IS2 RESEARCH TABLE GREATEST HITS

Greatest Hits: Research Reading Table

Through all the things we read semester, the things that stayed with me the most were the writings by women. I really liked to get to know female authors from a variety of different genres. These quotes all taught me something about myself, visual culture and art, or politics. My understanding of visual culture was changed through these readings; visual culture is anything that can be seen that expresses an idea, opinion, or some sort of symbol.

I really appreciated Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It was the writing that definitely will stick with me the most and follow me through my learnings. It is a writing that is so painfully honest about sex, mental health, and inner thoughts. Nelson’s stream of conscious style writing is hard to match in modern writing, but it reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time, James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. Her intensive writing on one topic is something that will definitely inspire me in the future. I want to start keeping a journal of the little obsessive thoughts I have in hopes that I will be able to compile them into a writing one day.

I knew this before, but one topic in writing that I really am drawn toward is sexuality. Growing up in a family where sexuality was taboo, sexuality will always intrigue me in writing and art (hence my studio/seminar final about sexuality). This was seen through my fixation on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Bluets, and How do we define the female gaze in 2018.

My favorite writer through the readings this semester was Susan Sontag, who I believe to be extremely wise in a variety of topics. Regarding the Pain of Others opened me up to other Sontag writings, like Notes on Camp.

 

Without further ado, Madeline Benfield’s Reading Research Table Greatest Hits…

 

 

1. “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Gifs.” Lauren Michele Jackson.

Black characters in TV and movies are most of the time exaggerated, which is why websites like Giphy have reactions tags like Angry Black Woman, Sassy Black Lady, and Fat Black Woman.

It’s an implication that points toward a strange way of thinking: When we do nothing, we’re doing something, and when we do anything, our behavior is considered “extreme.” This includes displays of emotion stereotyped as excessive: so happy, so sassy, so ghetto, so loud. In television and film, our dial is on 10 all the time — rarely are black characters afforded subtle traits or feelings. Scholar Sianne Ngai uses the word “animatedness” to describe our cultural propensity see black people as walking hyperbole.

People on the Internet want to put forth a persona and using black reaction gifs on your Twitter/in texts is a form of blackface. You are using the face and actions of someone else to further yourself/give yourself an identity and using a black reaction gif is just the same.

 

2. Maggie Nelson.

She has been working on writing this book on blue for years without having written anything.

#13 – page 5

She says “we don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.” I believe this is true for everyone, and I see it in my own life. The things I love that are random, I just love. There is no reason. As for colors, I love a rich bright green color and I can’t explain why. It just appeals to me in a way that other colors can’t.

 

3. Maggie Nelson.

Love is ugly and it is selfish.

#58 – page 23

I’m definitely a romantic, and I love love. I dream about love and I wonder how things would be different if I was always in a perfect love. Love hurts so much after its gone.

 

4. The Graffiti Question. Suzi Gablik.

Art is subjective in a way, but Keith Haring believes that art is more of a temporary installation in life.

Art is about something being seen, whether it is absorbed by the eyes of people in the subways or of people in galleries. In the subways, one needs total abandon; since the work only exists for a fleeting moment, it can and probably will be erased. The moment when it was seen may be all that is left of it. Objects, of course, have much less chance of disappearing, they will be protected, and this changes the value that is placed on them. But permanence and impermanence are both plausible outcomes to an activity. Pg 5/13

Everything is temporary, in its own way. The way we see things affects this. Objects are more permanent, but the art of an object is not, especially when it comes to graffiti. We should appreciate and love graffiti because before we know it, the art is going to be gone.

 

5. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Laura Mulvey.

The second of the two ways of understanding the sexual stimulation of cinema is the egotistical approach. Seeing a sexual being on a screen, either man, woman, or other, can source pride for something as identifying with the character/the narrative.

Top of 837

Humans are always looking for a connection, whether it be with a film, with another person, or with something intangible. Mulvey states here that one might enjoy seeing the sexy or sensual to imagine oneself in that situation. One identifies with the ego on the screen, either picturing themselves as the object of sensation or the one enjoying that sensation, adding to the allure of sexuality in cinema.

 

6. How do we define the female gaze in 2018? Tori Telfer.

Babette Mangolte says that in New York in the early 70s, the idea of the female gaze was finally on the rise. Women desired to be heard, and they wanted their art to be seen and heard too. Everyone agreed that the men had been in the spotlight for too long but the women wanted to “invent a new language that would be different to from the one of [their] fathers and lovers”.

Middle of 5/9 – Babette Mangolte

The female gaze is seen to have been something that needed to be invented: without giving it a title, a name, and a description for it, it didn’t exist. Men took their spotlight and had it for too long.

 

7. Regarding the Pain of Others. Susan Sontag.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

Top of 1st page of chapter 2

This is insanely relevant. Immediately, this passage brought Kony 2012 to mind. It was a campaign to attack/get rid of Kony, a tyrant, child stealing, rapist dictator in Africa. The Internet heard about it and decided to band together to donate money to the cause and later, it came out that the campaign was fake. We are being fed information every single day from headlines and media sources, regardless of how real or true they are.

 

8. Regarding the Pain of Others. Susan Sontag.

“Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens…”

4 pages into ch 2 at “Ever since” paragraph

Everything that comes in front of a camera that is captured commemorates something. This essay revolves around the idea of censorship: to censor or not. Especially with war images (as well as pornography and some extreme political ideas) – they have the tendency to be censored, but once they come across the camera (in modern times), there is going to be little to no TRUE censorship because everything captured is reality.

 

9. Find Your Beach. Zadie Smith.

Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way…you don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality.

Page 4 /5

My interpretation of this quote is the realness of it, just like the previous Berger quote. I resonated with this entire essay and the comments Smith makes about New York. Everyone is on their own pace and running around and doing their own thing. Personally, I want to be successful and work for a magazine in the fashion world. This is my own dream, and I will stop at nothing to get there, including working myself very thin.

 

10. The personal archive as historical record. Susan Schwartzenberg.

 

“Every home in a sense is a library, an informal archive of past and present intermingled. As I made my journey through each home and domestic environment, I found myself absorbed in the idea of the private space, the intimacy of the home as a platform – a place from which to project this story into the public realm.”

Middle right column of pg.71

This passage stuck out to me as being the thesis of the article, but also the most important and informative part of the passage. It’s really interesting to me how you can have an entire history in just your photos, journals, and personal belongings. I wonder what someone could find through my belongings and photos and documentation. Also, my family has a lot of photos and memorabilia and information physically, so I just wonder what could be learned or dug up in the future.