Geek Vagabond Pocketmonster
Sep. 14th, 2008 01:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI was in the perfect company to see the exhibition Strich und Faden: Heimat, Volkskunst, und Travestie (running to October 8th at Kunstraum Richard Sorge, Landsberger Allee 54, Berlin) yesterday -- accompanied not just by Hisae and Sunshine, but by Uli Westphal, the elephant taxonomist. Last time I hung out with Uli, I made a taxonomy of Terries, a collection of hipsters sporting post-Terry Richardson moustaches. This time, we stood in front of some new photos by the Dutch photographer and stylist team of Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, who collect similar-looking people on the street, photograph them against a plain white background, cluster the results in groups of twelve, give each group a name, and build up a stock (on their website, in their book, and in exhibitions) of tribes they call Exactitudes.
The Exactitudes Project -- it's being going on for about ten years now -- is a wonderful piece of visual sociology, a taxonomy-in-progress of street style, and a poke in the eye for cherished notions of individuality. "In their quest for heightened individuality and emancipation from the masses," reads the Berlin exhibition handout, "most persons still end up as part of a distinct category. It is this irony that the Exactitudes pictures lovingly and painstakingly document... It seems to question the authenticity of identity, suggesting it may be just another thing to be consumed, the result of fashion, peer pressure or ideology... and present mainstream figures as just another kind of freak". Versluis and Uyttenbroek see style as, essentially, semantic: "There is always a sentence in what people wear," says Versluis. "That can be poetry, or shouting out loud. We try to catch that." And just as language communicates by using familiar signs with fixed, shared meanings, so does visual style.
It can be a lot of fun trying to work out which group the couple would put us into. Here's how I was dressed when I visited the exhibition yesterday. Having looked at all 96 tribes on the Exactitudes website, I'd say I'm some mixture of Pocketmonster and Vagabond and Geek. A Geek Vagabond Pocketmonster, then, with fruity undertones of Chairman and a cheeky hint of Musulman. Oh, and I'm dating a Bu Ying! and just made an album with a Cassettes Gang.
Are you in there somewhere?
The Exactitudes Project -- it's being going on for about ten years now -- is a wonderful piece of visual sociology, a taxonomy-in-progress of street style, and a poke in the eye for cherished notions of individuality. "In their quest for heightened individuality and emancipation from the masses," reads the Berlin exhibition handout, "most persons still end up as part of a distinct category. It is this irony that the Exactitudes pictures lovingly and painstakingly document... It seems to question the authenticity of identity, suggesting it may be just another thing to be consumed, the result of fashion, peer pressure or ideology... and present mainstream figures as just another kind of freak". Versluis and Uyttenbroek see style as, essentially, semantic: "There is always a sentence in what people wear," says Versluis. "That can be poetry, or shouting out loud. We try to catch that." And just as language communicates by using familiar signs with fixed, shared meanings, so does visual style.
It can be a lot of fun trying to work out which group the couple would put us into. Here's how I was dressed when I visited the exhibition yesterday. Having looked at all 96 tribes on the Exactitudes website, I'd say I'm some mixture of Pocketmonster and Vagabond and Geek. A Geek Vagabond Pocketmonster, then, with fruity undertones of Chairman and a cheeky hint of Musulman. Oh, and I'm dating a Bu Ying! and just made an album with a Cassettes Gang.Are you in there somewhere?
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:50 pm (UTC)The nearest to fish worker style is the Butchers (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=22), but I've always found butchers a little bit grim.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 01:48 am (UTC)i love momu
Date: 2008-09-14 03:18 am (UTC)I'm a gimmie (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php) mixed with a chairman ( what can I say? my mao jacke† looks great on me)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 05:46 am (UTC)...is damn good fun. Lighten up!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 05:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 07:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 09:35 am (UTC)I can't find myself in there, the closest I got was a mixture of French Touch (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=82), Bimbo (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=04), and Madam (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=20).
Though I think I like Bimbo best.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:50 am (UTC)The individual and the collective exist only within the context of macro/micro-categories, which are sociological constructs.
As for the Exactitudes categories, I cant say I relate to any particular group. (I've met 3 people featured in the Exactitudes project it seems, 2 guys from the bears category and 1 girl from the Pin-ups.)
