Rachel's Design Portfolio

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contact me to view my MPhil Dissertation]

Design Projects

Table of Contents

Writing Samples

Curriculum Vitae

To Win an Election

NUS | M(Arch) Thesis | August 2020 - May 2021

Monument to the Freedom of Speech

NUS | Year 4 Semester 2 | January - May 2020

#ALTLife

NUS | Year 4 Semester 1 | August - November 2019 (Featured in To-Gather, Singapore's Pavilion in Singapore Vennice Biennale 2021)

Building 28

NUS | Year 3 Semester 2 | January - May 2018

Atelier théâtre

NUS | Year 3 Semester 1 (Exchange in Tongji University) | August - November 2018

Equfinality

NUS | Year 2 Semester 2 | January - May 2018

(No) Monkey Business

NUS | Year 2 Semester 1 | August - November 2017

Confronting the Postfeminist Media Urban-scape

University of Cambridge | M(Phil) in Architecture and Urban Studies, Lent Term | January 2021 - April 2022

Through the Lens of Materiality

University of Cambridge | M(Phil) in Architecture and Urban Studies, Michaelmas Term | October 2021 - November 2021

Reconceptualizing Female Spectatorship

NUS | M(Arch) Semester 1 | August 2020 - May 2021

“But where’s the art?”

NUS | M(Arch) Year 4 Semester 2 | January - May 2020

Education

MPhil Architecture and Urban Studies (Distinction), October 2021 – June 2022

University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Dissertation: A study on the dialectics of spontaneity and organization in social movements, using the case studies of the January 25 Revolution in Cairo, the 15-M/Indignados Movement in Madrid, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. The study is positioned at the intersection of urban theory, media and communications theory, and new social movement theory, and was conducted with the aid of original mappings constructed using AutoCad and Adobe Illustrator.

Coursework includes: Graduate Research Methods, Introduction to Socio-politics and Culture of Architecture and the City, Architecture outside the Norm, Landscape: Image, Territory, Park and Hinterland, Managing Urban Change

Master of Architecture, August 2020 – May 2021

National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore

Thesis: A study on the tactical appropriations of Singapore’s “Heartland” infrastructure undertaken by Opposition parties, situated at the intersection of urban theory, media and communications theory, and political theory. The study was faciliated by interviews and original mappings constructed using AutoCad, Rhinoceros, and Grasshopper.

Design Proposal: Explored the notion of aesthetics in disseminated political imagery, such as those generated during the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Aesthetic parameters were extracted, after which political imagery was designed for Opposition parties, facilitated by use of original architectural modules situated in “Heartland” infrastructure. This imagery was to be disseminated via social media as part of Opposition party campaigns, facilitating the construction of alternative identities within Singapore’s political landscape.

Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with Honours (Distinction), August 2016 – May 2020

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Coursework includes: Design 1-6, Options Design Research Studio 1-2, Reading Visual Images, History and Theory of Southeast Asia, Environment and Civil Society in Singapore, History and Theory of Western Architecture, Introduction to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Urban Design Theory and Praxis

Student Exchange Program, August 2018 – January 2019

College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Coursework includes: Future of Retail Space, Frontiers of Architecture: Craft, Urban Design: Emergence, Evolution and New Topics, Urban Mobility and Transport: Emerging Issues and Planning Practices in China, Chinese and Western Classical Garden, Relationship between the Culture and the Moulding Arts in China, Quantifying the Immeasurable: Parameterizing Urban and Architectural Aesthetics using BIM and Virtual Design/Construction Methodology

Teaching Experience

Temporary Workshop Facilitator for Introductory Software Workshop (Unity), April 2020

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Department of Architecture

Key Tasks: Introductory step-by-step guide on how to use Unity

simjingxi123@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-sim-50b493142/

Architectural Portfolio: https://simjingxi123.wixsite.com/racheljsim

Architectural Portfolio (Issuu): https://issuu.com/racheljs/docs/rach_design_portfolio_writing_samples

Teaching Assistant, January 2020 – April 2020

Module: History and Theory of Western Architecture

National University of Singapore, Singapore Department of Architecture

Key Tasks: Conduct weekly seminars, grade reading responses, and provide essay consultations

Teaching Assistant, August 2019 – November 2019

Module: History of Southeast Asian Architecture

National University of Singapore, Singapore Department of Architecture

Key Tasks: Conduct weekly consultations for essay writing, grade essay assignments and student presentations

Research Experience

[Current Role] Research Assistant under Dr. Lilian Chee, September 2022 –NUS, Singapore

Department of Architecture

Research Project involved in: “Foundations of Home-based Work: A Singapore Study”, supported by Social Science Research Thematic Grants, Singapore

Key Tasks: Assisting with administrative duties, including budgetary work, procurement, website design and conference planning. Co-leading a seminar module entitled “Domestic Capital and Workaround”, which entails the revision of module readings, giving student briefings, and commenting on student presentations, reading responses, and essays. Involved also in a visual ethnography of home-based work, to be conducted in neighbourhoods around Singapore. Is expected to be involved in the editing of a special journal series, as well as a journal paper on home-based work and the architectural typologies that accommodate it.

Brief Description of Research Project: Foundations of Home-based Work is an inter-disciplinary project seeking to understand how home-based work is built into homes and neighbourhoods, and what it builds for them. Supported by the Social Science Research Thematic Grant (WBS no.: A-0008463-01-00; IRB no.: NUS-IRB-2021-799), the team comprises of established researchers across the National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture, Department of Communications and New Media, and Yale-NUS. The project was launched in September of 2021, with the aim of offering foundational scholarship to meet a gap in scholarly insight into the past and present experience of home-based work in Singapore. See: https://www.makingdo.org/about

Research Assistant under Dr. Heng Chye Kiang, May 2020 – August 2021

NUS, Singapore

Department of Architecture

Book Publication involved in: Vertical Cities Asia (upcoming)

Key Tasks: Assisted in the compilation of content – including essays and competition submissions – generated across a 5-year program organized by NUS, titled the Vertical Cities Asia International Design Competition and Symposium. Involved in the initial reframing of content spanning all 5 symposiums to emphasize the importance of verticality and densification for evolving

Asian cities. Heavily involved in translation (Chinese to English) and editing in the later stages of the project.

Brief Description of Research Project: The Vertical Cities Asia International Design Competition and Symposium was created to encourage design explorations and research into the prospects of new models for the increasingly vertical, dense, and intense urban environments in Asia.

See: https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/vertical-cities-asia

Research Assistant under Dr. Simone Chung, May 2019 – July 2019

National University of Singapore, Singapore Department of Architecture

Journal Publication involved in: Deciphering the Spatial Rhetorics of Millennial Nomads (upcoming)

Key Tasks: Conducted semi-structured virtual interviews with millennial nomads (sourced from Facebook and other social media platforms); processed their responses through the generation of ArcGIS mobility mappings and qualitative coding in NVivo.

Brief Description of Research Project: Understanding the formation and management of a multi-mobile millennial nomad’s identity and spatial practices in the private domain, urban environment and the digital realm. Core research methodologies include virtual ethnography, spatial mapping, and systematic qualitative analysis.

See: https://millennialnomadspace.com/about/

Research Assistant under Dr. Lilian Chee, May 2019 – July 2019 National University of Singapore, Singapore Department of Architecture

Book Publication involved in: Art in Public Space: Singapore (2022)

Key Tasks: Sourced and condensed research material into essays covering a range of topics, e.g. implications of IndonesiaMalaysia-Singapore growth triangle on human mobility, impact of colonialism on Singapore’s tropical landscape, and the evolution of public art in Singapore. Indexed and compiled an Appendix for an upcoming book on public art in the Singaporean city core – Art in Public Space: Singapore (2022), commissioned by the Urban Development Authority in 2018.

Brief Description of Research Project: Tracing the history of public art in Singapore and postulating the future trajectory of public art in Singapore.

Conference Planning Experience

Organizer of Speakers’ Series, November 2021 – expected October 2022 Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Key Tasks: Organized the one-day Newnham Rebels Graduate Conference (June 2022) around the theme “Feminism in the Everyday”. Responsibilities included liaising with invited speakers, emceeing duties, logistics, and social media publicity. About the theme: The theme was designed to bridge the gap between feminist theory and feminism in real life, that is, how feminism can be expressed in the domestic or work situations, etc. Invited speakers included: Anne Thorne, EDIT Collective, Araminta Hall, Jasvinder Sanghera CBE, and Empower Her Voice.

Planning Committee Member of NUS M(Arch) Gradshow, May-June 2021 NUS, Singapore

Key Tasks: Planned an hour-long introductory seminar on architectural pedagogy and the relevance of thesis projects to architectural students; presented Masters’ thesis project in a sociopolitical/geopolitical seminar on fieldwork/ethnographic practices in socio-politically oriented architectural projects.

Practical Experience

Studio Marque

Architectural Intern, June 2018 – August 2018

Key Tasks: Generation of digital graphics using AutoCAD and SketchUp; assisted with interior designs of residential projects

and resorts in Indonesia.

FYE Design Studio

Architectural Intern, July 2017 – July 2017

Key Tasks: Generation of digital graphics using AutoCAD and SketchUp; assisted with the interior designs of residential projects, ranging from condominium units to townhouses.

Surbana Jurong Pte Ltd

Architectural Intern under the departments of Urban Development and Townships (Public Housing), March 2016 – July 2016

Key Tasks: Generation of digital graphics using AutoCAD and SketchUp; assisted with the interior revamp of Surbana Jurong office a senior centre.

Awards

Dean’s List, 2020

Student Achievements Awards (Gold), 2018

Participatory Design Project | NUS SMILE Village Overseas Community-involvement project

Exhibitions

ArchiVAL 2020 and 2021

Showcased design work in annual exhibition by the NUS Department of Architecture

CityEx 2017 and 2018

Showcased design work in annual exhibition by the NUS Department of Architecture, in partnership with Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Technical Skills

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign Rhinoceros, Grasshopper AutoCAD

SketchUp

Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint Fluent in Mandarin and English

Volunteer Work and Other Roles

SMILE Village Overseas Educational Program, May 2017

National University of Singapore

Key Tasks: Holding participatory design workshops for the construction of a public shelter, part of a greater initiative to reinvigorate public spaces

Co-organizer of Speakers’ Series, November 2021 – October 2022

Newnham College, University of Cambridge

Key Tasks: Organizing student and graduate conferences

NUS M(Arch) Gradshow, May-June 2021

National University of Singapore

Key Tasks: Planned introductory seminar, presented in sociopolitical/geopolitical seminar

THIS project functions as an inquiry into the possible spatial negotiation of the communitarian ideology of Singapore’s ruling party, PAP (People's Action Party), through the study of Opposition parties’ spatial practices. It first examines how an ideological consensus with the citizenry is produced and reproduced by the state’s built community infrastructure in the “Heartlands” (suburban residential areas in Singapore with subsidized public housing), thus projecting their political identity into these areas. Such a process, combined with the universality of Heartland community infrastructure, allows the ruling party to exert a virtual monopoly over grassroots activities and many other aspects of everyday life, engendering further ideological consensus amongst the governed (Chua 1995: 128). Most of these infrastructures, such as CCs (Community Centres), are also banned from Opposition use.

Amidst this entrenched hegemony, how then could we possibly conceive of an alternative “Heartland”? Michel de Certeau (1988: 96) offers us a lens, in the form of “strategy” and “tactics”; upon PAP’s fixed infrastructure, Opposition political parties “walk”, using transient tactics to project alternative political identities into the infrastructure. WP (Workers’ Party), in particular, employs everyday practices emblematic of its stance – a defender of blue collared workers and the lesser privileged. While the PAP imposes buildings of permanence upon Heartlanders, WP appropriates HDB flats via transient void deck consultations, setting up time-based systems through which they conduct their weekly welfare events and distributions. In a bid to express their own brand of community outreach, they fluidly traverse multiple flats within their constituencies to reach out to their constituents. It is through such tactics, that WP manipulates space and redefines some of the community rituals imposed upon the citizenry by the incumbent majority. Given a political terrain with marginal spatial allowance for Opposition political outreach, how much more can alternative political voices negotiate dominant ideologies through space? And more importantly, how can the everyday citizen resist and potentially play a role in enriching Singapore’s – or any similar – political landscape?

Months of research have culminated in the decision to capitalize on the power of social media, specifically the sharing and reposting of ‘aesthetic’ digital images to further the impact of the Opposition’s political outreach. Inspired by Hong Kong’s umbrellas and Thailand’s rubber duckies, these digital images would be staged using modified everyday objects, easy enough for the everyday citizen to stack or agglomerate into larger forms. Using WP as a case study, this project explores spatial and architectonic ways of constructing alternative forms of political identity within the Heartlands – as well as the meaningful augmentation of WP’s tactics – through social media.

With that, I hope to have provided somewhat of an answer to my own questions.

*Please refer to my report for more graphics and a more detailed explication of this project. It can be found here: https://simjingxi123.wixsite.com/racheljsim/copy-of-reconceptualizing-female-spec.

Semester: Master of Architecture, Thesis (National Univeristy of Singapore) | Project type: Individual Software(s) used: Procreate, Photoshop, InDesign, AutoCAD, Rhinoceros

Ubiquity of PAP infrastructure, taking East Coast Group Representation Constituency (GRC) as an example

INVESTIGATIVE MAPPING - PAP STRATEGIES

Singapore’s Heartlands are made up of many New Towns. Within each New Town, a Town Centre serves public housing estates radiating out from it, while estates further away from it are served by Neighbourhood Centres (NCs), smaller-scale sub-centres that included coffeeshops, hawker centres, markets and various other Small & Medium Enterprises selling basic necessities. PAP’s near-universal provision of easily accessible goods and services, part and parcel of people’s everyday routines, signify an irrevocably deep – and as a result, virtually unnoticeable – political penetration into everyday life.

