Indecent exposure

[imomus]

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!

Comments

here's what i look like

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Re: here's what i look like

[dzima.livejournal.com]

you look like Keanu Reeves.

[(Anonymous)]

I refuse to show myself! To you, I will always be (anonymous)! Even if you check the IP, just to get some vague idea of what culture I belong to, you will only discover it's a proxy! Sometimes not showing yourself is good! Sometimes it is in itself a means of assuming another persona, one that can tell the truths that your public persona can't! I know that Momus is a fan of reading the cover not the book, but that itself can become just another disingenuous convention!

Isn't "photos of models vs photos of ordinary people" a naive binary to posit? FRUITS doesn't do some passive snapshot of what's out there on the street. They actively seek people who reflect the Platonic ideal of the FRUITS look. Where's the difference?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

OrgName: Everyones Internet
OrgID: EVRY
Address: 390 Benmar
Address: Suite 200
City: Houston
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 77060
Country: US

But, you know, one of the problems with anon posts is that I attach way too much importance to what people say in them. This is because they're just text, and as disembodied text (and yes, a LiveJournal is a kind of body, a guarantee that someone lives, has a particular location and face and set of values) they have this abstract authority, this big weight of impersonality. Just like the name of your server, they seem to be everyone... and no-one. And although I appreciate the opportunity to be nasty -- I'm not being sarcastic, I really do, there can't be any productive dialectics without that -- I think this impersonality gives anonymity too much weight. You could call anonymity the worst sort of narcissism -- the kind that says "We are the world!"

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< I refuse to show myself! To you, I will always be (anonymous)! Even if you check the IP, just to get some vague idea of what culture I belong to, you will only discover it's a proxy! Sometimes not showing yourself is good! Sometimes it is in itself a means of assuming another persona, one that can tell the truths that your public persona can't! I know that Momus is a fan of reading the cover not the book, but that itself can become just another disingenuous convention! >>

Don't piss me off buddy or I'll turn my finely-honed stalking talents on you. You think we can't find you? You think someone who has studied the law, computer science, and library science, can't find you? Despite a proxy? I fucking wrote proxy code in undergrad bub

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Momus, we always thought you were in favour of wearing masks and hiding one's self from the others by playing different characters (which are ultimately a shield) so are you mellowing and changing your tune now?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think this is one of the major differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. And actually, now I think about it, it's also a difference between David Bowie 1.0 and David Bowie 2.0, and the difference between rockist authenticity and popist artifice. So I'm really really split, because yes, masks, yes, anti-rockism, yes, early Bowie, not late Bowie, and yes, that old anon internet where "nobody knew you were a dog".

But, you know, this desire to be "anyone you want to be" is finally a lie. Nobody fakes it that well. Also, it's brain-in-jar stuff, it's disembodied. Also, you know, I wasted five years debating people on a bulletinboard I've now left, when, really, if I'd just looked at them, their faces and their bodies, I would have concluded "these people have the negativity they do because they can't get laid. I'm wasting my time trying to change they way they think with reasoned argument".

Also, I think equality of opportunity (which obviously ties into the super-rich and the celebrity system) is bullshit. I want equality of outcome. And that involves situating people. For instance, to get equality of outcome for [insert minority], you have to see how being in that minorty really does affect all possible outcomes for them. It's "a difference that makes a difference". You can't help someone while wearing a blindfold that blocks the specificity of their problems and abilities. You can't level playing fields by acting as if they were already so.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

What a lovely, optimistic post.

I wonder if eventually, tech will come full circle in that oft-parodied way, where the world we inhabit in computers is exactly the same as real life. "Here's the footage of me, live feed, and here's my physical projection, and here's the hologram of my house............let's just meet up ok?"

[dreamyshade.livejournal.com]

The Sartorialist (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/) shows that kind of grassroots fashion, and it's pretty popular, but then again it's on the web.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My problem with the Sartorialist, which people are continually telling me to look at, is that it's the same old snooty, top-down attitude to fashion, just formatted in the populist format of a blog. It still goes to official fashion events and namechecks Armani and shows us what Hamish Bowles is wearing. I think Shoichi Aoki is much more "punk" in the sense that he really is proposing street fashion as a more interesting alternative to designer- and stylist-dictated top-down fashion.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

This from a March entry in Sartorialist:

"I wish more New York young ladies looked as colorful and 'naturally stylish' as this young lady.

