Alfred Gell We Have Neutralized Our Idols by Reclassifying Them as Art
operation: materials, surfaces
Dissimilar a painting, photograph, or religious statue, operation artists oftentimes create characters by altering their own bodies through the use of materials, such every bit makeup and costuming. It is primarily through these materials that performances get agents, if an ability to "human action" upon audiences is the main mensurate of bureau, as suggested by Bennett (2005). I farther posit that information technology is through this embeddedness, and interaction with materials, that performances "mirror" ourselves in a way -- that they are descriptive accounts of what it is like to be what Braidotti (2006) might refer to as a "cyborg" living in a abiding flux of engaging materials. As reflections or portraits of ourselves, performances say something about the many lives led by each of usa, not just within the social sphere equally friends, parents, employees -- but also every bit people who "distribute our personhoods", to employ Gell's terms, through materials. But it is not as simple every bit this. Things, also, distribute themselves through the states, through our performances -- since they come equipped with a history apart from united states, and a composite made up of fifty-fifty more than materials. A unmarried lipstick, which 1 human might utilise to convey passion, or eclecticism, or vibrance, or professionalism, may contain ingredients that were derived from fossils.
The topic is broad, so this paper remains a sketch of associations. To showtime, I take the position that characters displayed by performance artists are in many instances objectified; they become textile objects in the sense that they are something which we must encounter or bargain with every bit fictional characters, and which, much similar other forms of art, are "worshipped" in various means. Characters inspire awe, fear, and controversy of diverse kinds, still live and die on screen and on stage in ways that transcend the concrete and real life capacities of the performers themselves. Often characters are interpreted completely differently than would be the person, the "agent" actually doing the performance. In addition, it is interesting how performers are and so often dislocated with their characters. Such is the case when people confuse actors on the street with the characters they play in Law and Society. In these instances, characters become and then associated with the performers' visages that the characters themselves and the mythologies surrounding them transform the perception of the artist herself.
The second season of "Twin Peaks" was recently released on DVD, with some extra features including nowadays-twenty-four hours interviews with some of the actors. Kimmy Robertson, who plays the daffy secretarial assistant Lucy, said in an interview that outside of the bear witness many people would afterward ask her almost her character's fictional pregnancy as if Robertson herself were the same person. In the adjacent-to-last episode, Lucy performs a trip the light fantastic number which ends with her doing a full dissever. Co-ordinate to Robertson, several people afterward expressed concern nigh the acrobatic human action, asking her: "Weren't you worried about the baby?" Humorously, Robertson said that she responded to these queries in unlike ways, acting as if the fictional baby were real.
This is an example of how Lucy, a fictional character and an epitome, a textile thing requiring encounter, becomes confused with the bailiwick, but as a religious icon becomes associated with its human counterpart. One can see a sort of magical thinking like to that in Gell's depiction of the common conventionalities that past doing harm to an image, it is possible to harm the person associated with that image. In this case, several people held the conventionalities that if Kimmy Robertson did harm to her Twin Peaks prototype, she must have risked injuring herself as well.
In providing an anthropological theory of art, Alfred Gell explicitly lays out his concepts in relation to "art objects", then gain to name a kind of master and secondary agency, the first attributed to the "agent" in any given relationship and the latter attributed to what he calls the "patient". This seems to be a useful fashion of analyzing how people collaborate with selected works of art and, furthermore, demonstrates the religiosity and worship inherent in the fashion in which we regard many artifacts.
However, every bit we continue to look at performance art, it becomes more than hard to isolate the diverse shifting instances of cause and effect. In the case of performance art, Gell's theory becomes unsatisfactory for explaining how materials and settings are able to transform a person into an image, to exist objectified and worshipped as something at once the same as, and different from, the performer herself. If nosotros are to speak of a master agency, the artist would just be a source for it insofar as her choice to put on her wearing apparel and her makeup just then, and human action a certain way. But the nonhuman materials themselves come up with a history; they impart letters to the audience because the materials themselves are associated with those messages, due to that history and also due to concrete and material attributes that are derived not from man agency, only from the very ingredients themselves.
It might be more enlightening to consider the creative person/torso/material substances and alterations/graphic symbol and everything else that is involved in a single work of functioning art not as a case of distributed personhood, so much as an example of Ingold'due south conception of materials in flux and transition; or in Haraway'southward and Braidotti's terms, a performance can be seen every bit an organism meant to exemplify the nomadic country and hybridity which we all experience, as we are constantly engaged with the material and at in one case a function of information technology.
