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Bella Jenkins

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Eisenhauer + blackmediamatters3

Sorry this is late. I am having *a month*. I will hopefully get through finishing my response by the end of tonight.

This section of the article raises some good questions in regards to the material discussed. “How do our very efforts to liberate perpetuate the relations of dominance?” How do we not generalize all students as students? How can we unify the category of student and teacher without implying that everyone within those categories are the same and receive visual culture the same, come from the same background, and require the same treatment. Eisenhauer states that, “failures to entertain differences result  in failures  to recognize inequalities.” This ties in, not only with the language of bombardment, and within schools, but directly with the BlackLivesMatter movement. It also ties back into schools not recognizing that “Student” is too vague of a group when there are so many racial, socio-economic, cultural, and learning style differences. Students in general are treated as if they are “not yet a real human being,” and are constantly being spoken for. 

The video games from The Street Arcade are an interesting way to get away from adults speaking for children in that they literally are made by children. Even if the information may have been taught to the children, they were allowed to make their own interpretation of the material come to life. Taking issues, such as peer pressure or diet, allowed the children not only to recognize an issue, but to find a solution, as games tend to have a sort of end goal. With the peer pressure game, the girl in the game had outfit choices, and could talk to students, and find a way to make a friend in the locker hall. It showed a thinking through of a problem to find a relevant solution for the student. 

I had trouble finding things to talk about with the other media individually; however, I found that just visually and through subject matter, the videos were showing diversity within black media. There were more ages (If It Wasn’t True vs Time Crisis) , groups (nationality-wise, or genre-wise), and gender variations involved in the videos. The videos were also less focused on celebrities, and more on less famous artists and everyday people / artists. 

Here’s my GIF of an average Joe being a hero with his good ideas and nice heart. I really like this program . 

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Eisenhauer + blackmediamatter2

I, Destini follows the perspective of a teenage girl with an incarcerated brother. The short film is visually and audibly minimal forcing attention to the issue and emotion being referenced. There is comparison of the black man in today’s society to animals in Africa as viewed by white people, being seen as only the predatory and aggressive animal, while there are peaceful animals existing in the same continent. The animation in this film is so stunning, and the audio and slow tempo to go along with it gives a very meditative and thoughtful feeling. The incarceration of the brother is almost comparable to having a death in the family, or any other absence of a family member. Forgetting how they look, looking for what’s lost in personal time, and the general mundaneness in feeling their absence in the day-to day. She describes her disconnection from her peers in not having experienced visiting a missing brother in prison, most likely having their siblings and parents right at home. Animations like this have the ability to connect with most age groups in discussing the difficulties faced by people in this same situation, addressing how to be more sympathetic and understanding to peers in this boat.

The George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People has a similar message about the unequal treatment of black americans, not only in the justice system like I, Destini, but in response to safety and first-response to natural disaster as with Katrina. There is an audio clip saying, “you simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. So poor and they are so black,” as if the fact that they’re “so” black contributes to their poorness and a reason for almost pity. According to the video days passed without proper assistance, and it attributed to Bush not caring as much about helping due to the race of the majority of people in need. 

Flying Lotus - “Until The Quiet Comes” explores also the experience of being black in an urban setting. It talks about both death (the quiet) and life (until the quiet comes). It shows an innocent child holding a finger gun and shooting, wearing as I, Destini describes, as a nondescript basic shirt and pants, and suffers from being shot down, I think implied by the helicopter. This could be expanding on the ideas from I, Destini of a “giraffe” being viewed as a “lion”. There is another death seen of everyone somberly overlooking the death of a member of a neighborhood. There is an after-death dance that follows, as everyone turns their heads to watch. Intermittently between the violence and darkness, there are moments, as stated by Jack Lundquist  in a response on http://web.stanford.edu/ , of “innocent joy, beauty and a strong sense of community.”

Eisenhauer speaks of Cindy Sherman in this section of the article. Cindy Sherman drastically changes her appearance in conceptual self-portraits. By doing this, she is exploring the multifaceted nature of individuals. According to Eisenhaur, “Sherman's "real" self is not lost or hidden beneath a pastiche of popular costumes. Rather, her multiplicity of representations dismantles presumptions of interiority/exteriority and activity/passivity and articulates the very fiction of a "real" self (Grosz, 1994).” In other words, it challenges the idea that we are linear and  static beings, and encourages the idea that we are not just how we appear, and how we present ourselves. It “complicates the very idea of finding an origin, original, or “real” identity.” Just with the previous videos discussed, there is question over persona, and physical looks and it’s correlation to a “Real” self.