Like Jordan said, it's all the little differences you notice that these categories seem to omit. A lot of people wear jeans and tshirts, but the styles, sizes and colours set them apart. I also dress differently depending on where I'm going and what I'm doing. Some of my clothes are bland and utilitarian, some of them are very unique, and a lot in between.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 11:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:30 pm (UTC)It's one of fashion's eternal paradoxes that its liberal desire to embrace the grass roots can lead it to cherish illiberal things. But it's also true that meanings are never fixed: a Fred Perry shirt and DMs and braces, for instance, doesn't have to mean "racist bootboy" forever. A lot of the people in the Anti-Nazi League dressed that way too. And when Japanese kids wear swasktikas, they aren't swastikas any more -- and Hitler's ideology, because it's forgotten, is defeated.
Not everyone agrees, of course, including my old mentor Steve Heller, who's argued (http://dcrit.sva.edu/pdfs/heller_postscript.pdf) that the swastika needs to remain taboo forever -- or at least for a very long time. I think that keeps the power, mythology, symbolism and ideology unnecessarily strong and pure, and I think it works only when, like Steve, you frame the question with the concept of redemption, and say that the only two options are that the swastika remain "beyond redemption" or "be redeemed". There's another more neutral fate: that the swastika should become subject to semantic drift and decay, should pop up in a number of different contexts with a number of different meanings, until it becomes something vague and diffuse: exactly the opposite of what the Nazis wanted.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 01:16 pm (UTC)how apt.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 01:22 pm (UTC)Choice novelty gabber hits of my primary school days:
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Date: 2008-09-14 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 02:34 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 02:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 03:01 pm (UTC)I also spotted Naoko (http://exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=33) by the way...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 03:17 pm (UTC)-M.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 03:30 pm (UTC)The "background" story makes the same sort of mistake that these exactitudes make (as some have pointed out, already), lighthearted and fun though it may be: there's a (personally) fine-tuned difference between similar looking aesthetics. For instance: gabbers and Lonsdale-youth only share some aesthetical overlap, but the latter can also be associated with oi-punk/hardcore, or no music-scene at all, just the brandname clothing And then still not all of them are fascist-racists and there is a good play of media involved. Both anti-fascists and the general media have a hard time pinning down and classifying such youth cultures. But I expect better from a post-materialistic metamorphing geek vagabond pocketmonster...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 04:21 pm (UTC)So you're blaming media manipulation for making Gabber appear "too fascist", I'm doing the opposite: media manipulation -- in the form of harmless, parasitical bubblegum novelty hits like the ones Electricwitch embedded -- was trying desperately to make Gabber seem less fascist. Just how widespread fascist attitudes became in Holland was made clear by the success of Pim Fortuyn's party. I don't think it's a sensibility -- or a risk -- that should be downplayed, even in today's Holland, with Fortuyn dead. And it's something we even have here in Click Opera (Cerulicante's comments on the Islamization of Europe), and even has its poisonous little niche in the mainstream of British letters, in the form of Martin Amis and his pals -- literary Gabbers, if you like.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 04:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 05:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 06:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 06:32 pm (UTC)Any happy memories of cleaning fish for your Da? My grandad (http://www.loftcam.com/grafix/homer/fog_warning.jpeg) took me fishing a few times, but it never really stuck. I always wanted to be in the water with the fish, not standing on the shore with a line and pole.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 07:06 pm (UTC)those who would impose rather than offer
The poison in the Eurabian argument (http://imomus.livejournal.com/164207.html) is all bound up with that "would" -- things being done in the present are justified by a projection of what their victims would do to us, had they the dominance we currently have over them. Actual oppression is justified by the projection of a projection. "If they were in our place -- if they were the majority in our societies, instead of us..."
Nietzsche nailed the aggression in this projecting presupposition: "Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 07:55 pm (UTC)the Izzue (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=qw1060430040293B225) news article.
essentially, semantic
Date: 2008-09-14 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 08:31 pm (UTC)I really find the logic of that hard to fathom. It's as if he's saying the swastika itself is now a sacred signifier, and any diluting or inappropriate uses of it are "desecration" or sacrilege.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 09:38 pm (UTC)Dominance, majorities - well, any bomb is dominance. If your legs were blown off tomorrow you wouldn't think "I kinda deserved that." Surely the poison of the seesaw argument is some people now in wheelchairs have to.
"Christo-fascists",
Date: 2008-09-14 11:32 pm (UTC)from Landsberger Allee
Date: 2008-09-15 08:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 08:40 am (UTC)And how can i trust any of the other picture sheets to be any less fake then?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-24 04:23 pm (UTC)