Judith Butler, Speak to Me

I love finding contextual clues in other artists' works. There's that concept again - intertextuality. But not everyone will be coming from the same context. There in lies the breakdown in communication, that is, if we expect those same cues to register with the receiver of our information.

I know this; I know this. I know this! So why do I always forget this when I'm working on assignments for this class? I think maybe it's the whole creative element. See! I said I was going to regret not having to write traditional papers. This time we were to make a collage of images that represent the elements of Butler's arguments from The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Great! I think in images anyway, so no problem.

BIG Problem. As usual, I was too abstract. I decided to take images from The Breakfast Club to show things like ambivalence, power, interpellation. But apparently the images could only work if you saw the film, and for most people, recently. Many of the images depended on knowing either what the character was actually doing at the time of the shot or what role the character was playing in relation to the other characters. I thought I had arranged them in the collage so that this would be apparent. I completely dropped the ball with my translation. Maybe I should have used images of Oz (Ashley's - my oldest daughter - cat). He's almost human.

Oz
Ambivalence beyond belief

The Death of Marat
Jacques-Louis David

I still hadn't understood why at least half of the images didn't work until I saw another collage. In it was David's The Death of Marat being used for melancholia, but since I knew the image was of a dead person, I originally missed why it was used. Finally, (I thought) I got it. For me the image took on a different meaning than it did for most everyone else because I knew the context and content. I even mentioned to Dr. Reese what I finally realized about my own work. I've got to learn to keep my mouth shut.

As soon as I got back to the apartment, the brain went on overload. How to redo this project and blow it out of the park, because now I get it. What to do? What to do? I should have had a glass of wine or something to slow the over-processing down. I couldn't focus, so I started on the next week's reading (more about that one next time). Just suffice it to say the reading inspired my next attempt. I thought with great excitement: I've got it - Madonna! She has everything in her videos. Absolutely everything! I'm a fucking genius!

So. I go through the videos I have and download a few more, legally from ITunes, by the way. We artists must protect each other. (I actually laughed out loud typing that, so go ahead. But I am serious.) Anywho. I find what I think represents everything, with Madonna in most of the images. I know you get where this is going - why the hell didn't I? My collage was so pretty, even the more disturbing images had a certain, I don't know, symmetry? to them. (My niece has requested the collage for her room, but I have to switch out a couple of images or my sister might shoot me.)

Returned to class for the second go-round. Well, they got more from this one than the last, but that whole context thing that was the problem before was still there. Some couldn't get past figuring out which of Madonna's videos I had pulled from. UGH! (Just call me Charlie Brown - that means "blockhead" by the way.) Dr. Reese keeps telling me to "dumb it down." I thought I had.

So back to the start of this post: intertextually isn't everyone's cup of tea. I get it. But pulling my "stuff" out in order to get to the essence of someone else's work and then translate it into my own language is making me crazed. Things I think most (if not all) will recognize - many have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. And really, I'm not that clever! Or maybe I am and didn't realize. Maybe it's all the Gulf air I've been surrounded by most of my life. No, that can't possibly be it. Or maybe it is the air that has screwed up my brain. That's it, I'm just a bit warped. The thing is, I can see the problems in other people's work, but have a tendency to miss the exact same thing in my own. Willed blindness or sea air? (Butler could have a field day in this head.) You decide. And please, let me know.

Quote (although not quite covering everything for this session but I like it anyway) for the day: There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. Judith Butler