Yet another post by Jeremy Jeresky

Tonights lecture Monday 19th was interesting in that the article we discussed talked about Fanon's relationship to a visible majority ( in this case a colonial superstructure ) and his relationship to himself. The gaze of the other subsequently caused him to look at himself as an object. This objectification shaped his identiy, which is something I have never had to deal with, but thnks to this reading, has given me a personal insight into a double or even triple reading of ones identity that many people in this world must cope with. I thought it was interesting how Fanon described the black mans identity and his experience as a construct within a oppositional binary to the white man. It is in this way that he will be percieved and perceive himself. One can only hope that humanity can get past this dicotomy regarding any race. But as this cultural opposition is situated primarilay on a basis of power, it remains a question of how long this dicotomy will remain with us, absolute power corrupts.

I was a little concerned with the nature of the images that we looked at tonight. It was interesting to see the origin of the visual discourse regarding how the west views other cultures. We looked at a lot of images from the 19th century, Delacroix, images of stereo scopes, Inges, advetisments from Pears (white mans burden), and others such as a 19th century print of the Columbus discovery. And while we looked at Star Trek and Alien queen imagery, we really only saw one example of artists who examine this discourse like Fred wilson. So while we examined the backwardness of 19th century imagery, I think we lingered on it for too long and it became more of a lighthearted survey. Its pretty easy to look at these images, given our place in time and judge them as ignorant, which they are. But it would have been interesting to examine statagies which contemporary artists use to add to this discourse. Yinka Shonibare is a prime example in that he even uses 19th century conventions pertaining to western art. In his Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads, the artist has restaged Gainsborough's famous painted portrait as a sculpture, but has decapitated the sitters, removed the landscape, and dressed the subjects in colorful "African" fabrics that themselves have complex colonial histories. The strategy implicit in this piece is one in which the symbolic order of the original painting is inverted. "This symbolic inversion illuminates and challenges the visual conventions that police social hierarchies". ( Curator, Richard Hill ) In other words, when power relations are flipped, we can gain insights into behaviors and stereo types that we may take to be natural are merely conventional.