Indecent exposure

Yesterday I was videoed and interviewed in my living room for Flasher.com, an interesting new webzine with a growing archive of video interviews with creative people. The interview will appear on the site in a couple of weeks, when I'll join Owen Casiotone (hey, his beard got bigger!) and Ellen Alien (so that's what she really looks like!) and Marie Jan Lund from Jan Family (precious in a cute way, like Bjork or Joanna Newsom!) and many others.



This week I also received my comp copy of the new edition of British "music & graphics & hip lit" magazine Nude, which this month has a five page Momus interview. Flasher, Nude, Flasher, Nude -- are these titles trying to tell us something? Is there some element of indecent exposure to artists talking about their work? It's something I found myself talking about in the Flasher interview -- how, if you post a vlog of yourself, there'll always be a couple of comments saying that you "love the sound of your own voice", that you're Narcissus himself, showing off. In short, you're nude, or a flasher.

Now, I don't disagree with these comments -- I've been brought up in this culture too, I internalize its values. But while I agree that showing yourself too much or too proudly can be a sin and a vice, it's a vice to which I personally feel very indulgent, very lenient. It's an important vice, a virtuous one. Take the fashion victims in this video by Fumi Nagasaki, for instance. Fumi follows the formula set by Shoichi Aoki, who founded FRUiTS magazine (he's her boss at Street, the magazine for which she actually photographed me last year). Fumi photographs people and asks them where they got their clothes, and what kind of look they're trying to achieve. It's a Japanese formula, seen very widely in Japanese street fashion coverage, and not really considered dangerously narcissistic there. I guess it's offensive only if you think people are sort of saying "I'm incredibly exemplary" as they show us their clothes. But what if everyone is exemplary?



I've often wondered why magazines in the West don't tend to show ordinary people -- grassroots fashion -- the way Japanese mags do (on the Japanese web, though, it's a different story). In the West we rely much more on professional models, who, for me, are much more boring. It's the same with Western TV. I grew up in a country where you saw the same ten faces on TV all the time, television professionals. For a while in Britain it seemed like Graham Norton presented every single show. Television was full of over-familiar celebrities making jokes about other over-familiar celebrities -- Bob Monkhouse, Nicholas Parsons. You were supposed to love to hate them. But now they appear to me as a symptom of our feeling of discomfort about normal people showing themselves. We loved to hate TV celebrities because they were (over-) exposed, and it safely grounded our disapproval. At least they were professionals. They drew our anti-visual flak professionally. They could deal with it.

Now, watching vloggers like fishwithissues (I mention him in my current Wired column, Meet Bob and Judy, First Vloggers), I get a sense of -- well, how does that Lou Reed song go? "We're coming out, out of our closets, out on the streets..." The days of the West's intertwined representation taboo and "hate-me-please" celebrity culture are numbered. We can all be celebrities now -- but surely the reason for hating celebs (they think they're so special, and they're blocking out everybody in the world, hogging all the attention) has now been removed?

Thinking aloud about this in the Flasher interview, I ventured the opinion that there's still some hate for self-mediation. Think of Charlie Brooker's use of the phrase "self-facilitating media node" in Nathan Barley -- the phrase basically means "twat", and behind it is the idea that to self-select and self-edit yourself as "someone interesting, someone other people should watch" is presumptuous and pretentious. Thomas de Zengotita's book on Self-Mediation, meanwhile, gives a more positive American gloss on the idea.

But I felt that being videoed at someone else's request for a video magazine was somehow less narcissistic than videoing myself at my own request. It was consensual intercourse rather than flashing. And, watching Flasher's archives, I tried to imagine how I'd feel if, say, Ellen Alien were saying exactly the same things, but in a video on her own blog, initiated by no-one but herself. Wouldn't her ruminations on her artistic process, the importance of dance in her work and so on, seem a little self-involved if they were entirely self-mediated? We still need the convention of someone asking questions, someone who's not the artist, someone who admires the artist and wants to make the artist more widely known in order to spread the pleasure of her work far and wide.



I personally really want to know what someone looks like. I'm a big fan of situatedness and embodiment. We are not just brains in jars, we're humans in bodies, with faces and histories and accents. Culture is not a neutral stream of abstractions. But when text is king, we're tempted to think of it that way. Text is so utterly useless at conveying what someone's like in person, where they're coming from, how they fish around for ideas, how intelligent or attractive or confident they are. Our culture has only had video for a few decades, and is only now seeing a widespread publishing platform for "the people's video" in the form of the internet and vlogs. So I think we're going to have to recalibrate our ideas of what it's decent and indecent to show.

If you're not a big fan of self-mediation, think of it this way. There's a case for vidmags like Flasher actually diminishing self-mediation. Previously I'd only seen glossy, artist-approved press stills of Ellen Alien. Now I've seen what she looks like in front of a video camera, how she talks, and what it would be like to have a casual encounter with her. I love how people actually give up control over their own images in these interviews, and occasionally stumble, and inevitably erode their own myth, their distance, their otherness. But, you know, if someone really does have star quality, it's going to come through on video too. And if there really is some untouchability, some divine distance in them, that'll survive the domesticity of video intact.

Yesterday, talking about Massimo Vignelli's distinction between visual and verbal people, I commented that "visual people are very much black sheep in the West. They're considered effeminate, or gay, or corrupters, or narcissists. This is something very old in our culture, something that goes back to Plato and also to The Bible. We give the highest honour to abstraction, replicability, impersonality, disembodiment, practicality, rationality, convenience and so on. We mistrust beauty, appearance, embodiment, situatedness, sensuality and visual pleasures." Well, I think that's changing. Thanks to video and the net, we're emerging, coming out, showing ourselves. And I think that if we can just suppress our tabloidy gagging reflex, a new Renaissance -- in other words, a benign sort of embodied species-narcissism, the kind you see on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or in that speech about "what a piece of work is a man..." -- could be the result. For the love of mankind, show yourself!