Identity 04/11/11

- Look at historical conceptions of identity

- Foucaults and Cavallero, discourse analysis

- Baumans theory of identity

Essentialism was the traditional approach.

It talks about the biological - the inner essence.

It denies changing sexuality or gender, it is related to physiognomy and phrenology

It seems to often legitimise racism.

Post-Modern theorists deny this and are therefore Anti-Essentialist.

Nietzche wrote Man and Superman, which inspired Hitlers Arean race.

Chris Ofilis works deal with his identity as a black man.

His "virgin mary" painting caused some controversy, as she was depicted as black and as a large pile of elephant dung. It looks as though she is also surrounded by bums and vaginas. It was removed from an exhibition at the Tate.

Chris Ofili - "Virgin Mary" - image

Pre-Modern identity was defined by long standing roles in society. "secure identity" There was little movement up or down the social ladder. There were defined by institutions such as marriage, school, class.

To every position such as farm worker, soldier, factory worker, housewife, gentleman there was a related institutional agency with a vested interest in keeping people where they were.

 

Farm-worker ……….  landed gentry

The Soldier  …….  The state

The Factory Worker…  Industrial capitalism

The Housewife……  patriarchy

The Gentleman….  patriarchy
Husband-Wife (family)…..  Marriage/church

Baudelaire introduces the "the flaneur" or the gentleman stroller. His clothes and act of being out for leisure set him in high society.

Simmels trickle down theory is introduced. The lower classes buy cheap imitations of upper class fashion.

The idea of the bubble up theory is now evident, the upper classes wear trends that have come from the lower classes. For example, baggy clothes were made fashionable in poorer areas where it was logical to buy looser fitting clothes so people would grow into them. Rips in jeans, paint and bleach on clothes etc etc.

‘The feeling of isolation is rarely as decisive and intense when one actually finds oneself physically alone,

as when one is a stranger without relations, among many physically close persons, at a party, on the train, or

in the traffic of a large city’- George Simmel

Simmel suggests that because of the speed and mutability of modernity,

individuals withdraw into themselves to find peace. He describes this as

‘the separation of the subjective from the objective life.’

Postmodern Identity can be constructed. "The Fragmented Self"

Foucault suggests that identity is constructed out of the discourses available to us.

Cavallero defines discourse as "... a set of recurring statements that define a particular cultural 'object.'

(e.g. madness, criminality, sexuality) and provide concepts and terms through which such an object can be studied and discussed.'

Possible discourses: Age, Class, Gender, Nationality, Race/Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Education, Education, Income

Class, Nationality,

Race / Ethnicity, Sexuality / Gender (otherness)

Class.

definition - 1. there are different classes

                 2. to have class (upperclass)

Children playing with chicken feet - image

women watching shakespeare play - image

men in pub - image

  Humphrey Spender/Mass Observation, Worktown project, 1937

The above photographs were taken by two upperclass photographers.

They are observations of the working class.

The first is taken in a pub, there is question as to whether the guy at the back

is offering a freindly wave or telling them to fuck off.

The second is of two young lads playing with chicken feet.

The third of a small group of people watching a shakespearian reproduction.

Martin Parr - The Last Resort, taken at New Brighton, Merseyside 1983 - 85

Martin Parr - Ascot 2003

‘ “Society” …reminds one of a particularly shrewd,
cunning and pokerfaced player in the game of life,
cheating if given a chance, flouting rules whenever
possible’ Bauman on Identity, 2003

To me, the above photographs are about the class system and the desire to climb the social ladder by imitation of styles and trends and by an ideal being worth more than the actual experience, eg, a day at the beach. This could be nothing more than a class based stereotype?

Nationality

Martin Parr - Think of England 2000 - 2003

Martin Parr - Think of Germany, Berlin 2002

Playing on national stereotypes.

Alexander McQueen - Highland Rape

'Much of the press coverage
centred around accusations
of misogyny because of the
imagery of semi-naked,
staggering and brutalized
women, in conjunction with
the word “rape” in the title. 
But McQueen claimed that
the rape was of Scotland, not
the individual models, as the
theme of the show was the
Jacobite rebellion.'

Evans, C. ‘Desire and Dread: Alexander McQueen and the Contemporary
Femme Fatale’ in Entwistle, J. and Wilson, M., (2001), Body Dressing, Oxford,
Berg, page 202

I appreciate that this show was playing with socio-historical events and ideas but the expectation of an audience to look for and understand a loose metaphor in a piece of visual art seems pretentious and self indulgent. Or maybe its raising awareness of social injustice in the past in order to awaken peoples eyes to it in the present day. Who knows. 

‘I didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney World.  At
Disney World all the countries are much closer together, and
they just show you the best of each country.  Europe is more
boring.  People talk strange languages and things are dirty.
Sometimes you don’t see anything interesting in Europe for
days, but at Disney World something different happens all the
time, and people are happy.  It’s much more fun.  It’s well
designed!’
A college graduate just back from her first trip to Europe, in Papanek, V. (1995), The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, page 139

Race / Ethnicity

Captain Shit and the legend of the Black Stars - Chris Ofili

The painting is mouned on elephant dung, the image is of a black super hero.
Its rare that you see a black superhero, in fact I cant think of one in popular superhero comics.

