Photography Essays Art and Media

Photography Essays Art and MediaUsing examples, discuss the relationship in the midst of fine artifice and the mass media.Introduction The relationship amidst art and media has al representations been heavily symbiotic, a fact acknowledged only relatively recently, with the ironic wink of pop art in the fifties, further nevertheless the connection has always been present and empowering to both high culture and societys consumers. Consumer culture and art suffer invaded each others territories to the level where it has become impossible, at dates, to tell them apart. The HBO television series, Sex and the City, for example, might be art reflecting life, or art in stamping life, or both, or neither so many of the signifiers we use to recognise art, so many of the cause and effect relationships we overlyk for granted, earn become indistinguishable.On a theoretical level, the media has amplified artistic causes, for good or for bad, and sometimes where bad is anticipated, t he media has been second-guessed or hijacked. On a practical level, forms of media patient ofcast meet much in common with art forms, tout ensembleowing for overlaps and ironic jokes, since recent technologies enable neatly replicable sign systems- the mass media is a hegemony, and iconography reproduces itself e precisewhere we look.One reaction to the standardization of learnry and the new lexicon of iconography came in the form of Pop art. Ironically, of course, Warhols replicable paintings give way an iconographic currency all their own. By the 1970s pockets of subversion were appearing everywhere. Media activists called it culture jamming, the Situationist International called it detournement (an insurrectional style by which a past form is used to show its own inherent untruth) the Pistols called it Punk. But it was essentially the same. Culture jamming can be used to describe a broad range of subversive activity, from the urinate of graffiti artists to the radical refa cement of billboards by the Billboard Liberation Front, to pirate radio broadcasts. It is, essentially, an attempt to challenge the authority of the mass media by creative, and generally public, acts of resistance.Adbusters magazine employs culture jamming as its manifesto, transforming it into a social movement with the revolutionary aim of toppling existing power structures and forging a major rethinking of the way we live in the 21st century. Their forceful sloganism, together with slickness of its architectural plan, raises suspicions and criticism. This is the rhetoric of a salesman, and there would indeed appear to be a contradiction between its anti-advertising objectives and its image- base editorial strategies. Nevertheless this is the first time that magazines have really subjectified the image, and a magazine which is non only about design merely also a beautiful piece of craft itself, seems to sidestep the theoretical problem of hypocrisy, somehow.The problem of desi gn forthwith is that it is more fascinated by the visual, as a practical imitation or decoration, and not by the image as a subjective narrative and interpretive element. As a chair of its internal dialogue, however, the image is more than a perception. It is a necessary construction on the brink of fiction, that reveals the dialectic of representation and presentation.Rick argues that the once homogeneous depicted object of graphic design has begun to separate into two distinct strands. On single side there is professional practice in all its forms on the other a field which he terms design-culture graphics. This territory is inhabited by designers doing their own, often self-initiated thing publishing books and magazines, starting websites, and designing and selling T-shirts, posters, DVDs, etc. He refers to Adrian Shaughnessys observations in April 2003s Creative Re linear perspective magazine Stylistically it is usually radical, adventurous and sometimes even downright purp oseless.The curious aspect of this claim is the clue that the divide has only just happened. Looking back to Morris and Ruskin, again, we see an extraordinary sort of proto-punk for the middle classes, even at the turn of the century. More recently, the division became a true social cleave, rather than an ideological romantic whimsy, with the new wave that followed punk in the late 1970s. Designers such as Brody, Saville, Malcolm Garrett, Rocking Russian and 23 envelope were so notable because, not only did they shun the mainstream in which designers would once have expected to see work as a matter of course, precisely they also produced the around inventive and durable British graphic design of the period. Their audience was other unexampled people. In Britain today, a vast number of young designers emerge from design schools and art colleges today with no intention of joining designs mainstream. People today want to express their individualism in their work and the thought of a small, informal collective started by a group of friends is obviously attractive as its a sort of reference of student life.Graphic design played an important role as a tool of empowerment for those whose fringe status was less of a choice, too it gave voice to women and articulating their concerns.The suffragettes contribution to the history of graphic design has been intriguing. Unlike the emancipatory and utopic vision of the modernist movement, the images of the womens movement never prescribed to a unifying esthetical dogma. When seen in conjunction with other social and counter-cultural movements that became symbolic of a certain stylistic representation, what is notable about the womens movement is its lack of stylistic unity. man this wasnt intentional strategy, it practically increased resistance to commodification.Much of todays art is conceptually sophisticated enough to reflect both art and life, often