. Even with contextualization, the images are striking, primarily because they reverse my expectations. The sensuality of the young woman contrasts ironically with her (essentially) suicidal pose. Given the other people in the background and the incongruity of her expression, it’s easier to disassociate the image with the potential violence it depicts.

The vending machine look of the freezer (above) provides an interesting commentary on contemporary issues of mass-produced violence and the widespread availability of weaponry. I don’t know much about gun politics in Germany, so maybe I’m just reading my own political views onto it. However, images from this project were featured in an issue of as|peers (an American Studies journal) that focused on America and Crime.

These images come from "Freeze! Revisted," the second version of Valentin Beinroth and Florian Jenett’s “Freeze” project. In the first project the ice guns were flavorless, not intended for consumption but just to “look real on first sight.” The artists enacted realistic situations with the ice guns and then discarded them in various places around Frankfurt – until the performances were stopped by the police.

For “Freeze! Revisited,” the edible ice guns were handed out to visitors. Whereas the first project left little visible record, this version resulted in an exciting archive of images.

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

On the whole, I found the project delightfully morbid, and most of the images amused me thoroughly. The photo of the little boy, however, I find rather disturbing. Standing alone and gazing earnestly at the camera, the boy reverses the gaze and thereby implicates the spectator. Directly connecting youth and violence, this image loses the sense of irony that the project otherwise invokes.

Or, perhaps, irony was never the goal. The artists’ websites are largely written in German (which I don’t understand). So this brings up the interesting question of intentionality, especially across cultural divides. Is my reading of these images as anti-gun, pro-gun-control any less valid though the “text” is German and I’m American? Were these ever meant to be ironic? Or were they intended to shock instead of amuse? Does intentionality even matter if I can’t access it?

Visualizing (Post-)Racial Protest and Politics

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:25:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T: Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.” Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill. What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

I was fortunate to recently attend a talk at the University of Texas’s John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies given by Dr. Soyini Madison on the topic of “White Anger, Crazy Patriotism, and (Post) Black Performativity.” In this talk, Dr. Madison discussed how what she refers to as “crazy patriotism,” which she accounts for as something like a sacred belief in nationalist ideology, first projected their frustrations onto Michelle Obama to portray her as an angry black woman who hates America (as seen on a New Yorker cover previously discussed on viz.), then re-appropriated it as a righteous anger that seeks to preserve American values. This discussion seemed relevant for viz. readers if only because Dr. Madison constantly referred to the visual “momification” of Michelle Obama on newspaper stands nationwide.

Image Credit: Jezebel

Jezebel’s recent post on her magazine covers notes how frequently she likes to pose with her hands clasped:

Why do so many Mobama covers feature the First Lady with her hands demurely clasped? Deliberate signaling of her approachability? Or is it just how she likes to pose? What does it all mean?

Jezebel is clearly onto something here: the pearls she wears, along with her clasped hands, her manicured nails, and the apple on the table all serve to portray the First Lady as a suburban middle-class mom whose causes and views are all as wholesome as the organic foods she grows in her home garden. Yet while some have criticized her for this momification, Madison points out how this particular post-black identity allows the Obamas to displace crazy patriotism yet still maintain race as a part of the discussion. (It’s interesting to consider how her image helps sell magazines as a note, though—she helps sell magazines directed at African-Americans, but “doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift” for general-interest publications.)

The question that I think can come from pairing together what seems like two different discourses is to see how the visuals of post-raciality still lean on racially encoded signifiers. Just as refried beans serve as shorthand to identity an angry Hispanic speaker, Michelle is dressed and posed to present a nonthreatening blackness to viewers.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” We can see in these images that while some commentators and Tea Partiers might argue that this law doesn’t involve racial profiling and that Obama is not subject to racist attacks, racism and its legacy remain problems with which we must cope—especially when people are already being arrested according to this law's logic.

Girls Just Want to Party in the USA (and Boys, Too!)

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:21:09 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture. Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week. I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Marisa Meltzer, in a blog post called “Video Vixens: Spice Boys and Barbie Men,” groups together several YouTube clips that feature young men lip-synching to songs made by women. Meltzer wrote a book called Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, which claims that bands like the Spice Girls helped popularize the empowering message of riot grrrls for both men and women. Speaking of clips that include covers of artists like Shakira, Taylor Swift, and Aqua, she writes:

There's something very joyous and celebratory about girlhood in all of these songs. They can express, in a kind of candy-colored way, excitement, heartache, and pride of being a girl. I don't think boys who film themselves lipsynching are making fun of us girls, though. I think this is a way of expressing some kind of homage to us and our music. I'm not sure there's an equivalent for boys—that is, music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy, which is perhaps why so many guys are so happy to post themselves singing along.

