Indecent exposure
Mar. 29th, 2007 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusYesterday 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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!
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!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
here's what i look like
Date: 2007-03-29 09:33 am (UTC)Re: here's what i look like
Date: 2007-03-29 09:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 09:58 am (UTC)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?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:04 am (UTC)Re: here's what i look like
Date: 2007-03-29 10:09 am (UTC)Re: here's what i look like
Date: 2007-03-29 10:13 am (UTC)Re: here's what i look like
Date: 2007-03-29 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:21 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:29 am (UTC)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!"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:39 am (UTC)And isn't a bit lame and a bit of a cliché to accuse people who don't agree with you of being in need of a good lay?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:40 am (UTC)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?"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:50 am (UTC)This is probably an age thing. I think the divergent self-creation thing is the dominant myth of ambitious youth, and the convergent self-acceptance thing is the dominant myth of mellowing age.
But no, I'm personally not very interested in pure self-creation any more. Actuality is more interesting than potentiality, the same way failure is more interesting than success. Every happy family is the same, as Tolstoy said.
And, you know, if you'd given me a free hand when I was younger to become whatever I wanted to be, it would have had a much more boring outcome: I would have waved a wand and become David Bowie.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 10:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 11:02 am (UTC)I guess the fact that YouTube is better-designed and owned by a "less evil" megacorporation seriously counts, but still.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 11:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 11:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 12:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 12:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 01:06 pm (UTC)