A representation of the New Town’s checkerboard urban layout

Various trails/connectors converging at - and used to draw people into - the Town Centre, taking the Bedok division of East Coast GRC as an example

INVESTIGATIVE MAPPING -

TACTICS

Movement of furniture during the Meet-the-People’s session (MPS), conducted in the Kaki Bukit division of Aljunied GRC

INVESTIGATIVE MAPPING - WP TACTICS

MPS - more transient inhabitation of places in comparison to PAP’s strategies

WP’s welfare distribution route, conducted in the Kaki Bukit division of Aljunied GRC

INVESTIGATIVE MAPPING - WP TACTICS

The transient inhabitation of places remains true for volunteer/welfare programmes

WP’s welfare distribution route, conducted in the Kaki Bukit division of Aljunied GRC

INVESTIGATIVE MAPPING - WP TACTICS

DESIGN SCHEME - CREATION OF ‘AESTHETIC’ DIGITAL IMAGES

Modifying everyday objects for the everyday citizen to stack or agglomerate into larger forms

DESIGN SCHEME - CREATION OF ‘AESTHETIC’ DIGITAL IMAGES

Modifying everyday objects for the everyday citizen to stack or agglomerate into larger forms

DESIGN

OF

DESIGN SCHEME

OF WELFARE PROGRAMMES

DESIGN SCHEME

MANUALS

BE DISTRIBUTED TO

PUBLIC

ARTICLE14 (1) guarantees all Singaporean citizens the rights to “freedom of speech and expression” , peaceful assembly “without arms” , and “the right to form associations” . Yet this is subject to Article 14 (2), whereby the parliament may by law impose on the rights conferred by 14 (1) as it considered “ necessary or expedient in the interest of the security of Singapore” , “friendly relations with other countries, public order or morality” (Constitution of the Republic of Singapore 2021), terms that are purposefully vague. The terms “necessary or expedient” , in particular, confers upon the Parliament the power to a “multifarious and multifaceted approach,” with no questioning of whether the legislation is “reasonable” and effectively according them a position of unlimited power over the people. The Courts and their ability to persecute, thus, are the instruments through which this power is exercised.

These laws do not cease to exist within the boundaries of Hong Lim Park, Singapore's only spot for legal (peaceful) political protest and public assembly since 2001; a reality which effectively makes the Park a veritable landmine for persecution. In a spatial manifestation of surveillance, the Park is circumscribed - almost imposed uponby the State Courts, the Kreta Ayer Police Neighbourhood Centre, and the Attorney General’s Chambers, given the noticeable height difference between these symbols of authority and the flat green Park. This reinforces the idea that political protest has effectively been ‘quarantined’ within the Park

Monument to the Freedom of Speech was conceived on the grounds of Hong Lim Park as a satirical statement on the lack of legal immunity within a space designated for protest; to contest the very ‘public’ character of the space (Butler 2018: 71); and most of all, to give protesters an agora where they could freely air their views and exchange their ideas.

The architectural design of the New State Courts was chosen through an open-call competition (Frearson 2021). To the competition jury, it was “symbolically open and accessible to the public”, and sufficiently explored the “relationship between the city and its civic buildings”. I tried reconciling this statement with the legal mechanisms set in place to deter politically-sensitive protest, as well as the design of the Courts, where its symbolically open facade disguised the hierarchy that was very much still present - courtrooms arranged in order of increasing gravity of offense as the floor level increased; judges seated in the most spatially dominant position of the courtrooms. Thus, if we defined ‘public’ as the protesters, how much of the Courts were actually designed ‘for the public’?

In response to my own question, I made the decision to ‘mirror’ the State Courts, conceptually deconstructing and reconstructing its material form unto the grounds of Hong Lim Park, making a satirical piece of architecture in which protesters could truly and freely protest. This building would also exploit Hong Lim’s legal boundaries as a space for protest, and thereby provide protesters with a platform on which they could contest the very ‘public’ character of the space. Without further ado, dear reader, please join me in this process of satirical deconstruction, and the subsequent reconstruction of the Monument to the Freedom of Speech

Semester: Y4S2 (National Univeristy of Singapore) | Project type: Individual Software(s) used: Photoshop, InDesign, AutoCAD, Rhinoceros, Grasshopper

‘MIRRORING’ OF THE NEW STATE COURTS ONTO THE GROUNDS OF HONG LIM PARK

This conceptually borrows from Comaroff and Ong’s “Horror in Architecture” (2013), in which they discuss reflexive doubling, a process of creating “imperfect” architectural replicas which could function as insights to evolving societal contexts. Inversely, the perfect clone could also function as a “potentially destabilizing kind of deviance” (Comaroff and Ong 2013: 70). By latching onto these two devices, I could symbolically appropriate the form of the newly-built State Courts, the very apparatus meting out punishment to the protesters, and architecturally parody the values it supposedly represented.

PROCESS INFOGRAPHIC - THE RECONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF THE NEW STATE COURTS

Firstly, the existing State Courts building was abstracted – based on its floorplans – into a three-dimensional grid, through which new “protester” functions would be ordered. This order, if you could imagine, would work like a carousel system, with each successive functional block situated at steadily increasing heights. These blocks would then be clad with the same terracotta that adorn the State courtrooms, encased within the same white columns that distinguish the façade of the State Courts. Via this imperfect cloning, the Courts undergo transformation to take on a more democratic, yet uncannily similar form.

“...and most of all, to give protesters an agora where they could freely air their views and exchange their ideas.”

“...we do want to create a labyrith to confuse authorities, as well as craft "alleyways" mostly hidden from the sight of people on the ground for people to discuss politically contentious issues ”

CENTURY technological advancements have metaphorically shrunken the world and allowed for global transpatiality. The introduction of virtual reality (VR) has intensified this phenomenon, augmenting two-dimensional social media platforms and providing an alternative to physical gathering spaces. Through the process of research, experimentation and observations, #ALTLIFE seeks to answer two major questions: the extent to which virtual and non-virtual realms feed into each other; and how the design of virtual spaces can be optimized to facilitate gatherings undertaken by existing communities. In order to ensure the success of our experimentation, we chose make a huge existing community our target group - the fan base of K-pop boyband BTS, commonly known as BTS ARMY. VRChat (VRC), a free-to-play massively multiplayer online virtual reality social platform built on user-generated ‘worlds’, was used as our medium. Phase 1 (Virtual Logs) was a pictorial documentation of VRC users over the course of 1 month, informing Phase 2 (Permutations), our creation of BTUniverse, a ‘world’ where calculated modifications were made over the course of 2 months to better understand the relationship between virtual design elements and user behavior. Phase 3 (VR Guidebook) was the final creation of a design ‘guidebook’ to aid designers in the creation of virtual alternative spaces.

BTUNIVERSE

Based on logs of our adventures in VRChat, we launched 4 permutations of our self-created world, BTUniverse, onto the multi-player

12:42 AM 25/09/19 Rest and Sleep

The gang decides to leave BTUniverse and chill out at Rest and Sleep. We dip our legs in the onsen-esque pool and sit down on the edge of it. We start talking about our favourite singers. Freal admits he's a massive fan of JJ Lin. Promocat introduces us to Keshi. Yoyo later brings a pillow to Periokiex for her virtual comfort.

1:06 AM 25/09/19 Rest and Sleep

A new user, LostCat, enters and everyone stops the ongoing conversation to welcome him into the mix. Not unlike social protocol in real life - to me, this virtual gang seems way more welcoming than most groups in real life though.

1:20 AM 25/09/19 Rest and Sleep

LostCat is familiar with PromoCat. PromoCat starts detailing how they met virtually - and how they (PokiCat, LostCat, himself) changed their usernames to end with 'cat'. Seems like a way of establishing friendship bonds in the virtual world, not unlike cloning each other's avatars (as in Secret Base Anohana). (reciprocal movements)

1:22 AM 25/09/19 Rest and Sleep

PokiCat starts crawling along the edge - people will play with anything in the virtual world. Freal joins her.

5:05 PM Batch 2 25/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

5:14 PM Batch 2 25/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

5:16 PM

Batch 2 25/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

5:17 PM Batch 2 25/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

I AFK at BTUniverse while doing something else when Promocat and his korean friend, Gyumina, comes to find me. We hang aroud the central, getting to know each other. Promocat starts grabbing the plushies and arranging them in mid-air.

Soon after, Younea turns up and we hang out around the same area for while longer. Younea and Gyumina bond quickly as they are both Korean. Younea grabs a pen from table3 and starts drawing on the adjacent column. The columns flanking table 3 seem to define the 'drawing area', as seen in the previous group who visited as well.

Another korean, Tiffi, appears and the three went off to a corner to mingle in korean. Gyumina decides to AFK on the floor while Promocat pickes up a pen to draw. Meanwhile, Younea and Tiffi go around from one BTS portrait to another, discussing who's-who. (picture 2 and 3)

Meanwhile, Promocat starts placing plushies in front of Gyumina's AFK avatar and drawing on his face, similar to shine-building behaviour we noticed before around AFK avatars. Younea then brings a pen all the way to the steps and starts drawing on the wall. This is the first time I notice a user drawing somewhere other than table 3 and it's periphery.

PHASE 1. VIRTUAL LOGS OF VRCHAT USER ACTIVITY

- Written and pictorial documentation of observations in VRChat, focusing specifically on the relationship between material elements (e.g. virutal furniture, walls, mirrors) in three-dimensional virtual multiplayer spaces and user behaviour

- Two accounts (@Racheljs123, @Periokiex) were used

- Logs date from 19/09/19 to 13/10/19

1:24 AM Batch 4 27/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

When MasterBeat and I profess our love for V (taehyung), Najarvie picks up Tata (V's plush persona) and moves towards me. Meanwhile, Evulute continues emoting Blackpink dance moves. Najarvie, who has been silent all this while, communicates through his actions. He picks up an extra Tata plushie and hands it to MasterBeat and Evulute, both of whom are V fans.

1:31 AM Batch 4 27/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

MasterBeat and Evulute discover the markers and use them to spell out BTS. I interrupt MasterBeat mid-drawing to ask where he's from. He replies that he's from the Philippines. He then grabs an eraser and erases what he deems as mistakes.

1:40 AM Batch 4 27/09/19

BTUniverse Permutation 1

MasterBeat goes on to trace the silhouettes of both me and Boywithluv. The action isn't unlike what we've noticed thus far - building shrines around people. He then moves to V's poster and writes V at the bottom. He doesn't do this for the rest of the members.

2:13 AM 27/09/19 Rest and Sleep

I teleport to my friends Promocat and Freal Luv when everyone leaves BTUniverse. They are in deep conversation about how easy it is to form relationships here, mostly due to the lowering of social inhibitions, a confirmation of the 'anonymity-breeds-intimacy' concept perpetuated by media theorists. The conversation quickly moves to employment woes. Freal Luv admits his disillusionment with his major in fashion design, though he's completed his Bachelor's, remarking that he might be more interested in game development. PromoCat, still a student, says he comes to the virtual world to escape the banality of university life. I understand.

We enter the world too see many friends on first floor, huddled together hanging out. However, we notice that Promocat and FrealLuv (the usual life of the party) aren't there. I go to the second floor to notice both of them alone at hot tub, having a heart-to-heart conversation about why Promocat decided to join this platform and his struggles in the real world. warm lighting, starry sky and soothing music the second floor (roof terrace), along with the intimate setting of the hot tub seems like the perfect setting to hold such conversations.

2:32 AM 27/09/19 Rest and Sleep

The topic swings to hopes and dreams after Freal Luv tells PromoCat to keep his head up and look towards a happy future. It's heartwarming advice. PromoCat says his dream is to set up a Youtube channel after mastering the guitar. His ultimate dream leaves me a little stunned - he wants to meet everyone (in real life) he's been able to vibe with online, including me and Perrine, vlog his experiences, and post it on Youtube.

2:44 AM 27/09/19 Rest and Sleep

Two new users join us from downstairs, saying they're here to escape the noise. The onsen setting adds to the peaceful ambience. Since Freal Luv is a fresh grad, while the rest of us are all students, we start talking about student exchange experiences. I tell them about my Shanghai experience. One of the foxes elaborates on his experience in Taiwan. The ease and speed at which we've found a new topic surprises me. It usually takes a while to assimilate new users into the group.

on the FrealLuv up alone conversation The music on the the

*The 7 members of BTS are V, Jimin, Suga, Jungkook, J-Hope, RM, and Jin. Their equivalent characters in BT21 are, respectively, Tata, Chimmy, Shooky, Cooky, Mang, Koya, and RJ.

PERMUTATIONS OF BTUNIVERSE

Subjects | A blinded experiment was carried out on an average of 40 users per permutation, made to experience the modifications across BTUniverse Permutations 1 to 4 over a period of 2 months. Thse 40 users were segmented into batches, or groups, based on observation of group activity, amounting to 3 or more batches per permutation. Each batch consisted of at least 3 users. In any batch, users consist of either solely fans, or a mixture of both fans and nonfans, with non-fans being a minority user group.and recorded after each modification.

(e.g. floor area,

after each

because such

strong

In

PERMUTATIONS OF BTUNIVERSE

enabled’ in the legends) and its

and their eventual

(Sphere of Influence, drawn from the greatest radial distance between the original

of the

At

and

. For example, were there tables that users might have perceived as too

were there tables that users might have perceived to be overly 'spacious'?

and

chose not to

of

there?

for instances of group activity

Key Ratios and Definitions

Wp (min.)/Wa (min.) = width of primary object facing minimum width of adjacent object (minimum)/ width of adjacent object (minimum)

Wp (max.)/Wa (max.) = width of primary object facing width of adjacent object (maximum)/width of adjacent object (maximum)

H p/Hn (min.) = height of primary object/height of nearest object (minimum)

H p/Hn (max.) = height of primary object/height of nearest object (maximum)

D(min.) = distance to nearest object (minimum)

D(max.) = distance to nearest object (maximum)

D = distance to nearest object

H n = height of nearest object

W a = width of adjacent object

Permutation

Purposee

Permutation

To find an optimal range of ‘enclosure rankings’ suitable for the function of sitting (or resting), based off user selection of perceived ‘enclosed’ spaces in BTUniverse.

2,400.00 2,100.00

Methodology

Permutation

3,300.00 3,300.00

Calculation of ‘enclosure rankings’* | A total of 6 boundary variable scores were compounded together to produce a ‘total score’ that would dsetermine the ‘enclosure ranking’ of each space with respedct to the primary object. A ‘range’ of optimum ‘enclosure rankings’ would then be determined via tables where instances of group activity (minimum of 3 users resting/sitting) occurred.

*Based on the H/D ratio in Hayward and Franklin's (1974) paper on the Perceived Openness-Enclosure of Architectural Space.

Permutation 3 Steps [Used] 1,350.00 6,245.00 7,000.00 0.00 260.00 1,400.00

(Least enclosed)

Permutation 3 T8 [Unused] 1,000.00 2,400.00 2,100.00 0.00 3,100.00 940.00

Permutation 2 T4 [Used] 1,000.00 2,400.00 2,100.00 0.00 3,400.00 1,055.00

Permutation

Permutation

(Most enclosed)

Boundary variables (coloured boxes)

10 Score

Wp (min.)/Wa (min.)

Wp (max.)/Wa (max.)

All variables were dimensioned for each space, in relation to a primary object. The maximum and minimum within each variable, across all spaces, were then used to produce individual scales with steady increments/decrements for subsequent ranking and calculations.

