Publishable Blog 1 (18/05/2016)

Mirzoeff’s idea of being a citizen in the era of globalization means immersing ourselves into our visual culture, think about the world going on around us through social media, graffiti, film, art, etc. To be a citizen of today’s society is to be exposed to visual activism and think visually. We as individuals are visual thinkers and activists. Mirzoeff states that allows us to create “a new self image, new ways to see and be seen, and new ways to see the world”. (Mirzoeff, 279).
I feel like, though the world has globalized and advanced at such an unprecedented level, we still have problems like Sex Trafficking of women and prepubescent children. As of 2013, this is the third largest criminal industry. I will be exploring this particular issue in depth over the next few weeks; whether I break it down to one issue (such as Child Sex Tourism, JK Business, etc) or to the entirety of the issue will be more obvious as time goes by. Really if you had to breakdown Sex Trafficking, there are many factors involved such as:

• Different types of trafficking such as Pimp controlled trafficking, family controlled trafficking, etc
• Sex Trafficking and prevalence in nations such as India, Thailand, the Netherlands, and if cultural norms/economic, socio-political climates allow this industry to thrive or go underground. For example, Bangladesh is the only Muslim country that has legalized prostitution.
• Profile of victims – why, what, when do they become victims of sex trafficking? What are the numbers, statistics?
• How does governments and NGO combat these issues? Why is it still happening despite such organizations combating (or not combating).

My Aim: I want to create a series of visual images that demonstrate visual activism; to provoke a reaction and to create a discussion. Whether it pushes the audience to do something about this issue or make them think about it, who knows. The media I want to use is watercolour and ink and create a painting series; at the moment I do not know the number of paintings within the series but I do want to portray the grim realities of sex trafficking and its consequences.

This image provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shows a poster part of the Blue Campaign to raise public awareness of human trafficking. Awareness campaigns are underway at airports from New York to Los Angeles, as DHS has posted messages on video monitors and airport shopping bags. Other industries, including hotels and trucking, also are increasing efforts to detect trafficking. (Department of Homeland Security via AP)

Above are ads raising awareness against sex trafficking and uses iconography associated with sex trafficking mixed with thoughtful compositions and slogans.

Next week I will create mind maps on the issue in depth, visual activism/thinking, gather more information and book readings.

Chapter 7: Changing the World Summary (Or bite sized pieces for me to understand)

