Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
I Never Saw John Wayne on the Sands of Iwo Jima
I Never Saw John Wayne on the Sands Of Iwo Jima.
The World War Two battle for control of the Japanese Island, Iwo Jima, is well represented in popular culture. Indeed a photograph of a US flag being raised at the volcanic island’s summit, Mount Suribachi, is often claimed to be the most reproduced photograph of all time. This image has even been cast in bronze as the USMC National Memorial, sited in the famous military personnel cemetery, Arlington. The US Marine Corps holds a particular spot in the hearts of many US Nationals. It is portrayed as the embodiment of all that is good in US culture, as it is imagined that only the elite – the strongest, smartest and fittest of this young nation’s young nationals – are enlisted, to this, the most glamorous of the American Armed Forces. However, this position has largely been constructed from the popular mythology of the Battle of Iwo Jima, reinforced with Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph. Indeed, the Marine Corps’ position pre the Pacific Campaign was precarious - rumours of amalgamation into the Army or Navy were rife and the Marines’ existence as a separate entity was under serious threat. It was necessary for them to prove their use value, and the opportunity to do this arose with the Pacific Campaign and its opportunities for amphibious warfare.
The Battle of Iwo Jima took place between the USA and the Japanese Empire between February and March 1945. It was the first American attack on the Japanese home islands and took place under the precedent that its airfields were of strategic importance to both sides. Iwo Jima is a barren volcanic island of only 8 square miles and at the time of invasion had no civilian presence. This made it both an appealing military target for humanitarian reasons and a ferocious no-holds barred battlefield for the forces sent to fight there. It was decreed that victory was essential for both sides due to strategic and propaganda reasons and thus the battle was hard fought. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers over 20,000 were killed and the US forces suffered more than 7,000 losses, either confirmed dead or recorded as missing.
The famous photograph depicting American Marines raising the US flag (the Stars and Stripes) at the summit of Mount Suribachi appears to show victory, triumph and success.
fig 4.
In actuality, this event took place on day 5 of a more than a month long battle and the well-known moment recorded was not a moment of triumph at all, rather it was soldiers replacing another Stars and Stripes flags previously placed at the summit due to a dispute over which battalion actually owned the flag. Thus, it was not success that was recorded in this, possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time, but in fact a banal task of bureaucratic mundanity.
ig 5.
Even the events surrounding the initial flag raising 2 days before the iconic photograph was taken were not of particular significance. The Americans had been allowed to scale the volcano with only minimal intervention from Imperial forces who were actually lying in wait in a network of tunnels preparing to fight to the death for the principle of defending their homeland, although in reality Iwo Jima is a barren rock only slightly bigger than Canvey Island in Essex.
Japanese command had already concluded that victory was impossible and that they would be unable to repel invasion of the island due to their already much depleted Navy and Air forces, and instead were commanding operations with the intent to lose as fiercely as possible, never surrendering, and taking as many enemy lives as possible, thus claiming a psychological victory designed to deter the US forces from making any more land invasions.
However, this was not the story presented at the time, rather, due to a combination of propaganda and popular legend the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima has largely been considered to be broadly the same as that depicted the John Wayne vehicle of 1949 “The Sands Of Iwo Jima”. This was a hugely popular film at the time and earned John Wayne an Oscar nomination (the film received a total of four nominations, including Wayne for Best Actor in a Leading Role).
Fig 6.
The film was released just four years after the events dramatised - a time when tales of war-time heroism were still the norm and the natural questioning and criticism that comes about through time, distance and research had not yet begun. Consequently, the film is a typical Boy’s Own type adventure movie featuring a tough career sergeant and his adversarial subordinates learning to appreciate each other’s qualities before (or even after) the heroic death of a main character. Interestingly, out of John Wayne’s not inconsiderable back catalogue of over (number) pictures, this is one of very few in which his character dies[1], shot unexpectedly by a sniper, cementing the popular legend of Marine sacrifice and heroism for legions of movie-goers.
This fictionalised account is directly challenged in the Drive-by Truckers song of the same name[2]. The Drive-by Truckers have taken an oppositional stance to Hollywood on several occasions, often choosing to portray the view of the supposed anti-hero, filling in the good/evil black and white of Hollywood with numerous shades of grey. Their musical style and use of local historical and geographical detail present a compellingly authentic or truth-like feel[3] and their strategy of utilising Hollywood narratives to locate quiet tales of ordinary folk reinforces this sense of the authentic. This is most obvious in their (2003) track “Boys From Alabama” which begins with this spoken word introduction:
We’re going to take you up to McNairy county Tennessee,
Back in the days when Sheriff Buford Pusser ran things around there.
Sheriff Buford Pusser was trying to clean up McNairy County, Tennessee from all of them bootleggers that was bringing crime and corruption and illegal liquor up to his little dry county.
And for his troubles he got ambushed and his wife was murdered and his house got blown up and they made a movie about it called “Walking Tall”.
This is the other side of that story:[4]
The song goes on to tell the story of a young man pressed into illegal activity against his will, rather than that of the career criminals depicted in the cited film[5]. With this oppositional stance in mind, it seems natural that the narrative expressed in the (2003) song Sands Of Iwo Jima takes an oppositional stance in to its John Wayne movie namesake. This opposition is not as explicit as that in the song “Boys from Alabama”, instead utilising a more quiet, implied position. Telling the story of an Iwo Jima veteran, professed to be the great uncle of the songs protagonist, the song presents the narrative as a post-memory tale of life after war by describing the narrators Great Uncle, George A, and his conscription into the US forces in order to fight “half-a-world-away”[6]. The song gives little clue to actual events of World War Two, preferring instead to focus on the years beyond, peace-time and the distinct lack of peace it brings to George A and his fellow soldiers in their twilight years. The songwriter, Patterson Hood, says this:
As a kid, I spent every weekend at my Great-Uncle's farm (my family's old homestead) where I rode go-carts and acted out my favorite movie scenes in the woods. George A. is an amazing man (still kicking hard at 84) and I have long tried to capture a glimpse of those times in a song.
During World War II he was drafted and ended up on the island Iwo Jima in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. As a curious child, I'd often innocently ask him about all that. One night while watching the old John Wayne movie (The Sands Of Iwo Jima) on TV, he simply said that he "never saw John Wayne over there".
So many of the folks I've written about in this album feel forced into doing terrible things. George A. was no doubt, changed by his experience, but I know him to be easily one of the greatest men I have ever met, thus, making it a much trickier subject to write about. [7]
This unspoken tale of unspoken horror and quiet heroism is in stark contrast to the boy’s own depiction seen in the 1949 film of the same name. The refusal of George A to tell an explicit tale of a life in combat becomes the narrative in Hood’s post-memory. The gaps that would ordinarily be filled by Hollywood depictions and representations are denied and it is this absence of the usual content that indicates the presence of true horror. As discussed previously, the DBT’s sense of Authenticity implied through performativity and utterance make a powerful argument for their representation to be consumed as truth, even though it contains almost no information on the actual events.
The undermining of the accepted, legendary narrative is further apparent in The Ballad of Ira Hayes. Dissent against the dominant ideology has a precedent throughout the history of country and folk music; indeed, the survivors of the Battle of Iwo Jima have previously been represented in the hugely famous song, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes”[8] recorded by both the granddaddy of Country, Johnny Cash and the Folk hero, BobDylan. The only one of the six-pictured flag-raisers to become a household name, Ira Hayes, was a member of the USMC and as a subject of that much-reproduced, lauded photograph he was subsequently sculpted and cast in bronze to take up permanent residence in Arlington National Cemetery.[9]
Ira Hayes came from a Native American family resident on the Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona. He enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves in 1942 at the age of 19. Like many young men of his generation his joining the Armed Forces would likely have been a largely economic decision. Conditions on the reservation were arid and the Gila River Native Americans (also known as Pima Indians) had been struggling for survival since the US government had restricted their water supply, rendering the cultivation of crops near impossible. Thus, Ira Hayes signed up to fight for the United States, prepared to be an “Honourable Warrior” [10] in order to secure the well being of his immediate family. Hayes subsequently fought in three Pacific campaigns between 1943 and 1945. After the iconic flag-raising image was taken on Iwo Jima, Hayes and his fellow survivors John Bradley and Rene Gagnon were used for PR and propaganda purposes, travelling with President Truman on the 7th Bond Tour a fundraising drive to obtain further support for the war effort. The quiet Ira, a man from a humble background, was uncomfortable with the attention afforded to him and found himself of particular interest to many due to his ethnic heritage.
This attention was to continue, with the three flag raising survivors pressed into playing themselves alongside John Wayne in the 1949 film “Sands of Iwo Jima”, and was still ongoing 8 years later when the transformation of the flag photograph into the huge bronze USMC statue was completed, and during it’s ceremonial unveiling.
Fig 7.
Ultimately this attention became too much for Ira Hayes, whose alcoholism led to frequent arrests for drunkenness and finally to his premature death at the age of 32, attributed to alcohol related exposure. Now, Ira Hayes would likely be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic shock and would be able to access appropriate treatment, but things were different then, ex-soldiers were expected to soldier-on, in the words of Patterson Hood “Things were just that way”.[11]
Hayes was buried in Arlington Military Cemetery, in 1955, close to the bronze statue depicting him as a young Marine, forever frozen in that moment of supposed great success, a charade that Ira Hayes was never comfortable with, unable to forget about his fallen comrades.
I was sick. I guess I was about to crack up thinking about all my good buddies. They were better men than me and they're not coming back. Much less back to the White House, like me.[12]
With this story in mind, Ira Hayes is a natural subject for a country song. As previously noted, Ira Hayes is the only one of the six flag raisers to become a household name. This legendary status has certainly been reinforced by the song The Ballad of Ira Hayes, originally performed by Johnny Cash. As seen in the previous essay, Cash, as a statesman of country music, is a figurehead for the notion of performative authenticity. This heavyweight position adds weight to the alternative version of the consequences of heroism depicted in the song (in opposition to the John Wayne film that featured Hayes himself) and simultaneously benefits from the association with Hayes as an outsider – reiterating Cash’s own position as the outsider of country music, the Man in Black rather than the rhinestone cowboy. Like the Drive-by Truckers’ song, “Sands of Iwo Jima”, The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ narrative focus is on life beyond the events of the Battle of Iwo Jima, detailing Hayes’ treatment, first as a hero and subsequently as source of derision and amusement as his life spiralled into alcoholism. It is this social criticism that caused much of the controversy that surrounded the song - many radio stations refused it airplay. This refusal to acknowledge or publicise the stark account, the seemingly authentic story, is entirely indicative of the notion of cultural memory. America did not want to hear the Country truth, the Hollywood legend was far more palatable and thus a far more useful historical account in regards to the collective identity of Americans.
In response to this refusal of airplay, Cash self-funded a full page advertisement in Billboard Magazine[13], directly challenging this disregard of Hayes’ fate, repudiating those that sought to deny it due to vanity or political or financial/commercial related issues, the very issues that shape collective or cultural memory and present it as historical fact. Cultural memory is well understood to be a process that requires forgetting as much as it requires remembering. Through country music narrative, Cash reinstated a hidden, or forgotten story and this has subsequently overwritten the legend and been accepted as truth. In turn, Hollywood has been forced to readdress its own depiction of the Battle Of Iwo Jima through two Clint Eastwood directed films representing the two opposing military forces, the first, Flags of Our Fathers (2006) showing the battle from the US point of view and the second, Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) taking the Japanese position (and language – unusual for an American-made film). These ongoing, ever altering positions evolving over a 60 year period, readdressing the same supposedly historical story expose and make transparent the mechanisms that sustain cultural memory, even the perceived authentic space of the country song is subject to its own form of cultural memory - the rewrite.
I will conclude with a brief look at the Tom Russell cover version of The Ballad of Ira Hayes. It is introduced with two other seemingly unrelated stories of Native American men, positioning the fictionalized, idealized construct of the Indian Chief alongside the country singer in the ongoing battle of identity survival against the dominant ideology. He uses the emblem of the Native American Indian as an example of the authentic body yet simultaneously exposes the consequences of fetishisation (as discussed in the previous essay) and thus the need for ongoing performativity both for a sense of authenticity and within memorialization practise:
Bacon Rind was an old sage chief. He wore a regal hat.
I found him in a gas station, painted on one of those give-away glasses,
Said, “The Indians of Oklahoma, you can collect the entire set
Hunting Horse, Sequoia, A Dull Knife, I don’t have them all yet.
As I drive across this wild ground, looking for what wisdom I can find,
I thought of those gas-station glasses and a chief called Bacon-Rind.”[14]
The differences between the two versions of The Ballad of Ira Hayes are subtle, but tangible. Notably the number of battling soldiers detailed has been revised; La Farge’s poetic licence has been replaced with accuracy. Elsewhere the anger has been muted by switching the word “greed” for “deeds” and by the altered emphasis of moments created by different vocal nuances. Overall, the feeling of the Tom Russell version is one of resigned melancholia, to listen to it is an intensely sad experience – quite different to Cash’s palpable rage, augmented with military overtones in beat and instrumental score.
fig 8.
Ira Hayes is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, in the shadow of the USMC Memorial, but through the performativity of remembrance and ongoing representation in cultural memory, his story and that of his comrades continues to haunt us like a thirsty ghost in a dry ditch, even without John Wayne ever really being on the Sands of Iwo Jima.
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[1] This information was supplied by a family member and life-long John Wayne fan in general conversation. It is interestingly that this fact somehow contributes to both the legend of the US Marine Corps and the legend that is John Wayne. It is also worth noting that John Wayne’s star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame is black, black cement made from the black sands of Iwo Jima.
[2] Boys From Alabama, Patterson Hood
[3] As discussed in previous essay – Coal Miner’s Daughter.
[4] Patterson Hood – www.drivebytruckers.com
[5] Sands of Iwo Jima, Patterson Hood 2003
[6] Ibid
[7] Patterson Hood – www.drivebytruckers.com (accessed March 2008)
[8] Written by Peter Lafarge in 1964
[9] The other soldiers depicted are Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank and Rene Gagnon. Hayes is the soldier at the rear, whose out-stretched hands have already launched the flag into the air. Together, the likenesses of these six Marines have become the 78ft Marine Corp memorial statue, representing all Marines, past and present, reinforcing the iconic status of the photograph. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a proclamation that a U.S. Flag should fly from the memorial 24 hours a day — one of the few official sites where this is permitted. The current U.S. Flag, however, is not a factually accurate depiction of the flag that was raised over Mount Suribachi, as two stars have since been added for Alaska and Hawaii.