E.g. for D(min.)/mm,

1. Maximum distance = 1500.00

2. Minimum distance = 0.00

AND SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

more

Optimal

also presents evidence that

refer to an external booklet labelled

of

for

of virtual alternative

on how to construct optimal rest

is still very much

who wish to include

may refer back to the corresponding

and

Permutation

Permutation

[Unused]

Permutation

Permutation

[Unused]

[Used]

Permutation 3 T10 [Used]

2,400.00 2,100.00

2,400.00 2,100.00

2,400.00 2,100.00

3,300.00 3,300.00

3,100.00 2,400.00

4,140.00

3,250.00

2,240.00 1,035.00

Permutation 3 Steps [Used] 1,350.00 6,245.00 7,000.00 0.00 260.00 1,400.00

Permutation 3 T8 [Unused] 1,000.00 2,400.00 2,100.00 0.00 3,100.00

Permutation 2 T4 [Used] 1,000.00 2,400.00 2,100.00 0.00 3,400.00 1,055.00

Permutation

Permutation

[Unused]

2,100.00 3,000.00

2,100.00

4,000.00 0.25

4,000.00 0.25

4,000.00 0.25

4,000.00 0.24

2,340.00 0.58 4,000.00 0.34

4,000.00 0.25

Dynamic gimmicks and their extent of influence (SOI)

Respawn point and the crafting of isovist views

Correspondence between

Proxemics and the Distance in Virtual Man

four distances of

Hall’s (1990)

the distances in man. In his book, The Hidden Dimension, he posits that every individual has situational personalities associated with responses to initimate, personal, social and public transactions. Chapter X on “Distances in Man” quantifies each distance zone and provides in depth descriptions on each of them.

exist

our experiment, 56 user goups were categorized into no. of users and subsequently colour coded according to distance types. The users were observed to have situational personalities with regards to initimate, personal, social and public transactions, similar to that of non-virtual interaction Hall described.

IN the year 1943, Building 20 was hastily erected as a temporary extension to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a three-floor combination of cheap plywood and gypsum boards. Despite the unending complaints from its inhabitants about creaky floorboards and dimly lit interiors, the building served as a "magical incubator" for research programs and innovation up until its demolition in 1988, for the temporal nature of the building meant that incumbent researchers felt free to modify interiors at will, accommodating sudden spurts of innovation. Researchers created holes through floors to accommodate huge equipment, ran wires across labs, broke down lab walls for inter-disciplinary collaborations - changes which later birthed modern linguistics and grammar and the world's first atomic clock.

Building 28, a play on Building 20, hopes to create this culture of innovation through transient architecture and modifiable rooms, bringing the spirit of Building 20 back to life. Here, customers bring their used furniture to recycle at the Practice labs, a safe space for them to destroy and re-purpose items; firms innovate in their Offices and test public reception to their products via the Retail section, free to collaborate among themselves due to their modifiable office spaces. In short, Building 28 aims to be an incubator and safe space for product design, as well as a revolutionary retail experience for the public.

Semester: Y3S2 (National Univeristy of Singapore) | Project type: Individual Software used: Photoshop, InDesign, AutoCAD, Rhinoceros, Grasshopper

THE FUTURE OF RETAIL: ASSEMBLY-LINE SHOP SPACE

Continuing Drucker’s theory, the future of retail would evolve based on consumer-brand relationships. Given the declining environmental climate, we can assume the resources would eventually be limited. Luxury fashion would have to be made sustainable through manufacturing on consumer demand and consumer personalization. What this entails is increased consumer involvement, meaning that consumers would be heavily involved in the design of their clothes and its concomitant manufacturing process. By way of the fact that consumers pay for the craftsmanship of luxury, they should be privy to the processes behind what they paid for.

This millennial trend gained traction with the promulgation of videos depicting ‘satisfying’ completion of tasks by people who possessed skilled precision. This was said to be extremely calming for perfectionists and people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, even if one lacked interest in the type of skill displayed. This fact will be capitalized upon in creating an immersive experience within the Atelier théâtre, regardless of one’s interest in fashion.

Chanel

CONTEXT

AMPLIFICATION OF SOUND WAVES

The pavilion’s assigned site was the K11 building, an art mall located along Xintiandi, Shanghai. Within the K11 mall, this project’s chosen site was located in the atrium of B2, based on consumer circulation and the level of noise, for the atelier had to provide the appropriate ambience for a completely immersive theatrical experience.

In 1931, the inventor M. R. Hutchinson invented a apparatus that could amplify sound waves within the space between two alternating arrangement of ‘teeth’, or ‘sound reflectors’. Within this space, sound would be rebounded off the walls continuously from sound sources to the end of the apparatus. This method was said to transform the apparatus into a veritable sound cave. This project utilizes a similar method to amplify the sounds of machinery whirring, tissue packaging, the shearing of fabric, and more. The concept drawing on the left depicts an envisioned scenario of the travelling sound-waves, beginning from the tables where the seamstresses sit, rebounding off the different concave walls to produce acoustic hotspots along the axis of the pavilion.

Plan

BEHOLD ATELIER théâtre, an immersive theatre experience combined with the craftsmanship of luxury retail. Through this experience, consumers are treated to the entire process of how their goods are made, starting from their selection of designs, all the way to the careful packaging of what they ordered. Along their path, they are treated to videos of the exact skills being projected behind the seamstresses - in perfect juxtaposition with reality. In other words, what you would usually see only on screen is now manifested threedimensionally before your eyes.

(Left to right) Head Seamstress' Table, Embroidery, Steaming & Stitching, Packaging

THE demolition of structures requires energy, manpower, and generates a horrific amount of noise and air pollution. Material

Cordoned off by authorities, this inefficiency and wastage goes unnoticed by most civilians. The deliberate retardation of the demolition process, along with the concomitant regeneration of the structure exposes ordinary civilians to the realities of the process: material wastage, pollution, and hard labour - all while minimizing health risks through passive design strategies. The repurposing of the materials from the old octagonal warehouse reduces the amount of energy loss through material wastage.

When demolition begins, the

at

process of

is also produced in the form of

to the

Site Plan: Kallang Industrial Site | As of 2018, the hexagonal warehouses were slated to be demolished in 5 years' time. they were then chosen as ideal test beds for the process of 'creative destruction', or slowed-down demolition.

Elevation

Plastic and timber was to be sourced from the junkyards of the industrial park... ...While concrete and masonry derived from the demolition were re-purposed for the construction of the museum and eventual center for re-purposing old materials. steel

concrete

plastic timber

REDEFINING THE DEMOLITION PROCESS

Demolition is typically seen as both a ‘loss of substance (in this case, a building)’ and ‘a possibility to create something new’ – a champion of ‘creative destruction’ that proffers a potential economic gain. However, the process incurs an enormous amount of material wastage in the form of demolition debris, most of which are sent to landfills to be processed. The amount of energy lost through demolition is naturally and unnecessarily high, given the speed at which buildings in Singapore – and most of the modern capitalist world are demolished.

This project approaches environmental awareness and sustainability using a methodology that circumvents and attempts to improve upon the traditional demolition narrative. In other words, the process of demolition is redefined for a single octagonal typology. Traditionally, the warehouse typology is demolished in structural sequence with machinery: the corrugated steel roof, followed by the steel purlins holding up the roof structure, then the masonry brick walls (consisting of masonry brick and reinforced concrete), and finally the supporting load-bearing concrete columns and subsequently, the concrete floor. The rate at which the structure is demolished via machinery typically takes up to a couple of days, given that the warehouse stands at approximately 6 meters tall.

For my project, the demolition process is lengthened and stretched out to approximately 3 months per phase in order to conserve material usage and concomitantly preserve material energy. The materials torn down during demolition are re-processed via machinery and used during the in-situ construction of the new structure. This construction will take place alongside the demolition process, while the demolition process will take place in a way that happens sequentially and segmentally, clockwise around the original octagonal typology.

Annihilation still defines the end state, yet the process, lengthened as it may be, morphs into something educational and ceremonial. The maximization and exploration in this project redefines demolition, transforming it into something artful, drawn out, and almost celebratory.

As the warehouse is demolished, materials are re-purposed and reused in the construction of a new building - a new center for the recy cling and re-purposing of old furniture and materials, as well as a bittersweet reminder of its past.

First five phases | For every segment of the corrugated steel roof and its supporting steel structure that is torn down (refer to left-most isometric drawing), a segment of the new structure is constructed using the torn-down materials. For the first 6 phases, only the roof is being replaced, which consists only of corrugated steel sheets and steel purlins. The corrugated steel sheets are melted and re-cast into 50 mm by 50 mm steel members, while the steel purlins are simply dismantled and reassembled to form the steel columns and members of the new segment (joined by welding). The floorboards are made of timber obtained from the demolition of other buildings within the Distripark.

DEMOLITION SEQUENCE

Last three phases | The same concept applies to the brick masonry walls, which are demolished in the following order: the exterior brick cladding layer, followed by the concrete in-fill layer, and subsequently the rebar gridwork. Replacing the original aforementioned components of the warehouse are platforms made of timber, a supporting steel frame structure comprising 50 mm by 50 mm steel members, as well as concrete crushing steel machinery for repurposing the concrete that has been demolished. The segment will be appended to each edge of the octagonal warehouse structure as the walls are being demolished. The concrete and brick masonry walls are processed into concrete and brick aggregate respectively, which then can be used in the repurposing workshop activities taking place in the structure.

Basement Workshop - Semi-excavated floor

Outermost ring - Concrete workshops

Reception and Docking Bay

FUNCTIONS

Workshop Areas

Workshop Areas

THEaim of this project’s design brief was to re-interpret the concept of an eco-lodge and successfully translate it into a form that could be used for camping with a certain level of comfort. What I had initially noticed about Mandai Zoo was that there were obvious barriers, either tangible or intangible, that defined the relationship between human and animal. Humans were given the role of the clear dominant, while animals were the clear subdominant or captive species. This has led to the formation of a hierachy that always ranks humans above animals. The resultant psychological effect in these animals is that, barrier or not, they would intentionally place a distance between themselves and the human species, because humans rank higher in the social dominance hierarchy.

My design intent sought to mitigate this effect and reshape the levels of dominance between primates and humans, with primates being the species of choice simply due to the Darwinist similarities in both species. Through an inverse in the relationship, the opposite effect could arguably be achieved, in which animals start to perceive themselves as higher up in the dominance hierarchy as opposed to the usual anthro-zoological interaction predetermined by zoos. The less fear that animals have around humans, the less they shy from interaction, which could potentially lead to a possibility in the coexistence of the 2 species within the same habitat. Over the course of the project, I have come up with 4 design parameters or spatial rules that shape my design process and translation of my concept: (1) Domination through Hierarchy; (2) Domination through Territory; (3) Domination through Ease of Accessibility to Food; (4) Domination through Ease of Navigation.

Semester: Y2S1

Software used:

Site: Mandai Zoo, Singapore

A. Area of Interestprimate enclosures

Ferry Routes

Tram Routes

Douc Langur

Gold Lion Tamarin

Cotton-top Marmoset Lion-tail Macaque

Colobus

2960 (Horizontal distance to maintain average personal space for primates)

2960

(Vertical distance to maintain average personal space for primates)

5000 (Horizontal leap distance**)

5000

(Vertical leap distance**)

SPATIAL FACTORS

(1) Domination through Hierarchy

(2) Domination through Territory (Emphasis on human’s territorial constraint as opposed to monkey’s freedom of territory)

(4) Domination through Ease of Navigation (of primates over humans)

1050 (Span of a monkey's arm length - spacing of rods tailored to monkey locomotion)

To ensure safety of humans:

*Horizontal distance beyond which primates would be too intimidated to leap

***Vertical distance beyond which primates would be too intimidated to leap

Dining/Feeding Deck | Accessible to both primates and humans Least accessible place to humans Room for more dominance levels set by self-determination or negotiation between the 2 species

Dining/Feeding Deck

Kitchen/Bedroom/Washer Circulation Spaces

W.C. (Concealed from primates)

Negotiation Space (Accessible by both) - compromised platform for struggle of dominance between species

Human-only Platforms - subtraction of domination through ease of navigation All 4 Criteria fulfilled - highest level of dominance (for primate species)

FUNCTIONAL DIAGRAMS

(Left to right)

Tamarin,

Confronting the Postfeminist Media Urban-scape: (How) Should Bodies Perform Femininity in Public Space?

18.3.22 Rachel Sim Jing Xi University of Cambridge

Abstract Postfeminist outdoor advertising has become a pervasive phenomenon in the 21st century, inhabiting not just ‘feminized’ con sumer spaces such as shopping streets and major commercial intersections, but mundane, everyday spaces such as urban furniture and public transport stations. Yet few scholars have evaluated this phenomenon explicitly in relation to these spaces; in contributing to feminine anxieties and reinscribing the public/private divide in the city. This essay argues that the rhetoric of women’s fear in the city produces and is produced by the mutually constitutive relationship between postfeminist outdoor advertisements and female consumer spaces. Noting the significance of female (bodily) representation for feminist activism in the public realm, the essay further uses the Guerrilla Girls as a point of inquiry into an alternative mode of representation, analysing how their active disappearance, or conscious refusal to participate in visibility in public space, can function as a legitimate mode of tactical activism.

Keywords postfeminist outdoor advertising, female consumer spaces, ‘scary city’, Guerrilla Girls, active disappearance

Introduction

“One of the most striking aspects of postfeminist1 media culture”, says Rosalind Gill (2007: 149), “is its obsessive preoccupation with the [female]2 body.” The body, relentlessly policed by both men and women alike, has constituted a wealth of media content since the nineteenth century, often accompanied by excoriating comments: “in 10 months Billie Eilish has developed a mid-30’s wine mom body”, or an insulting “Who’s The Dad?” caption adorning a magazine cover of Taylor Swift with a slightly rounded belly (Fig. 1; Daily Mail 2016; GamesNosh 2020). Such comments, albeit referencing celebrity bodies, are symptomatic of the wider scrutiny of the way women are expected to present themselves in the city3, which in turn determines whether they are deemed acceptable to be seen in the public realm. This ‘reality’, uniquely experienced by women, is what feminist geographer Leslie Kern (2010: 210) aptly terms the “scary city”, a place that is equal parts excitement and danger, continually reproduced by postfeminist outdoor advertisements and the (public) consumer spaces they inhabit. Both constitute each other, propagating variations of ‘correct’ female selves that if successfully emulated, could allow women to freely traverse the city while mitigating their fears of being rejected from public space. Within this strategy, tropes that might previously have been perceived as ‘sexist’ and for the heterosexual male gaze – billboard models proudly displaying their sexual power, for instance – are visibly reconstructed as exhortations to feminine self-confidence, inadvertently reinforcing the “gendered public/private [male/female] divide” that has historically influenced how women are perceived in public space (Gill 2007: 151-2; Gill and Orgad 2017: 19; Arnold 2021: 572-3).

