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

[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".