[10] A phrase reportedly used by Ira Hayes’ father and often used in relation to Hayes. The Ira Hayes Honourable Warrior Award is given by the Golfing charity, Pro-players Classic to an individual who exemplifies the attitude of giving back to their community. (http://proplayersclassic.com/irahayesaward.asp)
[11] Lyric from Sands Of Iwo Jima, Patterson Hood 2003
[12] Ira Hayes (http://www.irahhayes.org/ira.html)
[13] Johnny Cash -Billboard Magazine, August 22, 1964. "Ballad of Ira Hayes" is strong medicine. So is Rochester-Harlem-Birmingham and Vietnam...I've blown my horn now, just this once, then no more. Since I've said these things now, I find myself not caring if the record is programmed or not. I won't ask you to cram it down their throats. But...I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of "Ira Hayes”. Just one question: Why?” (http://maninblack.net/Museum-Ira_Hayes_Rebuttal.html)
[14] Tom Russell, Bacon Rind, Chief Seattle, The Ballad of Ira Hayes.
Born a Coalminer's Daughter
Born a Coalminer’s Daughter.
My interest in the concept of Authenticity in Art came about during a discussion about the work of the photographer, Nan Goldin. Goldin’s photographs are presented as documents of her own everyday, visual diary of her friends, relationships and locations. Nan ascertains that these images are candid shots and that both she and her subjects see the camera as an extension of Goldin herself. The photographs are not orchestrated images, but records of moments:
People in the pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other aspect of knowing me. It’s as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. [1]
Yet, in the debate that ensued amongst a group of my friends and peers, the reoccurring theme was that these images could not be genuine, candid, off the cuff shots. They were just too “Art”. Too “Staged”. Too “Much” and somehow they were just not “Authentic” enough. This idea of the Authentic reoccurs in the discourse surrounding various artists in a variety of ways and some interesting parallels emerge when comparing visual art to country music.
Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” features pictures that almost illustrate Loretta Lyn’s back catalogue. Both feature narratives of the minutiae, populated by brooding, smoking men and bruised, yet still tough women. Both are warts and all accounts of human existence and both are obviously autobiographical.
fig 1.
They also share a taste for causing controversy – Goldin has been accused of being a pornographer - most recently at the Baltic centre in Gateshead,[2] and Lyn has had more songs banned than any other artist in the history of country music. Lyn has lyrically addressed themes such as the loss of teenage virginity and becoming liberated via the birth control pill, almost taboo subjects for middle America
So considering all these parallels, why is it so much easier to believe in the Authenticity of Lynn’s music (despite the contrary existence of a faction-style biopic) than it is to believe in Goldin’s photographs?
The photograph is an indexical record of its subject, traditionally the result of a chemical reaction to light, so in theory it should always be authentic. Yet, the absence of materiality in the photographic process creates a feeling of the inauthentic… The photographer records, rather than participates in, the experience. The authentic moment is lived by the subjects, rather than the artist. Even the inclusion of the artist herself in the image does not dispel this disquieting moment of voyeurism. We simply do not associate the photograph with the photographer – so, in despite of a proven autobiographical narrative, we are left with what feels like an inauthentic experience. We seem more willing to suspend our disbelief when a narrative is presented in song – perhaps because the human voice and our reception of it can be considered unmediated in a way that the photographic image cannot. It has the ability to appear to be authentic, regardless of the content.
Historically, Authenticity in Art has been discussed in relation to forgeries. That which is not authentic, then, is a falsery, or a fakery. So, a painting is authentic if its history, its origin, has not been misrepresented. Does this imply that the use of photography somehow misrepresents Goldin’s history, giving it the appearance of inauthenticity? Does that mediation create a theoretical distance, thus giving a space in which disbelief may occur and even flourish? Authenticity is a term that is difficult to define, as it can only really be clear in regard to what it is not; therefore the Authentic is not the Inauthentic, it is not the fake, the false or the forgery. Thus, Authenticity could be described as being "at the limits" of language: as it is the negative space around inauthenticity, rather than the object itself. In the twentieth century, many writers considered the predominant cultural norms to be inauthentic. The dominant ideology is presumed to pressure individuals into particular ways of behaving and responding, or behaving in a manner that is inauthentic in relation to their true desires or needs. Advertising is an everyday example of how Western culture has distorted the individual for external reasons, selling us products and services that we have no real use for, yet convincing even the canniest consumer of their necessity,
Authenticity is a term that occurs in Existentialist philosophy. It is described as a desirable state of independent being. This is in opposition to the inauthentic body or person (someone who feels the pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person, the pressure to adopt a particular mode of living, the pressure to ignore one's own moral and aesthetic objections in order to have a more comfortable existence). So Authenticity is performative, it is located within action and doing. Therefore, if Authenticity is what the Inauthentic is not, it could perhaps be considered as living with faithfulness to your own self, not allowing this commitment to personal expression to be augmented by external pressures or influenced by the dominant ideology. The cultural fate of Existentialist philosophy, an endless parody of European intellectuals in berets, is often portrayed merely as a bygone oddity. Yet the concept of authenticity continues to be discussed. Only now the Authentic body is one that is described as “Keeping it real”, “Not selling out” or in country terms, “ Not forgettin’ your raisin’”.
A band that appear to “not forget their raising” are the Drive-by Truckers, who create an apparent authentic experience with every song they write. As is the tradition in country music, they draw heavily on cultural references regarding identity and place. The Drive-by Truckers’ identity and place are informed by the economically poor communities of the Southern United states, mostly Alabama. However, rather than approach their typical country themed first person narratives of drifters and missed chances in small towns with traditional country melodies and instruments, they employ three lead guitars, fusing metal and rock sounds with the pedal steel guitar and banjo more immediately associated with the folk music of the area. This hybrid of two strong traditions reshaped for their own use references the idea of the authentic body for allowing neither rule set to define your activity whilst acknowledging your roots is to observe the conventions set out by the existentialists themselves. All three of the Drive-by Truckers lead guitarists are credited songwriters and they each perform vocal on their own songs, which are almost exclusively written as first person narratives. Their topics are often historically factual stories based on the legends and stories of Alabama and Tennessee, and feature emblems such as poverty, farming, lawlessness, the church and gambling. They often reference music itself - including a whole double album based around the legendary band Lynnard Skynnard, using their story of childhood poverty followed by huge success and subsequent tragic deaths in an air accident as a metaphor for the political and economic failures of the southern USA.
The Drive-by Truckers constantly reinforce notions of Authenticity – both in their choice of themes and instruments, but also at the level of utterance. This is firstly evident in the personal performance of their own authored songs and secondly in the lyrics themselves. They implore their listeners not to “Sing with a fake British accent” and “Don’t tell them you're bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away...”[3]. In another song, they actually state “Every God Damn Word Is True”[4] and they make explicit their hunger for sincerity “Tell me how to tell the difference between what they tell me is the truth or a lie”.[5]
In the song “Boys from Alabama” they are directly taking an oppositional view point to a Hollywood film based on the same story[6] – the inference is clear: Hollywood is lies – we are truth. Patterson Hood says of his Song:
[The Boys From Alabama] was the first of a series of songs we worked on based (loosely) on some of the folklore surrounding The Redneck Mafia whose exploits have inspired countless books and a few (really bad) movies.
As kids, we all saw some of those movies (the most famous being the original "Walking Tall" from 1973) telling of the good Sheriff Buford Pusser and his battle against the bootleggers.
I never cared for those movies, but there was no denying the cultural phenomenon they became.
It always seemed to me that a far better story lay in "bad guys" point of view.
This year, Hollywood blew its chance to get it right, yet again.
This song could be the opening sequence for the movie I'd like to make about it.[7]
Their attention to detail, meticulously researched facts and performative authenticity, creates a persuasive argument - the Drive-by Truckers would not “Blow a chance to get it right”. Their narratives (usually performed in such a way that every word is immediately identifiable) are their focus and the fact that they are lyrically asserted as truth matters. This allows the Drive-by Truckers to create an authentic experience at the moment of utterance – their factual provenance is less important, they perform truth and in turn, we accept it as such.
A similar process is apparent in the work of Sophie Calle, who, like the Drive-by Truckers, uses her sense of identity and place (imagined or otherwise) to assert authenticity. However, Calle’s work appears to call upon the tradition of French literature, rather than country and western music. Working with photographs and performances, Sophie Calle places herself in situations as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. Calle has been called a detective and a voyeur; her pieces involve both serious investigations and natural curiosity. The works are immersive, long term projects, presented as texts, images and objects that illustrate narratives which may be factual or fictional, real or imagined – like the Drive-by truckers the provenance of these stories is immaterial, they are presented as if true. This is evident in the devices employed, such as observation and surveillance – Authorative, governmental devices of truth, and she also uses diaries and snapshots, personal devices of truth. In this way, Calle carefully provides us with the trace evidence required to seemingly prove the authenticity of the inauthentic. Thus, Sophie Calle's work inhabits a space between fact and fiction. She crosses private boundaries to explore the meanings that are potentially hidden there and exploits public spaces, investing them with a sense of intimacy. This intimacy is very much tied up with her process, allowing art to unfold as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. The form of the final product - the thing that the gallery viewer actually sees - is the least significant part:
For 'The Hotel' I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame...it's the last thought in the process.[8]
So again, Calle’s work relates to performative authenticity. We do not mind if her narratives are real, false, imagined or somewhere between the two, because she authentically participates in the process that creates them.
fig 2.
Her provision of trace evidence can be likened to the Drive-by Truckers utilisation of folk instruments, such as the pedal steel guitar and banjo, that also operate seemingly as substantiation of an authentic position.
In novels, we are happy to simply digest the narrative without needing to apply authentic/inauthentic labels, yet in art we are more likely to attempt to ascribe one of these definitions. Tracey Emin is an artist who is very aware of this tendency. Her work and its associated stories have been subjected to intense scrutiny and fact checking. Yet, it no longer really matters whether Tracey’s “Facts” are true or not, she tells the stories as though they are and we accept them – no matter how unsettling there are for the viewer, no matter vulnerable they make the artist. Indeed it is the rawness of these stories that repels challenges as to their genuineness. Instead, we tiptoe around, realising that like the fantasist, the habitual cheat, and the compulsive liar, this is Tracey’s truth. She seems no more capable of distinguishing fact from fiction than we are. Emin’s art, like her authenticity, again lies at the point of utterance, a packet of cigarettes, a Polaroid photograph, a beach hut, a bed – all become art because she declares them art.
fig 3.
Her art is the same as her truths; they are truths because she says they are. Jeanette Winterson says of Emin’s work:
Do we insist on reality and confession because we have lost the capacity to imagine and invent? Emin is able to imagine and invent within the context of her own life. By refusing all her own separations, she questions ours, by refusing to disentangle art and life, by fusing her autobiography with her artistry, Emin creates a world where personal truth telling moves beyond the me-culture and into collective catharsis.[9]
Thus by talking of a seemingly truth-based specific, wider general connections and relationships can occur, a similar process to that which occurs in the metaphoric story telling previously mentioned, where the Drive-By truckers use the story of Lynnard Skynnard to speak of the Southern USA as a whole. Nonetheless, despite Winterson's initial denial of the need to divide fact and fiction, later in the very same introductory essay she still returns to the idea of truth, of keeping it real “I like that Emin’s work is uneven – that’s one of the things that tells me she is the real thing” [10]. So, despite accepting the inauthenticity of Emin’s stories, we still seek a genuine experience somewhere in our relationships with her art and her as an artist. We still require a connection with the authentic. Even Winterson, a novelist, utiliser of first person narratives, weaver of fictions, still seeks reassurance that Emin is indeed “the real thing”.
Here, the authenticity seems to rely on the artist’s material connection with the work and the sense of a lack of distance between emotion and output. Thus the rawness of the drawing, the unpolished finishes and the direct transposition of selecting a found object, moving it to the gallery space and declaring it art (with an apparent lack of mediation), are all key to the idea of Emin as authentic. Tracey Emin declares herself an authentic body and continually reasserts this through her practise, much like Dolly Parton’s position in country music.
Parton is an artist who has been successful for a very long period - widely considered to be the first lady of country music - her career so far spanning 4 decades, achieving 41 top 10 country albums. Like Emin, Dolly continuously mines her childhood for ‘authentic experiences’ employing the vernacular of her Tennessee upbringing, pictured to be as unusual and as exotic as Emin’s presentation of her own working class Margate childhood. Despite Parton’s huge personal wealth and designer wardrobe, Parton positions herself as a Down-home country-girl. Although she [A1] left her childhood log cabin home in the Smoky Mountains over 40 years ago, she still carries the folklore of her east Tennessee home with her. One of 14 siblings, Parton “keeps it real” by employing many of her family members, although this seems somewhat less authentic when you consider that many of them are employed at her theme park “Dollywood”. Yet Dollywood’s status as a large employer in a previously depressed region again demonstrates that Dolly has not “Forgotten her raisin’”. The theme park financially sustains the “Dollywood Foundation and the Dolly Parton Imagination Library”, charitable organisations primarily concerned with literacy in children. A clearly suitable concern for a girl raised in a log cabin.
So, Parton's authenticity as the queen of country pervades. Just like Emin’s authenticity, it no longer matters if the stories of her past are true or false, just that they are. Dolly’s authenticity again lies in the performative action of speaking as if she were still a shack-dwelling teenage girl who only wore shoes on a Sunday, rather than a multi millionaire in a Bob Mackie dress. Indeed, she makes much of the tale that Whitney Houston’s Hollywood-film instigated cover of her 1974 song “I will always love you” earned her over $6 million in songwriters royalties, a case of the authentic benefiting from its association with the inauthentic. The story reinforces Parton’s reputation as “the real thing” by showing what it is not, not Hollywood and therefore positioning it outside the dominant ideology, despite her seemingly oppositional resounding commercial success. Parton’s well-recognised talents as an original songwriter are reinforced by her spectacular talent with instruments; at a recent London performance, she played nine different instruments, including a harmonica and a zither. Dolly’s performative and uttered reinforcement of her authenticity happens over and over again through her physical connection with these instruments, so much so that she is no longer bound by other aspects of authentic behaviour, leaving her free to record a bluegrass cover version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven.