However, after nearly three decades of analysing the spatial effects of postfeminist outdoor advertising, scholars positioned at the intersection of feminist geography and media theory, such as Winship (2000) and Arnold (2021), have largely posited postfeminist bodily representation as a feminist reclamation of the city, themselves falling prey to the media’s aestheticization of female selfpolicing. Additionally, with the exception of Kern (2010), no scholar has commented on the mutually constitutive relationship between outdoor advertising and female consumer spaces; geographers such as Bondi and Domosh (1998), Bondi (2005) and Dreyer and McDowall (2012) have discussed the gendering of consumer spaces as female, yet none have made explicit references to the overwhelming visuality of female bodies in outdoor advertising despite its ubiquity since the 1980s. Kern herself has also not considered more mundane, everyday advertising sites such as train stations and pedestrian streets as consumer spaces, locales that

1 The term ‘postfeminist’ is not taken in this essay to be an analytical perspective. Rather, postfeminist media culture is taken to be a “circulating set of ideas, images and meanings” characteristic of post-1980s media imagery (Banet-Weiser et al. 2020: 5).

2 Historical discussions of women’s roles in public space typically define women as white, heterosexual, and of middle-/upper-class, simply because these were the women that were deemed acceptable to appear in the public realm (Bondi and Domosh 1998: 270). In this essay, beyond explicitly historical discussions, the woman can be defined as LGBTQ/heterosexual, coloured/white, able-bodied/disabled, etc.

3 The urban context in this essay is primarily Euro-American, as well as developed nations outside of that context, such as contemporary China, where consumerism has come to define women’s identities to a large degree (Ferry 2003: 285-7).

Cronin (2006: 618-23) maintains should be considered given that they mark the “routine experience of traveling to and around cities”, and therefore have frequently been exploited by advertisers to increase female consumption.

This essay thus aims to explore how the rhetoric of women’s fear in the city reinforces and is reinforced by the mutually constitutive relationship between postfeminist outdoor advertisements and female consumer spaces, thereafter reinscribing the public/private divide. Sub-section I(a) draws parallels between the textual analysis of postfeminist advertisements (1990s and post2000) and feminine anxieties in the city, while I(b) embarks on a more urban/historical analysis of how consumer spaces (e.g., major shopping districts and commercial squares) and certain everyday spaces came to be coded private/female as a result of the modern city, eventually constituting postfeminist advertising sites and reproducing the anxieties elaborated upon in I(a). Additionally, in line with Judith Butler’s (2014: 110) assertion of the need for the female body to appear or be represented in a way that “avoids the retrenchment of paternalism”, section II asks how female bodies can alternatively be represented in public space as a form of feminist resistance, using the case study of the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist artist collective who employ flyposting in the public spaces of New York City (NYC), London, Los Angeles and more. When appearing in public, they don gorilla masks and adopt the pseudonyms of dead female artists, quite literally re-skinning themselves as “jungle creatures” to de-sexualize themselves (Flanagan et al. 2007: 6). Through the lens of Peggy Phelan’s (2005: 19) writings on “active vanishing”, that is, the “deliberate and conscious refusal to [participate in] visibility” in the public realm, I seek to articulate how the Girls perform bodily resistance to subvert gender roles in the public sphere.

(Left Column) Fig. 1. (top) Billie Eilish’s ‘wine mom body’; (bottom) “Who’s The Dad?”

(Right Column) Fig. 2. (top) Think of her as your mother, American Airlines, 1968; (bottom) ‘TOTAL’ watches your vitamins, while you watch your weight, General Mills, 1970

I. Commercial Strategies: Postfeminist Female Bodily Representations and the Reinforcement of the Public/Private (Male/ Female) Divide

I(a). Feminine Anxieties in the City

Contrary to what the contemporary feminist may think, the pre-1970s media urban-scape was not worlds apart from the one today. Replacing the overtly sexist advertising campaigns of the ‘50s and ‘60s – American Airlines coaxing the male public into perceiving beautiful, lithe flight attendants as their mothers in 1968, or General Mills telling females to “keep up with the house while [they keep] down [their] weight” with vitamin-packed cereal (Edwards 2015; Fig. 2) – are a dizzying array of postfeminist campaigns celebrating the ‘confident, empowered’ female subject (Gill and Orgad 2017: 19). Notably, they engage tantalizingly with women’s desire to freely explore the “scary city”, that is, the city whose excitement is in part (paradoxically) generated by danger and anxiety (Kern 2010: 210). There have been differing interpretations of this ‘anxiety’; geographers such as Valentine (1989: 386) and Rosewarne (2005: 70) attribute this to men’s harassment of women in public space, which gradually “becomes associated with the [urban] contexts in which they [take] place”, exaggerated by the more frequent usage of female (than male) bodies in sexualized outdoor adverts. Others such as Bondi (2005: 9) and Kern (2010: 210) herself have instead drawn parallels between discourses of urban revitalization and gendered imagery: just as revitalization is designed to exclude “a dangerous urban ‘other’”, postfeminist portrayals of women present the city as “feminized and empowering for women”, but also with the “ever-present threat” for the woman who chooses not to present herself in such a manner. ‘Anxiety’, in this case, is associated with the fear of appearing as the ‘other’, a female body lacking certain desirable dispositions, unequipped with trending commodities or possessing non-normative traits in public space (Gill and Orgad 2017: 19).

Advertisers engage with both definitions, drawing on women’s innate desire to experience the thrill of the city by conspicuously featuring or ‘intervening’ in urban streets. In The Sphinx in the City, Elizabeth Wilson (1991: 30) recounts the “elation and pleasure” experienced by Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), as she adventured alone in London, feeling as though she had never properly “felt London” before she “dared the perils of [road] crossings” and sunk herself into “the heart of city life”. Such a primal feeling was indubitably rooted in the post-industrialist (albeit white, middle class) division of labour, in which women tended to domestic matters, while men headed out into the public realm and took home the wages (LaFrombois 2018: 17-8). Consequently, the cult of the walking man remains one of the most salient aspects of nineteenth-century scholarship: “the dandy, the flâneur, the hero, the stranger”, all invariably male figures conceptualized to encapsulate the experience of modern life’s ephemerality (Wolff 1985: 41). Men had the freedom to appear anonymous in public as they frequented cafés and pubs, while women, who were just only emerging into work and public spaces, were attended by men’s anxieties and so were prescribed certain ‘regulations’: they could appear in public only as phantasmic fetishizations for the male gaze (1985: 42-3).

Postfeminist bodily imagery are emblematic of and capitalize on this urban imaginary, positioning itself at the nexus of women’s desire to freely traverse public space and the fear of being objectified by the male gaze, offering the urban female streetwalker a way to construct an alternative, empowered identity for herself in relation to the city (Kern 2010: 210; Bondi 2005: 9). This rhetoric was widely taken up by advertisers in the 1990s, who depicted women claiming their freedom in the city with their sexuality, through which they could ‘overcome’ their fear of potentially being harassed by men in public space. In Wallis’ Dress to kill (1997; Fig. 3) advertisements, for example, the female subjects are seemingly indifferent to the male gaze. She in Crash leans over the railing and stares out into the horizon, causing the undoubtedly male driver in the background to crash his car, while in Barber, a woman in a bodycon mini dress nonchalantly swings her purse as she notes, through the corner of her eye, that the barber within the shop, entranced by her sexual power, is precariously close to slitting his customer’s throat. To borrow Laura Mulvey’s (1975: 12) psychoanalytic account of the male gaze, in each of the scenarios the men are ‘trapped’; the male spectator “projects his look on to that of his like [the driver/barber]” only to find himself immobilized and unable to exact control over the events. The usual “active/passive [male/female]” narrative structure conventionally employed by films is subverted as the woman, exuding ‘power’ and ‘confidence’, relishes in her freedom to roam the urban streets.

The woman “kills”, according to Winship (2000: 36), and we, the female audience, discover a new way of self-construction through identification with her. Or do we? This trope was also utilized in Wonderbra’s Hello Boys campaign (1994; Fig. 4), which despite not explicitly featuring the urban streets, ‘intervenes’ in it and engages the urban streetwalker. The imagery of lingerie-clad Eva

Herzigova, averting her eyes and smiling coyly, knowingly goads the male observer’s gaze with the power of her sexuality; what happens next could be interpreted as a successful confrontation by the female subject – men trying to regain control by splattering cement on “the danger zone of [her] breasts” (2000: 43). Through self-identification, the female subject discovers that she too can subvert her own fetishization by harnessing her sexuality on the urban streets, a visual mode of self that consequently empowers and enables her to freely venture the city. However, the very stylization of female subjects in these adverts still reproduces ‘submissive’ behavioural archetypes often employed throughout the long history of gendered imagery (Fig. 5), much like Herzigova’s “head/eye aversion” and coy smile in Hello Boys, or the Wallis woman’s arched back and seductive walk in Crash (Goffman 1976: 63; Arnold 2021: 582), inadvertently pandering to the male gaze in public space. The postfeminist era rebrands these inherently sexist tropes under the guise of female autonomy, which is in turn predicated on the female assuming a ‘confident’ self with consumer power and the body type of a white, lithe woman.

This notion has persisted even in more recent campaigns depicting supposedly ‘healthier’ and more ‘intersectional’ forms of representation, despite seemingly being transformed by the new visibility of plus-sized, African American, and LGBTQ bodies. Both Dove’s Real Beauty (2004; Fig. 6) and Lane Bryant’s #ImNoAngel (2015; Fig. 7) campaigns depict this “glossy diversity” – ‘real women’ such as model Ashley Graham and actress Amber Riley championing ‘body positivity’ and confidence, contradictorily reiterating that a particular plus-sized or African American body is accepted into public space (Banet-Weiser et al. 2020: 14; Draguca 2019). Thus, while such representations do shy away from the more explicit 1990s ‘harness your sexual power’ rhetoric and visual references to the male gaze, they similarly hinge on the idea of presenting a certain self, along with the bodily results of their consumption, to others in the public realm. The very (ubiquitous) presence of these advertisements within the city propagates the fear of presenting oneself as otherwise in the public sphere, inducing within women a self-policing, narcissistic gaze through which the public/private divide is reinscribed (Gill 2007: 151-2).

(Top Row) Fig. 3. (left) Crash, Wallis, 1997; (right) Barber, Wallis, 1997 (Middle Row) Fig. 4. Hello Boys, Wonderbra, 1994 (Bottom Row) Fig. 5. Goffman’s examples of the head/eye aversion, in Gendered Advertisements, 1976

(Top Row) Fig. 6. Real Beauty, Dove, 2004

(Bottom Row) Fig. 7. (left and middle)

#ImNoAngel, Lane Bryant, 2015; (right)

#ImNoAngel on public buses

I(b). Female Consumerism and the City

To gain a more complete understanding of the production and reproduction of the ‘scary city’, that is, how feminine anxieties have become so deeply entrenched into the public realm, the initial coding of consumer spaces as private/female and its subsequent association with postfeminist advertising sites must be discussed. As Lefebvre (1992: 71) writes, production requires an organization of “a sequence of actions with a certain ‘objective’ in view”, which necessitates the mobilization of spatial elements, both material (e.g., the city and its dimensions) and immaterial (e.g., advertising agendas).

First and foremost, it must be acknowledged that women were for the longest time denied a proper place in the public realm; by the likes of Aristotle, who defined women’s value to society by her domestic duties in the fourth century (Mulgan 1994: 184-6), to Baudelaire’s inability to view women as anything but objects of his gaze in The Painter of Modern Life (Wolff 1985: 42). Women’s later inclusion into public life was routed primarily through consumer activities and spaces, aspects that accompanied the rise of the modern city and the concomitant emergence of the middle class. In the postfeminist era, this has continued to dictate where advertisement campaigns are placed, in city locales presumed to be closely associated not just with women’s consumer habits, but also their daily routines as a subtle attempt to increase their consumption. These locales are routinized into everyday life, including residential complexes, transportation infrastructure and shopping zones, further conditioning the female streetwalker into her dual role as commodity (to be scrutinized) and empowered consumer (Cronin 2006: 622; Kern 2010: 220).

Many feminist geographers, such as Dreyer and McDowall (2012: 33) and Bondi (2005: 7), agree that women’s entrance into public life has been inextricably connected to commerce and consumption, with the latter scholar further remarking that this connection has reshaped public space since the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to the development of department stores and other consumer spaces in major cities. Bondi (2005: 7) maintains the creation of suburban housing, spurred by the urge to escape overly congested urban cores, cemented the middle-class ‘image’, where men’s wages were sufficient to support their non-working wives, and so enabled her to play the role of maintaining a stable household for the male head while he navigated the uncertainties of modern life, inadvertently reinscribing herself as commodity/property (Roberts 1998: 819, 825-6). The female’s emergence in the public realm thus came to be justified by the ‘politicization of the household’, where she could be seen in public on the condition that she was performing activities associated either with care, domesticity, or consumption, such as the purchasing of food and clothes shopping (Bondi and Domosh 1998: 270). Spatializing this rhetoric, developers ‘feminized’ the outdoors by designing streets that were replete with fashion stores, museums or art galleries; programs of consumption and leisure deemed to be appropriate for the feminine body. Those of Ladies’ Mile shopping district4 in NYC, for example, grew so popular that it “made it safe for women to go shopping unaccompanied by men for the first time”, their visibility in these spaces further reinscribing acts of consumerism and the spaces in which they were carried out as female (1998: 279; NYPAP).

To this day, postfeminist outdoor advertising-rich sites, such as spaces of revitalization or key shopping districts, remain unequivocally female consumer spaces. Kern (2010: 214-21), for instance, posits gentrified areas as neoliberal versions of ‘feminized’ city spaces; residential complexes or streets previously deemed too ‘masculine’ or unsafe for women, securitized and converted into veritable extensions of the private domain, fitted with “nice lobb[ies]”, a “twenty-four-hour concierge” or various cafés with “soft furnishings, fireplaces, bookshelves, small tables for intimate conversation, and a general sense of hospitality”. Rose (1989: 133) and Bondi (2005: 9) both note that such spaces, typically located in the inner city, grant women a way of managing domestic and employment labour, as well as increased accessibility to the experiences of modern life – relative anonymity and safety – while seemingly helping women mitigate feminine anxieties. Capitalizing on and contributing to this rhetoric, advertising campaigns within these locales portray women as empowered for being active, visible participants in local social and consumption activities, yet simultaneously predicating this on appearing in such ‘safe spaces’, dressed and looking a certain way (Kern 2020: 104-6; 2010: 225). This circumstance, albeit branded feminist today, recalls the nineteenth-century bourgeois woman’s experience of ‘feminized’ consumer spaces and thus hardly represents “a feminist reworking of [historical] gendered norms” in public space (Bondi and Domosh 1998: 280; Kern 2010: 225).

