CreativeControl.com on Artistic Integrity

http://www.creativecontrol.tv/www/: A mini-series that looks at how artists fight to maintain their integrity without giving in to WACK WORLD!!!

bootLEG CORNER: When Art Worked, Roger Kennedy & David Larkin

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it." --Countee Cullen

While Obama gives his speech on jobs, Roger Kennedy is talking to Diane Rehm about how FDR, through the WPA, saved a place for artists in the New Deal.

Kennedy and David Larkin have just published a reminiscing text about how art--from post office murals to theatre projects to this to that and the third--created an opportunity for artists to get to work.

However, there is the ominous question of censorship--to which Kennedy answers with artistic commentaries of the tenements and sweatshops of the 1930s--graven enough into the national imaginary that we might not flinch, but "Bred'ren can we candidly speak?"

Many are calling in to ask how such a "wonderful program" could dissipate so quickly. Well...I think this may be the answer. As it applies to Black artists, subsidized art has always been the source of great contention and debate. Resources have always been slim, hence the theorem of eternal gratitude --within the history of Black art and literature-- to the Lomaxes, and van Vechtens, and lest we forget the "godmothers."

That being said, there's a strong resistance to the concept of democratically-sponsored art in the first place. But if it weren't for the humble "handout"...<*crickets...> would Black art--much of which risks co-optation (and has suffered co-optation) by public and commercial interests--have the visibility (and vulnerability) it currently enjoys?

There have to be crickets, because at the end of the day every subsidy is owed. Period.

So the real concern I'm having, then, I guess is this:

how do you maintain a critical politcs of Empire, make sure your art never loses its infidelity to Empire, and still spend Empire's so-called money to produce your critiques?

Child, please.

In the meantime, go read this book. And then read about the writers who would ultimately create the Memory project through the WPA's Federal Writers' program. When I find the name of this other book, I'll repost it. It covers the "Harlem Renaissance scene" so to speak, and this is the book that first taught me about rent parties. ;-)

See...that's what Wall Street should've had.

BTW, since we're also facing this Comcast-NBCU deal down its barrel, who senses some juice for independent film, TV, and LIVE theatre???? Anybody? Anybody??

theARCHIVES: Yeah...about that 'Semiotics, Structuralism & Television' by Ellen Seiter

on ELLEN SEITER's
“Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television”

nineteen eighty-seven, 4/2009

I raised the ‘signs’ conversation in writing on [Manthia] Diawara’s piece about identification. More than merely identifying with the characters, the context that that character exists in, the context the program exists in and, drawing from E. Ann Kaplan, how all those elements are constructed must be taken into consideration. Contextualizing the entire unit and the signs represented in the unit—whatever that unit will be—seems directly related to the matter of identification and resistant spectatorship.

Ellen Seiter sums up the ideas of Saussure and Peirce by saying that they “recognized that some signs have no ‘real’ object to which they refer: abstractions (truth, freedom) or products of the imagination (mermaids, unicorns). More important, they wished to argue that all signs are cultural constructs that have taken on meaning through repeated, learned, collective use” (p 34).

Roland Barthes, she says, believed verbal language closes down the number of possible meanings the image might have. She quotes Barthes as saying, “It is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image—we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full term of the informational structure. (…) [T]he text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance” (p. 44).

So if the sign is a collective configuration, and if I employ the five channels of communication that Seiter will modify for application to television, the verbal is indeed informing what denotations I should embrace in receiving the sign of, say, ‘Black female character’ located on ‘XYZ primetime comedy.’ But given the greater context or paradigm of primetime comedies (with Black female characters…), my ‘collectively-informed’ reading of a Black female character is, likely, going to be constructed by very similar “speakers” of the text (McDonald’s interludes), or very similar syntagms (back-to-back ‘urban’ comedies on TV schedule or, over a period of seasons: cancellations - re-airings - unannounced appearances on different nights, etc).