This fetishisation of the authentic, supplementing the part for the whole, is theoretically problematic, yet, in practise is of little negative consequence. In his later years, country legend Johnny Cash recorded almost nothing but cover versions of well-known songs from disparate genres[11]. These cover versions feel more authentic than the original versions, even when performed by their authors. This could be attributed to the strength of the connection between perceived authenticity and country music. The most well known of Cash’s cover versions from this period is his reworking of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt”, recorded in 2002. Originally performed by Reznor's band, Nine-Inch-Nails, Cash’s cover won a Grammy award and even Reznor found himself forced to reconsider his own song:
I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps… Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure.[12]
Thus, despite this being a cover version, the romanticised idea of the undeniably authentic country music star lives on. Of course, covers are a well-accepted part of all musical genres, after all, music originated as a score to be performed, not a single object to be observed. Music is not limited by the notion of the immediate experience in the way that much of art is. We are used to it being performed and re-performed, reworked, recorded. We are so familiar with its many representations and cover versions are so frequent that they rarely capture our attention, in art the copy functions differently:
Sherri Levine’s well-known work “After Walker Evans” functions similarly – These photographs of photographs (already reproduced in an exhibition catalogued and subsequently photographed by Levine from this published material) are in essence, cover versions. Dolly keeps her cover version appearing authentic with the employment of banjo’s and gospel choirs, but Levine eschews this kind of intervention. Her photographs are simultaneously authentic and inauthentic – these are fake Walker Evans photographs and genuine Sherri Levine photographs at the same time. Levine’s work questions the notion of originality in art, but it moves a step beyond the reappropriation of the cover version or the collage. This kind of appropriation is sometimes talked about as problematic in art, indeed, some people find this apparent lack of visual innovation insulting – where is the authentic experience? But again perhaps this is in someway due to the medium of photography, rather than the performative action of reuttering another persons words, after all, plays are restaged and songs are resung, perhaps Levine’s rephotographing is in someway illustrative of the Sartre notion of authenticity:
To be Authentic is to realise fully ones being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be, with a profound awareness that through the authentic realisation of the being-in-situation, one brings to plenary existence on the one hand and the situation on the other.[13]
So, an individual can only be authentic while transcending her attachment to ingrained social roles and by embracing the freedom to choose who she becomes. Living authentically means rejecting conformity to worldly institutions and instead following a true path. Conformity in art has been to search for the new, the unseen. Perhaps it takes someone truly authentic to reject that and instead directly flout those unwritten rules. Perhaps it is in the copy and the cover version that real authenticity may be found. Levine certainly appears to have a “profound awareness of…. being in-situation” as arguably the post-modern artist should, certainly all four artists discussed here, Goldin, Calle, Emin and Levine seem to be well aware of how the notion of authenticity is played out in their work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Goldin, N. (1986) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency New York, N.Y. Aperture Foundation. P6.
[2] Seized 'art porn' owned by Sir Elton John (The Telegraph 02/10/08) Sophie Borland and Nigel Reynolds - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/25/nbaltic125.xml
[3] Outfit, Jason Isbell.
[4] Alabama Ass Whuppin’ version of 18 Wheels of Love, Patterson Hood.
[5] Where the Devil Don’t Stay, Mike Cooley.
[6] This counter position is further explored on pages 18-20 of my learning record.
[7] From The Drive-by Truckers official website (Patterson Hood) Accessed March 2008
[8] Calle, Sophie: Talking Art 1, ed Adrian Searle, ICA publication, London 1999. P32.
[9] Jeanette Winterson in Fuchs, T. (2006) Tracey Emin : Works 1963-2006. New York, Rizzoli. P6.
[10] Ibid. P7.
[11] Johnny Cash American Recordings (released between 1994- 2006) produced by Rick Rubin.
[12] Trent Reznor, Alternative Press, Issue 194. September 2004.
[13] Sartre, J-P. (1984) War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War: November 1939-March 1940. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Verso. P54.
Tales of A Tattooed Lady
When I went to the boardwalk on my days off, I saw a tattooed man, Jack Redcloud. He was the man who had Christ’s head and crown of thorns on the top of his baldhead. That’s when I decided to get tattooed. I wanted to be independent and take care of myself. I sure didn’t want to go back to school.[1]
I used to be a thrill seeker, but thrills are a dime-a-dozen these days.[2]
The old giantesses were not the overtly sexualised fantasy girls of the internet, just overly tall ladies, in long dresses, standing on boxes. They toured as carnies, along with their oversized friends, the fat ladies, their undersized friends, the midgets and living skeletons and their friends in excess, the hirsute lady with her beribboned beard, the conjoined twins (twice the woman, twice the fun!) and the individual whose permanent decoration made her the most excessive of all, the tattooed lady.
However, the tattooed lady is the odd one out, her freakishness is not caused by an unfortunate gene, there is no accident of nature. She is a self-made freak, choosing to permanently align herself beside those socially deigned as oddities by constructing her own identity and status as other.
The circus tattooed lady has become an icon, her image, published on souvenir postcards, sold at the travelling fair are now static, residing in the museum and the collection[3] But the tattooed body itself is much harder to contain than the postcards displaying her image, although capture and control have been attempted. The first tattooed exhibits were seized “savages”, tribes people discovered, hunted and caught by explorers as though they were animals. Bought back for display, like curious zoo creatures, revered and feared in much the same way as a ferocious, unpredictable beast might have been. These tattooed tribes people were treated as commodities, to be bought and sold, traded and controlled the way a hunter controls its prey. But these trophies were living, not stuffed and mounted, and even in western captivity retained much of their supposed danger.
Tamed through enforced Christianity, renamed, rehabilitated, but still bearing the indelible marks of their past, their identities could not be truly altered, no matter the will of their captors. No Pygmalion-style transformation could take place, these disorded bodies could not be forced to order, although they tried, even in death their captors sought to possess, to control and classify, either by having them studied as scientific curiosities or by burying them with enforced labels, Christian names.[4]
Of course, not every exhibited tattooed person was from a far away tribe, although initially those that were not were certainly inspired by them and adopted stories and narratives utilising the legends of exotic others in far flung lands. Being tattooed became a profession. The “savages” were replaced with the “civilised” and the cultural fantasises that were presented with them “disguised what had been repressed, the brute act of genocide”[5]. A typical sideshow presentation of a tattooed wonder would include a fantastical tale, explaining the circumstances that led them to their indelible fate. The popular legend, as seen in various documentations of the period would be of the basic premise that this poor, hapless lady (or indeed, hapless man) had been captured and taken against their will into the lairs of an altogether more primitive people. That these terrible savages had forcibly and painfully tattooed their perfect, pink flesh, desecrating the very self of the pitiable, traumatised kidnappee. These were fictional tales, but tales inscribed with the politics of power and the powerless, nonetheless.
A variation on this theme was that told of the (non-native) American tattooed lady, La Belle Irene (Irene Woodward 1863-1916). Her fantastic biography, as presented to her European audience, placed her tattooed fate at the feet of her father, rather than some strange, exotic abductor. Her tale of being forcibly and completely tattooed with blue and red patriotic images was said to have been done in order to protect her, to repel the unwanted advances of the kind of so-called primitives, the very same primitives that were usually the culprits that applying the tattoos in these fictional narratives. Of course, La Belle Irene’s tale was just as much about control, power, ownership and objectification as her predecessors’ and just as unreal. The truth was usually far more practical and constituted a pragmatic solution to an economic problem. However, this was not a career to enter lightly. After all, there was no going back and even in retirement the marks of the working life would remain.
Certainly, many women must have felt that it was a irreversible step worth taking as in time, no sideshow was complete without its tattooed wonder, negotiating the cultural terms in which her body would be publicly encountered via the addition of spoken narratives. La Belle authored her body and thus controlled her audiences experience of it with the phrases that were etched into her flesh, missives such as “Never Despair”, “I live and die for those I love” and most interestingly of all, “Nothing without labour”.
Thus, the tattooed lady was both victim and instigator of her own fate. She picked out her own identity and a name to match it “When [she] submitted to the needle, it was not only her flesh which was pricked; the very letters of her name were rearranged.”[6] And this new arrangement was to be permanent. Perhaps this explains why La Belle Irene’s constructed narrative of enforced tattooing had the intention of preserving her purity in the face of her impure appearance:
She needed to emphasise her status as victim in order to restore an innocent blush to her skin; only then could respectable folk not feel unnerved at the sight of her. Her story was a fabrication, but it remained ambiguous, poised between claims of civilised behaviour and intimations of savagery.[7]
Is this where I am now? Am I poised between claims of civilised behaviour and intimations of savagery? Perhaps. My teenage desire for movement and transience has been augmented with a desire for the fixed, the permanent. Tattoos have always been popular in places with a transient population, sailors in dock, migrant workers. There is a lot to be said for stability, even as a notion. So if my identity as a tattooed lady is now fixed, perhaps I should pick a name to reflect this new permanence. A name that is not reliant on my status, a name all of my own, rather than my father’s, or my husband’s. After all, I am no longer a wife, nor do I feel like a daughter. But how do you pick your own name, title your life’s work? These words now seem so crucial, affecting the reading of everything:
It is not enough to simply see the work to decide what the subject is…at the edge of the work, neither inside, nor outside, readable rather than visible, the title is our only recourse. As for deciding the subject, the initiative is always left to words[8]
As yet, I have no answer, my inspiration lies in the re-interpretation of the words of others, a kind of grandiloquent cover version. Perhaps, for now, the names of others are adequate, as long as the opportunity for speech remains and I am not again silenced, the way the Guardian silenced me.
On August the 8th, 2008, The Drive-By Truckers played a gig in Manchester. I had never seen them live before, although I knew their melodies, instruments and narratives well, as they had been my connection to my now closed Alabama chapter, my familiarity, my muse. They had allowed me to connect with nostalgia for my own, near experience. I was almost afraid to witness them, afraid of the disappointment that inevitably follows a love affair, no matter how pure.
But I was not disappointed; instead, I stood in the darkness, alone in a tightly packed crowd and felt what I had not felt since that first gig at the Kilburn Ballroom. And I cried. I cried for the teenager I was. I cried for my past and the girl I would never be again. I cried for my blank skin. And then I began to write.
“Sister’s been a troubled teen, ever since she was 12.”[9]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Broadbent, B. quoted in Govenar, A. Tattooing in American Culture, 1846-1966 in Caplan, J. (2000) Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History London, Reaktion.
[2] Drive By-Truckers. (1998) Tails Facing Up lyrics by Patterson Hood. Complete lyrics, appendix one.
[3] In August 2008 I had the pleasure of meeting Lyle Tuttle (b1939), the most famous of the old-time American Tattooers and proprietor of the San Francisco Tattoo Museum. I gave him a photograph of myself for his collection, explaining that I greatly admired the old-time circus ladies and aspired to be like them. He looked me right in the eye and with a twinkle, said “Honey……. I don’t think there is much money in it anymore.” He did however, give me one of his special elongated keepsake one cent coins.
[4]
[5] [5] Beard, S The Tattooed Lady, a Mythology. (1992) in Wroblewski, C. (ed) Tattooed Women London, Virgin Pub.
[6] [6] Beard, S The Tattooed Lady, a Mythology. (1992) in Wroblewski, C. (ed) Tattooed Women London, Virgin Pub.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Derrida, J in Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked : the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge.p15
[9] Drive-By Truckers (1998) Too Much Sex, Too Little Jesus Lyrics by Patterson Hood
I used to be a thrill seeker, but thrills are a dime-a-dozen these days.[2]
The old giantesses were not the overtly sexualised fantasy girls of the internet, just overly tall ladies, in long dresses, standing on boxes. They toured as carnies, along with their oversized friends, the fat ladies, their undersized friends, the midgets and living skeletons and their friends in excess, the hirsute lady with her beribboned beard, the conjoined twins (twice the woman, twice the fun!) and the individual whose permanent decoration made her the most excessive of all, the tattooed lady.
However, the tattooed lady is the odd one out, her freakishness is not caused by an unfortunate gene, there is no accident of nature. She is a self-made freak, choosing to permanently align herself beside those socially deigned as oddities by constructing her own identity and status as other.
The circus tattooed lady has become an icon, her image, published on souvenir postcards, sold at the travelling fair are now static, residing in the museum and the collection[3] But the tattooed body itself is much harder to contain than the postcards displaying her image, although capture and control have been attempted. The first tattooed exhibits were seized “savages”, tribes people discovered, hunted and caught by explorers as though they were animals. Bought back for display, like curious zoo creatures, revered and feared in much the same way as a ferocious, unpredictable beast might have been. These tattooed tribes people were treated as commodities, to be bought and sold, traded and controlled the way a hunter controls its prey. But these trophies were living, not stuffed and mounted, and even in western captivity retained much of their supposed danger.
Tamed through enforced Christianity, renamed, rehabilitated, but still bearing the indelible marks of their past, their identities could not be truly altered, no matter the will of their captors. No Pygmalion-style transformation could take place, these disorded bodies could not be forced to order, although they tried, even in death their captors sought to possess, to control and classify, either by having them studied as scientific curiosities or by burying them with enforced labels, Christian names.[4]
Of course, not every exhibited tattooed person was from a far away tribe, although initially those that were not were certainly inspired by them and adopted stories and narratives utilising the legends of exotic others in far flung lands. Being tattooed became a profession. The “savages” were replaced with the “civilised” and the cultural fantasises that were presented with them “disguised what had been repressed, the brute act of genocide”[5]. A typical sideshow presentation of a tattooed wonder would include a fantastical tale, explaining the circumstances that led them to their indelible fate. The popular legend, as seen in various documentations of the period would be of the basic premise that this poor, hapless lady (or indeed, hapless man) had been captured and taken against their will into the lairs of an altogether more primitive people. That these terrible savages had forcibly and painfully tattooed their perfect, pink flesh, desecrating the very self of the pitiable, traumatised kidnappee. These were fictional tales, but tales inscribed with the politics of power and the powerless, nonetheless.
A variation on this theme was that told of the (non-native) American tattooed lady, La Belle Irene (Irene Woodward 1863-1916). Her fantastic biography, as presented to her European audience, placed her tattooed fate at the feet of her father, rather than some strange, exotic abductor. Her tale of being forcibly and completely tattooed with blue and red patriotic images was said to have been done in order to protect her, to repel the unwanted advances of the kind of so-called primitives, the very same primitives that were usually the culprits that applying the tattoos in these fictional narratives. Of course, La Belle Irene’s tale was just as much about control, power, ownership and objectification as her predecessors’ and just as unreal. The truth was usually far more practical and constituted a pragmatic solution to an economic problem. However, this was not a career to enter lightly. After all, there was no going back and even in retirement the marks of the working life would remain.
Certainly, many women must have felt that it was a irreversible step worth taking as in time, no sideshow was complete without its tattooed wonder, negotiating the cultural terms in which her body would be publicly encountered via the addition of spoken narratives. La Belle authored her body and thus controlled her audiences experience of it with the phrases that were etched into her flesh, missives such as “Never Despair”, “I live and die for those I love” and most interestingly of all, “Nothing without labour”.