"I say 'naturally stylish' because I hear/read alot of people talk about being "effortless" but I think it's unfair to expect people to look 'effortless'. We all put in some effort - nothing wrong with that - but to look 'effortless' I think you almost have to be born perfect - like Christy Turlington or my wife. (scored a big one there!)

"I think we should strive less to be "effortless" and more to look naturally and happily ourselves - the best we, we can be."

Rather humane sentiment, I think.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, do you see any danger in the kind of relentless self-mediation that a daily updated blog entails? I read your blog daily but frankly I'm starting to get bored. I feel I know exactly what you're going to say about just about anything now, I know exactly what type of things turn you on and turn you off, I've got the "Japan = collectivism = good, U.S. = individualism = bad" down pat, I've internalised your demotic, Brit-folksy style with all its Blair-ish "you know"s, I know the type of magazines, art and design you like... and I think it's all had an impact on how I see you as an artist. I guess you're demystified for me so I'm not as interested. I just know too much about you. (Although you probably think that the very notion of art as mysterious is Romantic delusion.)

[(Anonymous)]

yes and who is it all for?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I guess you're demystified for me so I'm not as interested.

I absolutely accept that that is going to happen. It's happened with all of my enthusiasms, and they've been replaced at that point by new ones. The difference between me and Graham Norton, though, is that here on the internet I'm totally avoidable. You're free to rifle through the one trillion gazillion terrabytes of other stuff out there.

I certainly don't subscribe to the "shut up and sing, Dixie Chick!" argument, though. The stuff I thrash out here is absolutely central to what I sing.

[(Anonymous)]

A writer-director named Roger Avary (http://imdb.com/name/nm0000812/) (Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe, Rules of Attraction etc.) was very much like the filmmaker equivalent of Momus in the blogging world. He started in the 90s long before it was called "blogging" and by the mid-noughties, all of the regulars knew the minutiae of his tastes in film, art and music, as well as his worldview. He was definitely a blogging pioneer, though perhaps more well-known for his collaborations with famous friend Quentin Tarantino than his own work.

Instead of a Bowie obsession it was a Kubrick one. One day it was as if he realised that he was nothing like Kubrick and never would be if he kept revealing all through his blog (Kubrick was famously private). Avary suddenly pulled the plug and his blog was history and he's never looked back. He later commented through Neil Gaiman that the reason he stopped was because "everybody was doing it."

[(Anonymous)]

Ditto. And this is not the only blog/artist where that's happening either.

divine distance?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

In asking myself why I resist the flashy or showy visual person I realise that I think they are what we used to call "loud". In your face also comes to mind.

There is a tendency to think these space grabbers will alter the environment in an uncomfortable way. This does gives the quiet, shy, non visual types like myself a hope for escape or disappearance in the visual melee. It's odd that the word loud comes to mind to express a visual situation. It's syn-aesthetic?

Of course its suggested that if one is less visual one must then be more verbal. I often ask myself if I am a shout them down type or if I think what someone says is more significant than how they look. Yet, I retreat from the promotion of both as an aesthetic reaction. I am obviously observing the habitats of these beings.

Perhaps this is why animals and plants develop poisons and stings and awful repellent smells and screeches. Some kind of security for sticking out like a sore thumb.

Mind you, disappearance, anonymity and camouflage are as a good a costume as any.

Re: divine distance?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Everyone is visual, though. There's no avoiding it. I find people wearing white sports shoes with blue jeans and a black jacket "loud"! Especially that clash of the white shoes with the dark outfit. It just screams!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, cycling to the library I had an idea about why some people might find the videos on Flasher "indecent exposure". I think it's tied up with this idea of creativity-as-distinction, and the paradox of "everyone is special".

The Flasher contact page says "We would like to assist filmmakers, musicians, authors, painters and video artists to find the most effective means of getting their creativity into the public view." Creativity is being proposed here as the means to distinction, and distinction implies that one has a "good difference" from others (or possibly even from a slightly less organized and motivated version of oneself).