Update: I got home at 12 from work, spent the last 30 minutes on my gif, and now it says this

I will redo it tomorrow bc I’m falling asleep!!

sad girls club

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Instagram more like Instascam amiright

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Horses in Luv

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Eisenhauer 148-160 + Syreeta  McFadden

Syreeta McFadden spoke of, in her interview with NPR, a sort of racism which inherently exists in photography because of technology, the development of the camera and film to allow white people to look their best, and lighting practices. She state in her interview that it was not intention that created this distortion to black and brown skin on film, but a “willful obliviousness”. A black persons skin could look muddy or blue from one shot to the next. She also brings up the problematic practice of white washing POC in photographs, magazine covers, and media, not through photoshop, but through lighting practices. The interviewer brings up that even white people get washed out at times so why does it matter. The problem with this is, according to Syreeta, that it doesn’t “reflect a kind of normalcy” when POC are already so often misrepresented in other ways. I think that because of the history behind all of these issues, they are taken with a much greater sensitivity than that of white people being washed out. There isn’t stigma around a white person being more pale in a photo, but there is controversy over being darker, more light skinned, even within communities of POC. Being lighter is often misrepresented as being more desired, and so lightening a darker person’s skin-tone, even if unintentional due to traditional lighting practices, should perhaps be given more attention. 

Solange’s music video for “Don’t Touch My Hair” was so great. A very beautiful video displaying black hairstyles in an artistic light, and creating a sense of normalcy that was talked about by Syreeta. There is a sense of ownership over her hair with lyrics such as “this hair is mine,” and “you don’t understand what it meant to me”, and identity/individuality  with lyrics like “Don’t touch my hair, when it’s the feelings I wear. Don’t touch my soul, when it’s the rhythm I know.” Overall, it seems like a self-love video promoting self-acceptance over a part of one’s racial/cultural identity (hair), and framing it in a positive light.

I usually view this Key and Peel video through a purely comedic lens on a monthly basis, but I thought I would watch it this time through the lens of the issue at hand. It seems to be a role reversal type skit in which a black teacher treats a white classroom the way a black classroom could be potentially treated by white teachers. This is something we’ve discussed in ARTE301 -- how it’s important to recognize cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in order to better suit the students needs. This is like a how-to-not-to on being culturally aware and sensitive. Key starts out trying to intimidate the class by saying he taught in an inner city. He reads off the students names mispronounced, reacting in anger with their correction, assuming they are messing with him, connecting only with the only black student in the room (Peele) at the end. This definitely ties back to Digital Blackface where it says, “When we do nothing, we’re doing something, and when we do anything, our behavior is considered "extreme." 

The Eisenhauer piece goes into the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, the consumer and the producer. The juxtaposition of the viewer being a “homogenized victim” (within the language of bombardment) and as a largely complex and complete self (beyond the language of bombardment). Within our culture, there isa discrepancy between ability to understand and tools to understand, as well as the meaning of the media to us and young people. Eisenhauer discusses agism in sexism in this way describing how a young girl might be treated as though she is unable to critically engage in “junk culture” and therefore suffers as a victim to “overconsumption and over exposure”, an incomplete person susceptible to the negative outcomes of the media through passivity. There is a risk of “losing an ‘ actual’ self” through this constant wave of outside ideas. As if we are incomplete without them. She says, “students are immersed in popular culture and lacking in literacy”. They are constantly bombarded with ideas and material, good and bad, that they, according to Sholle & Denski, lack the ability to manage those ideas without an adult -- being someone with the tools, education, and wisdom to guide a younger person. There is argument within the article that girls do have the power to make change within our culture, and that the construct of a passive/active dichotomy hinders that. I think that the role of the educator is not to tell the student how to feel about the media, or to treat the individual student as incompetent, but to guide what kind of media is being shown, or exposing certain things that could be valuable to a young person. Things that explore the identities of the students. The videos from the Black Media Matters list are examples of that. Things that are accessible to young people, and have room for discussion, learning, and act more as a commentary on social structures rather than trying to exploit or advertise.

