Gender issues

Article about the movie "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C05EEDF143AF933A15754C0A9679C8B63

The body in action

"AFTER A WHILE I HAD TO FACE THE FACT THAT A PERSON ISN’T JUST A BODY, A PERSON IS A THINKING, FEELING, CONFUSED, WORRIED, NERVOUS, FEARFUL BEING.”

------ Vito Acconci

Each time period has its unique character. That why Maurice Berger asks: "why was 'theatrical'space and time so important for artists in the 1960s?"  During that time, so many things coming up: black power, gay and lesbian, women' right, students' right, and left anti-war movement. During that time, Vito Acconci was one of the most influencial  artist.  He interesting in performing his body, focus on activity in his body art work, that makes his work powerful and more straight forward.

Seedbed

I think most of Acconci's works can  only be produced in 1960's.  I post his major works here. 

Opening

In "Opening", he says: "I am opening part of my body". He wants both open himself to us and to protect himself from our gaze. 

Trappings

trademarks

Claim

Remote Control

Performance-The Creation of Identity

The concept of identity is constructed by the ‘acts’ played out in ones life. Judith Butler, in the article, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory discusses the significance of acts in ones perception of self. Perception plays a significant role in establishing societal ‘norms or taboos’, which contribute to determining ones identity.

Embodiment is an ‘active process’; a sense of being. The concept of embodiment is filled with possibilities, engages in interactions with others, as well as takes action independently. However, as people do not live in isolation, neither is the action completed in solitude. As humans we never fully determine ourselves, as history plays a significant role in establishing how we define our self.

In the discussion of gender, as a sense of body, one can not exclude the discussion of appearance, as well as the physical attribute, which establishes one’s gender, in society. The identification of gender, in the context of the model of phenomenology model ignites a discussion of cultural identity, in general. Identity is a created reality, whether referring to gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. This creation occurs when the immediate culture and those in the periphery have defined the ‘norm’. However, defining ones self also includes the perception of others. The body is considered a boundary and gender is a construction.

The contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE does not address issues of gender identification, but instead the performative acts of defining national and racial identity. Shonibare, spent the formative years in Lagos, Nigeria. Eventually he relocated to London to earn his BFA and MFA. This is significant because he doesn’t feel he can be identified as African or European. He uses the “African” cloth to discuss themes of a created sense of being African, via wearing the imported batik style cloth. The wearing of the cloth is apart of the performance of establishing one’s identity on the continent and abroad. This would not be successful if the historical and societal norms didn’t pre-exist. The use of cloth demonstrates the theatrical performance of acts and the acceptance of the ‘audience’ and appropriating other cultural traditions for their own. Performance acts of feminism and gender can be played on life’s stage. Like Shonibare, the audience has to be an active participant in the performance of identity creation.