Now, in all the narratives that emerge in the videos on Flasher, there are accounts of distinction. For instance, Bruce La Bruce (http://www.flasher.com/view_profile.php?profile_id=135) talks about how he distinguished himself from the suburban students he was at university with, then from the squat punks he gravitated towards (because he was gay), and then from the emphasis of the gay movement itself, characterized as both too bourgeois, and too distracted, by the fight against AIDS, from aesthetic concerns. His life story is a series of distinctions.

A different account of distinction comes through in artist Dan Colen (http://www.flasher.com/view_profile.php?profile_id=64)'s video. He credits Javier Peres -- a well-connected art world insider -- for his distinction. As well as his own talent and efforts, obviously. But he's very honest about group connections being crucial.

I think both of these accounts of distinction might worry some people -- the account which defines the individual as special against a series of groups, and the account which defines his specialness as an aspect of his membership of a particular group.

I have thoughts

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< an interesting new webzine with a growing archive of video interviews with creative people >>

hey, I just wrote Flasher about my 2005 vlog about stopping the Iraq war, "Gangbang the Jihad"

Maybe they'll host it! It's sloppy but parts are funny if I do say so myself. And I do think if we sent some sexy chicks over there and showed those guys what good sex is, they might see things differently

Ps. on narcissism, I rate its level in others on a percentage basis. A "regular" person is a 50% narcissist, I am a 79% narcissist, and this guy that eludes me because he never ever thinks of me is a 98% narcissist. You, momus, because you listen to, consider, and respond to others, are only a 88% narcissist

No uglies

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

The problem is when you show too much about what you physically look like then it becomes about that. The big vloggers are hot young girls, not because they have anything interesting to say, but because hot young girls get watched. This is why newscasters are no longer middle aged males but are all blond MILFs.

If you're not a hot girl, or a hot guy, then your visual appearance detracts from your online presence rather than aids it. Humans are lookist to an astonishing degree, so why reward that behavior? You can establish a presence without having to intermediate through the constant filter of "I want to fuck this person" or "I must compete with this person to fuck someone"

FRUiTS or whatever shows pics of cute young Japanese girls, who are allowed to wear goofy outfits and be creative, while if a 45 year old man does it it's creepy and disturbing and held up as comedy. At least the Sartorialist shows people older than age 21.

Re: No uglies

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The problem is when you show too much about what you physically look like then it becomes about that.

I'd rather say "...it connects what you look like to what you're saying". Which I think is a plus, though I know what you're saying. "Never mind that he's saying a missile is heading towards us, look at his tie!"

If you're not a hot girl, or a hot guy, then your visual appearance detracts from your online presence rather than aids it.

I very much disagree with this. I'm rather prejudiced against too-goodlooking people. And I think ordinary-looking people should be more widely exposed in the media. That's one of the great things about the internet, surely, and something that's more or less inevitably going to happen. If we can't listen as well as look, we're in trouble!

[thuggery.livejournal.com]

Hm! I think that's my friend Paolo on the leftmost of the last set of photos you posted!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is he in New York? He's in the New York edition of Street magazine, here (http://www.fruits-mg.com/xnew/image/ST-W170/ST-W170-now/S-_64.jpg).

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Pff, you know what I look like.

I do love that little Momus doll, it´s a lot like the Adam Ant one in the Friend or Foe vid.

FRUiTS SHMUiTS

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Interesting that this month's print issue of Wired is titled "Get Naked and Rule the World", and is all about a new business model called RADICAL TRANSPARENCY.

My stuff is all about striking a balance between the raw feed and total cartoonish abstraction. I see them both as powerful tools, and I'm obsessed with Herzog's idea of ecstatic truth. But the youtube-verite explosion is so important to focus on because it's a corrective to TV and other old media that've never ever thought give us that kind of unedited embodied entertainment. (Except for C-Span!!!)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Peaches is so annoying," Chloe had written. "She's uploaded about seven pictures of herself posing, then about 10 of Fred [my beloved boyfriend] and then all the rest are of her stupid rat-dog and her dressed as some kind of scary clown. She really needs to stop being such an exhibitionist all the time." WHAT?"

Peaches Geldof in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2046236,00.html), discussing the same issue without reference to Plato, the Renaissance or self-mediation. Her solution? Get a dog.