As I go about my life, things continue to human activity upon me. As I sat writing this newspaper, the grilled cheese sandwich I had placed on the stove burned considering, though I had put it there, I failed to monitor the temperature of the flame, and and then together the flame and the pan and the staff of life created a charred sandwich, all of their own accordance. They did not demand personhood in gild to practice that, nor tin can the event be entirely reduced to a chain of crusade and effect relationships; we tin can call their activity agency if we similar; or, like Tim Ingold with his wet rock and his dry stone, we tin surmise that this is but another daily example of how cloth beings, whether organisms or not, alive equally, live within, and interact with materials and the material globe. I would say that art thrives on this interaction and embeddedness.
Tori Amos, a popular pianist and vocalizer with a large cult following effectually the earth, has just released a new CD entitled, "American Doll Posse". E'er a feminist, she is once more commenting on what it is like to be a woman fighting for position and self in a patriarchal society. The posse of American dolls displayed on the cover are all various representations of herself with variations in hair color, wearing apparel, and makeup -- all of which together seem to alter even the shape of her body. Suddenly Tori is many dissimilar people, each of whom nosotros tin collaborate with in different means. Each song on the anthology is led by one of the characters on the comprehend, or is a collaboration between two or more than characters. Tori fans, or at least those on the mailing list, are being introduced to each character one by ane. Santa, the character on the left, "relates to Aphrodite and is the sensualist of the quintet. 'Santa is somebody who's a daughter's girl,' Tori says. 'She understands her fellow sisters and she believes that there is plenty love and passion out there for anybody. But she won't accept that in that location is something perverted about being very sensual and she won't drink shame with her sensuality.'" Pip, on the other mitt, is a warrior likened to Athena, and confronts issues with free energy and fervor. Tori, waxing more political over the years, has had this to say about the album (Wikipedia 2007):
The main message of my new album is: the political is personal. This as opposed to the feminist statement from years ago that the personal is political. I know information technology has been said that it goes both ways, but nosotros have to turn information technology effectually. We have to call up like that. I'm now taking on subjects that I could not have been able to take on in my twenties. With Lilliputian Earthquakes I took on more than personal things. Merely if y'all are going to be an American woman in 2007 with a real view on what is going on, yous need to exist brave, and you need to know that some people won't desire to look at it.
Tori's doll posse depicts not only that a woman can make of herself whatever she wants (implicitly, through materials), but that she already has many faces. Each character says something near aspects of Tori, simply in addition, they speak of sure themes and ideas that can be related with the fashion in which her body is displayed in various attire.
When talking about artists who perform through materials, information technology is difficult to avoid Marilyn Manson, whose epitome has generated a smashing bargain of controversy and mythology.
Marilyn Manson is a grapheme lived and created by Brian Warner, a man who is frequently described equally having grown up in a troubled religious home. He attended a Christian schoolhouse during his formative years and, subsequently entering public school, became exposed non simply to sex drugs and rock and curlicue, but also philosophy like Nietzsche. The proper name Marilyn Manson is a combination of ii American icons (some might say we worship them both in similarly iconic means): extra and model Marilyn Monroe and serial killer Charles Manson. Some accounts suggest that Manson represents what is depraved almost America and and the hypocrisy of religion in a country where nosotros effectively worship "false idols" in the religious sense. Writing for Rolling Stone in response to accusations that he was responsible for the Columbine shootings and that he is a murderer, Manson said, "A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band equally a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name Marilyn Manson has never historic the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Fourth dimension magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite flick stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes." Paradoxically, Manson himself is a folk hero precisely because of his media stunts, a fact that both corroborates his act and makes information technology more ironic. Interestingly, very lilliputian is known nigh the human behind the human action; a bully deal of mythology is congenital up around Marilyn Manson and why Brian Warner became him, but the man himself has get virtually inseparable from the performance.