Thus, the tattooed lady was both victim and instigator of her own fate. She picked out her own identity and a name to match it “When [she] submitted to the needle, it was not only her flesh which was pricked; the very letters of her name were rearranged.”[6] And this new arrangement was to be permanent. Perhaps this explains why La Belle Irene’s constructed narrative of enforced tattooing had the intention of preserving her purity in the face of her impure appearance:
She needed to emphasise her status as victim in order to restore an innocent blush to her skin; only then could respectable folk not feel unnerved at the sight of her. Her story was a fabrication, but it remained ambiguous, poised between claims of civilised behaviour and intimations of savagery.[7]
Is this where I am now? Am I poised between claims of civilised behaviour and intimations of savagery? Perhaps. My teenage desire for movement and transience has been augmented with a desire for the fixed, the permanent. Tattoos have always been popular in places with a transient population, sailors in dock, migrant workers. There is a lot to be said for stability, even as a notion. So if my identity as a tattooed lady is now fixed, perhaps I should pick a name to reflect this new permanence. A name that is not reliant on my status, a name all of my own, rather than my father’s, or my husband’s. After all, I am no longer a wife, nor do I feel like a daughter. But how do you pick your own name, title your life’s work? These words now seem so crucial, affecting the reading of everything:
It is not enough to simply see the work to decide what the subject is…at the edge of the work, neither inside, nor outside, readable rather than visible, the title is our only recourse. As for deciding the subject, the initiative is always left to words[8]
As yet, I have no answer, my inspiration lies in the re-interpretation of the words of others, a kind of grandiloquent cover version. Perhaps, for now, the names of others are adequate, as long as the opportunity for speech remains and I am not again silenced, the way the Guardian silenced me.
On August the 8th, 2008, The Drive-By Truckers played a gig in Manchester. I had never seen them live before, although I knew their melodies, instruments and narratives well, as they had been my connection to my now closed Alabama chapter, my familiarity, my muse. They had allowed me to connect with nostalgia for my own, near experience. I was almost afraid to witness them, afraid of the disappointment that inevitably follows a love affair, no matter how pure.
But I was not disappointed; instead, I stood in the darkness, alone in a tightly packed crowd and felt what I had not felt since that first gig at the Kilburn Ballroom. And I cried. I cried for the teenager I was. I cried for my past and the girl I would never be again. I cried for my blank skin. And then I began to write.
“Sister’s been a troubled teen, ever since she was 12.”[9]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Broadbent, B. quoted in Govenar, A. Tattooing in American Culture, 1846-1966 in Caplan, J. (2000) Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History London, Reaktion.
[2] Drive By-Truckers. (1998) Tails Facing Up lyrics by Patterson Hood. Complete lyrics, appendix one.
[3] In August 2008 I had the pleasure of meeting Lyle Tuttle (b1939), the most famous of the old-time American Tattooers and proprietor of the San Francisco Tattoo Museum. I gave him a photograph of myself for his collection, explaining that I greatly admired the old-time circus ladies and aspired to be like them. He looked me right in the eye and with a twinkle, said “Honey……. I don’t think there is much money in it anymore.” He did however, give me one of his special elongated keepsake one cent coins.
[4]
[5] [5] Beard, S The Tattooed Lady, a Mythology. (1992) in Wroblewski, C. (ed) Tattooed Women London, Virgin Pub.
[6] [6] Beard, S The Tattooed Lady, a Mythology. (1992) in Wroblewski, C. (ed) Tattooed Women London, Virgin Pub.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Derrida, J in Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked : the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge.p15
[9] Drive-By Truckers (1998) Too Much Sex, Too Little Jesus Lyrics by Patterson Hood
Narratives of the Small
Collecting is not acquiring, it is more like planning a delightful small party, where everyone will find a friend and feel at home.[1]
The red book was also an alluring tactile object – its cover could handle my peanut butter and jelly coated fingers, and on the last page there was a pop up anatomy of a man that I quickly demolished. I don’t remember why I tore it out, probably because I could. I liked to feel my strength in those days, and paper was a foe I could master. I remember looking at the hole I had made with great pride. I showed it to my sister, laughing about how this outline was a much better anatomy of a man than the one with red ink and blue veins provided by the book publishers. My sister did not understand my delight but she indulged me anyway and asked me if I wanted to make another pop up model. I did not, but I lacked the words then to tell her why. [2]
In 1997, I found a small ad in the back of the Evening Standard, “Are you Female? 18+? Do you like talking on the phone?” Which I duly noted to be an advert for telephone-sex chat-line operators. I showed it to my flatmate, Zoe, purely for entertainment purposes and she, quite naturally, dared me to ring the number at the bottom. Clearly, my terribly home counties accent must have just what they were looking for, because before I knew it, I was wearing a headset and secret listening to a conversation between top girl, Julianne and a Texan truck driver. Or rather, I was listening to a conversation between Christy-Anne and a Texan truck driver, as Julianne was studying to be a speech therapist and the kind of things coming out of Christy-Anne’s mouth were not on the list of approved therapeutic sounds. No, this was a completely different sort of noise and she was not the only girl making it, rather she was one of 20 on the 6am-2pm shift. We sat in a room that could have passed for a telesales or market research office, grey carpet, regulation desks, tiny booths. Spouting obscenities for 8 hours at a time (with a half-hour lunch break) 5 days a week. This is, to say the least, a somewhat peculiar thing to do. Not nearly as peculiar as our regular callers though, who were either morose, unimaginative and generally personality deficient or completely bizarre loners dying to share their obsessive strangeness with a paid, non-judgemental stranger. Sadly for them, the girls on the 6-2 shift were anything but non-judgemental. Most of us felt nothing but contempt for their pathetic fantasies, their neediness, and their very selves. Luckily, some of the girls were talented vocal actors, able to disguise their disgust and thus encourage and inflate their customer’s desires and egos, not me, though. Instead I discovered a way in which I could legitimately tell them exactly what I thought of them. I became a specialist in domination. By taking on the role of Mistress Carla, I had carte blanche to be as sneering and as dismissive as I liked. Unfortunately, this also meant that I attracted the strangest of the customer base, the fetishists, the trannies and the slaves. The slaves were relatively easy to deal with, as I could pretty much be as mean as I liked and the only effort required was spent coming up with new and imaginative insults and perfecting a clipped Queen of England style accent. However, the trannies were a little harder.The ladies were essentially concerned with the same thing: creating, nurturing and maintaining a constructed identity. What they required from the phone lines was an external validation of that identity. They wanted to “pass” and they wanted someone else to tell them that they did so. If “…the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies”[3] then the trannies wanted to be the evidence of this. But a conversation with a person in flux regarding their gender identity is fraught with problems, not least regarding pronouns and I should have had empathy for them, if not sympathy, but I did not. Their obstinate clutching at the concept of binary genders infuriated me. Their languid, loving descriptions of the outfits that they wore enraged me. The pink bridesmaids dresses, the leather mini skirts, the stockings and suspenders, all strictly obeying the rules of the stereotype, creating grotesque parodies of womanhood. Not only did I question their motivation, “A man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to him”[4] but a quick glance around the room revealed none of what the trannies seemed so desperate to embody. Quite the opposite, as a job where you are only ever heard and never, ever seen is the perfect place for the imperfect woman to hide. In the booth to my left, Alexia, 24 stone and on the waiting list for gastric bypass surgery. To my right, Joanne, young, beautiful, brunette Joanne, a below the elbow amputee. Opposite, Rochelle, loud, raucous, bawdy and an achondroplasic dwarf. Perhaps it was not so hard to understand why a job that allowed you to construct your own appearance through verbalisation would appeal. Thus, it seemed the girls in the office had more in common with the “girls” on the phone than they might have liked to believe, even if the common ground lay in the performativity, rather than the performance. The phone girls performed for full time hours, 40 hours a week, playing the role of a person that did not really exist; we did not even know each other’s real names.
However, I never sought to create a new identity. Instead, I wanted to fix mine, make it permanent, unalterable, to do anything else would to be inauthentic, unreal, to sell out. It was incredibly difficult to tolerate the pretence of my Mistress Carla persona. My enforced, constructed identity was informed by the same sad stereotypes that the trannies were using as their template. I was a female, female impersonator, a faux queen[5] and even the adoration of my fans could not compensate, no matter how total (nor how peculiar) that surrender.
Quite the strangest of my regular callers was an American man that I knew only as The Miniature Boy. He wanted to be shrunk, which at the very least was an unusual fantasy, one that had at least not been directly lifted from the pages of the Sunday Sport. This caller wanted to be Lilliputian to my Titan. He wanted to be small enough to be kept as a well-loved pet. He wanted to be told that I loved him, to be adored:
The reduction in scale that the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its “use value” transformed into the infinite time of reverie.[6]
He needed to be told that I would care for him, like a pet, but that his opinion should be too inconsequential to matter to me. I should carry him in my hand to protect him from everything that is so huge and frightening. He needed me to be his protector, his saviour, to feed him, to care for him. He called frequently, eager to discuss his fantasy, and through description and language alone I would render him small and weak merely by talking to him. In a world where the male of a species is usually both size dominant and socially dominant the fantasy of disruption of these norms holds my attention for a while, even if the male desire for submission is relatively common, at least in the world of the phone lines. Of course, there is no need for the usual kind of physical reinforcement and corporal punishment required in a more common domination scenario, there is simply no question as to who is in charge if the woman, me, is a relative giantess to a tiny man. I can crush him; swallow him, if I will. His only defence is to run, run and hide.
I still tire of playing along with his game though, tire of his squeaky, high-pitched voice. The very fact that I am paid to provide the service that he is buying (for £3.99 per minute) renders it conceptually hollow. As per my usual style, I terminate our relationship by pushing his fantasy further than he wants. I know this means he will prevent him from calling me again and it is the only way to be rid of unwanted customers without risking my job. For miniature boy, the time of reverie has come to an end. I know he has an ongoing need for nothing more than the tender descriptors that create his tiny status, my adjectives cause his miniaturisation:
The depiction of the miniature moves away from… narrative in that it is caught in an infinity of descriptive gestures. It is difficult for much to happen in such depiction…[7]
So, the way to end him is obvious. I get out my swish, powerful, super-suction vacuum cleaner and plug it in. It has very powerful suction. He is hiding from me, but I go hunting for my shrunken prey. My Hoover has everything I require to find my little shrinkee, no matter how hard he tries to escape me. I can collect him, possess him. Keep him caged away from prying eyes, or show him off. He is mine, to do with as I will. I can eat him, crush him. Instead, I destroy him with narrative. And through the power of this story telling, I eradicate him with a routine domestic appliance.
The miniature, collection, possession, control. Is this what Sir John Soane felt as he surveyed his collection of scale architectural models?[8] Displaying models of his own buildings alongside his extensive collection of similarly miniaturised versions of iconic classics such as the ruins of Pompeii and the temple of Minerva, in the Acropolis of Athens and the Arch of Theseus in their own, top floor room against a panoramic backdrop of London must have been a tremendous ego-constructing triumph:
By their form as models, the models of Soane’s own buildings marry with the classical models to form a single collection, a single set. This is an outrageous parallelism, of course. It implies, with little space for modesty, not only that Soane’s buildings may dwell with all that is classical with architecture, but that together (together in miniature on the pedestal) Soane’s buildings and ancient architecture constitute a single new entity… The siting of the model room, high in the house, is hardly accidental. The conflation of ancient and Soanic in miniature is deliberately juxtaposed against ‘the rather extensive view of London to be obtained from the gallery, or loggia of the second floor’. To invoke a pun of which Soane was not unconscious, the model room serves as a model, a set of criteria, against which the actual architecture of London is to be judged. In effect, these actual buildings now become items in the same set as those in the Model Room…[9]
The subsequent preservation of Soane’s home and its contents, guaranteed by an Act of Parliament, froze his environment and its associated objects, his collection. Suspending it like a photograph and thus further miniaturising it, as a tableau:
The tableau effectively speaks to the distance of the context at hand and the narrated context; it is possible only through representation, since it offers a complete closure of a text framed off from the ongoing reality that surrounds it. Here we might think not only of sculpture but also of the photograph…[10]
This specifically requested and officially deigned conservation leads one to further assumptions that Soane’s investment in the tiny served to inflate and massage his ego, to extend his feeling of power. His authority over his mini-Parthenon was as real and as intoxicating as my own control of Sindy’s three story townhouse. But the dollhouse is a strange sort of miniaturisation, quite oppositional to Soane’s museum diorama, which he positioned as part of the seemingly open London landscape and invited the public to view. Instead, the dollhouse’s domestic position, inside the real house, poses it as a secret:
Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: centre within centre, within within within. The dolls house is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority. In fact, we can see the dollhouse-maker’s relative inattention to the exterior of his or her structure as further evidence of this movement inward.[11]
Internalisation and secrecy bode well with the idea of labour for labours sake. Keeping those idle hands busy, yet again, producing an object laden with the products of hours and hours of activity. The dollhouse is a container for the painstaking results of hours spent, and, like the family album and the compulsive hoarders[12] accumulation, intended to be enjoyed by those intimately involved. The depicted, the collator, the maker.
The diminutive size of the dolls house makes it the perfect place for discards and offcuts, the kind of stuff deemed to inconsequential for uses elsewhere. Thus, the dollhouse becomes a site of salvage, a place where if you waste not, you want not. Its modest scale means that it is a place where otherwise unobtainable dreams can be realised. No matter how elaborate, it retains an air of piety, the labour value outweighs the cost value and objects and furnishings normally outside of ones financial reach are easily approximated here, if only through the labour of the hand-made. The relationship between the craft object and the body of the maker is perhaps perfected in the example of the dollhouse:
The dollhouse erases all but the frontal view; its appearance is the realisation of the self as property, the body as container of objects, perpetual and incontaminable.[13]
As the frontal view is the view of the portrait, perhaps the miniature house is a portrait of its maker, a self-portrait, after all, its boundaries are as defined as firmly they are on the surface plane of a painting, but nonetheless, painting is quite different to domestic crafting. A painting is completed when the activity of painting stops, it is the cessation of the verb that creates the noun and this peculiarity of language that intimates that neither activity nor object has precedence, but that both have equal value.
Most domestic craft exists on either side of these two ideas i.e., the emphasis is usually on activity or the object, the act of passing time, or the making of something useful. Occasionally, like in the painting, these two elements are found in combination, with the labour and its result in balance. This resulting object is imbibed with an aura that is impossible to define but can be likened to the romantic concept of love. In these perfectly equated quantities, with perfect balance and emphasis in neither place, craft + crafted object = love. This equation is most readily visible in the special outfit, the bodily-worn object, such as the bridal trousseau, the ballroom dress, the Sunday best. This “special-object-clothing” marks the boundaries of the internal and external in much the same way that the dolls house does. It defines the boundary of the body, marks out public and private space. The heavily beaded bodice is perhaps the dollhouse turned inside out.