• Activists and groups take advantage of social media and networking, even far as the 90’s.
• Changing media and politics are two parts of the same process to some.
• Hactivism – a term to describe online activism that seeks to disrupt the operations of government or corporate websites.
• Approaches amount to a new form of “representation” in an era of globalization. There are two distinct meanings to representations: one is how we depict people or events in other forms such as film, photography or other mediums. The second means a representative system of government, in which individuals are elected or appointed to represent the interests of others. However, once in place, these representatives have a good deal of latitude on how they act.
• Right of the City – the young, urban, networking majority questioning both forms of representation.
• Can the new global majority represent itself both politically and visually or will the visible oligarchies generated by globalization continue?
• Social Media plus political action often mix.
• Assert the right to look, be seen, online and in the city space. This new self-presentation uses smart phones, graffiti, websites, social media, demonstrations and occupations.
• Some movements were the first to use global social media to try and create a visual thinking about resentation and social change.
• Some acts, such as setting oneself on fire as a form of protest, may not resonate with people earlier. Why? Because social media didn’t exist when it happened. News spreads fast due to social media. It allows dissemination of information.
• Artivist – a mix of artist and activist.
• Artocracy – the rule of art
• It created the possibility of political action and gave new meaning to the concept of public space. In short, it was both a new form of visual representation and the claim to be politically representative, cross-hatched in a new experience of space.
• The Philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described what he called the “general will”, the force and power of public opinion.
• Social movements in Egypt produced new forms of visual thinking, including street art, graffiti and video collectives. Egyptian dictatorship had maintained absolute control of public space, so graffiti is new.
• Ganzeer or Mohadmed Fahmy, calls himself a “contingency artist”; his work responds to the needs of the moment in whatever way seems right. He thinks of this as participatory art in this sense; “art that participates in dealing with the immediate struggles and concerns of the audience.” It thinks along with it s audience, rather than for them.
• Online counter-archive is a key tactic in creating new means of engagement. Mosireen had used this in 2011, using video to show the world what was happening in Egypt in the face of domestic censorship and international ignorance. They archived the revolution with 10 terabytes of video collected.
• “As long as there’s a camera, the revolution will continue.” Meaning that as long as people can see what is being done, they will continue to demand a regime that truly represents them.
• People combined social media with street protests and online archiving to create a new form of visual culture activism.
• In high censored countries like Tunisia and Egypt, the chance to depict yourself and others in public, let alone to express political opinions, was a rupture with decades past experience. The resulting visual thought created hope, made revolutions possible and helped them drive forward.
• Mixed with a young, urban, networking population, experiencing such problems like food shortages had made visual activism on and offline was the key component to urban uprisings.
• “Cultural jamming” – a satirical play in mess media intended to cause the viewer to question what they see.
• Tumblr played a huge role in the movement, “WeAreThe99%’ – a form of creative and emotionally powerful form of visual thought that appealed to young people and soon became widely known. People posted photographs of themselves holding written texts about their living and financial situations. These were powerful because they were compressed to one image with only as many words as they could fit into a single sheet of paper.
• Meme – a widely reproduced visual image
• Some photographs are spread by mainstream media rather than the protesters themselves; could be orchestrated.
• Mainstream media now reports perceived wrongdoings, such as wrongful use of pepper spray by law enforcers. This has also turned into a meme.
• Media representations of the scene bought many other people into protest. What began as a social media meme has become a mainstream media pattern of reporting that unintentionally reinforces the events that are being covered. This set of effects, from protest to social media, mainstream media and back to protest, is indicative both of how the new global situation has changed and how change itself is now a key subject for anyone interested in the visual.
• People are adept at sharing and disseminating media content, especially in a media environment that is already saturated with images, therefore the audience is skilled with visual analysis.
• Creating a meme takes conscious effort and in order for it to work, it requires a pre-existing network.
• Visual culture has to respond day to day in its effort to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine. It seeks to understand the total visual noise all around us every day as the new everyday condition. And it learns how to learn about the visual imagination, visual thought and visualizing combine to make worlds that we live in and seek to change.

Assessment 3 ideas

Main issues to tackle/think are important:

• Sexual Slavery/Sex Industry/Trafficking
• Child Abuse/Child Sex Tourism/Child Pornography/Child Prostitution
• Forced Prostitution/Survival Sex
• Devadasi
• JK Businesses/Idol Culture in Japan

These issues encompass a harmful industry that dehumanizes women and children as sex objects and takes away their basic human rights and dignity. This subject is broad and varies country to country, culture to culture. Where I go from this will be more clear within the weeks to come.

Video Documentaries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GFaN9-1iz0

Task 4: Visual Analysis and Contextual Knowledge

Task: Demonstrate Visual and contextual knowledge in a paragraph.

Elizabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun: A prominent 18^th century French painter, who mostly painted the aristocratic class; her major patron was the Queen Marie Antoinette. Over her years of patronage, Le Brun had done over thrity portraits of the Queen and her family; leading her to be the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. One of Le Brun’s paintings of the Queen, Marie Antoinette in a Muslin Dress, had drawn controversy at the time. In modern eyes, Marie Antoinette’s attire is modest but casual. The casual part of the painting did not bode well with the public; Marie Antoinette simply did not look like a Queen of France. The painting was quickly replaced with a more formal portrait.
In this portrait, Marie Antoinette wears a simple muslin dress; at Petit Trianon, the Queen and her entourage wore such attire, where court protocol is not enforced. The background is possibly set in Petit Trianon (like the dress, it’s very simple and rustic). In her hands, Marie Antoinette holds a cabbage rose, a recurring motif in all her portraits.
Referring back to Mirzoeff and the power of “Majesty”, he states that this concept is built around Absolutism rule and that its monarch’s had power that centred in their very person. This impressive power, or Majesty, is visualized but not seen. With the absence of Majesty from the portrait, did it make the public uncomfortable? Did they see, within this painting, not a Queen but an ordinary woman? Without the element of Majesty, I believe this is what the public had thought at the time.