In other words, I have a feeling, via a convenient sampling (2006, The CW, Sunday nights: Everybody Hates Chris > All of Us > Girlfriends > The Game > (America’s Next Top Model) and the sponsors of this programming, plus Mara Brock Akil, Kelsey Grammar, and Debbie Allen) that all the same things are informing the Black female character that I am ‘unconsciously’ attracted to on the television. The first signification—skin color—is what will probably draw me, because the second signification, “Black woman/woman of color” is what is denoted to me. The connotation will probably include a sense of her rarity on the television screen.

But, if I knew/cared to examine who “speaks” the text –whether at the level of production, commerce, or current events/public advocacy—I think I’m bound to find patterns that reflect why this image is marketable for those creating her—and what’s more—why I’m hard-pressed to find too much variation among these Black women, in terms of class, mostly, and why I know they won’t last long. (Only The Game is left.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t watch (I definitely did). Of course, in my viewing, my ‘gaze’ may still be an oppositional one—I’ll interpret the signs on my own personal-communal collective terms, since the ‘reality’ is a dearth of representation behind the screen as well as on the screen—where the so-called ‘collective’ builds the signs for highest maximum return. However, this kind of engagement with the signs I ‘should’ be identifying with is, arguably, characteristic of a ‘niche’ television viewing audience.

Later in the essay, Seiter recasts Emile Benveniste’s remarks about ‘discourse’ saying, this is the “medium” through which we come to know television. Seiter says that, “In its current usage, discourse carries the stronger implication of speech governed by social, material, and historical forces, which disallow certain things from being said or even thought while forcing us to say certain other things” (p. 67).

Seiter notes that discourse “is not ‘free speech.’” She cites how censure played out in the children’s viewing of Fangface. She cites Hodge and Tripp as saying, “Verbal language is also the main mediator of meaning. It is the form in which meanings gain public and social form, and through discussion are affected by the meaning of others” (p. 62).

This suggests that while Barthes may have a point where his ‘civilization of writing’ is concerned, there are still a very select few (globally) who are positioned in such a way to be about the business of dictating the ‘informational structure.’ As long as film and television are such corruptible, colonizing and dangerously popular worldwide exports via the image (constructed and informed by such a small minority) how can the discourse of television not function as censorship in and of itself? I knowingly paint with a broad brush, but television and film as a medium of (global) social ‘discourse’—and as a capitalist construct—keeps so-called minority and niche audiences out of the community that informs sign creation.

theARCHIVES: Yeah...about that 'Feminist Criticism & Television' by E. Ann Kaplan

On E. ANN KAPLAN's
“Feminist Criticism and Television”
nineteen eighty-seven, 4/2009

I think it interesting that to merit critical attention one must still engage these very rigid identities. Because while the conversation of Madonna—and salutation given to her “Blond Ambition” phase—at the conclusion of the essay is meant to point to her obstruction of the presumably (patriarchally) gendered lens, and complete awareness of the ‘televisual apparatus’ and the politics it engages, there’s still, ultimately, a reification of the identity she’s employing as an ideally desirable identity.

To return to the discussion of signs, specifically Ellen Seiter’s reference to connotation and denotation, I feel it useful to repeat her breakdown of connotation:

“On a connotative level, shades of hair color (the first level of signification)
are used to produce signifieds such as ‘glamorous,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘youthful,’
‘dumb,’ or ‘sexy’ on the second level of signification. These connotations,
widely known through their repeated use in film and television, are ones that
have a specific history in the United States, one that stems from glorifying the
physical appearance of Anglo women (based on their difference from and presumed
superiority to other races and ethnicities). But they are also subject to change
or revision over time” (p. 40).

Seiter also points to Madonna’s music videos citing an instance “in which she deliberately ‘quoted’ Marilyn Monroe’s hairstyle and what it connotes: sexiness as a costume).” Which is really to confirm the ‘signifieds’ associated with the connotative significations: shades of hair color, shades of lip color, shades of skin color, etc.