As noted previously, Susan Stewart has compared the dolls house to a locket, declaring it “a materialized secret”; she goes on to state that:
The locket creates additional recesses of the body. Such recesses, which depend upon the protective functions of clothing, are always vulnerable to exposure. In contrast to the bursting sexuality of the carnival, they typify the restrained and domesticated sexuality of “the private life”.[14]
So, if the locket “typifies the restrained and domesticated sexuality of “the private life” then surely she has intimated that the dolls house does too. But what of the dolls house made by the hand of the body that belongs not to the internal domestic, but instead to the “bursting sexuality of the carnival”? Surely, the tattooed lady must also partake in crafts, as despite her status as decorated object, she must surely have time to pass as the fair travels from city to city and, unlike the menfolk of the carnival, her allotted menial work is negligible. Nevertheless, Stewart is adamant:
The antithesis of the locket is the tattoo. The tattoo creates not depth, but additional surface. It is publicly symbolic; calling on communal symbols and communal values, it is easily read and easily exposed. The locket is always threatened by loss, for its magic is dependent upon possession. But the tattoo is indelible, and in the sense that all ownership proper implies potential separation and loss, it cannot be “owned”. It represents incorporation just as other carnival grotesques images do.[15]
But the tattooed body, the carnival exhibit, is like the special-object-dress, it is the sum of both activity and product and, like the encrusted beadwork of the wedding dress, its commitment to both labour (through craft and the physical pain endured) and the finished product (through it’s life-long permanence) are of equal importance. Besides, if the tattoo is easily read and exposed, it is just as easily hidden and its wearer’s intent can be very hard to read, with intent and semiotic readings refusing to co-exist peacefully. Also, the “bursting sexuality of the carnival “belongs to the miniature just as much as it belongs to the tattooed, or the giant, as the Miniature Boy will attest. This equation of secret-miniature-internal and open-giant-external is perhaps overly simplistic.
I wonder where the miniature boy discusses his fantasises now that the phone line trade is all but over. The Internet has everything, so I expect he has found a whole community of shrunken men and giantesses, all macrophiles, like him. It is good for the trannies too; they can find each other so much more easily nowadays and can construct and validate their new identities together and find admirers through dating sites. The Internet killed the phone trade, as surely as video killed the radio star. Web cam girls are cheaper than premium rate numbers and now there is one less place for the imperfect girls to hide now that the soundtrack has its visual. Where have they gone?
The Internet is about looking, about display and about voyeurism. It is here that the modern day bodily grotesque resides. It is a freak show in the comfort of your own home. Only now you can view the freaks without the awkwardness of having to look them in the eye, without the risk of them staring back at you, forcing you to question your own gaze. The guilt and shame that closed down the carnival has shifted. Now the thrills of voyeurism are sought out through late-night Google searches and Channel Five shockumentaries, they are mediated by the lens and the screen. The danger is gone, the “Bursting Sexuality” is absent. Only the looking remains.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Green, V. in Nicholson, V. (1995) The Vivien Greene Dolls' House Collection Woodstock, NY Overlook Press 1995, Woodstock.
[2] Phelan, P. (1997) Mourning Sex : Performing Public Memories London ; New York, Routledge. Introduction
[3] Butler, J (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Routledge. p174.
[4] Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge. p17.
[5] Women that pretend to be drag queens, also known as female impersonator, impersonators. UrbanDictionary.com description is “A Drag Queen trapped in a woman’s body.” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=faux%20queen [accessed August 2008]
[6] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press.p65
[7] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p47.
[8] Sir John Soane's Museum comprises his collections and personal effects, acquired between the 1780s and his death in 1837. http://www.soane.org/
[9] Elsner, J. The House and Museum of John Soane in Cardinal, J. (1993) Cultures of Collecting Reaktion Bks, 1993. Reaktion Bks. p166-167
[10] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p49.
[11]Ibid. p61.
[12] As discussed more fully in my Diploma Stage Learning Record, May 2008.
[13] Ibid. p62.
[14] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p127
[15] Ibid p127.
The red book was also an alluring tactile object – its cover could handle my peanut butter and jelly coated fingers, and on the last page there was a pop up anatomy of a man that I quickly demolished. I don’t remember why I tore it out, probably because I could. I liked to feel my strength in those days, and paper was a foe I could master. I remember looking at the hole I had made with great pride. I showed it to my sister, laughing about how this outline was a much better anatomy of a man than the one with red ink and blue veins provided by the book publishers. My sister did not understand my delight but she indulged me anyway and asked me if I wanted to make another pop up model. I did not, but I lacked the words then to tell her why. [2]
In 1997, I found a small ad in the back of the Evening Standard, “Are you Female? 18+? Do you like talking on the phone?” Which I duly noted to be an advert for telephone-sex chat-line operators. I showed it to my flatmate, Zoe, purely for entertainment purposes and she, quite naturally, dared me to ring the number at the bottom. Clearly, my terribly home counties accent must have just what they were looking for, because before I knew it, I was wearing a headset and secret listening to a conversation between top girl, Julianne and a Texan truck driver. Or rather, I was listening to a conversation between Christy-Anne and a Texan truck driver, as Julianne was studying to be a speech therapist and the kind of things coming out of Christy-Anne’s mouth were not on the list of approved therapeutic sounds. No, this was a completely different sort of noise and she was not the only girl making it, rather she was one of 20 on the 6am-2pm shift. We sat in a room that could have passed for a telesales or market research office, grey carpet, regulation desks, tiny booths. Spouting obscenities for 8 hours at a time (with a half-hour lunch break) 5 days a week. This is, to say the least, a somewhat peculiar thing to do. Not nearly as peculiar as our regular callers though, who were either morose, unimaginative and generally personality deficient or completely bizarre loners dying to share their obsessive strangeness with a paid, non-judgemental stranger. Sadly for them, the girls on the 6-2 shift were anything but non-judgemental. Most of us felt nothing but contempt for their pathetic fantasies, their neediness, and their very selves. Luckily, some of the girls were talented vocal actors, able to disguise their disgust and thus encourage and inflate their customer’s desires and egos, not me, though. Instead I discovered a way in which I could legitimately tell them exactly what I thought of them. I became a specialist in domination. By taking on the role of Mistress Carla, I had carte blanche to be as sneering and as dismissive as I liked. Unfortunately, this also meant that I attracted the strangest of the customer base, the fetishists, the trannies and the slaves. The slaves were relatively easy to deal with, as I could pretty much be as mean as I liked and the only effort required was spent coming up with new and imaginative insults and perfecting a clipped Queen of England style accent. However, the trannies were a little harder.The ladies were essentially concerned with the same thing: creating, nurturing and maintaining a constructed identity. What they required from the phone lines was an external validation of that identity. They wanted to “pass” and they wanted someone else to tell them that they did so. If “…the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies”[3] then the trannies wanted to be the evidence of this. But a conversation with a person in flux regarding their gender identity is fraught with problems, not least regarding pronouns and I should have had empathy for them, if not sympathy, but I did not. Their obstinate clutching at the concept of binary genders infuriated me. Their languid, loving descriptions of the outfits that they wore enraged me. The pink bridesmaids dresses, the leather mini skirts, the stockings and suspenders, all strictly obeying the rules of the stereotype, creating grotesque parodies of womanhood. Not only did I question their motivation, “A man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to him”[4] but a quick glance around the room revealed none of what the trannies seemed so desperate to embody. Quite the opposite, as a job where you are only ever heard and never, ever seen is the perfect place for the imperfect woman to hide. In the booth to my left, Alexia, 24 stone and on the waiting list for gastric bypass surgery. To my right, Joanne, young, beautiful, brunette Joanne, a below the elbow amputee. Opposite, Rochelle, loud, raucous, bawdy and an achondroplasic dwarf. Perhaps it was not so hard to understand why a job that allowed you to construct your own appearance through verbalisation would appeal. Thus, it seemed the girls in the office had more in common with the “girls” on the phone than they might have liked to believe, even if the common ground lay in the performativity, rather than the performance. The phone girls performed for full time hours, 40 hours a week, playing the role of a person that did not really exist; we did not even know each other’s real names.
However, I never sought to create a new identity. Instead, I wanted to fix mine, make it permanent, unalterable, to do anything else would to be inauthentic, unreal, to sell out. It was incredibly difficult to tolerate the pretence of my Mistress Carla persona. My enforced, constructed identity was informed by the same sad stereotypes that the trannies were using as their template. I was a female, female impersonator, a faux queen[5] and even the adoration of my fans could not compensate, no matter how total (nor how peculiar) that surrender.
Quite the strangest of my regular callers was an American man that I knew only as The Miniature Boy. He wanted to be shrunk, which at the very least was an unusual fantasy, one that had at least not been directly lifted from the pages of the Sunday Sport. This caller wanted to be Lilliputian to my Titan. He wanted to be small enough to be kept as a well-loved pet. He wanted to be told that I loved him, to be adored:
The reduction in scale that the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its “use value” transformed into the infinite time of reverie.[6]
He needed to be told that I would care for him, like a pet, but that his opinion should be too inconsequential to matter to me. I should carry him in my hand to protect him from everything that is so huge and frightening. He needed me to be his protector, his saviour, to feed him, to care for him. He called frequently, eager to discuss his fantasy, and through description and language alone I would render him small and weak merely by talking to him. In a world where the male of a species is usually both size dominant and socially dominant the fantasy of disruption of these norms holds my attention for a while, even if the male desire for submission is relatively common, at least in the world of the phone lines. Of course, there is no need for the usual kind of physical reinforcement and corporal punishment required in a more common domination scenario, there is simply no question as to who is in charge if the woman, me, is a relative giantess to a tiny man. I can crush him; swallow him, if I will. His only defence is to run, run and hide.
I still tire of playing along with his game though, tire of his squeaky, high-pitched voice. The very fact that I am paid to provide the service that he is buying (for £3.99 per minute) renders it conceptually hollow. As per my usual style, I terminate our relationship by pushing his fantasy further than he wants. I know this means he will prevent him from calling me again and it is the only way to be rid of unwanted customers without risking my job. For miniature boy, the time of reverie has come to an end. I know he has an ongoing need for nothing more than the tender descriptors that create his tiny status, my adjectives cause his miniaturisation:
The depiction of the miniature moves away from… narrative in that it is caught in an infinity of descriptive gestures. It is difficult for much to happen in such depiction…[7]
So, the way to end him is obvious. I get out my swish, powerful, super-suction vacuum cleaner and plug it in. It has very powerful suction. He is hiding from me, but I go hunting for my shrunken prey. My Hoover has everything I require to find my little shrinkee, no matter how hard he tries to escape me. I can collect him, possess him. Keep him caged away from prying eyes, or show him off. He is mine, to do with as I will. I can eat him, crush him. Instead, I destroy him with narrative. And through the power of this story telling, I eradicate him with a routine domestic appliance.
The miniature, collection, possession, control. Is this what Sir John Soane felt as he surveyed his collection of scale architectural models?[8] Displaying models of his own buildings alongside his extensive collection of similarly miniaturised versions of iconic classics such as the ruins of Pompeii and the temple of Minerva, in the Acropolis of Athens and the Arch of Theseus in their own, top floor room against a panoramic backdrop of London must have been a tremendous ego-constructing triumph:
By their form as models, the models of Soane’s own buildings marry with the classical models to form a single collection, a single set. This is an outrageous parallelism, of course. It implies, with little space for modesty, not only that Soane’s buildings may dwell with all that is classical with architecture, but that together (together in miniature on the pedestal) Soane’s buildings and ancient architecture constitute a single new entity… The siting of the model room, high in the house, is hardly accidental. The conflation of ancient and Soanic in miniature is deliberately juxtaposed against ‘the rather extensive view of London to be obtained from the gallery, or loggia of the second floor’. To invoke a pun of which Soane was not unconscious, the model room serves as a model, a set of criteria, against which the actual architecture of London is to be judged. In effect, these actual buildings now become items in the same set as those in the Model Room…[9]
The subsequent preservation of Soane’s home and its contents, guaranteed by an Act of Parliament, froze his environment and its associated objects, his collection. Suspending it like a photograph and thus further miniaturising it, as a tableau:
The tableau effectively speaks to the distance of the context at hand and the narrated context; it is possible only through representation, since it offers a complete closure of a text framed off from the ongoing reality that surrounds it. Here we might think not only of sculpture but also of the photograph…[10]
This specifically requested and officially deigned conservation leads one to further assumptions that Soane’s investment in the tiny served to inflate and massage his ego, to extend his feeling of power. His authority over his mini-Parthenon was as real and as intoxicating as my own control of Sindy’s three story townhouse. But the dollhouse is a strange sort of miniaturisation, quite oppositional to Soane’s museum diorama, which he positioned as part of the seemingly open London landscape and invited the public to view. Instead, the dollhouse’s domestic position, inside the real house, poses it as a secret:
Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: centre within centre, within within within. The dolls house is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority. In fact, we can see the dollhouse-maker’s relative inattention to the exterior of his or her structure as further evidence of this movement inward.[11]
Internalisation and secrecy bode well with the idea of labour for labours sake. Keeping those idle hands busy, yet again, producing an object laden with the products of hours and hours of activity. The dollhouse is a container for the painstaking results of hours spent, and, like the family album and the compulsive hoarders[12] accumulation, intended to be enjoyed by those intimately involved. The depicted, the collator, the maker.
The diminutive size of the dolls house makes it the perfect place for discards and offcuts, the kind of stuff deemed to inconsequential for uses elsewhere. Thus, the dollhouse becomes a site of salvage, a place where if you waste not, you want not. Its modest scale means that it is a place where otherwise unobtainable dreams can be realised. No matter how elaborate, it retains an air of piety, the labour value outweighs the cost value and objects and furnishings normally outside of ones financial reach are easily approximated here, if only through the labour of the hand-made. The relationship between the craft object and the body of the maker is perhaps perfected in the example of the dollhouse:
The dollhouse erases all but the frontal view; its appearance is the realisation of the self as property, the body as container of objects, perpetual and incontaminable.[13]
As the frontal view is the view of the portrait, perhaps the miniature house is a portrait of its maker, a self-portrait, after all, its boundaries are as defined as firmly they are on the surface plane of a painting, but nonetheless, painting is quite different to domestic crafting. A painting is completed when the activity of painting stops, it is the cessation of the verb that creates the noun and this peculiarity of language that intimates that neither activity nor object has precedence, but that both have equal value.
Most domestic craft exists on either side of these two ideas i.e., the emphasis is usually on activity or the object, the act of passing time, or the making of something useful. Occasionally, like in the painting, these two elements are found in combination, with the labour and its result in balance. This resulting object is imbibed with an aura that is impossible to define but can be likened to the romantic concept of love. In these perfectly equated quantities, with perfect balance and emphasis in neither place, craft + crafted object = love. This equation is most readily visible in the special outfit, the bodily-worn object, such as the bridal trousseau, the ballroom dress, the Sunday best. This “special-object-clothing” marks the boundaries of the internal and external in much the same way that the dolls house does. It defines the boundary of the body, marks out public and private space. The heavily beaded bodice is perhaps the dollhouse turned inside out.