Additionally, mundane, everyday advertising sites organized around women’s “linear rhythms of work [and] commuting” in the city, while not all historically gendered female, also contribute toward retaining women’s experience of the city at the nexus of freedom and anxiety. According to Cronin (2006: 622-7), the company Clear Channel targets housewives by running advertising sites on “routes to (and within 1000 metres of) supermarkets or major [chains] (a third of sites are within 300 metres of these)”, including transport (buses, taxis, trains, train stations, etc.) and freestanding panels along shopping or pedestrian zones (Fig. 8). For various other female youth groups, these panels might be situated closer to high street stores (e.g., Zara) and universities. Such mapping strategies subtly persuade the contemporary female spectator to identify with postfeminist representations by the likes of Dove, Lane Bryant or more, who rhythmically reiterate that she maintains the right to be seen in public through consumerism. This urge toward self-identification is augmented by the large, ‘cinematic’ scale of certain adverts in cities, transforming each advertising site into a metaphorical cinema in which a false sense of “closeness” is fostered between the viewer and the adverts’ contents (2006: 625). Nigel Thrift (2008: 245) describes this phenomenon as a “transmission of affect”, where the outdoor adverts continuously exact an “affective force” to quite literally sap one’s agency not to look. In the opening credits of Sex and the City (seasons 1-4; 1998-2002), Carrie Bradshaw, clad in a pink muscle tank and tutu, struts on the streets of NYC, confident and free, only for a passing bus to cruelly splash rainwater all over her. Flustered and having lost her composure, she looks up and sees an image of herself plastered on the side of the bus, instantly looking away in fresh horror as the film frame freezes (Fig. 9). Against the backdrop of feminine anxieties, one has to ask, does her horror stem from being splashed with rainwater, or that she is forced to confront the visual disjunct between her undoubtedly more glamorous, sexual self in the bus ad and her flustered self on the sidewalk?

Served NYC primarily from mid-19th century into the early 20th century (NYPAP).

II. “Creative Complaining”: The Guerrilla Girls and ‘Invisible’ Representation

Certain political demands made by vulnerable bodies, such as their protection and mobility, “sometimes must take place with and through the[ir] bod[ies]” in the public realm (Butler 2014: 102). Given that the public visibility of the female body has functioned as the key medium through which space is gendered, it is unsurprising that many international feminist movements have witnessed women protesting through their bodies, from SlutWalks since 2011, to the Latin American Ni Una Menos movements since 2015. Certain movements, however, have demonstrated that women may be unaware of the risk of taking in – or worse, practicing –discourses framing postfeminist bodily representation as a liberating reclamation of female autonomy; SlutWalks, for instance, are symptomatic of women choosing to objectify themselves as an ‘empowering’ personal choice (Evans 2017).

Further, both Butler (2014: 110) and Phelan (2005: 10) lament the struggle to ideate all-encompassing representational strategies, acknowledging that it is almost impossible to represent the self adequately “within the visual or linguistic field”. The visibility of African American skin, for example, can never be an “accurate barometer” for representing what is “resistant to representation”, that is, her “diverse political, economic, sexual, and artistic interests” (Phelan 2005: 10; Banet-Weiser et al. 2020: 14). Kern (2020: 106) also asserts that physical mimesis promotes the ‘othering’ of women who fail to behave in normative ways, such as those

possessing “outward signs of trauma or mental illness” being asked to leave cafés along gentrified streets. For feminist resistances, then, there remains a need to explore alternative methods of representing female bodies in public space without reinforcing the spatial manifestations of paternalism, in order gendered norms might be temporarily reworked in the city.

The Guerrilla Girls are a feminist art collective who explain their conception by inviting you to “imagine [you are an] artist pissed off that almost all the opportunities in the art world go to white men” (Guerrilla Girls 2020: 5). “[N]o museum goer even cares!” They holler, further inviting you to “dream up a new kind of street poster to wake people up to the pathetically low number of women artists shown in galleries and museums”. Back in 1984, the glaringly disproportionate ratio of male to female artists at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) International Survey of Painting and Sculpture exhibition was the last straw, to which they kickstarted a street poster campaign targeting many institutions deemed perpetrators of women and non-white artists’ exclusion from the mainstream art scene. Adopting the visual language of “fly-posting”, they “[snuck] around New York in the middle of the night” the following year, lathering glue on the walls of SoHo and slapping posters – bolded, blocked-lettered statistical lists and art market prices – calling out sexist and racist policies influencing museum collections (Fig. 11). When appearing in public, they don gorilla masks and adopt pseudonyms from deceased feminist figures - writer Gertrude Stein, artist Frida Kahlo, and more (2020: 5; Tate; Fig. 12).

The Girls engage in what Phelan (2005: 15-9) calls an active vanishing, that is, a conscious refusal to participate in visibility. Pointing out the psychic paradox of Lacanian psychoanalysis (“one always locates one’s image in an image of the other and, one always locates the other in one’s image”), she observes its inevitable failure: seeing the self is negotiated through representation, yet the Real is never faithfully and accurately reproduced. “Saying [the whole truth] is literally impossible: words fail” (Lacan 1990: 3). Just as words fail, “eyes fail”; the eyes, searching for the self in the other (representation), similarly obscures the Real. The Real here is perhaps most succinctly defined by Foster (2003: 189-90): “a black hole […] of non-subjectivity”; in order to see the Real, we must shed the “illusions that mystify reality” (for example, the ‘scary city’ construct). Phelan (2005: 19) builds on Lacan, suggesting that since nothing will be depicted or read in a non-subjective manner, exploring the invisible – active vanishing – may paradoxically function as a way to reveal more of the Real. Using the Guerrilla Girls as a case study, the remainder of this essay is dedicated to exploring what it would mean to perform ‘invisibly’ in public space as a means of feminist tactical activism.

Posing in fishnet tights, a leather jacket, and holding a banana in the Guerrilla Girls’ publicity poster for the 1987 Whitney Biennial, a figure with a gorilla head perches atop a high stool (Fig. 13). Naturally, as self-identifying audience, we search for tell-tale gender indicators, yet the figure’s left arm is purposely positioned across its chest, while its face and hair are obscured by a gorilla head. Having finally fought their way into the interiors of MoMA’s PS1, the Girls opened their exhibition with The Banana Report, a commentary on MoMA’s dismal record of exhibited work by women and non-white artists. Works displayed included a biennial gender census from 1973 to 1987, a bar chart depicting the regressing gender ratio, listed under the cheeky slogan Well Hung at the Whitney, and an exposé on the Major Contributors to the Whitney Museum and the Products their Companies Make: lingerie manufacturers Lane Bryant and Victoria’s Secret, news corporation and owner of Cosmopolitan magazine Hearst Corporation –companies claiming to know “What Women Want”, all while ignoring women’s exclusion in the art world (MoMA; Fig. 15). These, and all other exhibited posters, adopted the same representational strategy: witty one liners alongside cold, hard facts and statistics, textually speaking on behalf of the non-present woman or non-white artist.

Fig. 10. Slutwalk, Los Angeles, 2017

(Top Row) Fig. 11. (left) Early wheat pasted posters in NYC, Guerrilla Girls, 1985; (right) Guerrilla Girls dressed in gorilla garb while wheat pasting

(Bottom Row) Fig. 12. (left) Guerrilla Girls at a pro-choice rally in Washington D.C., 1992; (right) Posters along Whitechapel street, London, 2016

Outside the museum, out on the streets of SoHo, in direct confrontation with the affective urban landscape, the Girls wheat-past ed similar satirical posters “on walls, streetlamps and telephone booths” or “doors of closed galleries” late on Friday nights to 3:00 am, in order that the posters would still be on the walls when galleries opened in the morning (Guerrilla Girls 20085; Phelan 2005: 19; Fig. 11). Cordova (2021) recalls encountering the group’s works, “one-by-one – and sometimes en masse, papered over an entire section of wall”, at once harnessing and fighting against the urban surfaces of the very institutions that threatened to exclude them. Every so often, the Girls would pop back to paste a recount of the dismal number of one-women exhibitions at New York’s muse ums; or which galleries (still) showed “no more than 10% women artists or none at all”, papering over their old representations and reproducing new ones on urban walls, textually performing and re-performing their cause in public space (Fig. 15). Significantly, these posters were tagged to the surfaces of spaces historically gendered feminine and used to reinscribe the ‘scary city’ – spaces of leisure, such as museums and galleries, and spaces used to advertise and encourage women’s consumption, such as SoHo, notorious for its designer boutiques and opulent chain stores. Acknowledging that they cannot faithfully represent the Real, they conceal their bodies with gorilla garb while wheat-pasting their posters (Fig. 12), all of which are purposefully ephemeral, remaining there until other advertisements or graffiti art threaten to obscure them. By acting as an essential activator of the posters and thereafter ‘actively disappearing’ in spaces deemed appropriately feminine, the Girls protest society’s confinement of women to – and the need for their female bodies to be visible in – such spaces, as well as the “visibility-is-currency economy” determining the value of female represen tations in the art world (Phelan 2005: 19).

In their Naked (1989, 2000-; Fig. 16-7) poster series, ‘La Grande Odalisque’ satirizes herself with a gorilla head and wryly asks, “Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?” After which she points out that “85% of the nudes [including her] are female”, despite females taking up less than 5% of Modern Art sections. These posters ran as adverts on buses in Lower Manhattan, later manifesting as smaller versions on the walls of NYC, and continue to run every time the Girls do a recount, in Boston, European cities and beyond, interrupting the city’s wider network of targeted advertisement sites that would otherwise have served as vessels to encourage female consumption, while their contents satirize the art world’s penchant for visibly and publicly displaying female bodily mimesis. ‘La Grande Odalisque’, far from her idealized original, is re-skinned into a gorilla chimera, becoming an ambiguous body capable of representing various identities – cis, African American, transgender, lesbian or more, all victims within the “world of white male privilege” (Guerrilla Girls 2008).

Girls (Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz), conducted by Judith Richards on March 9, 2008.

The implications are significant: by ‘disappearing’ in specific spaces of leisure, consumerism or that of the everyday, they disrupt the mutually constitutive relationship between these spaces and postfeminist outdoor advertisements that works to produce and reproduce the ‘scary city’; exploiting the surfaces of the urban to protest its contribution to perpetuating women’s roles in public space as primarily consumerist/sexual.

(Top Row) Fig. 13. (left) Publicity poster for Guerrilla Girls’ ‘review’ of the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, 1987; (right) Well Hung at the Whitney, Guerrilla Girls, 1987 (Mddle Row) Fig. 14. Major Contributors to the Whitney Museum and the Products their Companies Make, Guerrilla Girls, 1987 (Bottom Row) Fig. 15. Recounts in NYC, Guerrilla Girls, 2015

(Top Row) Fig. 16. Naked, Guerrilla Girls, 1989 (Bottom Row) Fig. 17. Reproductions of Naked, Guerrilla Girls, 2000-

Conclusion

“[T]o what extent are […] meanings created or simply reiterated by advertisers?” Roberts (1998: 833) asks. This essay has been careful not to posit postfeminist outdoor advertising as the progenitor of women’s dual role as consumers and commodity, but rather as a symptom and subsequent perpetrator of the ‘scary city’. In fact, to understand the cultural production of female consumption, studying outdoor advertising alone does not suffice; one need necessarily rely on a wider range of evidence, such as novels, films, or debate. Yet to this day, more so than ever in the 21st century, it exists as a distinctively urban medium through which the visibility of particular feminine bodies is continually and pervasively reinscribed into the public realm; into specific areas deemed appropriate for female consumerism, regardless of whether the urban female streetwalker chooses to appear as a reflection of such imagery. It is against this background that this essay has attempted to articulate the mutually constitutive relationship between postfeminist outdoor advertising and the consumer spaces they inhabit, first embarking on a textual analysis of the adverts in relation to the city, followed by an explication of how these campaigns hinge on the history of women-as-consumer/-as-sexual-commodity, the spaces in which they perform acts of consumption, and market these roles under the guise of empowerment and autonomy in the ‘scary city’. More women should be made cognizant of what it means to inscribe these ‘norms’ visually on their bodies; that their appearing in public space to others risks cementing these ‘norms’ as ‘reality’ (Roberts 1998: 833).

As art theorist Amelia Jones says, “[t]he transformation of the public sphere parallels and is implicated in the transformation of how representation functions – and how we relate to images, texts, objects, bodies, and spaces” (Flanagan et al. 2007: 7). For the woman who wishes to protest the above ‘norms’, this essay has explored the Guerrilla Girls as an example of the bodily subversion of gender roles in the public realm, as well as how they attempt to efface their visibility and complicate their own identities as females in the very spaces society demands they should be visible. While the large-scale radicalization of culture and femininity remains to be seen, such methods are proof that the everyday woman can participate and enact their bodies to a performative invisibility, radicalizing feminine identities one step at a time.

Fig. 18. Guerrilla Girls invite you to “continue making trouble in the artworld and beyond” with them

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Image References

Fig. 1. (top) Billie Eilish’s ‘wine mom body’; (bottom) “Who’s The Dad?”

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Fig. 2. (top) Think of her as your mother, American Airlines, 1968; (bottom) ‘TOTAL’ watches your vitamins, while you watch your weight, General Mills, 1970

Edwards, Jim. “26 Sexist Ads That Companies Wish We’d Forget They Ever Made.” Business Insider, September 28, 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/sexist-vintage-ads-2015-9

Fig. 3. (left) Crash, Wallis, 1997; (right) Barber, Wallis, 1997

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Fig. 4. Hello Boys, Wonderbra, 1994

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Fig. 5. Goffman’s examples of the head/eye aversion, in Gendered Advertisements, 1976

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Fig. 7. (left and middle) #ImNoAngel, Lane Bryant, 2015; (right) #ImNoAngel on public buses

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Fig. 8. Adverts on shop fronts and in subways

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Fig. 9. Opening credits of Sex in the City, 1998-2002

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Fig. 10. Slutwalk, Los Angeles, 2017

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Fig. 11. (left) Early wheat pasted posters in NYC, Guerrilla Girls, 1985; (right) Guerrilla Girls dressed in gorilla garb while wheat pasting

Cordova, Ruben C. “Taking It to the Street: The Guerrilla Girls’ Struggle for Diversity.” Glasstire, November 28, 2021. https:// glasstire.com/2021/11/28/taking-it-to-the-street-the-guerrilla-girls-struggle-for-diversity/.