According to an MTV interviewer, Manson is a "true artist", living his art, and never breaking out of character except for when he acts in films. Even during interviews, Manson "speaks slowly, pausing for effect" (Wiederhorn 2003). Manson seems to be quite aware of the dramatic effect this has on audiences, fans and opponents alike, and speaks of having get America's "Antichrist". As Gell points out, "We accept neutralized our idols past reclassifying them as art; but we perform obeisences earlier them every bit every bit deep every bit those of the virtually committed idolater before his wooden god" (97). Marilyn Manson fans have been known to pay extravagant forms of homage to his persona; one account (and who knows if it is truthful, or mythology) tells of ii teenage girls who would follow Manson and carve "Marilyn" and "Manson" into one some other's chests at concerts. Yet if this human action is true, it is as an obeisance to Manson'due south paradigm as Johnny Lee Clary's website, "The Truth About Marilyn Manson", which blames Manson for the Columbine murders and refers to him every bit an evil Satanist, a "transvestite homosexual", and and so on. Indeed, Manson himself has said that he looks frontward to being the subject of rants by the likes of Pat Robertson. Ane could run into such rants as a sort of act of worship, at least every bit much as one might sacrifice to a frightening god.
Björk, as well, is some other creative person who relies heavily on costumes and makeup every bit part of her performance. Unlike Manson, she does not play one fairly consistent character or draw on similar themes, only herself appears to metamorphose from 1 shifting function to another, at times occupying the hybrid form of a human and animal, or human and plant, or human and car, or human and goddess, and sometimes a mix of these elements.
What these performances have in common -- The American Doll Posse, Marilyn Manson, and Björk -- is that their acts depend on an interaction with materials and the generation of a materiality. This is done by altering their own bodies, using their bodies as components in cloth demonstrations. For Manson, well-nigh of the act lies in the cosmetics and dress and the way he drawls, all as one character dressed up in different outfits. Our fascination with Manson has nothing to do with Brian Warner, who would be hard put to assume the championship of Antichrist all by himself. What enabled him to do it was the gender bending, which was accomplished by applying bright and outlandish paints to his confront and body, and dressing in garb that associated him with common ideas of nihilism and the macabre.
Björk incurs fascination by stretching the limits of what performers are supposed to wear, by incorporating eclectic dress and stances and cosmetics into her performance. As we enter into conversations with these entertainers, as we respond to them, what nosotros are really responding to is the fashion in which they brandish their bodies -- and we are confronted, actual, with the materiality not merely of their bodies, but also of the material things adorning them, and below that, the ingredients bubbling upwards through the surfaces of the material things. As Ingold points out (2007:12):
Things are alive and active not because they are possessed of spirit – whether in or of affair – but because the substances which they incorporate continue to exist swept up in circulations of the surrounding media that alternately portend their dissolution or – characteristically with animate beings – ensure their regeneration. Spirit is the regenerative power of these circulatory flows which, in living organisms, are spring into tightly woven bundles or tissues of extraordinary complication. All organisms are bundles of this kind. Stripped of the veneer of materiality they are revealed not equally quiescent objects simply as hives of activity, pulsing with the flows of materials that continue them alive. And in this respect human beings are no exception. They are, in the start place, organisms, non blobs of solid matter with an added whiff of mentality or bureau to liven them up. As such, they are born and grow inside the current of materials, and participate from within in their farther transformation .
To add together to the long line of material civilization theorists critiquing other material culture theorists, I suggest that ane fault usually fabricated when looking at materiality, or materials, is that theorists proceed to focus on objects, on things, that are considered nonhuman, while at the same time trying to pause downwardly the discipline/object and human/nature dualities. What if we were to take the radical arroyo of addressing people as we might address things -- or of exploring the ways in which people themselves are composed of, and engage with, materials? Some might argue that this would be returning to colonial anthropology -- but the colonialism lay in describing whole peoples as "other" and in pretending to be objective while imposing our own subjectivities. If we employ the opportunity to look locally every bit well as broadly, internally too equally externally, we might go far at a kind of posthumanistic stance that explores our lives -- equally one creature in Star Trek, Next Generation described what it means to be human -- as "bags of more often than not water". To add to that, we might say that as bags of mostly water, we wear many different masks, and hats too.
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. 2005. The Agency of Assemblages and the Due north American Blackout. In Public Culture 17 (3): 445-465.
Björk. 2006. The Emma Brockes Interview. In The Guardian, February 13.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Posthuman, All Too Man: Towards a New Process Ontology. In Theory, Culture, and Society Vol 23 (7-8), 197-208.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Clarendon Printing.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Materials Against Materiality. In Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1-16. Cambridge University Press.
Manson, Marilyn. 1999. Columbine: Whose Mistake Is It? In Rolling Rock Mag, May 28.
Wiederhorn, Jon. 2003. The Argument: Marilyn Manson is the Only True Creative person Today. MTV.com.
Wikipedia. 2007. American Doll Posse. Wikipedia.org.
justiceartudistrums.blogspot.com
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/maria2.html
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