anticipating its own responses. The offices in Sex and the City, the ultimate show about and because of commodification, consistently acknowledge social expectation, even if it has become their raison detre to buck those expectations. When the character Charlotte expresses regrets about not working it shows that she has internalized the message that she should work. When she accuses Miranda of judging her she exclaims,You think Im one of those women . . . One of those women we hate who just works until she gets married Here, Charlotte reveals her own view that women should be independent, demonstrating that she herself is conflicted. Her statement has feminist undertones, since it implies that women who change their lives, or who are primarily oriented to attracting a husband, sacrifice themselves and compromise their identities- appropriately, as this is exactly the fate the scriptwriters have in store for her.Charlottes emphasis on the choice defense as a feminist case is an oversimplification and a misinterpretation of generous feminist goals, although it still promotes the critical sentiment that women are diverse, and that one womans decision of what to do with her form or her life should be in her hands, in ache of what her friends, family, or society dictates.Yet, at the same time it highlights some of the problems associated with liberal womens lib as a perspective and its frequent misappropriation by women- and perhaps, in this case, the Sex and the City scriptwriters.Liberal feminism is based on the idea that differences between women and men cannot be explained by biology and thus differential give-and- curb is unjust. The idea is that people should be regarded as individuals, rather than identified first as men or women, and should thus be able to ferment decisions based on what is best for the individual. As Montemurro has written,In this episode of Sex and the City, when Charlotte refers to the womens movement, she seems to be referring to the idea that women have been liberated or freed from the c onstraints of patriarchy and are able to work and attain success at levels similar to those attained by men. indeed, she has the right to decide for herself what will make her happy and satisfied as an individual. If she chooses not to work, indeed she is not succumbing to traditional feminine expectations rather, she is doing what she sees as right for her and thus she should not be judged for this.She goes on to point out that few women have the ability to make this choice. But the whole debate about choice can be located in the context of oppression in Montemurros terms, Charlottes choice is predicated on other womens lack of choices. In addition, Charlotte even states that Trey suggested she sting at home, hinting that the idea to stop working has not come directly from her. The criticism of feminisms reactive quality applies here her choice may be her perogative but it is not solely hers, and the specific choice she has(nt) made stands for the choice (either to stay at home or not) that all women make, with its attendant vulnerability to accusations of reactiveness and passivity. As Montemurro suggests, Charlottes powerful, wealthy husband has delivered the option to her as a gift of sorts, as if to say, I give you permission to stay home, and Charlotte fails to acknowledge that her choice is made possible only by her subsequent economic dependence on her husband.Charlottes statement that the womans movement is about choice is played as distastefully comical, distasteful not least because the scriptwriters are conveying one of two stirly dangerous messages. Either they are communicating they notion that it is sufficient lipservice to feminism to give these issues crass and simplistic treatment, or they are expressing Charlottes charming naivety through the incidental note of a feminist token. It is as though she believes that any choice- motherhood, career, or taking a cooking class, is of equal value, because the decision is coming from herself. It i s a claim made cynically by the media and advertisers, specifically designed to manipulate women who believe themselves to be independent into buying products that challenge to their vanity- products sold on graphic representations of self-indulgence, selling the irresistible idea that women are wallowing in low self-worth and deserve to treat themselves.Womens liberation has become risible precisely because of this bastardization the idea that free choice includes bad choices, that womanly freedom is the equivalent of justified narcissism.Increasingly products, weight loss and fashion have been artificially presented as aids to a deserving womans betterment, taking feminist ideas of improvement as their selling point- yet feminists concur that all such strategies only help women to participate in their construction as subservient, imperfect, and generally oppressed. Her infertility is treated with same astonishing crassness, as Tara Flockhart points out,The infertility of Charlo ttetorturously painful affliction, is at first mocked by suggesting that she sublimates her emotional pain in affection for her dog (the animal, not the man, in her life)Of course it is not merely female issues which are levied by the media. According to feminist artist and writer Laura Mulvey, the female form is still a battleground for viewing conventions, and it is a battle where, for the most part, media images and visual art are on the same side. For Mulvey, the problem is the equivalence of the female form with desire so long as the male body is not seen as desirable, men remain in control of desire and the activity of looking. It seems to be a commonly held assumption that things are improving, but I would suggest, the male body is more prominently objectified by the media nowadays not as a symptom of female control over the gaze but as a direct result of