Resources:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Chapter One: How to See Yourself”. How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. 36 – 17. Print.
Vigee Le Brun, Elizabeth Louise. Marie Antoinette in a Muslin Dress. 1783. Oil on Canvas. Schloss Wolfsgarten.
Vigée Le Brun, Elizabeth Louise. Marie Antoinette with the Rose. 1783. Oil on Canvas. The Palace of Versailles, Paris.

4B Image Selection

Toulouse-Lautree, Henri De. Self-Portrait in Front of a Mirror. 1882-1883. Oil on Cardboard. Musee Toulouse Lautrec, Albi.

Selfie with Pope Francis. 2013. Huffington Post. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

Zoffany, Johann. Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Her Cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. 1778. Oil on Canvas. Kenwood House, Scotland.

N. Hoyer, ed., Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933. Photograph: Lili, Paris, 1926, opp. p. 40.

Goldin, Nan. Greer and Robert on the Bed. 1982. Claire Raymond. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

Fig. 1: Self Portrait of a Man by Henri de Toulouse-Lautree
This painting was featured in chapter 1 and Mirzoeff talked in length about Toulouse’s self portrait. Mirzoeff talks about how the artist had done the self portrait by painting the reflection from a mirror; this conceals Toulouse’s physical disability by just portraying his head and shoulders (the rest of his body is not proportionate in real life). This relates to Mirzoeff’s idea of identity and the selfie – what is the difference of Toulouse hiding his disability in his own self portrait to someone of now angling their faces to make it more attractive in a selfie?

Fig 2: Selfie with Pope Francis
Mirzoeff talks about the idea of Majesty, that a monarch is God’s representative on Earth; thus over the course of history there are paintings that portray monarchs, or people like the Pope, as such. However here is a selfie of some people with Pope Francis taken at the Vatican. This is a departure from the history of Majesty; here the Pope is in an informal photograph (a selfie no less) and seems to be an ordinary (probably fun loving) man! This changes our perception of this person, who is seen by some as God’s representative on Earth, and totally turns it into something else.

Fig 3: Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her Cousin Elizabeth Murray
The chapter refers to a photographer called Samuel Fosso who visualized how his body was “Africanized” and “Racialized” by other people (and mentions the “white gaze” – how white people see people of colour). This, to me, bought in mind of old portraits of noblewomen, some who had a black child as a servant in the portrait with them, and the case of Dido Elizabeth Belle. Dido was a gentlewoman born from an enslaved African woman and a British Naval Officer; she was raised by her relatives, the Earl and Countess of Mansfield, alongside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. During that time, Dido was classified as a Mulatto and no doubt had to struggle with her racial identity in a time where slavery was the norm in England. Here in this portrait, she is painted alongside her cousin as near equals. I say near equals because Dido is still portrayed slightly behind her white cousin with a costume that has an air of orientalism to them. Their position hints to the differences in their race.

Fig 4: Photograph of Lili Elbe
Mirzoeff refers to Marcel Duchamp’s alter ago, “Rrose Selavy”, the LBGT scene and how gender to some is a performance. No one else is more relevant to this idea than Lili Elbe. Lili Elbe was born Einar Wegener, a painter who was Danish transgender woman and one of the first people to go through sex reassignment surgery during the 1920s to 1930s.

Fig 5: Greer and Robert in Bed by Nan Goldin
I feel that Nan Goldin has a unique look at gender, race and sexuality in her photographs in a way that is ugly, uncompromising but real at the same time. She had portrayed people such as drag queens as a “third gender”, another sexual/gender option. Along with her other themes like sex, drug use and violence, I feel Goldin not only ties in with the Mirzoeff chapter of “How to See Yourself” in terms of identity but gives another perspective of it.

