Villain of the piece

[imomus]

It was hard to be a man at the Barbara Kruger installation at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art yesterday. A whole room was covered with text about what monsters of sex and violence men are, and in the information area it was all related to life in Glasgow with a series of chilling facts and figures about wife-beating in the city. It made Glasgow's Argyll Street feel like Elm Street and all men look like potential Freddy Krugers, about to batter their pinch-featured, ruddy-nosed wives or slay the Umbro- and Vodaphone-blazoned wee'uns they dragged behind them through the drizzle. It made Aidan Moffat's bruised, obscene, honest, romantic, depressing, dour lyrics at the Arab Strap acoustic show we saw immediately afterwards all the more apt.

Comments

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

I probably would've had a nervous breakdown, seeing all of that at once. I have a hard enough time dealing with the opposite sex as is (I was considered "very weird" to most girls in my schools), and just seeing that would just enforce my guilt of being male.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

There is no shame in your gender. The construction of guilt-based social control is an invention of the post-modern feminist movement that cannot envision any progress for women that also does not entail the lessening of rights for men.


NEVER apologize for being male. There is NO shame in it.

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

I'll try to keep that in mind, though I doubt it's going to make me any better... I can be undermined pretty easily.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

makes an interesting foil to christian holstad's exhibit in the victoria miro: http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/all/_384/

newsprint as small and ghostly or newsprint as gigantic and barbaric

[(Anonymous)]

that black outfit of yours must have been preplanned especially for the visit. i can't picture you wearing it otherwise.

I have to use my BK icon for this.

[artysmokes.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of Kruger (Barbara, not Freddie!) and I'd LOVE to see that installation, and not just to see other men looking uncomfortable.

On the subject of Arab Strap, what do you think of Malcolm Middleton's solo album? "My Loneliness Shines" is one of the happiest sad songs I've heard for years. Wonderful stuff, which reminds me why I love Scottish accents so much. :)

Everyone needs to hear this.

[artysmokes.livejournal.com]

Malcolm Middleton - Loneliness Shines. 6.3MB mp3 (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=40HCGMT1)

[augstone.livejournal.com]

how was jens leckman?

[(Anonymous)]

Yup, we all want your views about Jens!

A.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Alas, we had to catch the train back to Edinburgh half way through Bill and Isobel's set, so all we heard was Jens' ukelele guest spot in that (which was judiciously plucked).

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The hat and patch are perfect; the ensemble gives you a severe, archetypically male air. You're the black fly in Kruger's ointment.

[chillies.livejournal.com]

It's such a powerful and claustrophobic installation. Even attempting to gain some respite by looking out of the skylight didn't work as slogans like don't fail me are stickered across the windows.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

Terrific pictures. And a fabulous outfit, you very much look meant for being in the installation...err not meaning that as being the male monster. Just meaning visually.

I've loved Barbara Krugers work for years. I love the graphic power of it. But basically i just have a weakness for a certain way of using text and image together in art. For some reason she's hardly known in the Netherlands.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

and i like your haircut.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It's only half a Louise Brooks bob cut. Long with 2 short bits next to my face.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Saw a Kruger exhibit in Siena, Italy a few years ago. The space of the exhibition was so incongruous with the feeling of the city, your typically fossilized European small-city center with gothic arches, cobbled piazzas, and very little ambient advertising. This last feature somehow made Kruger's whole schtick seem pointlessly shrill, but if your coming out of an environment that's basically permeated with commercial iconography, then there's a continuity between inside and outside that makes her art take on greater subtlety, a insidious force that prompts Momus to see potential rapists in the streets of Glasgow.

Moronically cynical art?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"Pointlessly shrill" is right on the nose, I'd say. "Preachy" comes to mind, too.

I've seen many of her installations over the years, and while I think they make powerful graphics, they always strike me as linear and one-dimensional, containing very little in the way of ambiguity: we're being spoken to, not with. Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy aesthete, but to me, her work epitomizes that crunchy, moronically cynical, whiny, glib, paranoid late 80's-era political agitprop that made the '93 Whitney Biennial such a self-righteous bore. In the long run, I think her work will probably be of more historical interest than artistic; but in the meantime, such work will continue to place crap-colored glasses upon the noses of all who encounter it.

Re: Moronically cynical art?