As noted previously, Susan Stewart has compared the dolls house to a locket, declaring it “a materialized secret”; she goes on to state that:
The locket creates additional recesses of the body. Such recesses, which depend upon the protective functions of clothing, are always vulnerable to exposure. In contrast to the bursting sexuality of the carnival, they typify the restrained and domesticated sexuality of “the private life”.[14]
So, if the locket “typifies the restrained and domesticated sexuality of “the private life” then surely she has intimated that the dolls house does too. But what of the dolls house made by the hand of the body that belongs not to the internal domestic, but instead to the “bursting sexuality of the carnival”? Surely, the tattooed lady must also partake in crafts, as despite her status as decorated object, she must surely have time to pass as the fair travels from city to city and, unlike the menfolk of the carnival, her allotted menial work is negligible. Nevertheless, Stewart is adamant:
The antithesis of the locket is the tattoo. The tattoo creates not depth, but additional surface. It is publicly symbolic; calling on communal symbols and communal values, it is easily read and easily exposed. The locket is always threatened by loss, for its magic is dependent upon possession. But the tattoo is indelible, and in the sense that all ownership proper implies potential separation and loss, it cannot be “owned”. It represents incorporation just as other carnival grotesques images do.[15]
But the tattooed body, the carnival exhibit, is like the special-object-dress, it is the sum of both activity and product and, like the encrusted beadwork of the wedding dress, its commitment to both labour (through craft and the physical pain endured) and the finished product (through it’s life-long permanence) are of equal importance. Besides, if the tattoo is easily read and exposed, it is just as easily hidden and its wearer’s intent can be very hard to read, with intent and semiotic readings refusing to co-exist peacefully. Also, the “bursting sexuality of the carnival “belongs to the miniature just as much as it belongs to the tattooed, or the giant, as the Miniature Boy will attest. This equation of secret-miniature-internal and open-giant-external is perhaps overly simplistic.
I wonder where the miniature boy discusses his fantasises now that the phone line trade is all but over. The Internet has everything, so I expect he has found a whole community of shrunken men and giantesses, all macrophiles, like him. It is good for the trannies too; they can find each other so much more easily nowadays and can construct and validate their new identities together and find admirers through dating sites. The Internet killed the phone trade, as surely as video killed the radio star. Web cam girls are cheaper than premium rate numbers and now there is one less place for the imperfect girls to hide now that the soundtrack has its visual. Where have they gone?
The Internet is about looking, about display and about voyeurism. It is here that the modern day bodily grotesque resides. It is a freak show in the comfort of your own home. Only now you can view the freaks without the awkwardness of having to look them in the eye, without the risk of them staring back at you, forcing you to question your own gaze. The guilt and shame that closed down the carnival has shifted. Now the thrills of voyeurism are sought out through late-night Google searches and Channel Five shockumentaries, they are mediated by the lens and the screen. The danger is gone, the “Bursting Sexuality” is absent. Only the looking remains.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Green, V. in Nicholson, V. (1995) The Vivien Greene Dolls' House Collection Woodstock, NY Overlook Press 1995, Woodstock.
[2] Phelan, P. (1997) Mourning Sex : Performing Public Memories London ; New York, Routledge. Introduction
[3] Butler, J (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Routledge. p174.
[4] Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge. p17.
[5] Women that pretend to be drag queens, also known as female impersonator, impersonators. UrbanDictionary.com description is “A Drag Queen trapped in a woman’s body.” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=faux%20queen [accessed August 2008]
[6] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press.p65
[7] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p47.
[8] Sir John Soane's Museum comprises his collections and personal effects, acquired between the 1780s and his death in 1837. http://www.soane.org/
[9] Elsner, J. The House and Museum of John Soane in Cardinal, J. (1993) Cultures of Collecting Reaktion Bks, 1993. Reaktion Bks. p166-167
[10] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p49.
[11]Ibid. p61.
[12] As discussed more fully in my Diploma Stage Learning Record, May 2008.
[13] Ibid. p62.
[14] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. p127
[15] Ibid p127.
All The Fun of the Fair
There was not much excitement in our village (if you discount Friday night Bingo at the sports hall) so when the fair came to town it was quite the big occasion. My peers liked the May-time fair best, with its electric dodgems and cutting edge 80’s airbrushed signage featuring girls in leather swimsuits and thigh boots. They even liked the gap-toothed long haired youths that pushed the waltzers ever faster hoping to cause a suburban14 year old to vomit on her Lady-Di-sailor-collared dress. But not me. I liked the steam fair that came in August. There wasn’t much there for the Alton Towers generation, but it wasn’t about the thrills, not the kind you got on the big wheel, nor the kind you got when the gap toothed long-hair waltzer boy accidentally brushed against your dress. My love for the steam fair was all about the look of the thing. The hand painted hoardings and base boards, the matching liveried vans, the lettering, the flourishes, the shields. Of course, the grand pomp of the Jones Domes was absent from behind. Really, they were just empty facades, held up by 2x4 struts and the gilt leaf was just gold paint, but I did not mind. Best of all, these rides were old, vintage, historical. These rides had a prior life, thousands upon thousands of bottoms had rested on each of the galloper mounts carved backs or at least on one just like it – some were replacements, perhaps they all were. [1] As their owner says, “Fairground rides have a considerable similarity to trusty brooms, they can last a hundred years with six new heads and seven new handles!”[2] And in this way, the copies became the original, by behaving as though they were, performing it, believing it, they became the authentic. They were made using the same techniques, they did the same job and travelled the same roads, they were the precious primary, or as close to it as was necessary to keep the illusion intact. An aura surrounded these items as surely as it did inhabit those handmade heirlooms interred in my mother’s airing cupboard. But the rides were not being saved for some impossible moment known as “best”; they were out there living their best, no matter the risk to the gold paint or the plaster scrolling. Through the steam fair I worked out where I wanted to be, out there with the living objects, not the suffocating, suffocated dead matter in the airing cupboard.
And so life became for living, for moving, for doing – the souvenirs and traces just side products. And craft became something to be carried with you, on your clothes, in your hair and in the performative person, the carefully crafted image.
My first gig was at the Kilburn National Ballroom. I was 14. The bands that played are unimportant, although I loved them all. It was the experience that changed everything for me, that tipped the world on its axis. London, at night with no parents or otherwise responsible adults to interfere, smells of excitement, of independence and of possibility. It was summer, the bright, breezy evening contrasted starkly with the dark, stagnant ballroom, with its intoxicating stench of sweat, cigarettes and stale beer. It was busy, packed tight, I couldn’t see my feet, nor my friends, and it was so loud, so all encompassing, so intense, surrounded by sound and passion and caught in the unmediated moment of the authentic experience, I cried.
I dropped out of school to follow the rest of the tour; I became an overly zealous convert to my newly discovered religion, the church of rock and roll. The concert tour and the travelling fair have a lot in common. The circus has come to town[3] and with it comes its awesome power for momentary transformation and the bringing of danger to suburbia. Only, some of us cannot bear the subsequent return to tranquillity, we cannot allow ourselves to be left behind in the silence. And so, we went too. An assortment of oddments from quiet towns up and down the country. Sometimes we travelled in the tour bus, but if budget constraints replaced the double-decker sleeper-bus with a battered old transit van we would jump trains or hitch hike to the next venue and collect our guest passes on the door. Then the waiting, waiting, waiting would begin. Waiting through the boring bits, the sound checks, the crew dinners, the drummer’s banal arguments with his latest girlfriend, waiting, waiting, waiting for the magic moment. House lights down, bass vibrating in your stomach and treble ringing in your ears, waiting for the high, the addicts unachievable high, waiting for that first-hit feeling that, despite the constant thrill seeking, can never be achieved again, never repeated.
It was 3 years before I became static again, although I never went home. Instead I halted in London, where else? And Ivy began to post things to me, things that she did not trust me to purchase myself, tin foil, kitchen roll, and air fresheners. She tried to make my squalid, shared flat into a home through the acquisition of the consumable niceties of suburbia. She was trying to keep me static again and she had another approach too, because every package she sent contained the same girl’s weekly comics that she used to bring to our family house every Wednesday. She simply never stopped buying them, some titles had merged, amalgamated, folded, but Bunty was still going strong[4] and so Ivy kept buying it. Every single week without fail, reserved at the newsagents in town. Every week until she died – I was 24.
I have no doubt that should she still be alive, she would still be buying Bunty for me now. I am not sure if this certainty brings me pleasure or some kind of mild horror as I have always had an ambiguous relationship with Bunty and her ilk. My childhood was choc-full of suitable reading material for girls, from the book prizes presented to my grandmother for good attendance[5] through schoolgirls annuals of my mothers all the way up to Princess Diana monthly (with additional lashings of Enid Blyton's rah-rah hockey-playing dormitory-sleeping old gals, that, in the words of Steven Patrick Morrissey, “says nothing to me about my life”[6]. Although I doubt he was referring to the Four-bloody-Marys).
My sister and I were quite spoiled in the context of our village peer group. This was most apparent when viewing our extensive Sindy doll collections and all their associated accessories. This included the much-coveted three-story-town house (fully furnished). My sister kept hers in immaculate condition in a direct binary with mine, its ugly sibling, it’s David Lynchian bad double. No-one seemed to support my sartorial decision to re-wallpaper with “save Worzel Gummage” stickers and the spindly plastic legs of my Louis XVI style furniture was beyond the help of superglue and had consequently been swaddled in brown packing tape. The truth was, I just did not much care for Sindy, nor her pony and trap, nor did I care for her fireplace, tongs and scuttle. She had a big head, she liked gymkhanas and I suspected that she had attended a fee-paying school. The girl that I was really interested in was Barbie. Barbie’s head was not disproportionately large, for a start, plus she was an astronaut, which beat Sindy’s nursing career into a cocked hat. Most crucial of all, I felt sure that Enid Blyton would not approve of Barbie. Of course, Barbie isn’t the kind of role model that any right-thinking person would want for their child, but children don’t see her as an aspirational dream anyway, I certainly never wanted to be busty and blonde like Barbie, rather I enjoyed being her puppet master. I could control her, make her do whatever I wanted. She was my uncomplaining slave always willing to do my bidding, willing to be who I wanted her to be. Unfortunately for her (and her re-sale value) the destiny I selected was as a shorn headed tomboy with nail-varnish nipples and a far greater fondness for Sindy than I had ever personally felt. Controlling the miniature world of the fashion doll felt good. It took some years before I knew why.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] John Carter estimates his machine is on its fourth set of mounts in the introduction to Braithwaite, P. (1995) John Carter's Jubilee Steam Gallopers Berkshire, Carters Books.
[2] Carter, J in Braithwaite, P. (1995) John Carter's Jubilee Steam Gallopers Berkshire, Carter's Books.
[3] ...And The Circus Leaves Town is the title of the fourth and final studio album by Kyuss, released on July 11, 1995. Various ex-Kyuss members now play as Queens of The Stone Age.
[4] Bunty, a British comic for girls was published weekly from 1958 until 2001. I read every copy between 1982 and 2000.
[5] My grandmother received various non-prize prizes at school. They were probably the only books she owned as a child. One, the, Big Book for Girls- on the River, is inscribed “Midsummer 1932, 1st prize Standard VII.”
[6] The Smiths Panic 1986
And so life became for living, for moving, for doing – the souvenirs and traces just side products. And craft became something to be carried with you, on your clothes, in your hair and in the performative person, the carefully crafted image.
My first gig was at the Kilburn National Ballroom. I was 14. The bands that played are unimportant, although I loved them all. It was the experience that changed everything for me, that tipped the world on its axis. London, at night with no parents or otherwise responsible adults to interfere, smells of excitement, of independence and of possibility. It was summer, the bright, breezy evening contrasted starkly with the dark, stagnant ballroom, with its intoxicating stench of sweat, cigarettes and stale beer. It was busy, packed tight, I couldn’t see my feet, nor my friends, and it was so loud, so all encompassing, so intense, surrounded by sound and passion and caught in the unmediated moment of the authentic experience, I cried.
I dropped out of school to follow the rest of the tour; I became an overly zealous convert to my newly discovered religion, the church of rock and roll. The concert tour and the travelling fair have a lot in common. The circus has come to town[3] and with it comes its awesome power for momentary transformation and the bringing of danger to suburbia. Only, some of us cannot bear the subsequent return to tranquillity, we cannot allow ourselves to be left behind in the silence. And so, we went too. An assortment of oddments from quiet towns up and down the country. Sometimes we travelled in the tour bus, but if budget constraints replaced the double-decker sleeper-bus with a battered old transit van we would jump trains or hitch hike to the next venue and collect our guest passes on the door. Then the waiting, waiting, waiting would begin. Waiting through the boring bits, the sound checks, the crew dinners, the drummer’s banal arguments with his latest girlfriend, waiting, waiting, waiting for the magic moment. House lights down, bass vibrating in your stomach and treble ringing in your ears, waiting for the high, the addicts unachievable high, waiting for that first-hit feeling that, despite the constant thrill seeking, can never be achieved again, never repeated.
It was 3 years before I became static again, although I never went home. Instead I halted in London, where else? And Ivy began to post things to me, things that she did not trust me to purchase myself, tin foil, kitchen roll, and air fresheners. She tried to make my squalid, shared flat into a home through the acquisition of the consumable niceties of suburbia. She was trying to keep me static again and she had another approach too, because every package she sent contained the same girl’s weekly comics that she used to bring to our family house every Wednesday. She simply never stopped buying them, some titles had merged, amalgamated, folded, but Bunty was still going strong[4] and so Ivy kept buying it. Every single week without fail, reserved at the newsagents in town. Every week until she died – I was 24.
I have no doubt that should she still be alive, she would still be buying Bunty for me now. I am not sure if this certainty brings me pleasure or some kind of mild horror as I have always had an ambiguous relationship with Bunty and her ilk. My childhood was choc-full of suitable reading material for girls, from the book prizes presented to my grandmother for good attendance[5] through schoolgirls annuals of my mothers all the way up to Princess Diana monthly (with additional lashings of Enid Blyton's rah-rah hockey-playing dormitory-sleeping old gals, that, in the words of Steven Patrick Morrissey, “says nothing to me about my life”[6]. Although I doubt he was referring to the Four-bloody-Marys).
My sister and I were quite spoiled in the context of our village peer group. This was most apparent when viewing our extensive Sindy doll collections and all their associated accessories. This included the much-coveted three-story-town house (fully furnished). My sister kept hers in immaculate condition in a direct binary with mine, its ugly sibling, it’s David Lynchian bad double. No-one seemed to support my sartorial decision to re-wallpaper with “save Worzel Gummage” stickers and the spindly plastic legs of my Louis XVI style furniture was beyond the help of superglue and had consequently been swaddled in brown packing tape. The truth was, I just did not much care for Sindy, nor her pony and trap, nor did I care for her fireplace, tongs and scuttle. She had a big head, she liked gymkhanas and I suspected that she had attended a fee-paying school. The girl that I was really interested in was Barbie. Barbie’s head was not disproportionately large, for a start, plus she was an astronaut, which beat Sindy’s nursing career into a cocked hat. Most crucial of all, I felt sure that Enid Blyton would not approve of Barbie. Of course, Barbie isn’t the kind of role model that any right-thinking person would want for their child, but children don’t see her as an aspirational dream anyway, I certainly never wanted to be busty and blonde like Barbie, rather I enjoyed being her puppet master. I could control her, make her do whatever I wanted. She was my uncomplaining slave always willing to do my bidding, willing to be who I wanted her to be. Unfortunately for her (and her re-sale value) the destiny I selected was as a shorn headed tomboy with nail-varnish nipples and a far greater fondness for Sindy than I had ever personally felt. Controlling the miniature world of the fashion doll felt good. It took some years before I knew why.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] John Carter estimates his machine is on its fourth set of mounts in the introduction to Braithwaite, P. (1995) John Carter's Jubilee Steam Gallopers Berkshire, Carters Books.