Watching the clip of the young men lip-synching to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” does make me feel quite a bit of joy:

However, I’m not sure I can totally accept Meltzer’s reading here. Homage may be a part of the Taylor Swift cover, for example, but this version isn’t acknowledging Lauper’s popular song (and its own memorable video) so much as re-envisioning it. The shirtless male bodies rolling around in the bed enact a kind of queer performance of which the gay icon Lauper would probably approve. We as an audience see the singer hump a car and a friend put a whole banana in his mouth to perform a sexuality that the song insists is for “girls,” but which the male performers co-opt for themselves. The men here look manly, but not manly in the heterosexual way of the Abercrombie-attired boys who lipsync and dance their way through Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

The same queer aesthetic seems to be part of the semi-famous lip-synch cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” which Meltzer did not include in her post:

These men here lay on the beach here in their highly colored bathing trunks to purposefully camp up their performance of the Disney teen’s song. As they try to surf in their blow-up swimming pool while wearing colorful Ray-Bans, I can’t help but want to take part in their fun. The fact that they tag it as “Party in the FIP” makes the queer connection explicit (as Fire Island is a notorious gay vacation spot) as well as its intent to be a transformative performance.

The homemade aesthetic that these videos share, whether filmed on Flip cameras or in front of iMacs, incorporates a call for authenticity of a particular kind. Each of these artists attempts to construct himself for his YouTube audiences by following the common models of other viral videos, but in these works each works to condition that performance through girl’s pop music. This isn’t to say that this qualifies the kind of masculinity, but draws our attention to the process of its construction in lo-fi and high-fi ways.

I can agree with Meltzer that this is all in good fun, but this seems to be more than just tribute. There may not be “music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy,” but it’s not like popular culture lacks an attention to teen boys (see: Harry Potter). These clips instead seem to be doing another kind of cultural work, hopefully one in which we can all join in.

For Your Oral-tainment or Not?: The Politics of Adam Lambert’s AMA Performance

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:39:58 +0000

Image Credit: Towleroad

H/T: Noel Radley

While usually I’m good at keeping up on my pop culture news, I’m grateful to Noel for giving me a tip about American Idol star Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards of his new song “For Your Entertainment.” As can be seen in the above image, Lambert aggressively performed his homosexuality in the number, including simulated oral sex, men on leashes, and an unplanned make-out session with one of the members of his band.

(I’m including a link to the video, with apologies if it’s pulled from YouTube before you can view it.)

While Lambert denied any explicit political intent in an interview with CNN after the performance, he did describe “a double standard in the entertainment community … I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope sexually for the past 20 years. And all of the sudden a male does it and everybody goes, ‘Oh, we can't show that on TV.’ For me, that's a form of discrimination and a double standard.” Certainly a brief search on Google provides evidence for this argument: artists like Janet Jackson and Madonna have engaged in sexy performances of the same kind as Lambert’s. While I’m not trying to suggest that the Madonna-Britney kiss wasn’t controversial—far from it—part of the negative reaction surrounding Lambert’s performance is in all likelihood related to the fact that he is a gay man simulating homosexual acts on broadcast television, where Glee’s Kurt hasn’t even managed to get a boyfriend.

Image Credit: Towleroad

What I find particularly interesting about the performance in terms of defining Lambert as sexual is that it occurs within a larger controversy about how Lambert has not represented his homosexuality. The controversy surrounding his recent photo shoot in Details and his inclusion in the OUT100 have both centered around what has been seen as Lambert’s refusal to be “too gay” in the media. Lambert is involved in constructing a sexualized image for himself, but one whose orientation is unclear. However, as a popular media figure and as a gay man, what is Lambert’s responsibility to perform his sexuality in the public sphere? Does he have the right to claim privacy for his sexuality at the same time as he flaunts sex? Perhaps the AMA performance can be read as a rhetorical reaction to OUT Magazine editor Aaron Hicklin who asked Lambert to follow “a path that’s honest and true” as a gay pioneer—or maybe it’s just only for our entertainment.

Meat Joy

dsmith — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:16:43 +0000

Carolee Schneeman’s controversial sixties-era films remain to my mind some of the most visually provocative reflections on the “deep and meaningless” facets of life during that turbulent period. Meat Joy (1964), made during an era of U. S. Cold War propaganda, Vietnam War escalation, and multiple political assassinations, celebrates flesh in a context that, at first, may seem anachronistic. And yet, American military and economic claims on the world provided artists of the period a safe space to reflect on the body and cultural taboos associated with libidinal experience.