Gender Trouble: Introducing Ms. Vaginal Davis

Of Dada and Dr. Davis
By Hilary E. Macgregor 
May 02, 2004
Los Angeles Times

He starts the day at 6:30 a.m. in boy drag -- khakis, a black T-shirt -- standing at a bus stop on Hollywood Boulevard like a veteran commuter, a newspaper tucked neatly under his arm.
He finishes the day at 3 a.m. in flapper drag -- white drop-waist dress, an auburn bob -- standing on a tiny stage in West Hollywood, spinning jazz records, singing and spewing subversive social critique.
This latest persona, the flapper, is Bricktop. Over the years he has also been Clarence, the white supremacist militiaman; Graciela Grejalba, a 13 1/2-year-old cholita; Cicciolina, the Italian porn star turned parliamentarian; and the Rt. Rev. St. Salicia Tate, itinerant preacher woman. He is way beyond "drag queen." He is a one-man psycho-socio-sexual revolution. As one academic who studies him has put it, this is "terrorist drag."
Who is he? For the purposes of everyday life, for this story, he is Vaginal Creme Davis. Ms. Davis. Dr. Davis. (His friends call him Vag, but refer to him as "her.") Performance artist, painter, writer, singer, filmmaker, poet, conversationalist.
Who is Vaginal Davis?
"Who is Vaginal Davis?" he says. "I don't know."
IN THE PAST 25 YEARS VAGINAL DAVIS HAS produced an astounding body of work that few outside the demi-monde, or academia, will ever see. He is what an artist used to be, before the '80s made them market stars and the '90s made them eternal grad students: He lives for his art. He is incapable of selling out. And he is all but unknown.
Davis came of artistic age in the L.A. punk scene of the '70s. He appeared in Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro's "Hustler White" and has made his own socially blasphemous films, such as "The White To Be Angry," which is studied by art students across the country. He has started rock bands such as the Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita! the Female Menudo, and Pedro, Muriel & Esther (P.M.E.). He has produced a series of 'zines, including his most well-known, Fertile La Toyah Jackson, which chronicled scandalous celebrity gossip in a manner reminiscent of Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon." One of his short stories, whose title cannot be printed here, was included in "Best American Erotica 2003." And for the past year he has performed every Friday at the Parlour in West Hollywood, where he plays Ada "Bricktop" Smith, the real-life redheaded African American vaudevillian and jazz impresario who owned eponymous nightclubs from Paris to Harlem to Mexico City.

Occasionally Davis pokes through into mainstream cultural consciousness, as when he appeared in PBS' "Tales of the City" or as a Santa in drag on the short-lived ABC series "Gideon's Crossing." Or, more recently, when he opened for Margaret Cho on her "The Notorious C.H.O." tour. Sometimes his name slips into gossip columns alongside bona fide celebrities, as when "drag queen Dr. Vaginal Davis" appeared in the New York Times and New York Daily News after he grabbed Gwyneth Paltrow at the Roxy, kissed her on the lips and squealed repeatedly, "You are a beautiful white woman!" Earlier this year several of his paintings were included in "Fade (1990-2003)," the Craft and Folk Art Museum's survey of African American artists in Los Angeles.

But Davis is far better known among his global cult following, the sort of people who might know he's the singer on the club hit "I Could Have Sex" by Technova and is featured on the group's coming album "Electrosexual."
"Vag is the most famous not-famous person in L.A.," says Susan Matheson, a.k.a. Crepe Suzette, a friend and costume designer for films. "I think Vag is aware of popular culture before it is popular. I feel like she is the Annie Warhol of our time."
Jose Esteban Munoz, a professor in the department of performance studies at New York University, has studied Vaginal Davis, written papers on him and put him on the cover of his book "Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics." He considers Davis a "conceptual artist" in the Dada tradition.
"It's all about concept," Munoz says. "The execution is fine, but the concepts are great. She is all concept, all the time, starting with her answering machine. I could give you a history of performance art that would start with Dada and Surrealism and end with Vag. Her 'zines are like the manifestos associated with Dada and the Surrealists."
--
''Who am I and where do I come from?'' Mr. Davis said as he made himself up on a recent Friday before his show. Chugging the first of many beers at the Hollywood house of one of the Parlour Club's owners, he referred to himself as an ''alcoholica,'' and offhandedly claimed to be the offspring of a half-Creole, half-Choctaw New Orleans woman and a Mexican-born Jew, allegedly conceived during an assignation beneath a table at a Ray Charles concert in the Hollywood Palladium. ''Doll, there is no biography of me,'' he said.

''I was hatched a half-breed drag baby out of the primordial ooze of L.A.,'' he added later, as the bar filled up and patrons thronged around to hear him speak in tongues. ''I was a Vagisaurus rex who popped out of a leathery egg in a welfare hovel in South Central, perfect as you now find me, complete with high heels.''

Constituting gender through perfomative acts

Check out this commercial which supports Judith Butler's essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0LgJo9Do-8

Site Insistence

Although Miwon Kwon has written "site-specific works, as they first emerged in the wake of Minimalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s..." (p. 85), I would have to question if site-specific works have not been around since the beginnings of humankind.

The Old Kingdom pharaohs from circa 2500 BCE were pretty insistent on their site. It HAD to be on the West bank of the Nile. It HAD to be located in the necropolis Valley of the Kings. It HAD to face East. Had the builders or architects in any way shape or form deviated from these requirements, I'm sure it would have been off with their heads.