[2] Carter, J in Braithwaite, P. (1995) John Carter's Jubilee Steam Gallopers Berkshire, Carter's Books.
[3] ...And The Circus Leaves Town is the title of the fourth and final studio album by Kyuss, released on July 11, 1995. Various ex-Kyuss members now play as Queens of The Stone Age.
[4] Bunty, a British comic for girls was published weekly from 1958 until 2001. I read every copy between 1982 and 2000.
[5] My grandmother received various non-prize prizes at school. They were probably the only books she owned as a child. One, the, Big Book for Girls- on the River, is inscribed “Midsummer 1932, 1st prize Standard VII.”
[6] The Smiths Panic 1986
Caravans, Prayer Cushions and Idle Hands
The labor was the labor of the hand, of the body, and the product, in its uniqueness, was a stay against repetition and inauthenticity.[1]
I grew up in a 1950’s built semi-detached 3-bedroom council house in a small village in Hertfordshire. Number 13 House Lane looked like the sort of house that all children seem to draw, no matter the circumstances of their actual home – a pointed roof, four windows and a square front garden with a small fence. It looked like a dolls house, for all the world the perfect home. Perfect, at least, if you ignored its semi-attached Siamese twin – number 15. Most of our village was economically deprived and very few of the residents owned their own home, so the majority of the village belonged to the council, except for a small smattering of houses bought under the right to buy scheme. Number 15 was one of these. Initially, number 15 was inhabited solely by Mrs Smith, a rather unfriendly, hairy, pensioner, but as she became increasingly infirm (and increasingly hairy), her grown up son moved in to take care of her. When she died her house passed into the hands of the loving son and his brother, who no one had seen for some time, on account of him spending the last few years pleasing her Majesty. When brother Perry next came up for parole, he was released, the board happy and satisfied that that he now had a stable home awaiting his return. Perry’s brother was less happy about the new arrangement and promptly set about splitting the house into two – rapidly building makeshift walls from breezeblocks. So it happened that Perry’s side of the newly divided number 15 was the side that adjoined our family home. His bedroom and my parent’s bedroom were akin to the band of flesh that bound those original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng together, forever stuck in an enforced embrace.
This close proximity, coupled with an air vent, enabled us to hear him going about his business, talking to the teenage boys he lured home with promises of contraband, John Player Specials, Party Sevens and miniature Bells. There was alcohol in out house too, a liquor cabinet full of Advocaat and Ouzo and a bottle of sickly sweet liqueur that had been gifted to my parents by my great aunt Ivy on return from her unlikely travels to a desperately exotic sunnier clime (Tunisia? Barbados?) accompanied by my mother’s camp younger cousin, Keith. The bottle was as tacky as its syrupy contents and came adorned with a tiny set of ornamental cymbals, which my sister and I would play loudly in my mother’s bedroom. Surely if Percy could hear us, he would know that we could hear him? It appeared that he was oblivious.
The rest of the village were clearly not oblivious. In a small community like Sandridge, there really are not that many secrets, thus most of the villagers avoided Perry, except my Great Aunt Ivy. Already a strange fish, as illustrated by the fact that her marriage had lasted for only six heady weeks of 1942, Ivy did not quite fit in either. A fact she tried to disguise by approaching all she met with great disdain, followed quickly by loudly expressed disapproval. Her scornful ways suggested that she alone was the arbitrator of social decency in the community. She was a chain smoking Mary Whitehouse with an inexplicable fondness for the otherwise ostracised Perry. Every Wednesday she would come to visit us, delivering things that my mother did not approve of: Pepsi, Hula Hoops, Spacedust and sherbet, Mandy and Judy, Bunty and Diana. With my sister and I firmly distracted by our comics and candy, Ivy would take the chance to pop next door to deliver a couple of home-baked fruit cakes to Perry. Considering she lived off Marks and Spencer's fish dinners for one and Regal Superkings, this was unusual, to say the least.
In time, Perry went back to prison (the teenagers in his bedroom soon realised that the bottles of miniature Bells weren’t free after all) and his brother scraped the funds together to buy out Perry’s share of number 15. Like many divided cities, the wall eventually fell. We never saw Perry again, but Ivy did get a present from him in the post, hand made, just like the fruitcakes. An overly large-scale model of a gypsy caravan, fashioned from thousands and thousands of matchsticks. It sat on a side table next to a souvenir camel (Tunisia? Barbados?) made from real animal skin.
Much of the best prison art comes out of long-standing inmate craft traditions rather than exceptional personal vision. The clever horsehair belts and other weavings at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge reflect logistical exigencies that have shaped prison creativity for decades. Similarly, folded cigarette-wrappers, tooled leather and matchstick constructions seem to relate more to time-bending activities like whittling or knitting then to the idiosyncratic ideas of their creators.[2]
The devil makes work for idle hands, so keeping hands busy and thus beyond the reach of temptation has always been a motivator for craft. In St. Leonard’s parish church, Sandridge, every single prayer cushion is completely enveloped with the prim, ordered, mechanisms of cross-stitch. Cross stitch is a chaste activity, the perfect distraction for a lady like Ivy – dying to break bad but never really doing so (apart from the incident with the Italian soldier that should never be mentioned) and hiding even the desire for rebellion behind a façade of prim disapproval of pretty much everything. Ivy did not do cross-stitch though. Her pass-time was knitting. She knitted ugly dolls for church bazaars, baby jumpers for the local hospital and endless squares for some Blue Peter or Girl Guide appeal. Her needles clicked furiously and I often wondered what she was so afraid her idle hands might do without the constant clack-clack-clack of activity. Ivy did not attend church, did not kneel on the cross-stitch cushions that left tiny little imprints on your skin. Instead, she did take it upon herself to escort my sister and I to Sunday school every week. I didn’t know that we only attended at her insistence until many years later when I somewhat unfairly accused my mother of packing us off to colour in endless pictures of the Stations of the Cross and sing unfathomable metaphors featuring oil in lamps solely and simply due to the free babysitting aspect. I was rather surprised when I was told it was all Ivy’s idea. I expect she was trying to ensure our souls remained pure, either through Jesus Christ Our Saviour or through the repetitive and pointless labour of colouring in. I suppose it was better than knitting, anyway,
As well as taking responsibility for our spiritual welfare, Ivy also took it upon herself to furnish our “Bottom Drawers” a kind of Home Counties version of a dowry. Each Christmas we would be presented with something distinctly adult and thoroughly uninteresting, a recipe book, a set of napkins or a box of stainless steel fish knives. Undeterred by our bewildered faces, Ivy continued, year on year to build a future home for my sister and I, whether we wished for it or not. Occasionally we would be presented with something handmade, or at least hand embellished, by a previous generation. Something with so much labour invested into its making that the resulting object would be decreed as to be “saved for best” and thus fated to languish in a dusty airing cupboard for evermore, waiting for the very concept of what might constitute “best” to be decided. All this wistful, saving, hoarding and preserving of objects for some potential unspecified momentous occasion had an adverse affect on a teenaged me. Not content to labour towards my handcrafted, doily-spangled destiny of a stable home and stationary future I sought movement. Or at the very least the illusion of movement, even if it were poorly constructed from matchsticks and cigarette wrappers like Perry’s caravan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. P 39.
[2] From http://www.interestingideas.com/out/prison/prison.htm [accessed August 2008]
I grew up in a 1950’s built semi-detached 3-bedroom council house in a small village in Hertfordshire. Number 13 House Lane looked like the sort of house that all children seem to draw, no matter the circumstances of their actual home – a pointed roof, four windows and a square front garden with a small fence. It looked like a dolls house, for all the world the perfect home. Perfect, at least, if you ignored its semi-attached Siamese twin – number 15. Most of our village was economically deprived and very few of the residents owned their own home, so the majority of the village belonged to the council, except for a small smattering of houses bought under the right to buy scheme. Number 15 was one of these. Initially, number 15 was inhabited solely by Mrs Smith, a rather unfriendly, hairy, pensioner, but as she became increasingly infirm (and increasingly hairy), her grown up son moved in to take care of her. When she died her house passed into the hands of the loving son and his brother, who no one had seen for some time, on account of him spending the last few years pleasing her Majesty. When brother Perry next came up for parole, he was released, the board happy and satisfied that that he now had a stable home awaiting his return. Perry’s brother was less happy about the new arrangement and promptly set about splitting the house into two – rapidly building makeshift walls from breezeblocks. So it happened that Perry’s side of the newly divided number 15 was the side that adjoined our family home. His bedroom and my parent’s bedroom were akin to the band of flesh that bound those original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng together, forever stuck in an enforced embrace.
This close proximity, coupled with an air vent, enabled us to hear him going about his business, talking to the teenage boys he lured home with promises of contraband, John Player Specials, Party Sevens and miniature Bells. There was alcohol in out house too, a liquor cabinet full of Advocaat and Ouzo and a bottle of sickly sweet liqueur that had been gifted to my parents by my great aunt Ivy on return from her unlikely travels to a desperately exotic sunnier clime (Tunisia? Barbados?) accompanied by my mother’s camp younger cousin, Keith. The bottle was as tacky as its syrupy contents and came adorned with a tiny set of ornamental cymbals, which my sister and I would play loudly in my mother’s bedroom. Surely if Percy could hear us, he would know that we could hear him? It appeared that he was oblivious.
The rest of the village were clearly not oblivious. In a small community like Sandridge, there really are not that many secrets, thus most of the villagers avoided Perry, except my Great Aunt Ivy. Already a strange fish, as illustrated by the fact that her marriage had lasted for only six heady weeks of 1942, Ivy did not quite fit in either. A fact she tried to disguise by approaching all she met with great disdain, followed quickly by loudly expressed disapproval. Her scornful ways suggested that she alone was the arbitrator of social decency in the community. She was a chain smoking Mary Whitehouse with an inexplicable fondness for the otherwise ostracised Perry. Every Wednesday she would come to visit us, delivering things that my mother did not approve of: Pepsi, Hula Hoops, Spacedust and sherbet, Mandy and Judy, Bunty and Diana. With my sister and I firmly distracted by our comics and candy, Ivy would take the chance to pop next door to deliver a couple of home-baked fruit cakes to Perry. Considering she lived off Marks and Spencer's fish dinners for one and Regal Superkings, this was unusual, to say the least.
In time, Perry went back to prison (the teenagers in his bedroom soon realised that the bottles of miniature Bells weren’t free after all) and his brother scraped the funds together to buy out Perry’s share of number 15. Like many divided cities, the wall eventually fell. We never saw Perry again, but Ivy did get a present from him in the post, hand made, just like the fruitcakes. An overly large-scale model of a gypsy caravan, fashioned from thousands and thousands of matchsticks. It sat on a side table next to a souvenir camel (Tunisia? Barbados?) made from real animal skin.
Much of the best prison art comes out of long-standing inmate craft traditions rather than exceptional personal vision. The clever horsehair belts and other weavings at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge reflect logistical exigencies that have shaped prison creativity for decades. Similarly, folded cigarette-wrappers, tooled leather and matchstick constructions seem to relate more to time-bending activities like whittling or knitting then to the idiosyncratic ideas of their creators.[2]
The devil makes work for idle hands, so keeping hands busy and thus beyond the reach of temptation has always been a motivator for craft. In St. Leonard’s parish church, Sandridge, every single prayer cushion is completely enveloped with the prim, ordered, mechanisms of cross-stitch. Cross stitch is a chaste activity, the perfect distraction for a lady like Ivy – dying to break bad but never really doing so (apart from the incident with the Italian soldier that should never be mentioned) and hiding even the desire for rebellion behind a façade of prim disapproval of pretty much everything. Ivy did not do cross-stitch though. Her pass-time was knitting. She knitted ugly dolls for church bazaars, baby jumpers for the local hospital and endless squares for some Blue Peter or Girl Guide appeal. Her needles clicked furiously and I often wondered what she was so afraid her idle hands might do without the constant clack-clack-clack of activity. Ivy did not attend church, did not kneel on the cross-stitch cushions that left tiny little imprints on your skin. Instead, she did take it upon herself to escort my sister and I to Sunday school every week. I didn’t know that we only attended at her insistence until many years later when I somewhat unfairly accused my mother of packing us off to colour in endless pictures of the Stations of the Cross and sing unfathomable metaphors featuring oil in lamps solely and simply due to the free babysitting aspect. I was rather surprised when I was told it was all Ivy’s idea. I expect she was trying to ensure our souls remained pure, either through Jesus Christ Our Saviour or through the repetitive and pointless labour of colouring in. I suppose it was better than knitting, anyway,
As well as taking responsibility for our spiritual welfare, Ivy also took it upon herself to furnish our “Bottom Drawers” a kind of Home Counties version of a dowry. Each Christmas we would be presented with something distinctly adult and thoroughly uninteresting, a recipe book, a set of napkins or a box of stainless steel fish knives. Undeterred by our bewildered faces, Ivy continued, year on year to build a future home for my sister and I, whether we wished for it or not. Occasionally we would be presented with something handmade, or at least hand embellished, by a previous generation. Something with so much labour invested into its making that the resulting object would be decreed as to be “saved for best” and thus fated to languish in a dusty airing cupboard for evermore, waiting for the very concept of what might constitute “best” to be decided. All this wistful, saving, hoarding and preserving of objects for some potential unspecified momentous occasion had an adverse affect on a teenaged me. Not content to labour towards my handcrafted, doily-spangled destiny of a stable home and stationary future I sought movement. Or at the very least the illusion of movement, even if it were poorly constructed from matchsticks and cigarette wrappers like Perry’s caravan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham, Duke University Press. P 39.
[2] From http://www.interestingideas.com/out/prison/prison.htm [accessed August 2008]
Snapshots, an Everyday Critique
Snapshots, an Everyday Critique. 2007.
Every family has them, stacks of albums stuffed full of snapshots. First black and white photographs then more latterly colour, held in with corner stickers or by crackling yellow cellophane. We accept these images as visual histories and consign them to the category of memory be those memories real, imagined or supposed. We consider them to be everyday family documents. Yet examining these everyday images, viewing the subject in it’s chosen landscape and pose, you could easily make the mistake that the whole of human existence is spent on a beach, blowing out candles or riding on a fairground carousel, in fancy dress.
