Sometime in 2010, when it was warm outside and sunny, I had a strong urge to get on a train with a video camera and film. So I did. I ended up taking a trip to Beacon, NY, with a slightly erroneous hope that the Dia art museum would be open at that time. It was not, but that’s OK. I still got my film.
I ended up with 82 short clips. Most just a few seconds (3-8), some were a little longer (30 sec), and a rare one or two were about 60 seconds. Turns out that I’d been shooting Lumiere style video the whole time and ended up with several clips. I didn’t keep the camera in the same place for all the clips, and I didn’t have a tripod either. But, it was a fun adventure.
Here’s a link to my vimeo album, Beacon. And here are a few selections.
I’m still on my body image kick, but I’ve been thinking more about identity. Recently, we’ve had a discussion about women vs. men and technology on our school’s student email listserv. I don’t want to keep posting to that thread (but here’s another article ‘Why No Women Want To Be On A “Women In Tech” Panel‘), but as I just read an article in the New Yorker about the feminist movement and The Feminine Mystique, (“Books as Bombs: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique”), I can’t help but see some related overlap. So instead of posting to that list, I’ll just make some related comments here.
In the thread, someone mentioned male identity and how men, in general, seem to be “falling behind” in certain social and eduction context, in comparison to women. For instance, more women graduate from college than men. In checking out a Wikipedia entry on identity, I checked out an external link on “Our male identity crisis: What will happen to men?” which itself is a blog entry on Psychology Today.
In the article, written by Ray Williams, he states, “In a post-modern world lacking clear-cut borders and distinctions, it has been difficult to know what it means to be a man and even harder to feel good about being one. The many boundaries of a gendered world built around the opposition of work and family–production versus reproduction, competition versus cooperation, hard vs. soft–have been blurred, and men are groping in the dark for their identity.”
The gist of many of his points I like, but not quite how he gets his points across. Such as, “The last bastions of male dominated roles appears to be top leadership positions, particularly in the corporate world, the military and politics, although even those areas are slowly being eroded. But leadership in those spheres has often been associated with the traditional male identity–with power, control and often aggression.” Are women supposed to feel guilty because we want to be in charge, too? And, if men have been holding the traditional top leadership positions all this time, why the negative slant to what is supposedly the “traditional male identity…power, control and often aggression”?
One commenter made an excellent point in stating that the advancements made by women in our society do not need to be seen as zero-sum, “where if women gain, men must lose.” She follows by stating, “Our culture’s slow shift towards gender equality for women is throwing into sharp relief the restrictive roles that men are still taught to identify with. That, in my opinion, is where the identity crisis and cultural backlash against feminism is coming from: that women are taught that they can be anything they want, from housewives to CEOs, but men are still taught that they can only be CEOs and that to do want or do anything that is ‘feminine’ is unmanly and unforgivable. That is what we need to change and is crucial to bringing this culture to true egalitarianism.” Eloquently put.
And, while Williams’s points about women’s gains in higher education surpassing statistics for men in high education may be true, I also wonder historically how many women were deliberately kept out of school so that they could stay home and work, or because going to school was for boys and men only. Still happens in some countries.
After this, I reviewed another blog post on a related subject that I liked a lot better. This article, “Bring home the bacon AND fry it up?“, by Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D., was focused on how women being the breadwinner has changed the dynamics of marriage and being a couple. While it did address men’s identity roles, it put them in the context of couples, rather than pitting men vs women. For instance, in reference to women out-earning men at work and at university, she quotes a variety of reasons and suggests that “some couples are choosing this lifestyle, others are forced into it.”
She does address how changes in traditionally held perceptions of men’s and women’s roles have affected men. “Studies indicate that in spite of the changes in women’s earning potential and role as breadwinner, men have struggled with issues related to their pride as well as social pressure and pressure from family when their wife is the breadwinner, often feeling emasculated or low self esteem.” In response, she goes on to say that it is up to both men and women to shift their perceptions of the roles of men and women, to fit their current lifestyles.
I agree with the commenter to the first blog post, in that while there may be shifts in male identity, I’m not sure if I’d call it a crisis. I also think that men and women should be working together to change our perceptions and notions of who and what men and women are and what we do, as men and women, in society. Pitting women vs men against each other isn’t going to help us understand each other and certainly won’t make things easier. I doubt that things will ever go back to the way they “used” to be.
For my final, I wanted to go back to some of the themes we’d discussed earlier in the class, related to advertising and basically using attractive people to make us think that we can be like them if we subscribe to the advertising message, too. But, in our teacher’s lottery to pick a pre-ordained theme, I’d chosen Romeo and Juliet.
At first, I’d decided to make ads featuring items from various scenes or speeches in the play. Maybe a new GPS for that lousy messenger you know. Or maybe an ad for poison, for you and your loved one. I looked on archive.org for good old videos about poisons, while I didn’t find any on poisons when I started using “drugs” as my keyword, I got a nice little video featured George W. Bush. Given my attitude towards this former president, I wondered if sexy advertisements would have positive effects for me….