Today, Meat Joy is a delight to view. The French voices and Dylan-esque harmonica background provide a feeling of joie de vivre that correlates with the playful embraces of scantily clad women and men. When processed fish, chicken, and sausage enter this orgy, I thought, okay, Schneeman is going to drive the metaphor down our throats (maybe not literally, but close enough). But visually, the performance remains so compact, visually kinetic and complex, and surprisingly light-hearted, that the gesture of, say, a fish, squeezed up tight between a young woman’s thighs, is, well, marvelous to behold in this context.

Schneeman’s argument, however, materializes the body—bringing it out of our minds, where too often it exists in submission to social and cultural ideals. By recontextualizing bodies on a stage in orgiastic abandon to the performative moment, the arms, legs, and torsos we see give definition to the space around them, and ask viewers to see bodies at play as they explore tabooed social boundaries.

Fuses (1967), by contrast, presents bodies in a much more intimate, domestic setting. With only ambient beach sounds to supplement the 22-minute, 16 mm film, the intimacy between Schneeman and her lover, James Tenney, is mediated through frequent narrative cuts, image-layers, and post-production manipulation of the celluloid itself. Despite the occasional glistening, post-coital cock, Fuses distances the audience from an experience of literal fucking. Instead, viewers witness an argument for how sexuality can be internalized and reflected on as an experience of the mind as well as of the body. If anything, the film is grounded in a mimesis that recalls the mental state during sex, with rapid image juxtapositions, visual submission to the body, ambient sources of light through a window, intrusions from a pet cat, and glimpses of the face of the other.

While the argument is made in a specifically hetero-context, the intrusion of ecstatic otherness often experienced in sexual intimacy is revealed here, making this a unique, and valuable, film about an area of life that typically remains hidden from popular view. Unlike pornography, which is about manipulating the image-as-product, aiming stylized sexual acts at a particular audience’s desire for physical gratification, Fuses, with its gorgeous shifts of light over the room and textured visual tableau, invites speculation from viewers on attitudes about sexuality, bodies, and expressive, if unconscious, forms.

I find films such as these compelling because they challenge our notions of suasion in the epideictic mode. Without explicit narratives—or even spoken arguments—we are left with the performative gestures of the visual frames of the films themselves.

The inconsistency of Easter imagery

Brett Ommen — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:48:04 +0000

Easter is one of those odd holy days turned secular holidays that creates a lot of incongruous images. Why do we have baskets with marshmallow bunnies instead of a nougat filled crucifix? Perhaps it is that kind of visual confusion that lead a group of protestors to create a new kind of visual Easter mix up.

On Sunday , a group calling themselves Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War stood up in Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral right before Cardinal Francis George’s homily and sprayed stage blood on themselves and other worshipers. The gaps between visual display and reality are as confused here as they are between the Easter story and Peeps.

The problem, in my estimation, is that the protestors assumed a kind of visibility that exists in a vacuum. The image of protestors covered in fake blood, while perhaps a bit cliché, is powerful. It forces people to imagine bloodshed in everyday life to call attention to the real bloodshed war-torn nations experience. The protestors’ choice of venue was in some ways a wise one. The press was on hand to cover the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Easter celebrations, and so a broad kind of exposure was guaranteed. And so if good visual performance were limited to the creation of a powerful image that has a strong channel of circulation, this protest would have been a success. But visual communication, being communication, needs to recognize the other contingencies of meaning production.

The Catholic Church, by way of the global voice of the Pope and the national voice of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been clear in its opposition to the war. The setting of Holy Name Cathedral, then, serves as perhaps the most incongruous location for this protest. What’s more, the Chicago area has experienced a few high profile acts of public violence in recent months along with the unfortunately typical violence of urban life. And so a Catholic Church in Chicago is doubly problematic as the setting for this protest. The failure to recognize the setting that serves as a backdrop for the visual protest causes all kinds of problems for the protestors and undercuts their message. Some of the protestors suggested that the setting was appropriate because Cardinal George has visited with President Bush, but that line of reasoning suggests that leaders who disagree with the President over issues relating to the war should avoid him, and that indicates a certain lack of faith in the prospects of communication. Of course, if I were as poor at communicating as the Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, I suppose I’d have a certain lack of faith in the prospects of communication as well.