The Romans were just as insistent as the Egyptians.


Monuments to the emperors (and his family), like Hadrian's Mausoleum, had to be built in the round (pun intended) and it had to be specifically located outside the city walls.

It's easy to forget that St. Peter's was once a site specifically placed in the periphery only because it has taken center stage today.

St. Peter's site is additionally important because it was also a sacred site where he was martyred. The sacredness of A Specific Site took on unprecedented frenzy during the medieval and Gothic times with the construction of the absolutely grandiose and monumental structures of the cathedrals.

We have always insisted on a specific site. Which is why my 80 year old aunt (not unlike kings and presidents) in Korea would have never considered purchasing her house without consulting the geomancy specialislt.

If our global society has "unanchored" us such that meanings of specific sites are being challenged and questioned by sculptural artists such as Antony Gormley (whom I will discuss further next Thursday), where the body has become its own justifiable site, is there a need for specific place anymore?

My own answer would have to be a contemplative yes. The most memorable sites seem to be those that are connected to memory and significant in personal and/or public history.



Humans have literally built one city upon an existing one, not always due to lack of space. This seems understandable and even valid for it is our innate desire to connect (physically, mentally, emotionally) new identities and emerging histories to our past identities and memories.

One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity

In Miwon Kwon's essay on site specificity, we realize that there were a multiplicity of ideas within the movement of site specific art in the 1960s and 1970s.

In looking at "Tilted Arc," by the minimal artist, Richard Serra,  we see a structure that was created for the Federal Plaza in New York, a specific site with specific physical elements; (height, length, depth). It was grounded. It held a "presence." The viewer was necessary to complete its experience. The site specific work merged with the site of the installation. Serra deemed the two were inseparable, " to move the work would be to destroy the work." When the public found the work to be too intimidating and feared it could be used as a place of hiding for wrong doers, the sculpture had to come down. But indeed, rather than it being moved to a new site, the 120 foot long structure was destroyed.

The Conceptual artists of the 60's developed a somewhat different model of site specificity. 

The Conceptualists were challenging the politics of the white cube, (ie; gallery space, museum space, etc). They insisted the white cube functioned with a hidden motive of "idealism,"and power of the elitists. One of their intents was to expose this ideology within the gallery space.

The institutions maintained that their white walls were neutral and allowed for the autonomy of the work. Conceptualists took exception to this notion, believing that the ideology of the institutions was what had been whitewashed. As the pedestals of sculpture had been knocked down, the walls were about to be exposed, as well as the power of the elite and their influence over the artists who embodied those spaces.   

In Ilya Kabakov's painting we see people looking into the inside of the white cube. 

Conceptual artist Hans Haacke's "Condensation," calls attention to the gallery space it is in. The gallery site can no longer pretend to be hidden. The content of the art is inseparable from the site and embodies the phenomenology of the culture.

Site-specific again shifted. Robert Barry and the Constructivists pushed it toward the dematerialized and de-esthetic.

The site became a "functional site," a site of information, text, video, photographs...."It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus." 

Kwon tells us that the "operative definition of the site has been transformed from a physical location-grounded, fixed, actual- to a discursive vector...." 

We move away from the literal interpretation of site as one specific site, anchored in place, as it embodies political, economical and ecological ideas.  

In Robin Lasser's  "The Ice Queen: Glacial Retreat Dress," she meshes site and ecological and political idea with performance. It takes on a nomadic specificity. She moves from Mount Shasta with her Glacial Queen to the downtown streets of San Jose's Zero 1 festival. The viewer walks beneath her dress tent. The every day becomes a performance. The following day she is gone.

"Site specific" has made multiple shifts, from the idea of permanence, as Serra demanded, to impermanence. Site specific work no longer seeks to be a noun but a verb. The process has become the content. It no longer (necessarily) grounds itself in one place. As it has become "dematerialized," and "de-estheticized," the presence of the artist has become even more significant. "The presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects," one place after another.