(My first beef)
I am in no way a Madonna-hater, and actually would echo Kaplan’s sentiments about the ways in which her ‘filmic’ literacy constructs her performances as a violation of hegemonic patriarchy at work on the so-called idiot box. I would especially echo Kaplan’s statement that Madonna “challenges constructs of both genders because it understands gender as a sign-system that does not necessarily coincide with identity.” And I would go on to say that this statement is where I wanted Kaplan to go much sooner in her breakdown of feminist criticism of television—an awesome essay in such a short space of Allen’s complete text.

As a Black female (wannabe) filmmaker, already interested—if not necessarily competent—in the convergence of sexual politics, film and television, and what that convergence means, I will say I missed Kaplan’s reference to ‘womanism,’ coined, actually, by Alice Walker, and entering the lexicon of at least wom(e/y)n-of-color feminist thought(s) in the 1980s. Womanism came to be viewed as a necessary space for Black women in the absence of a feminism that spoke to their plight at the intersection of race and gender and non-normative sexual identification in an only recently post-Jim Crow era at that time. While these feminisms have their shortcomings and do overlap with the feminisms Kaplan has already laid out, I think I’ll still use ‘womanism’, Kaplan’s (Althusserian) Marxist-feminism, and the concept of post-structuralist feminism (specifically because she identifies post-structuralist feminism as an anti-essentialist theory) to build my response to her essay on the whole.

Kaplan references Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” piece in order to recast the ideas of ‘fetishism’ and ‘voyeurism.’ She uses these to give us a way of understanding the “three basic ‘looks’” that Hollywood uses to satisfy desire in the male unconscious. The first voyeuristic look is entirely dependent on the ‘scopophilic’-indulgent presumably male camera technician; the second is the perspective of the males in the narrative, meant to objectify the women within their gaze; and finally the look of the actual spectator, which is forced to mimic either previous gaze. A few sentences later (p. 263), Kaplan would go on to identify the whole female body as “’fetishized’ in order to counteract the male fear of sexual difference, that is, of castration,” and if the spectator is female, these are positions she is forced to inherit.

This would be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that we are assuming a lot about the spectator and the film-er. For one, we’re assuming they identify as ‘heterosexual’ and; two, in assuming a female objectification, we are forced to dis-imagine a non-heterosexual-male objectification. We haven’t fully problematized patriarchal-hegemonic constructions of the masculine side of the binary in our (albeit revolutionary, but short-sighted) feminist-analyses. While ‘womanism’ might recognize and beg an account of the racist-sexist lens (and likely include an analysis of the otherization and fetishizing of any woman-of-color presence, and non-every-American-is-middle-class presence), and (Althusserian) Marxist-feminism may recognize how these constructions obey the maximum-possible-return rules of capitalism even as they inform these identities and are informed by ‘real’ manifestations of these identities (Kaplan’s and Meehan’s “goodwife, harpy and bitch display[s]”), it appears to me that the post-structuralist-anti-essentialist approach is missing.

The very thing Kaplan will praise MTV and Madonna for is lost, because we’re assuming the very gender-specificity that Kaplan argues MTV and Madonna destroy. Perhaps, the root of the problem is what language “won’t allow” us to do when we’re having these conversations about these kinds of ideas. However, I’m feeling there’s an awesome body of work that’s been left untouched by television critics because of these same conservative bents and assumptions.

For example, I would greatly appreciate a similar analysis of Sri Lankan singer/rapper M.I.A; Even more dangerous, an analysis of rapper, Lil’ Kim or Jamaican dancehall DJ Lady Saw. These women, through their performances, and by their identification as women of color already ostracized by dominant forms of media and culture, are excellent examples of what Madonna may never be able to do for little girls of color, like myself, where reclamation of agency is discussed. How these women work the televisual-apparatus—with all of its rules and presumptions, and faithfulness to normative significations where race, historically/racially/morally constructed sexualities, and colonial relationships between the U.S. and the so-called Third World are concerned, and constructions of Black masculinities and men of color masculinities are concerned (something that Kaplan completely ignored, but was entirely relevant to her discussion of Madonna’s Cleopatra performance (p. 275))—is an area of ‘feminist’-deconstruction of film and television that I would love to see.