The records we make are records of leisure time and leisure activities, holidays, birthdays and other celebrations. Clearly not everyday activities, but rather as Lefebvre asserts, activities that critique the everyday:
“be he and author or not, the man of our times carries out in his own way, spontaneously, the critique of his everyday life. And this critique of the everyday plays an integral part in the everyday; it is achieved in leisure activities” [1]
Lefebvre goes on to discuss how the relationship between the everyday and leisure is dialectical, united yet contradictory. That the everyday cannot be separated from it’s own critique through leisure. He also places this into an historical context, as previously the critique of the everyday was a subject reserved for the educated and excluded the manual workers. Lefebvre says that this time of critique must be explicit, that it must manifest as a clear break from the everyday, that there is little sense of leisure in gardening or DIY. He states that the ambiguous forms of leisure that look like work or seem to require an obligatory exchange are inadequate. Thus rejected are such past-times as reading or viewing art (and we certainly rarely document these activities through photography). Thus I would like to propose that the typical figurative snapshot could be viewed as a document of everyday critique. Susan Sontag asserts, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”[2] Perhaps this is key, we cannot step out of the everyday entirely, that is the dialectical nature of work and leisure, but by documenting the leisure time it can give the appearance of participation and thus the appearance of a break, a separation from work.
Sontag states that photographs “help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure”[3] so to indexically record the ruptures that leisure creates in every day life is not only to reinforce the idea of separation, but to also help the subjects come to terms with that rupture. Leisure time critiques the everyday, but we negotiate this critique and understand it through the snapshot. It could be said that photographing these unusual events, normalises them and allows for them to be catalogued, functioning similarly to the banal documents of Mass Observation, which Ben Highmore describes as “At one and the same time mundane and poetic”. [4] Mass Observation, an organisation founded in 1937 with the aim of studying and recording the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain, employed 500 volunteer observers to maintain diaries and facilitate questionnaires. They also anonymously documented people's overheard conversation and observed behaviour. This observation took place on the street, in the workplace and at various public events, a kind of anthropology of the near. A strange transformation takes place, the banality of the everyday becomes a moment of strange poetic beauty via it’s textual recording. Snapshots work almost oppositionally, taking the unusual moments of our existence and through the medium of the lens transforming them into everyday objects, which seldom hold the interest of those that have no vested interest. The camera is a democratising tool, by recording and representing an event it can begin to negate the event and certainly manages to sanitise it, creating a safe distance between the event and the viewer. An example of an event that requires sanitising or polite mediating would be the funfair or carnival. Described by Lefebvre thus:
The Funfair: a people’s event whose survival and indeed industrialization have occasioned much astonishment. The noise and the deafening music supply the required break. He we enter a humble, restless, microcosm, extraordinary and vulgar. And apparently cheap. Only things which might remind us of work are excluded from this microcosm. In it we find knowledge (the aquarium, anatomical displays, eroticism (naked dancers), travel, wonders, departures, sort, etc.[5]
Interestingly Michel Foucault refers also to the fairground: “These marvellous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake women, fortune-tellers and so forth.”[6] Foucault refers to the fairground as a temporal heterotopia. For him a heterotopia reaches its full function or capacity “when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” [7] This idea of a break or gap is an echo of Lefebvre’s thoughts, Foucault even suggests the idea of the break only appearing to be separate, but actually being dialectically related to it’s proposed other.
But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect. These spaces as it were, which are linked with all the others which however contradict with all the other sites [are of two main types].[8]
So it seems that the funfair is a theoretically valuable and it is certainly a site that falls under the category of must-document experience and thus features in our family albums. Carnival workers of the sort described by Foucault, also feature in the photographic work of artist Diane Arbus.
Her work of 1970 “Albino sword swallower at a carnival” is a fairly typical example of her images, black and white, not overtly showy or overly-lit and the pose assumed is, as usual for Arbus, the familiar attitude of the vernacular photograph:
A strange woman (with her incredibly white hair) performs a bizarre act for what is presumed to be a single spectator, a mechanical spectator. This is a private performance; it doesn’t take place in its deigned spot, the carnival stage, but instead behind a tent, in secret. The sword-swallowing woman is well dressed, but not in particurlarly theatrical garb, this is her everyday. Yet as a document it speaks of the opposite, it is here at the carnival, the temporal heterotopia, where the everyday is critiqued, where the rupture happens. This is not the everyday of the viewer, nor, we assume that of the photographer. This is the strange. Still, the action of photographing this event has democratised it, the event may have seemed unusual, but now it is no longer an event, but merely a trace of an event. An ordinary object has been fashioned from the medium of the extraordinary.
In medicine, Heterotopia is a term used to describe the displacement of an organ or tissue from its normal place within the body. Foucault’s various examples of heterotopias (museums, libraries, prisons, cemeteries, ships, cinemas, care homes etc) could be described as sites where normal human behaviours and responses are displaced. Lefebvre’s sites of everyday critique through leisure could be described similarly, but perhaps as sites where normal human behaviour (work behaviour) is not displaced, but rather replaced (by leisure behaviour). Of course, despite the similarities, we do not choose to document heterotopias in the way that we document leisure time, nonetheless a parallel between the two concepts emerges, this notion of a break or rupture with the everyday, as illustrated by “Albino sword swallower at a carnival”.
The strategy of normalising the strange, of making the unfamiliar familiar is one that Arbus repeats in many other photographs such as “A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY” (1970). In it, a young man towers over an older couple, barely able to stand due to the confines of the suburban sitting room in which they are pictured. His enormous size is emphasised by the woman’s upward gaze. This strangeness is not only tempered by the assorted lamps, sofas and curtains of suburbia, but also by the title Arbus has assigned to the image; the giant is at home with his parents. Through Arbus’ documentation this mysterious tableau becomes normalised. Almost just another family snapshot.
Of course, Arbus’ images are not really snapshots, but widely published and exhibited art pieces. Like all images their function changes depending on where they are shown and how they are curated. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that Diane Arbus would have liked for her photographs to be more akin to snapshots than glossy magazine or art images. Indeed a book has been published with the intent of recasting her work as if a family album[9] and indeed, many of her titles refer to filial relationships or place her subjects “at home”. Certainly, even some of Arbus’ wilder images can find spiritual and aesthetic twins within the volumes and volumes of family albums and images spanning five generations that I personally inherited:
I find the critique of the everyday inherent throughout these albums. Here are the documents of the unusual, framed in the action and the language of the common and these critiques through breaks, through leisure are joyous moments, so long may we continue to document ruptures, select moments from the everyday and makethe unfamiliar familiar. For it is in the unheroic, the trivial and the unnoticed that magic and mystery continue to dwell, here with the giant houseplants.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life London; New York, Verso. P29.
[2] Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography [Harmondsworth], Penguin. P10.
[3] Ibid P9.
[4] Highmore, B. (2001) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: an Introduction London, Routledge. P75.
[5]Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life London; New York, Verso. P41.
[6] Foucault, M (1967) published in Mirzoeff, N. (2002) The Visual Culture Reader London; New York, Routledge. P234.
[7] Ibid P234.
[8] Ibid P231.
[9] Lee, A. (2003) Diane Arbus: Family Albums New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
Every family has them, stacks of albums stuffed full of snapshots. First black and white photographs then more latterly colour, held in with corner stickers or by crackling yellow cellophane. We accept these images as visual histories and consign them to the category of memory be those memories real, imagined or supposed. We consider them to be everyday family documents. Yet examining these everyday images, viewing the subject in it’s chosen landscape and pose, you could easily make the mistake that the whole of human existence is spent on a beach, blowing out candles or riding on a fairground carousel, in fancy dress.
The records we make are records of leisure time and leisure activities, holidays, birthdays and other celebrations. Clearly not everyday activities, but rather as Lefebvre asserts, activities that critique the everyday:
“be he and author or not, the man of our times carries out in his own way, spontaneously, the critique of his everyday life. And this critique of the everyday plays an integral part in the everyday; it is achieved in leisure activities” [1]
Lefebvre goes on to discuss how the relationship between the everyday and leisure is dialectical, united yet contradictory. That the everyday cannot be separated from it’s own critique through leisure. He also places this into an historical context, as previously the critique of the everyday was a subject reserved for the educated and excluded the manual workers. Lefebvre says that this time of critique must be explicit, that it must manifest as a clear break from the everyday, that there is little sense of leisure in gardening or DIY. He states that the ambiguous forms of leisure that look like work or seem to require an obligatory exchange are inadequate. Thus rejected are such past-times as reading or viewing art (and we certainly rarely document these activities through photography). Thus I would like to propose that the typical figurative snapshot could be viewed as a document of everyday critique. Susan Sontag asserts, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”[2] Perhaps this is key, we cannot step out of the everyday entirely, that is the dialectical nature of work and leisure, but by documenting the leisure time it can give the appearance of participation and thus the appearance of a break, a separation from work.
Sontag states that photographs “help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure”[3] so to indexically record the ruptures that leisure creates in every day life is not only to reinforce the idea of separation, but to also help the subjects come to terms with that rupture. Leisure time critiques the everyday, but we negotiate this critique and understand it through the snapshot. It could be said that photographing these unusual events, normalises them and allows for them to be catalogued, functioning similarly to the banal documents of Mass Observation, which Ben Highmore describes as “At one and the same time mundane and poetic”. [4] Mass Observation, an organisation founded in 1937 with the aim of studying and recording the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain, employed 500 volunteer observers to maintain diaries and facilitate questionnaires. They also anonymously documented people's overheard conversation and observed behaviour. This observation took place on the street, in the workplace and at various public events, a kind of anthropology of the near. A strange transformation takes place, the banality of the everyday becomes a moment of strange poetic beauty via it’s textual recording. Snapshots work almost oppositionally, taking the unusual moments of our existence and through the medium of the lens transforming them into everyday objects, which seldom hold the interest of those that have no vested interest. The camera is a democratising tool, by recording and representing an event it can begin to negate the event and certainly manages to sanitise it, creating a safe distance between the event and the viewer. An example of an event that requires sanitising or polite mediating would be the funfair or carnival. Described by Lefebvre thus:
The Funfair: a people’s event whose survival and indeed industrialization have occasioned much astonishment. The noise and the deafening music supply the required break. He we enter a humble, restless, microcosm, extraordinary and vulgar. And apparently cheap. Only things which might remind us of work are excluded from this microcosm. In it we find knowledge (the aquarium, anatomical displays, eroticism (naked dancers), travel, wonders, departures, sort, etc.[5]
Interestingly Michel Foucault refers also to the fairground: “These marvellous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake women, fortune-tellers and so forth.”[6] Foucault refers to the fairground as a temporal heterotopia. For him a heterotopia reaches its full function or capacity “when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” [7] This idea of a break or gap is an echo of Lefebvre’s thoughts, Foucault even suggests the idea of the break only appearing to be separate, but actually being dialectically related to it’s proposed other.
But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect. These spaces as it were, which are linked with all the others which however contradict with all the other sites [are of two main types].[8]
So it seems that the funfair is a theoretically valuable and it is certainly a site that falls under the category of must-document experience and thus features in our family albums. Carnival workers of the sort described by Foucault, also feature in the photographic work of artist Diane Arbus.
Her work of 1970 “Albino sword swallower at a carnival” is a fairly typical example of her images, black and white, not overtly showy or overly-lit and the pose assumed is, as usual for Arbus, the familiar attitude of the vernacular photograph:
A strange woman (with her incredibly white hair) performs a bizarre act for what is presumed to be a single spectator, a mechanical spectator. This is a private performance; it doesn’t take place in its deigned spot, the carnival stage, but instead behind a tent, in secret. The sword-swallowing woman is well dressed, but not in particurlarly theatrical garb, this is her everyday. Yet as a document it speaks of the opposite, it is here at the carnival, the temporal heterotopia, where the everyday is critiqued, where the rupture happens. This is not the everyday of the viewer, nor, we assume that of the photographer. This is the strange. Still, the action of photographing this event has democratised it, the event may have seemed unusual, but now it is no longer an event, but merely a trace of an event. An ordinary object has been fashioned from the medium of the extraordinary.
In medicine, Heterotopia is a term used to describe the displacement of an organ or tissue from its normal place within the body. Foucault’s various examples of heterotopias (museums, libraries, prisons, cemeteries, ships, cinemas, care homes etc) could be described as sites where normal human behaviours and responses are displaced. Lefebvre’s sites of everyday critique through leisure could be described similarly, but perhaps as sites where normal human behaviour (work behaviour) is not displaced, but rather replaced (by leisure behaviour). Of course, despite the similarities, we do not choose to document heterotopias in the way that we document leisure time, nonetheless a parallel between the two concepts emerges, this notion of a break or rupture with the everyday, as illustrated by “Albino sword swallower at a carnival”.
The strategy of normalising the strange, of making the unfamiliar familiar is one that Arbus repeats in many other photographs such as “A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY” (1970). In it, a young man towers over an older couple, barely able to stand due to the confines of the suburban sitting room in which they are pictured. His enormous size is emphasised by the woman’s upward gaze. This strangeness is not only tempered by the assorted lamps, sofas and curtains of suburbia, but also by the title Arbus has assigned to the image; the giant is at home with his parents. Through Arbus’ documentation this mysterious tableau becomes normalised. Almost just another family snapshot.
Of course, Arbus’ images are not really snapshots, but widely published and exhibited art pieces. Like all images their function changes depending on where they are shown and how they are curated. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that Diane Arbus would have liked for her photographs to be more akin to snapshots than glossy magazine or art images. Indeed a book has been published with the intent of recasting her work as if a family album[9] and indeed, many of her titles refer to filial relationships or place her subjects “at home”. Certainly, even some of Arbus’ wilder images can find spiritual and aesthetic twins within the volumes and volumes of family albums and images spanning five generations that I personally inherited:
I find the critique of the everyday inherent throughout these albums. Here are the documents of the unusual, framed in the action and the language of the common and these critiques through breaks, through leisure are joyous moments, so long may we continue to document ruptures, select moments from the everyday and makethe unfamiliar familiar. For it is in the unheroic, the trivial and the unnoticed that magic and mystery continue to dwell, here with the giant houseplants.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life London; New York, Verso. P29.
[2] Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography [Harmondsworth], Penguin. P10.
[3] Ibid P9.
[4] Highmore, B. (2001) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: an Introduction London, Routledge. P75.
[5]Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life London; New York, Verso. P41.
[6] Foucault, M (1967) published in Mirzoeff, N. (2002) The Visual Culture Reader London; New York, Routledge. P234.
[7] Ibid P234.
[8] Ibid P231.
[9] Lee, A. (2003) Diane Arbus: Family Albums New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
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