Fig. 12. (left) Guerrilla Girls at a pro-choice rally in Washington D.C., 1992; (right) Posters along Whitechapel street, London, 2016 Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020. ———. “PROJECTS/POSTERS/VIDEOS.” Guerrilla Girls. Accessed February 21, 2022. https://www.guerrillagirls.com/proj ects

Fig. 13. (left) Publicity poster for Guerrilla Girls’ ‘review’ of the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, 1987; (right) Well Hung at the Whitney, Guerrilla Girls, 1987

MoMA. “Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, Apr 16–May 17, 1987, MoMA PS1.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1987. https:// www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4458

Fig. 14. Major Contributors to the Whitney Museum and the Products their Companies Make, Guerrilla Girls, 1987

MoMA. “Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, Apr 16–May 17, 1987, MoMA PS1.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1987. https:// www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4458

Fig. 15. Recounts in NYC, Guerrilla Girls, 2015

Cordova, Ruben C. “Taking It to the Street: The Guerrilla Girls’ Struggle for Diversity.” Glasstire, November 28, 2021. https:// glasstire.com/2021/11/28/taking-it-to-the-street-the-guerrilla-girls-struggle-for-diversity/

Fig. 16. Naked, Guerrilla Girls, 1989

Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020.

Fig. 17. Reproductions of Naked, Guerrilla Girls, 2000Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020.

Fig. 18. Guerrilla Girls invite you to “continue making trouble in the artworld and beyond” with them

curatingthecontemporary. “Openings & Exhibitions: October 2016.” CuratingtheContemporary    (CtC) (blog), September 30, 2016. https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2016/09/30/openings-exhibitions-october-2016/

Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020.

Through the Lens of Materiality: Evaluating the Role of Artifacts in the Creation of Hong Kong Prodemocracy Protest “Appearances”

2.12.21 Rachel Sim Jing Xi University of Cambridge

Introduction

There is an element of externalization embedded in the material actions of every individual or group; those who recently defaced statues venerating Christopher Columbus and other Confederate leaders during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, as well as those who vandalized and toppled Hong Kong’s latest symbol of democracy – a crowdfunded statue named “Lady Liberty” (Grundy 2019) – barely a day after it was hauled atop Lion Rock during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests (Fig. 1). According to Kelly Grovier (2020), such instances – and by extension, the agony of tolerating the statues’ continued existence – stem from mankind’s engrained instinct to “perceive an aspect of oneself in the image of another” human or object. This instinct also explains the now-entrenched political association of the umbrella with the 2014 Umbrella Movement, evolving from its pre-Movement status as an embodied tool of protection against the vicissitudes of Hong Kong’s weather, to that of protection against pepper spray, tear gas, even police batons shortly after the Movement began on 26th September (Taylor 2021). Two days later, umbrella-adorned protest camps mushroomed in Hong Kong’s key financial districts, kicking off a 79-day occupation and cementing the association of the humble object with the identity of the protesters and the urban spaces they inhabited. This constituted the Movement’s most prominent display of public action, creating what Hannah Arendt calls the “space of appearance”, a space which “comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action”, claiming a right to gather (Arendt 1998: 199-201).

The materiality of objects and spaces, such as the umbrella and protest campgrounds, are referred to by Daniel Miller as artifacts, concrete forms that derive meaning from “disparate elements of cultural life” and the basic human instinct to relate portions of their identity to these materials (Miller 2002: 397). Such forms have even included, in recent material culture discourse, social media platforms and digital imagery, with multiple scholars suggesting the materiality of digital artifacts could be defined by their provisions of “hard constraints and affordances” (Leonardi 2010). Similar to tangible artifacts, an individual would use a digital artifact in certain ways depending on what it afforded him in a particular situation. This is especially relevant to contemporary movements, wherein the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests, encrypted messengers played an important role in enabling a new structure of protest (Urman et al. 2021).

According to scholars such as Kim (2017: 196) and Khazraee and Novak (2018: 1), the precise position digital and physical artifacts inhabit in relation to public action and the construction of spatial identity remains to be articulated. Judith Butler (2018: 71-3), in rethinking spaces of appearance for the contemporary era, only briefly asks that we consider the mutually constitutive relationship between physical materiality and public action; how action lays claim to, is supported by and simultaneously reworks the functions of materiality. Later in his reflections on the BLM movement, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2017: 34) also reconceptualized spaces of appearance as existing in both the physical dimensions of the city and perceived space in media documentation (e.g., photography). However, both scholars neither conclusively discuss the role of artifacts in social movements, nor the mutually constitutive relationship between digital and physical artifacts, which could be central to understanding how spaces of appearance

Fig. 1. (left) A decapitated statue of Columbus in Boston; (right) Hong Kong’s Lady Liberty toppled on Lion Rock

emerge in contemporary movements.

This essay will thus attempt to investigate the role of physical and digital artifacts in the creation of an “appearance”, specifically in influencing public action and the production (and reproduction) of identity within spaces during the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests. To properly carry out this investigation, material culture theories will be employed as conceptual frameworks through which the specific role of each artifact can be articulated, facilitated by relevant visual images and interviews with Ray Wong and Antony Dapiran, respectively a former student political activist and political commentator. Objectification theory (Miller 1987) will first be used to evaluate the role of physical artifacts (objects and urban spaces) as projected forms of human identity and in influencing the location of the 2014 protest camp within the city. In the second section, affordance theory (Gibson 1983) will be used to evaluate the role of digital artifacts, examining how they affect the staging of physical protest performances and enable an alternative way of protesting in the city. Here, the mutually constitutive relationship between the affordances of digital artifacts and physical artifacts in creating a space of appearance will also be discussed.

I. The Role of Physical Artifacts (Objects and Urban Spaces)

A quick Twitter search reveals the term “Umbrella Revolution” had been in existence since 26th September 2014, picked up immediately by several media outlets in the days that followed. Already a usual “fixture of life” and protection against the vicissitudes of Hong Kong weather, perhaps it came as no surprise that when protesters answered then-professor Benny Tai’s call for civil disobedience via a Hong Kong Economic Journal column piece, many took to the streets with umbrellas, eventually having to use it as protection against the rounds of pepper spray unleashed by the riot police. If prior to 28th the use of umbrellas had been purely instinctive and “spontaneous”, by 28th the ‘institutionalization’ of the umbrella as the protester’s tool of defence was already well underway, with protesters now taking to the streets equipped with the item.1 Later that same day, amidst eighty-seven canisters of tear gas fired by the police along Harcourt Road in Admiralty, “Umbrella Man” emerged “holding two tattered umbrellas aloft” (Fig. 2), whose image was instantly captured and disseminated by the media as the totemic image of the Movement, despite the fact that umbrellas could not actually fend off tear gas. In the subsequent days to come, umbrellas were wielded just as practically as symbolically by protesters, who not only readied their umbrellas in anticipation of pepper spray and police clearance operations, but as a symbol of “power”, “resistance”,2 and the Movement as a whole (Dapiran 2020: 33).

The concept of externalization, to which Grovier attributed the performative defacement of statues, can be traced back to the Hegelian dialectic of self-identification, that a (human) subject’s subconscious externalization of itself would simultaneously develop the subject. The subject’s autobiography can be described as a “sequential, accretive and essentially linear” narrative (Miller 1987: 21), wherein the struggle toward self-awareness, it repetitively posits part of itself as an object, or the object as itself (Hegel 2018: 312). Thus far, several scholars have incorporated varying interpretations of the phenomenological dialectic into their own work. Pierre Bourdieu (2010: 90-1), in Outline of a Theory of Practice, demonstrated through the interiors of the Kabyle house how certain material orders, or “homologous oppositions” (e.g., male/female) were conditioned in its inhabitants as ways of being. These orders would later be revealed in the way inhabitants established themselves in “places of assembly, the fields, and the market”. Confessing to have been heavily influenced by both scholars, Miller (1987: 33), in developing a non-reductionist theory of material culture, scoped Hegel’s process of externalization into “objectification”, a process of becoming defined as the constant negotiating of the incompleteness of both human and artifact. Given that this is inherent in human and societal development, objectification would be an appropriate framework for evaluating the role of the umbrella within the 2014 Movement; in analysing how subject-artifact relations were formed in its initial stages, as well as how these relations have shaped public action and served in the production (and reproduction) of identity within urban spaces. To conclude this section, the role of the city and its architecture in creating an appearance, where residents could collectively dispute its public character and articulate a political demand, will also be reflected upon (Katz 2020: 203; Butler 2018: 71).

Some of the more influential additions to the field of material culture come from Bruno Latour (1999) and Alfred Gell (1998), both focusing on the term “agency” not only in relation to humans, but also to “matters” and objects. The former has famously applied the concept of “agency” to non-humans, focusing more on how a network of actants (human or not) is maintained rather than the 1 Zoom interview (by author) with Antony Dapiran, author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong, 12th November 2020. 2 Zoom interview (by author) with Ray Wong, co-founder of localist party Hong Kong Indigenous, 11th November 2020.

actants themselves – “B-52s do not fly,” says Latour (1999: 182), “the U.S. Air Force flies.” In any network, actants would be treated in the “same (truly symmetrical) way”, which has been criticized for “under-represent[ing] organic living things” (Jones 2009: 314). Gell, on the other hand, interprets the “agency” of objects as human agency embedded within objects, which dooms analytical discussions to a circular end, where subjects and objects ultimately cannot be differentiated. However, by assuming Latour’s stance, the discussion would be missing the “quality of the artifact redolent with prior historical creativity” (Miller 2005: 12). By drawing on objectification, in which both subject and artifact are incomplete and engaging in constant negotiation with each other at any given time, a circular discussion can be circumvented. Concomitantly, Miller retains the notion of the artifact, allowing discussions of subject-artifact relations to take place without privileging them over the subjects or objects themselves.

As a fundamental start to the umbrella’s narrative, due to Hong Kong’s frequent oscillation between rain and sun, the umbrella could first be conceptualized as an extension of the typical Hong Konger’s being – an objectification of his basic need for protection (Miller 1987: 119). This relation was reproduced in his confrontation of pepper spray and police batons (Bourdieu, 2010: 90-1), a situation which similarly called for the protection of oneself. Umbrellas henceforth also connoted defence, 3 serving as shields against a far more powerful force (Fig. 3). Bodies acting in concert, holding umbrellas and jointly pressed up against police lines, were at once a product and producer of this aspect of the umbrella’s symbolism, manifesting a space of appearance in which protesters could collectively negotiate the asymmetry of power (Fig. 4). Such material actions contributed to the virality of the digital image of “Umbrella Man”4 (Cram et al. 2016), where the eponymous protester, defiantly raising both his arms amidst the toxic cloud, embodied the umbrella as an objectification of power despite its powerlessness against tear gas. The umbrella as a symbol of power was affirmed in a “message from Hong Kong” delivered by The Atlantic on 29 September, in which a protester described how they “opened umbrellas and raised [their] hands” when they “felt threatened”; later more explicitly in Bloomberg’s reports on the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests (Fallows 2014; Whittaker 2019):

“The umbrella has been a symbol since the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and we use it to protect ourselves. But it gives us power. We stand at the back, but we can donate it to the front. We pass the power to them.”

- Elsa Chan, 30, protester

Fig. 2. Umbrella Man

Fig. 3. Protesters defending themselves with umbrellas against the Hong Kong police

These key successive steps of objectification produced a series of evolving subject-artifact (protester-umbrella) relations within the first few days of the Movement, which protesters could later capitalize on in the production (and reproduction) of “Umbrella Village”. By the evening of 28th September, the crowds in Admiralty were spontaneously morphing into largely self-sufficient occupations, with protesters pitching dome-shaped tents in three of Hong Kong’s downtown business districts, Admiralty, Mong Kok, and Causeway Bay (Dapiran 2020: 33). The largest of them, Harcourt Village (Admiralty), was a bricolage consisting of not just the necessary tents, rationed supply stations and study corners, but innumerable umbrellas and a constant weekly stream of physical umbrella-related artworks covering just about any vertical space available. Among the preponderance of artifacts was a 12-foot scrap wood reincarnation of “Umbrella Man”, a huge, overturned umbrella sculpture, and an ‘umbrella canopy’ – hundreds of broken umbrellas stitched together – straddling two footbridges over the Grand Stage, Harcourt’s de-facto command and geographical centre where movement leaders would give ceremonial speeches and make public announcements (Fig. 5, 6). Comparatively more mundane displays included umbrellas perched atop selected unsheltered tables and tent modules throughout the site, as well as “festival-marking [oversized and yellow] umbrellas”5 attached to lampposts along the camp’s boundaries (Ng 2016: 161, 215-8).

The performative gathering of bodies in Umbrella Village, constructing a mosaic of umbrellas as a “call to arms”6 for fellow protesters and global audiences, wheeling in to site the pre-assembled reincarnation of “Umbrella Man”, and hoisting oversized umbrellas onto lamp posts and tent modules, created a space of appearance, where a protester holding an umbrella, now a representation of power and resistance, could appear to others alike and “create a politics” negotiating the public character of the urban space (Mirzoeff 2017: 17; Butler 2018: 71). The act of affixing umbrellas and umbrella-related artifacts to the material surfaces of Harcourt Road (Fig. 7), repeatedly occurring over the course of the 79-day occupation, was thus the reproduction of this space of appearance. In their study on artifacts in the workplace, O’Toole and Were (2008: 626-8) noted the subject’s act of “[placing] objects in their personal space” was a “boundary-regulating” act of resistance meant to denote their territory. Similarly, the protesters were delineating their space, constantly using the umbrellas to draw and redraw the boundaries of Harcourt Village, for as long as they and their umbrellas were performing and “assembling together”, the public space of appearance would be sustained, where they would further be free to materially perform and assemble (Butler 2018: 72).

Zoom interview (by author) with Antony Dapiran.

Fig. 4. Protesters raising up their umbrellas

In evaluating the materiality of this appearance, the role of the city and the urban elements of Admiralty must also be considered. First and foremost, for any space of appearance to emerge there must be plurality, or “the idea that people must act in concert”; for plurality “there must exist a public realm”; and for a public realm to exist there must be a city (Katz 2020: 212) Ergo, the materiality of the city and its inherent condition of “[people living] so close together” (Arendt 1998: 199-201) remain foundational for any potentialities of action, making it possible for each protester to be “seen and heard by others”, together deciding on how to “influence their realities” (Katz 2020: 212). Second, as much as the formation of Umbrella Village might have appeared wholly spontaneous, the location in which protesters chose to camp was far from that. In The Human Condition, what grounded Arendt’s (1998) understanding of the public exercising of rights was the classical Greek polis and the Roman agora (Butler 2018: 72); in Hong Kong, there is an abject lack of truly public space. Majority of the city’s space belongs to the state, real-estate developers or equivalent capitalist conglomerates, which would explain the 2014 encampments, where protesters fashioned Harcourt Road, surrounded by multiple imposing financial centres, into Umbrella Village, a temporary agora through which the “securitization” of Hong Kong’s ‘public’ space could be exposed (Dapiran 2020: 79; Ramadan and Pascucci 2018: 205).