[(Anonymous)]

that's spot on mr. W . that green set-up looks seriously nasty. Is B K some sort of Keith Richards of 80s PC Art? The only interesting B K display I've seen so far were I shop therefore I am Tshirts worn by people shopping in markets and supermarkets in Bangkok Thailand.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

I would've laughed my ass off and gotten kicked out. I don't know about Scotland, but here in the US, domestic violence statistics would have you totally believing that 100% of all men are slavering brutes who can't orgasm until they beat a helpless woman into a shivering pulp.

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

Very true.

Curious

[(Anonymous)]

I'm curious what statistics you're talking about. Is there a link or reference you can pass along?

Re: Curious

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

The scary college statistic that 1 in 4 college women is raped was spread like a virus around my campus. The Office of Manhating put up posters and had little cards on the cafeteria tables emblazoned with that fact on it.


Nevermind that 1 in 4 college women would mean hundreds of thousands of rapes...

Re: Curious

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I believe the actual statistic is that 1 in 4 women (in the USA), by the time they reach college age, have been sexually assaulted at some point in their life, not that 1 out of every 4 women who go to college end up getting raped.

Even so, for sake of argument, let's use the 1 in 4 number. Heading back to college math (slipping standards, I know), 1 in 4, when represented as a percentage, is 25%.

That leaves us with 75% to make up, unless you forget to reference/link some other studies? Did you?

(75% + 25% would make 100%, the number used in the original post)

Thanks for your help in getting to the bottom of this.

Re: Curious

[(Anonymous)]

I remember this as one in three women at college raped, during the time that they were in college. It comes from an anti porn writer called Diana Russell, and her definition of rape includes "A man looking at you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable." (I have the meaning but maybe not the exact words.) IE: Rape means whatever you want it to mean. This must make girls going away to college for the first time feel very uncomfortable.
(From a book called Defending Pornography, by Nadine Strossen, by the way.)

[emobus.livejournal.com]

Nice hat. You look like maybe you could be a part of that installation in that last pic there.

[magnakai.livejournal.com]

Great outfit!

I'm going to be in Glasgow for a few days next week helping my girlfriend settle into Glasgow School of Art. Maybe we'll go see this.

[betrayyrfriends.livejournal.com]

how long are you in glasgow? some momusian places of interest might be: the no.1 tea art studio (silly name but very nice) on great western road, russian cafe cossachok (on king st - you should also check out 'mono', run by the former owners of the 13th note cafe in nearby kings court), the glasgow autonomous project (also great western road, an equivalent of sorts to the forest cafe)

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

fetching. just like the new whimsy.

[(Anonymous)]

I just got back from this exhibition, which I visited on my lunch break, on your exhortation. I...

czn

Commercial Tie-ups

[(Anonymous)]

I smell a new Uniqlo T-shirt collection!

Marxy

the paradox of the taboo

[(Anonymous)]

in the uk two women every week die in the comfort of their own home at the hands of their lover/husband/partner/boyfriend.

i sometimes think that in any discussion about sexual politics this is the starting point. not wages. not childcare. not housework. but murder.

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

Ah I actually talked to her.. she seems just as hostile to women as men!

She gave a lecture at the School of the Art Intitute of Chicago back in 1995 or 96... can't remember the year but I do recall how she seemed to even HATE people in admiration of her.

(I wondered how she could have a top job at one of the most comercial magazines in fasion at the time and still manage to do the work to attempt to undermine the system so wonderfully, yet I recall some of her anti-comercializtic works backfired with shopping bags saying "I shop therefore I live"... whilst it was an ironic commentary, somehow people generally didn't seem to get the irony..maybe this harder direction is something she CAN do.. without people mistaking the intention.)

Being that I was from New York, sort of, most people in Chicago thought of her as automatically agressive, I didn't see her as agressive but, "normal" of the type of work and buisness she worked in..it's hard and agressive.. its an interesting direction for her to be MORE direct about her underlying hostilities.

Dorian

P.S. sorry about such a late response... long week.
I won't personally get into the "feminst arguments" the statistics sadly speak for themselves and don't need anyone to comment on them.. men who are "good" sadly have to live in the shadow of the "bad deeds" of others.. just as EVERY American has to live in the shadow of the deeds of the various wars and crimes against humanity commited under those various wars.. one can justify the actions and causes, one can deny it ever existed, one can support fully, or many of the various combinations.

There is something to be said about the power of men though...it sometimes excludes the men themselves and then it becomes a "class issue".