Isaac Cordova Kathy O'Dell Response

My first impressionable moment from this piece was how the author mentions that Honeymooners is the first engendering piece. After watching some of the show, I can see how the husband elicits traits that were thought of as feminine at the time. For its time, this must have been pretty groundbreaking. Gender and gender roles have evolved quite immensely over time so it is rather quaint for me to view a piece that served as a milestone.
Another important note the author mentioned was that our collective placement of TVs (in our homes) has made us associate TVs with the places we keep them. This means that displaying an art form on a TV would subliminally have a "home-y" effect. It is important as an artist to keep in mind what medium is the best for their project AND also what implications and hidden notions revolve around that choice.
Thirdly, I found O'Dell's passage on the meaning of a mask to be rather intriguing. It is a mask that disguises us but at the same time it epitomizes us through anonymity. Identity is such an imperative part of human interaction and when we deny someone that they are left viewing a persona without flaw, a perfect ghost in a sense.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Television, Furniture, Sculpture -- Vito Acconci -- Gabi Smith

The first part of Acconci's essay that stood out to me was his concept of a television set making the power of the screen handleable. It brought to mind a Bo Burnham interview in which he discusses his film Eigth Grade . In the interview Burnham describes how he felt it was important to release the film on the largest screen possible (as opposed to offers to release it online or reformatting it as a tv show or something) because he felt that a large part of the message of the film was establishing his thirteen year old female protagonist as powerful. He discussed how the audience should be humbled before her and her problems, and that upon rewatching on a TV or a laptop, the viewer could get another unique experience by literally feeling closer to her in proximity and size through the screen. Acconci's point about television sets being initially sort of trojan horsed into the home was also really interesting. I think this is why often times video installation not based on pro...
Read more

The Precession of Simulacra

Simulacrum: image or representation of someone or something Borges fable: "On Exactitude in Science," (1946) short story by Jorge Luis Borges about the map-territory relation. In an empire where cartography becomes an exact science, a map is made that portrays every element of the country with perfectly accurate detail. A map that precedes what it depicts, and therefore causes the territory's rise, raises a simple but valuable dilemma of what is representation and what is real. The author says the sovereign difference between the representation and the real is what gives that abstraction charm. In this case, mapping is simply equating the real into a system of signs of the real. "The real will never have a chance to produce itself." It's like removing death as even an option in life. Simulate (from text): to feign to have what one doesn't have Dissimulate (from text): to pretend to not have what one has If one were to simulate an illness, he wo...
Read more