More importantly, the site was already politically potent, in that it housed state institutions symbolic of the “second colonization of Hong Kong” (Ng 2016: 86-7) – Tamar Government Headquarters, LegCo7 Building, the Police Headquarters, and the Civic Square (Fig. 8), perceived by protesters as instruments wielded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to perpetuate Chinese rule and thereby assimilate the city with the rest of Mainland China. From their takeover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty in 1997, the CCP, through their figureheads in LegCo, had rolled out aggressive plans to “Sinofy” the city, including a proposal for a compulsory patriotic curriculum (2011) intended to inculcate love for the motherland into young Hong Kongers. This had resulted in mass protests outside the Government Headquarters, constituting Admiralty’s political potence and speaking volumes regarding the efficacy of political protests when the government eventually did withdraw the proposal (Dapiran 2020: 32). It was thus far from a coincidence that in 2014, protesters chose to wield umbrellas and appear to each other in Admiralty, a site whose role in creating the space of appearance was its very representation of colonization, magnifying their political statement of defiance against their colonizers (Ramadan and Pascucci 2018: 201).

Fig. 5. (left) Giant umbrella sculpture; (middle) Umbrella Man statue; (right) umbrellas in the Study Corner

Fig. 6. (left) Canopy of umbrellas; (middle) scrap-wood Umbrella Man statue; (right) Oversized umbrellas on lamp posts

7 Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, overseen by the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China.

II. The Role of Digital Artifacts

“Can digital artifacts have materiality?” Paul M. Leonardi (2010) asks, suggesting the materiality of digital artifacts could be found in its provision of “hard constraints and affordances”, terms that had earlier been coined by James Gibson (1983: 285); at any given time, a subject (human observer) uses a constant object based on an affordance – a particular property he perceives in the object. Gibson’s account of affordances has been accused by Costall and Richards (2013: 87) of being “static” and deterministic, “of meanings inhering in objects just waiting to be discovered” while failing to consider that humans were actors just as much as they were observers. More recently, this conceptual framework has been applied to technological artifacts, ranging from digital imagery to social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) by Khazraee and Novak (2018) and Urman et al. (2021), all of whom acknowledge that the affordances of digital artifacts shape and are shaped by human action.

Fig. 7. Map of protest site, with artifacts marked out

Fig. 8. Surrounding context of Harcourt Village (light grey portion)

Khazraee and Novak have stressed the significance of social media’s8 affordance for performance to social movements, referring to opportunities for the construction of collective identity, through the rhythmic sharing and viewing of multimedia featuring similar symbols. In analysing the role of encrypted messengers (e.g., Telegram) in protest mobilization, Urman et al. primarily focus on their affordance for an alternative mode of protest coordination, allowing strategic discussions to take place while preserving the anonymity of participants. Given that the Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests generated a constant stream of viral protest performances, while the latter’s decentralized organization was largely contingent on the affordances of Telegram, affordance theory would be useful in understanding the role of digital artifacts. First, the role of mainstream and social media will be analysed through their affordance for performance, examining how it influences the staging of physical protest performances, in turn shaping subsequent digital imagery produced. Second, the role of Telegram will be analysed through its affordance for an alternative mode of protest coordination, enabling a more decentralized mode of embodied protest in the city. Taking the continuous reconfiguration of the Lennon Wall as a case study, this section will then conclude with additional reflections on how digital and physical artifacts work together to create a space of appearance.

Mainstream and social media’s affordance for performance refers to the possibility to rhythmically capture and post digital imagery bearing similar iconography, which over a period of sharing and reposting, could concretize the emergence of a new (viral) symbol representing the Movement, fostering collective identification with an online crowd (Khazraee and Novak 2018: 9; Gerbaudo 2015: 916). In the 2014 Movement, this had a rather cyclical effect, in that it shaped the staging of performances (involving physical artifacts) to be captured as digital imagery, the viewing and sharing of which would in turn shape subsequent physical performances (Lee 2015). The precondition for a viral digital image was the “memetic” character9 of the physical artifacts captured within the image, derived from a range of performative and spatial strategies.

Big. Light. Easy. Artistic. Fast. These are the “five points of protest art” Hong Kong activist artist Kacey Wong (2019) stands by for the creation of memetic protest performances; performative and spatial strategies he had coined after participating in the 2014 Movement. In order to achieve the qualities “Fast” (as in possessing the capacity for virality), “Light” (as in “lightweight”) and “Easy” (as in immediately intelligible for accidental viewers), protesters drew upon recognizable visual icons (Fig. 9), printing out absurd posters of superheroes posing with yellow umbrellas and tacking them to a large stand within the encampment. The memetic character of such artworks stems from an identification with figures devoid of “heavy ideological baggage”, allowing them to be rapidly adopted, imitated, and shared by an online crowd (Gerbaudo 2015: 920-4). An artwork that exemplified the above qualities, while also being “Big” (as in visible from afar), was the Lennon Wall, hand-written sticky notes plastered to the outdoor staircase of Tamar Government Headquarters, whose iconography originated from a message-covered wall in central Prague containing “themes of peace, love and democracy” John Lennon had espoused prior to his death (Fig. 11). The memetic character of its online imagery

8 Facebook, Twitter, or even mainstream media.

9 Possessing the capacity to “spread with extreme rapidity” (Gerbaudo 2015: 920-4).

Fig. 9. ‘Superhero’ posters

also derives from the ideologically “antagonistic” urban surface on which the Wall was inscribed – that of a state building perceived by protesters to be representative of colonial rule (Feigenbaum et al. 2013: 193; Patsiaouras et al. 2018: 78).

This was perhaps the clearest example of how social media’s affordance for performance was harnessed in tandem with the physical act of affixing a post-it to the Lennon Wall, essentially an objectification of one’s support for the Movement. Similar to the “Umbrella Man” image, whose virality played a crucial role in cementing the umbrella as an objectification of power, the deluge of photographs depicting protesters embodying the post-its and making contact with the Wall concretized its emergence as a prominent symbol of the Movement. This further spawned “representation[s] of representation[s]” (Lee 2015), subsequent digital imagery of others enacting similar performances for collective identification online (Fig. 10). As Mirzoeff (2017: 34) writes, there exists a “potential, latent” space of appearance in digital documentation, prefiguring future performative possibilities. What he failed to mention, however, was that social media’s performative affordance catalysed the physical and real reproduction of “latent” appearances, encouraging protesters to appear to each other and perform similar acts within the same space, in turn generating more “latent” appearances.

Finally, “Artistic” action was the bodily showcasing of craftsmanship that could express appreciation for other protesters, such as Wong’s (2019) own example of performing blind portraiture for – while talking to – other protesters in thirty seconds, subsequently giving them the drawing as a souvenir and symbol of their courage. The virality of the artwork derives from its lure as a gimmick, that according to Ngai (2020: 55-6), simultaneously does too much and too little. In Theory of a Gimmick, she singles out the film The Way Things Go (1987), where the performance of anticlimactically ordinary tasks (e.g., sharpening a pencil) in “painstakingly elaborate ways” seemed “excessively laborious but also strangely too easy”. Wong’s intent was simply to strike up conversation with fellow protesters. To build up the memetic character of the performance’s media documentation, however, he could not merely converse; he had to perform blind portraiture, an act that was both unnecessary and necessary at the same time (Fig. 11)

Fig. 10. Appropriations of the Lennon Wall running down Tim Mei Avenue in 2014

Although this essay has, up to this point, mainly discussed the protest camps of the Umbrella Movement, examining the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests reveals the crucial affordance of messaging applications such as Telegram for an alternative mode of protest coordination, enabling a more mobile and decentralized version of embodied protest in the city. The 2014 encampments had been effective in generating symbolism upon fixed grounds, yet the later stage of the Movement was characterized by growing antipathy among protesters toward the rather undemocratic presence of a central leadership committee. Additionally, following the mass arrests of student leaders after the Movement ended (Branigan and Ilaria 2014), it was decided that a more transient inhabitation of targeted spaces would be vital to the protection of students’ identities and futures.10 Foundational to the 2019 protests was thus the absence of a core leadership committee, as well as a new motto – to figuratively and physically “Be Water!” This meant performative action from here on out had to be “formless [and] shapeless”, transient and fleeting, leaderless and yet somehow structured (Wong 2019).

The affordances of encrypted messaging applications, most notably Telegram, was the precondition to achieving this motto. It is important to acknowledge that platforms like Twitter or Facebook have also enabled so-called ‘leaderless’ movements to emerge, such as the #Jan25 protests in Tahrir Square, yet the presence of a public feed eventually allowed certain individuals (e.g., @gsquare86 and @monasosh) to be identified through higher incidences of “retweeting, mentions, and commenting”, organically emerging as defacto ‘leaders’ with more influence to mobilize protesters (Papacharissi 2014: 46). This is comparatively harder to achieve on Telegram and other similar applications, devoid of a public feed sharing function and equipped with secret chats, unsending of chat messages, and anonymous forwarding. Crucial affordances include Telegram’s poll function and extraordinarily large groups anyone can join and post in (Urman et al. 2021). Within each online chat group (the largest could have “upwards of 200,000 members”), a protester could start a poll on the platform regarding their next course of action, “ranging from which buildings to target, to when to move on”, and others would vote immediately, facilitated by discussions “among smaller subgroups of protesters” on the ground (Dapiran 2020: 50-6). This also proved to be useful for reconnaissance, where protesters could raise immediate awareness on possible police presence.

Such affordances allowed them to adopt a highly agile mode of performing protest in the city, in which bodies could, like water, flow out onto the streets, dispersing and regrouping elsewhere within a much shorter time period, particularly if there was a possibility of meeting with police opposition. Upon blockading Harcourt Road to ward off riot police, protesters immediately splintered off into groups of only a “few hundred” bodies and camped temporarily at government buildings such as Tamar Government Headquarters and LegCo, leaving and flowing on to the next government facility when offices would close in response. This was in essence a more dynamic and transient revival of the 2014 encampments,11 for these locales were exactly where protesters had camped then, meaning the political potence of each site remained integral to creating a space of appearance regardless of the change in protest tactics (Section I).

In line with their “Be Water!” approach, protesters chose to let protest spaces ‘bloom’ in everyday spaces across the city, “engaging the populace where they found them”. A crucial implication was that protesters had to, in a much shorter timeframe, create spaces

Zoom interview (by author) with Ray Wong.

Zoom interview (by author) with Antony Dapiran.

Fig. 11. Wong performing blind portraiture during the 2014 Umbrella Movement

of appearance in decentralized spaces, mostly located near or in residential areas (2020: 82). In smaller groups, they gathered to reconstitute the Lennon Wall – which had already emerged in 2014 as a viral physical artifact representative of protesters’ resistance against colonization12 – with transitory spaces such as storefronts, footbridges, underpasses, and MTR stations, turning them into spaces of “gathering and exchange” amongst passers-by and visitors (2020: 84-8). While these spaces experienced a considerable volume of daily traffic, social media’s performative affordance crucially augmented their visibility, allowing people to appear to each other in front of a wider Internet audience, thus facilitating the creation of an appearance. Digital images of people affixing post-its to the walls of Tai Po underpass, one of the more monumental Lennon Walls, were circulated online, encouraging viewers to create ‘similar’ physical embodiments within the underpass or an equivalent space (2020: 85; Fig. 12).

One such (successive) embodiment occurred in the 26 July 2019 airport sit-in, where protesters offered their bodies and limbs as human Lennon Walls, to which other protesters could affix post-its (Fig. 13), standing motionless as if to blend in with the hard floors of the airport (2020: 84-8). This was a product of protesters deciding a mere sit-in was not nearly enough spectacle for the international and Internet audiences,13 a gimmick that was at once unnecessary and necessary. Yet it was also a product of many other processes, enabled by digital affordances and all the Lennon Walls that had come before, that worked to condition protesters into reproducing a ‘similar’ space of appearance; from the original iconography of Prague’s Lennon Wall to the “latent” and physical spaces of appearance created during the Umbrella Movement, to the digitally enabled “Be Water!” mode of protest, and by extension the decentralized “latent” and physical spaces of appearance in 2019.

“You can tear down Lennon Walls. You cannot tear down ideas.”

- Protester slogan

Fig. 12. Lennon Wall in Tai Po underpass

Fig. 13. Human Lennon Walls

interview

author) with Antony Dapiran.

Conclusions

Prominent protest camps have historically inhabited expansive ‘public’ squares, whose political potencies played roles in defining the identity of the respective movements; Tahrir Square in the #Jan25 protests (2011), Zuccotti Park in Occupy Wall Street (2011), and the temporary Umbrella Village in the Umbrella Movement. Such displays are also testament to the fact that the ‘publicness’ of a space has increasingly been defined less by parameters of ownership (Hou 2019), but rather by the gathering of bodies within, altogether creating an appearance and contesting its ‘publicness’. The spatial visibility of Harcourt Road has enabled protesters to appear to each other, holding umbrellas for power and altogether making a statement of resistance to the wider public and to their oppressors, a scenario that has continued to hold even in the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests, where protesters flowed like water yet still camped – albeit for a shorter period – in front of the exact government institutions surrounding Harcourt Village in 2014.

Mirzoeff (2017: 18) says, “Any appearance takes place in a specific space, loaded with histories and inequalities.” While that is certainly true, the “Be Water!” approach, which has seen protesters creating appearances in just about any trafficked space, raises questions about what ‘visible’, politically charged spaces are as platforms for protests in the city. Everyday spaces can be made politically charged by protesters holding physical artifacts such as post-its (representative of democracy and resistance) and affixing them to the walls of these spaces, creating appearances by gathering and recreating Lennon Walls. Concomitantly, digital artifacts (social media, digital photographs, etc.) and their affordances augment the visibility of such spaces and enable the prefiguring of successive physical appearances, allowing the spaces to emerge as ‘visible’ and politically charged. Only then can protesters properly create spaces of appearance, make a statement of resistance, and dispute the very ‘publicness’ of the spaces they inhabit.

Total Word Count (including in-text citations and in-text figure numbers | excluding title, headers, name, figure captions, bibliography and image references) = 4999

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———. “Under the Umbrellas: Conceptualising Umbrella Movement Space.” Master of Arts, The University of Hong Kong, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5353/th_991044049992803414

———. Interview by Rachel Sim. Zoom interview, November 12, 2021.