 Emily Bates created a dress made out of Ginger hair.
 

‘Hair has been a big issue throughout my life… It often felt that I was

nothing more than my hair in other peoples’ eyes’

Emily Bates, Textile Designer/Artist

Gender and Sexuality

‘Edmund Bergler, an American psychoanalyst

writing in the 1950s, went much further, both in

condemning the ugliness of fashion and in relating

it to sex.  He recognised that the fashion industry

is the work not of women, but of men.  Its

monstrosities, he argued, were a “gigantic

unconscious hoax” perpetrated on women by the

arch villains of the Cold War –male homosexuals

(for he made the vulgar assumption that all dress

designers are “queers”).  Having first, in the 1920s,

tried to turn women into boys, they had latterly

expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing

them into exaggerated, ridiculous, hideous clothes’

Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London, I.B. Tauris, page 94

this quote seems to be referring to flapper culture,
dress, hair, blond, smoking, flat-chested, and chic

Sindy Shermans - Untitled Film Stills

examining the female image in the media, the mirror represents vanity, to me she has a daft expression on her face, although its kind of spooky. Like she might be dead. The gaze is directed away from us. The photographer is the model. 

Sarah Lucas - Au Natural

again looking at sexuality and gender. the bucket is funny, but caused controversy.

 The Post-modern condition
Liquid modernity and Liquid Love

•Identity is constructed through our social experience.

•Erving Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)

•Goffman saw life as ‘theatre’, made up of ‘encounters’ and ‘performances’

•For Goffman the self is a series of facades

This is similar to wearing a mask. In councilling and therapy this idea is used to contradict

the idea that the self and solid and people can't change. It can be a comforting and useful concept.

‘Yes, indeed, “identity” is revealed to us only as something to be invented

rather than discovered; as a target of an effort, “an objective"

Zygmunt Bauman 

‘In airports and other public spaces, people with mobile-phone headset attachments walk around, 

talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings.

Introspection is a disappearing act. Faced with moments alone in their cars, on the street or at supermarket 

checkouts, more and more people do not collect their thoughts, but scan their mobile phone messages for

shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want them.’ Andy Hargreaves, 2003

‘We use art, architecture, literature, and the rest, and advertising as well, to
shield ourselves, in advance of experience, from the stark and plain reality in
which we are fated to live’. Theodor Levitt - The Morality (?) of advertising

Post Modern Identity

 "I shop Therefore I am" Barbara Kruger ad campaign for Miss Selfridges

"Buy it it will change your life" Posters etc

“The typical cultural spectator of 

postmodernity is viewed as a largely home 

centred and increasingly solitary player who, 

via various forms of ‘telemediation’ (stereos, 

game consoles, videos and televisions), 

revels in a domesticated (i.e. private and 

tamed) ‘world at a distance’" Darley - 2000, Visual Digital Culture

I have attempted a Foucaudian analysis of faceback that kind of rings with that Darley quote.

 Facebook reduces your social skills by introducing a system that creates the illusion of order and a dualistic approach to relationships. You end up complying to either "we are freinds" or "we are not freinds" approach to it which affects the way you view youre interactions in the real world.
You end up complying to the facebook institution and its values and letting that govern your social life, sometimes to the extent that just becuase a person denies your freind request online you are subject to self disciplinary action such as self-guilt and scrutiny when in the real world there could be many reasons that that person has denied your freind request, ignored your message etc, such as technical faults, human error or misunderstanding.

That could be how through compliance to a system and disciplinary action, facebook turns us into socially docile bodies.

 

‘Fun they may be, these virtual communities, but they create only an illusion of intimacy and a pretence of community’

Charles Handy (2001), The Elephant and the Flea, Hutchinson, page 204

“The notion ‘you are who you pretend to be’ has a mythic
resonance.  The Pygmalion story endures because it
speaks to a powerful fantasy: that we are not limited by our
histories, that we can be recreated or can recreate
ourselves... Virtual worlds provide environments for
experiences that may be hard to come by in the real”

Sherry Turkle (1994), Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality

‘In the brave new world of fleeting chances and frail
securities, the old-style stiff and non-negotiable identities
simply won’t do’

Bauman (2004), Identity, page 27

‘ “Identity” is a hopelessly ambiguous idea and a

double-edged sword.  It may be a war-cry of

individuals, or of the communities that wish to be

imagined by them.  At one time the edge of identity

is turned against “collective pressures” by

individuals who resent conformity and hold dear

their own ways of living (which “the group” would

decry as prejudices) and their own ways of living

(which “the group” would condemn as cases of

“deviation” or “silliness”, but at any rate of

abnormality, needing to be cured or punished’

Bauman (2004), Identity, page 76