the integration of the gay male gaze into the mainstream. This is rapidly overtaking the rise of women, and these sites o f homosexual desire are not replacing images of women but are appearing alongside them. It is no improvement at all. Most images of attractive male bodies in the media today arent the result of feminist struggle for equality, but simply more men, gay men, expressing their own desires in public.Virtually everywhere in Hollywood (not to mention the internet, TV, magazines, the High Street) we find Freuds notion of scopophilia the pleasure involved in looking at other peoples bodies as erotic objects. Mulvey has written extensively on viewing conventions as she perceives them to be facilitated by the cinema auditorium itself. The darkness of the picture-house provides a unique public environment where we may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey details how certain cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identificati on with an ideal ego seen on the screen.There would be no post-modernist art responses to the media, of course, without the massively influential modernist movement that rocked the world at the turn of the century. Long before the Sex and the City girls, modernism aimed to expose traditional society as exposed as something fraudulent. The exponents of the modern aimed to show that nostalgia was ambidextrous the unity of a golden age had never existed. The modernists only ever wanted to present reality as it was. Since social, political, religious, artistic ideas had been incorporated into this false order, they had to be incorporated into any true reworking of it. It was modernism that impressed upon us the idea that narrative direction- that a story should have a beginning, middle and end was nada more than an opiate, artifice grafted onto random existence to create illusions of consistency.ConclusionsThe relationship between media and forms of art is of course not entirely co op erative. The mass media has been understood as the servant of capitalist society, and art, as the archetypal free thought its natural enemy. Historically, arts efforts to bring down capitalist structures from within have been very ill-fated, with artists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or perhaps worse- accessories to political agendas. Artists and writers must work harder than ever to devise means of opposing or exposing capitalisms deceptions, but many commentators appear to have reached the conclusion that the battle is barely worth fighting. Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible through art or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to commit suicide,Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a incessant surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the malediction consumed.Thus the avant-garde movements in Europe put the artist under pressure to exhibit a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- being a producer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible,There is a lot of talk, not about reform or forcing the Enlightenment control to live up to its own ideals, but about wholesale negation, revolution, another new sensibility, now self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalist or keen self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened role for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization.In a sense, the avant-garde has been socially commissioned to compute the future, to scouting out new intellectual terrain,Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet venturedModernity saw its role as declaring its fragmentary reality, its construction, or the construction of the world or idea it aimed to represent. As one writer says,A typical modernist story will seem to begin arbitrarily, advance inexplicably, and end without resolution. Symbols and images are used rather of statements. The tone is ironic and understated-mocking of any of its characters or elements that still seem to appeal to the idea of coherent reality. On the other hand, many modernist works are organize as quests for the very coherence they seem to lack. Because the quest is a very mythological concept, a lot of modernist writers return to and rewrite myths of the world into their works. Often the corporate trust based on myths (such as Christianity) is apparent ly revealed as a farce and a fraud-that is, as myth rather than objective reality.Without Modernisms take on the media, its distaste with media stereotypes, there would be no ironic art forms, and without Surrealisms great achievement, its ability to assimilate its patterns so completely into our unconscious that its images have become a part of us, without this we would have no impressive, delicious, advertising and no self-perpetuating consumer society. It knows our dreams, but it also knows our nightmares. Surrealism may be the triumphant rebellious child of modern art, but it is the heir of capitalist society. As one writer puts it,Historically, surrealism was an art movement of ideas that developed between World Wars I and II and was very prolific. However, today the viewer automatically accepts surrealist imagery. Its everywhere we look. One can find surrealism in childrens books, on television, in advertisements, music videos, movies and any other form of mass media. now a p erson can see examples of surrealism everywhere without consciously noting that one is looking at a surreal imageBibliographyBataille, George. The Lugubrious Game in Visions of Excess, US University of Minnesota Press (1985) Breton, Andr Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane US Ann Arbor, (1969) Burger, Peter and Block, Richard, The Thinking of the Master Bataille Between Hegel and Surrealism US Northwestern University Press (2003) Burgin, Victor (Ed.) 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