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https://youtu.be/2g_gUdpvN0A

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RE: Eisenhauer 155-157 + Like Pearls

Interestingly, we touched on the subject of the first section of Eisenhauer’s piece in ARTE310 this morning while comparing DBAE, child-centered, formalist, and issue-based approaches. The criticism mentioned in regards to DBAE was that is focused primarily on museum objects, and lacked accessible language and imagery that was relevant to children’s day to day experiences. Eisenhauer states that, “Central to this shift is a challenge to the binary relationship between fine art and popular culture resulting in an emphasis upon ‘everyday aesthetic experiences’ as an important part of art curriculum.”  She is recognizing that there is an importance in balancing the times of imagery being taught, giving the everyday a place in the classroom. This idea leads into issue-based curriculum which is meant to relate to the students’ experiences to the world around them, and not just to the past (DBAE) or to themselves (child-centered). Looking at everyday media allows room for critical analysis about more relevant material. The “Like Pearls” site is an example of the type of media that could be discussed, although with an older audience. 

“Like Pearls” is, as the artist puts it, “is a mash-up of sex and romance collected from my Farsi email spam and online underwear stores based in Iran” juxtaposing the woman as a pearl in Western vs. Middle Eastern cultures. The word “bombardment” is used many times in this section of the Eisenhauer article, and relates to “Like Pearls” in that way most. The whole piece consists of a bombardment of sparkly models, being both objectified and censored, amongst “romantic” symbols such as hearts, birds, flowers, etc. There is a comparison of the saying "a woman in a Hijab is like a hidden pearl in its shell” and Westerners using the woman as a pretty pearl on display in an exploitative way. The artist’s notebook touches on “gheyrat”, which I understand to be an intense love this involves jealousy and possessiveness. I researched the word coming across a definition as “men who love you so much that they can’t live without you, but also love you “enough” to hurt you so that they can take you back or ruin your life forever by throwing acid on your face.“ from Iranian.com. She is saying that there is this aggressive energy and language that is masked by the sparkly, romantic imagery. These are displayed as “Underwear that hold the key to her heart” (Like Pearls), yet there is this contradicting mindset she is commenting on that  “Because women in Islam are asked to always and only beautify themselves for their husbands, so that their husbands are not bored with them and won’t cheat on them. It’s a woman’s job to be available and open for sex anytime her husband asks.”(artists notebook)

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RE: In Our Glory / Digital Blackface

As a white, American, non-photographer, I could not relate to every experience of Hooks. What I could relate to was her ideas of the snapshot as a sense of self, a timeline of one’s journey and history. As a sentimental person, I related to her experience of relating the past to the photos, and to deep connections to photos of people related to her. It was interesting to hear her viewpoint of ease of access to technology vs. the control over representation when it comes to POC. In Hooks article she says “The camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks…racist white imagination and that were circulated widely in dominant culture (on salt shakers, cookie jars, pancake boxes) could be countered by “true to life” images…”  That definitely ties in with the Digital Blackface reading being about media vs true to life.

 I can see many sides to this argument. Upon first reading it, I did not really agree with the comparison of white people using GIFs with black people in them to blackface. I read this response: “As noted by The Federalist’s Bre Payton, “Accusing someone of making fun of African-Americans by donning blackface is a serious thing indeed, which is why throwing that term around casually is problematic. When people share a GIF of a black person, they are not painting themselves with blackface makeup to perpetuate a stereotype or bar people entry from theater or even public life. Often they are not even stereotyping, given that posting GIFs is by nature an expression of shared humanity.” As talked about above, memes are used to express a common feeling. Although some memes of black people can be racist and should therefore not be used, I think that comparing it to something as objectively racist and as serious as blackface is in itself problematic and offensive. I don’t think that the intent of most people using images including black people are to be racist or offensive. I personally don’t use twitter or that many memes, but I don’t think excluding GIFs from your use because there is a black person in them is necessarily helpful at all. People don’t generally seek out memes because they have black people to make their point. They quickly choose one that gets their point across. Maybe a part of the issue is that there is a lack of thought and sensitivity, I am not sure. I have heard and read that intent isn’t what matters, but the outcome of the action. I could see what the author was talking about when saying that, “We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your “yaas” moments.” I can see how being black and seeing white people share these images could be annoying, or feel like being stereotyped. The fact is that people don’t become memes for showing no expression. There are plenty of memes of people of all races being exaggerated in their expression, action, and emotions. Black people shouldn’t be excluded from these memes. The black people in the memes chose to act that way on screen, and became a meme because of the hyperbolic actions, just as a white person with hyperbolic actions would become a meme. Tying back to the first article, memes are not white images of black people like Aunt Jemima, they are real videos of real black people. I wonder if it is offensive to undermine their actions and responses as being exaggerated and stereotypical, or if it is only offensive for white people to be sharing them. This is where I become conflicted on the issue, because as a white person, I am not affected by stereotypes perpetuated about white people, and I recognize that black people are. I just don’t think that this is a serious issue, but again, I am white.