3F Bringing Knowledge to your Topic

A. List the issues, ideas, concerns and visual texts

• Identity (This can include self concept)
• Selfies and the Self Portrait
• Sexual/Gender/Racial Identity (LGBT, Racism, Stereotypes, Gender Roles, etc)
• Perception (This can be tied into the spread of mass media, social media, mirrors)

B. Find out more about the issues, ideas, concerns, events and visual texts

Resources (Task 3E)

Selfie:
Mirzoeff talks about identity and the self and how we want to portray ourselves to the world. Thinking this topic is relevant to the essay questions, I gathered these links.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/selfie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-fire-guilty-idUSKCN0X600X

Self Portrait:
The selfie is derived from the history of the Self Portraits of old; they serve the same purpose. The artist portray themselves in a way they want to be seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/genres/self-portraits.htm
http://www.artrepublic.com/articles/475-selfies-and-the-history-of-self-portraiture.html/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rrose_S%C3%A9lavy
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/oct/27/art.surrealismatthevanda
Raphael. Self Portrait. 1506. Oil on Panel. Uffizi Gallery, Uffizi, Florence.
Eyck, Jan Van. Portrait of a Man. 1433. Oil on Canvas. National Gallery, London.
Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun

Identity (Sexual/Racial/Gender)
Identity is who someone is, or their name. It can also concern their qualities, beliefs, Gender or Race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Elbe
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-danish-girl/true-story-lili-elbe-transgender/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_Elizabeth_Belle

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/12046714/Dutch-gallery-removes-racist-artwork-titles.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender
http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=373&Itemid=236
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300308.html
Wiesner, Merry E. Gender in History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Print.
Chancer, Lynn S., and Beverly X. Watkins. Gender, Race, and Class: An Overview. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Print.

Visual Texts

Zoffany, Johann. Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Her Cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. 1778. Oil on Canvas. Kenwood House, Scotland.

Wegener, Gerda. Portrait of Lili Elbe. 1928. Watercolour. Iconographic Collections.

Mijtens, Johannes. Portrait of Margaretha Van Raephorst. 1668. Oil on Canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

N. Hoyer, ed., Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933. Photograph: Lili, Paris, 1926, opp. p. 40.

Ray, Man. Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. 1920-1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

3D Blog Task – Brainstorm

Mind map to come soon :)!

3C Blog task – Summary of a Paragraph

Original Paragraph
The seventeenth century was a period in which monarchs around Europe claimed the power of Absolutism. That is to say, they were more than just people. Kings were God’s representatives on earth, symbolized by their being anointed like a priest during the coronation ceremony. Combining secular and spiritual power, the Absolutist monarchs claimed overwhelming power that was centered in their very person.

Summarized Paragraph
Seventeenth Century European monarchs had claimed the power of Absolutism. This meant they were not ordinary people; they were representing God on Earth. This is symbolized by their coronation where they are anointed similarly like a priest. Combining secular and spiritual power, an Absolutist monarch had power that was focused on their very person. (Mirzoeff, 36)

Works cited:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Chapter 1: How to See Yourself.” How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. 36. Print.
Rigaud, Hyacinthe. Louis XV, King of France. 1730. Oil on Canvas. Palace of Versailles.

3B Blog Post – Chapter One

The selfie, the creation of how we perceive ourselves. How do we incorporate our identities? Selfie is part of a history of the historical self portraits. Power of majesty from the absolute monarchy.
Sexual, racial, gender identity, racial gaze, male gaze and perception.
Mirrors – Aztecs attributed it to the god of war and sexual transgressions. Europeans attributed mirrors to power; mirrors were used for divination, fortune telling and contacting the dead.
Gender roles – women are submissive and men lead the action. This applies to life and media like cinema.
Mass spread of media thanks to inventions like photography, magazines, etc.
Self Portraits are drawn to how artists want to be perceived. Visual media is rich with information and integrated into conversations; twitter, vine and snapchat. Look at queer and feminist views.