I think not, but decide for yourself. It’s short but there’s a lot in there. (NSFW)
Seems like sometimes things happen at the 11th hour! After submitting my dress to the Winter Show, I ran into a few logistical snags in the assembly and finish of my dress. Namely, misplacing my trimming and, after replacing what I thought I’d lost, running out of material and needing to make another trip. But, it was all finalized in time for the show, which was great.
Where I last left off, I was remaking the form of the dress in order to make for a more attractive silhouette. The Photoshop image really did help a lot, not just for the structure, but also with helping me imagine the colors – looks miles better in person. I did end up adding more connections between each section, which came in very handy when I was dealing with the wood, but what I didn’t account for was the rather significant weight difference between the foam core pieces and the wood. Even though my pieces were only 1/16″ in depth, they were much heavier than the foam core which made. This wouldn’t have been an issue, but my new connection was a very pretty semi-elastic, black mesh material about 1″ wide – not as strong as my macrame, but less initial work I suppose.
Anyway, after I was finally satisfied as much as I could be with the structure of the dress, I took out a ruler and notated the dimensions of each piece, on each piece. These dimensions, I transferred to Illustrator so that I could use the laser cutter to cut out each piece. Meanwhile, I spent some time on the websites for Sephora, Chanel, L’Oreal, MAC (really just for color), Lancome, etc., to find the names of foundation colors. I also decided on a font after downloading several: a slightly modified Perpetual Titling MT. Using this font, I put the names of a foundation color, either real or imagined, onto each piece of wood with a raster etch setting using the laser cutter. This step took a 2-3 days; human error issues.
Finally, I had all my pieces…but still, I had to dye and attach them!! This is finally where my hard work in finding the right colors paid off. At first I felt really overwhelmed because it had been so difficult the first time. But, when I finally sat down, with a good chunk of time to work, it was fine. Writing down the formula on the back of each sample piece was super helpful, but so were my notes. My only regret for this step was getting flustered and rushing when trying to meet an earlier deadline, and not dying both sides of each piece. In the first case, I wasn’t very methodical about the colors and in the second, it meant that the wood pieces slightly curled a bit when they dried. Apparently, this is a feature of basswood….
On to attaching! For this, I used black felt in 2 layers. The first layer went directly onto the back of each wood piece. Then, my connections attached to the under layer of felt, which was then covered with the 2nd layer of felt, to give it a nice attractive finish. Let me just say that I love hot glue. It was at this point that I realized that my wood panels were so much heavier than the foam core, and so I spent a decent amount of extra time reinforcing what I’d already glued. Very time consuming.
Finally, with dyed, felted and attached and reattached pieces, I decided that enough was enough, and I just needed to put it on the dress form. Right before I did so, I draped some black felt over the form to make a little dress, which I actually quite liked and got a few compliments on my unknown draping skills. I thought the black just helped the pieces pop out nicely, but it was difficult to see the connections between each piece. I also made the dress because while I’d done what I could to help the dress fit properly, it wasn’t perfect, and an under-form seemed to help give it more body than it would if it had directly been on the dress form. Ultimately, the front and back pieces were not connected to each other, and I used straight pins to help the pieces sit flatter on the black felt. An aesthetic decision.
During the show, I got a lot of “But, does it do anything?” questions. No, I told them. It’s more conceptual. Then I began explaining my process and how I’d done everything by hand. Sometimes they tried to find their colors, which was fun to help them with. I’d gotten much faster at it. It was a fun project. Definitely different from my video piece, but still the same in that the last piece required a physical action that affected your own experience, with a slight augmentation by technology to affect the experience, rather than using a physical action to use technology directly to augment the technical experience. I do have to say that I enjoyed many of the other students’ projects – very magical. Still, it was a fun project for me. I hope you enjoyed the photos!
A few days ago, I got a turn with the dress form again and, taking another look at the silhouette of the dress, I realized that I needed to make an adjustment. Compared to the back of the dress, the front just wasn’t very flattering. It didn’t have a very feminine shape and didn’t hang properly. So, I went back and remade the front of the dress, which now looks very good. I put more connections between each of the pieces, so now, in addition to looking better, it’s also sturdier – which is very good. I’ve decided to take a more critical look at the back, and it’s possible that I’ll redo the back again as well. The way I redid the front of the dress without getting too committed was to sort of recut the dress in Photoshop. I got a much clearer idea of the finished piece without doing anything drastic. Plus, I used these wood samples I found on the internet to stand in for the foam core. Doesn’t look as nice as I want the final piece to look, but it’s fine for now. For the back, I don’t think I need too many changes to most of the pieces, but I do think that adding more connections between the pieces will help it look less saggy.
The pictures show the original front, with wood; the modified front; and the back, with rows 3 and 4 modified.