Fallows, James. “‘When We Felt Threatened, We Opened Umbrellas and Raised Our Hands.’” The Atlantic, September 29, 2014, sec. Global. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/when-we-felt-threatened-we-opened-umbrellas-and-raisedour-hands/380876/

Feigenbaum, Anna, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy. Protest Camps. London: New York: Zed Books, 2013.

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Gerbaudo, Paolo. “Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave.” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (August 3, 2015): 916–29. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/1369118X.2015.1043316.

Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Grovier, Kelly. “Black Lives Matter Protests: Why Are Statues so Powerful?” BBC, June 12, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/culture/ article/20200612-black-lives-matter-protests-why-are-statues-so-powerful.

Grundy, Tom. “Hong Kong’s Lady Liberty Statue Vandalised after Being Installed atop Lion Rock.” Hong Kong Free Press. October 14, 2019. https://hongkongfp.com/2019/10/14/hong-kongs-lady-liberty-statue-vandalised-installed-atop-lion-rock/

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by M. J. Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Hou, Jeff. “Be Water, as in Liquid Public Space.” Medium (blog), March 28, 2020. https://houjeff.medium.com/be-water-as-inliquid-public-space-8148a2c80026

———. “Hong Kong’s Sticky-Note Revolution.” Smithsonian Magazine, January 24, 2020, sec. Travel, Arts & Culture, Articles. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hong-kongs-sticky-note-revolution-180974042/.

Jones, O. “Nature-Culture.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 309–23.

Oxford: Elsevier, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008044910-4.00716-1

Kacey Wong. Art of Protest TEDxVienna by Kacey Wong, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh0lfHti6O0

Katz, Irit. “Precariousness and Protest: Negotiating Urban Refuge in Cairo and Tel Aviv.” In Being Urban: Community, Conflict and Belonging in the Middle East, edited by Simon Goldhill, 1st ed., 201–15. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003021391

Katz, Irit, Diana Martín, and Claudio Minca, eds. “Urban Protest Camps in Egypt: The Occupation, (Re)Creation, and Destruction of Alternative Political Worlds.” In Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology, 197–212. Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds. London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018.

Khazraee, Emad, and Alison N. Novak. “Digitally Mediated Protest: Social Media Affordances for Collective Identity Construction.” Social Media + Society 4, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118765740

Kim, Eun-Sung. “The Material Culture of Korean Social Movements.” Journal of Material Culture 22, no. 2 (June 2017): 194–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183517703796.

Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Lee, Wing Ki. “Xi Jinping at the ‘Occupy’ Sites: Derivative Works and Participatory Propaganda from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (2014).” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, no. 1 (Fall 2015). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0006.107.

Leonardi, Paul M. “Digital Materiality? How Artifacts without Matter, Matter.” First Monday 15, no. 6 (June 7, 2010). https:// firstmonday.org/article/view/3036/2567

Miller, Daniel. “Artefacts and the Meaning of Things.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, edited by Tim Ingold, 2nd ed., 396–419. London: Routledge, 2002.

———.

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———, ed. “Materiality: An Introduction.” In Materiality, 1–50. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2005.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. [NAME], 2017.

Ng, Jason Y. Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement Uncovered. Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2016.

Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020.

O’Toole, Paddy, and Prisca Were. “Observing Places: Using Space and Material Culture in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Research 8, no. 5 (November 2008): 616–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794108093899.

Papacharissi, Zizi. “Affective News and Networked Publics.” In Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics, 30–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001

Patsiaouras, Georgios, Anastasia Veneti, and William Green. “Marketing, Art and Voices of Dissent: Promotional Methods of Protest Art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” Marketing Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2018): 75–100. https://doi. org/10.1177/1470593117724609.

Taylor, Adam. “The Humble Umbrella’s Surprising Role in Hong Kong’s Huge Protests.” Washington Post. Accessed November 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/09/29/the-humble-umbrellas-surprising-role-in-hong-kongshuge-protests/

Urman, Aleksandra, Justin Chun-ting Ho, and Stefan Katz. “Analyzing Protest Mobilization on Telegram: The Case of 2019 AntiExtradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong.” Edited by Chang Sup Park. PLOS ONE 16, no. 10 (October 8, 2021): e0256675. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256675.

Whiteaker, Chloe. “The Essential Tool for Hong Kong Protesters? An Umbrella.” Bloomberg, September 20, 2019. https://www.

bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-hong-kong-protesters-umbrellas/

Wong, Ray. Interview by Rachel Sim. Zoom interview, November 11, 2021.

Image References

Fig. 1. (left) A decapitated statue of Columbus in Boston; (right) Hong Kong’s Lady Liberty toppled on Lion Rock

Image source(s): Grovier, Kelly. “Black Lives Matter Protests: Why Are Statues So Powerful?” BBC, June 12, 2020. https://www. bbc.com/culture/article/20200612-black-lives-matter-protests-why-are-statues-so-powerful; Grundy, Tom. “Hong Kong’s Lady Liberty Statue Vandalised after Being Installed atop Lion Rock.” Hong Kong Free Press. October 14, 2019. https://hongkongfp. com/2019/10/14/hong-kongs-lady-liberty-statue-vandalised-installed-atop-lion-rock/

Fig. 2. Umbrella Man

Image source(s): Weisenthal, Joe. “This Is the Iconic Hong Kong Photo the World Will Never Forget.” Business Insider, September 29, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/umbrella-man-hong-kong-2014-9

Fig. 3. Protesters defending themselves with umbrellas against the Hong Kong police

Image source(s): Hernandez, Marco, and Simon Scarr. “Coordinating Chaos: The Tactics Protesters Use to Fortify the Frontlines.” Reuters Graphics, July 12, 2019. https://graphics.reuters.com/HONGKONG-EXTRADITIONSTACTICS/0100B0790FL/index.html

Fig. 4. Protesters raising up their umbrellas

Image source(s): Taylor, Adam. “The Humble Umbrella’s Surprising Role in Hong Kong’s Huge Protests.” Washington Post Accessed November 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/09/29/the-humble-umbrellassurprising-role-in-hong-kongs-huge-protests/; Weisenthal, Joe. “This Is the Iconic Hong Kong Photo the World Will Never Forget.” Business Insider, September 29, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/umbrella-man-hong-kong-2014-9

Fig. 5. (left) Giant umbrella sculpture; (middle) Umbrella Man statue; (right) umbrellas in the Study Corner

Image source(s): Ng, Jason Y. Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement Uncovered. Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2016.

Fig. 6. (left) Canopy of umbrellas; (middle) scrap-wood Umbrella Man statue; (right) oversized umbrellas on lamp posts

Image source(s): Image source(s): Dapiran, Antony. “Under the Umbrellas: Conceptualising Umbrella Movement Space.” Master of Arts, The University of Hong Kong, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5353/th_991044049992803414; Patsiaouras, Georgios, Anastasia Veneti, and William Green. “Marketing, Art and Voices of Dissent: Promotional Methods of Protest Art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” Marketing Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2018): 75–100. https://doi. org/10.1177/1470593117724609; Wilde, Crystal. “The Art of Democracy: The Fight to Save Hong Kong’s Protest Art.” Coconuts Hong Kong, October 17, 2014. https://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/art-democracy-fight-save-hong-kongs-protestart/

Fig. 7. Map of protest site, with artifacts marked out

Image source(s): Tsang, Emily. “Mapping out the Protest Sites for History.” South China Morning Post, December 10, 2014, sec. News. Of https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1659236/mapping-out-protest-sites-history

Fig. 8. Surrounding context of Harcourt Village (light grey portion)

Image source(s): Ng, Jason Y. Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement Uncovered. Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2016.

Fig. 9. ‘Superhero’ posters

Image source(s): Patsiaouras, Georgios, Anastasia Veneti, and William Green. “Marketing, Art and Voices of Dissent: Promotional Methods of Protest Art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” Marketing Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2018):

Fig. 10. Appropriations of the Lennon Wall running down Tim Mei Avenue in 2014

Image source(s): Hou, Jeff. “Hong Kong’s Sticky-Note Revolution.” Smithsonian Magazine, January 24, 2020, sec. Travel, Arts & Culture, Articles. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hong-kongs-sticky-note-revolution-180974042/; “The Lennon Wall in Hong Kong.” D+A Magazine, May 7, 2021.

Fig. 11. Wong performing blind portraiture during the 2014 Umbrella Movement

Image source(s): Kacey Wong. Art of Protest TEDxVienna by Kacey Wong, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sh0lfHti6O0

Fig. 12. Lennon Wall in Tai Po underpass

Image source(s): Hou, Jeff. “Hong Kong’s Sticky-Note Revolution.” Smithsonian Magazine, January 24, 2020, sec. Travel, Arts & Culture, Articles. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hong-kongs-sticky-note-revolution-180974042/; “The Lennon Wall in Hong Kong.” D+A Magazine, May 7, 2021.

Fig. 13. Human Lennon Walls

Image source(s): Jakubal, Mikal. “Lennon Wall Hong Kong.” Mikal Jakubal (blog), Jakubal. https://www.mikaljakubal.com/ lennon-wall-hong-kong/

Reconceptualizing Female Spectatorship: Investigations into the Docufilm and the “Postdocumentary”

Rachel Sim Jing Xi National University of Singapore

Introduction

40 years on, Laura Mulvey’s 1975 seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema continues to hold its invariable weight. The first to elucidate the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian models of spectatorship for an exposé of patriarchal cinema, Mulvey capitalized on classic Hollywood film’s proclivity to “voyeurism, fetishism, and narcissism”; all of which characterized a self-referential system that governed and psychically reproduced these conventions.1 Accordingly, the moving images shown on the cinematic screen perpetuated an entrenched polarity – males, the bearer and agent of the look, and females, the mere objects of spectacle, part of and yet inconsequential to the broader filmic narrative.2

Though historicized and now considered essential to feminist film theory, response to the essay in the following decade would reveal the somewhat Manichean angle from which Mulvey wrote rubbed many the wrong way. Other than the obvious absent mention of the female spectator, scholars such as Gertrud Koch criticized the impossibility of conceptualizing the female spectator as being anything more than a phallic ‘lack’ or a “sexual difference”.3 Later, Mulvey herself, in Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), reinforced this rhetoric; acknowledging the melodrama’s female spectator and defining her unconscious enjoyment of the hero’s “control over the diegetic world” through a reconnection with her repressed masculinity.4 Like the female protagonist Pearl in Duel in the Sun then, the female spectator oscillates between “passive femininity” and “regressive masculinity”, at this point no longer a mere pawn in the overarching narrative, but an embodiment of sexual difference all the same.5

Miriam Hansen notes, in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, that most investigations seeking to define female spectatorship have largely delved into two different perspectives: The first, predominantly male-addressed classic Hollywood cinema, such as “the gangster film”,6 or “women = sexuality”7 melodramas (as Mulvey had discussed in Afterthoughts), defining female spectatorship as oscillating and transvestite; or the second, explicitly female-addressed Hollywood films that positioned the “malehero-performer” as the erotic object, aligning the desiring gaze with the female spectator only to reinforce the precondition required for the female to appropriate the gaze – passive femininity, once again perpetuating the patriarchal system of sexual difference.8

However, a revision of this seemingly inevitable patriarchal binary might give us an opportunity to see it in less Manichean terms. Complicating the oscillation beyond its biological roots would reveal that it holds significant basis in female spectators’ daily experiences as women;9 and if the conventional structure of filmic content were to be reconfigured to consider wider consumption patterns, whether through the use of a widely-recognizable “star” or an emergent form of “postdocumentary”, the resulting female viewing experience could perhaps be accorded more agency. Additionally, given Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema to a large extent relies on spectator identification, John Caughie’s commentary10 in Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ – Dreams of Leaving could be utilized toward its subversion. Via the analysis of various counter cinema forms, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Grey Gardens (1975), and even Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007-), this essay ultimately aims to re-evaluate the fundamental

1 Hansen, Miriam. “Male Star, Female Fans.” In Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, 249. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.

2 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1, 1975): 11. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

3 Koch, Gertrud. “Ex-Changing the Gaze: Re-Visioning Feminist Film Theory.” New German Critique, no. 34 (1985): 142. https://doi.org/10.2307/488342

4 Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” In Visual and Other Pleasures, 35. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9

5 Ibid.

6 Hansen, “Male Star, Female Fans,” 249.

7 Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” 35.

8 Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, 21. New York: Rout ledge, 1991.

9 Ibid. It should be noted that Hansen does not explicitly discuss wider societal conventions at this point in her book, yet she acknowledges filmic constructions could be reconfigured according to the “historical basis in the viewers’ experience as women,” namely, their class, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference. My state ment was made with the consideration that all these experiences are after all moulded by societal conventions.

10 Caughie, J. “Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ - Dreams of Leaving.” Screen 22, no. 4 (December 1, 1981): 9–31. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/22.4.9

conditions required for Mulvey’s traditional Hitchcockian-type ‘gaze’, thereby creating avenues through which female spectatorship could arguably be granted more opportunity and control.

I. “Delayed Cinema”

In Section III of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which Mulvey had famously titled “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look”, it was asserted that the appearance of the woman-as-sexual-object bore a “to-be-looked-at-ness” that froze the “flow of [heroic male] action” within the film, providing a form of “erotic contemplation” for the spectator without disrupting the overall diegesis. Insofar as the traditional Hollywood film was concerned, this constituted one of the key temporary ‘plot-delaying’ (that is, the slowing down of filmic time) devices that performed well within the filmic narrative; an otherwise alien presence that still allowed for a synthesis of two gazes crucial to the formation of the “Look”: the gaze of the spectator and that of the male protagonists.11 The employment of the “show-girl” device, for instance, weaved the erotic and visual impact of Marilyn Monroe into The River of No Return (1954); her performance of One Silver Dollar which, like typical musical song-and-dance numbers,12 served as the temporary holder of the male protagonist’s “Look” (Fig. 1). She, the erotic spectacle, holds the spectator’s gaze (both in the film and in real life) as he continues his ongoing search for his son in the tent where she performs, made exceptionally apparent by the shifting angles of his gaze upon the tent’s inhabitants while ambling past her audience. The continuity of his gaze – upon which the overall narrative, his search, hinges on – does not break, and gravitates to Monroe at two points throughout the duration of his search, an act which momentarily delays the flow of his action, and in itself cleanly unifies the two prerequisite gazes with nary a break in the overarching narrative. The real-life male spectator, enraptured by Monroe’s isolated glamour on the foreground stage when she enters and begins singing, first appropriates her on-screen audiences’ gaze in an undertaking of “fetishistic scopophilia”, essentially consuming her physical beauty and morphing it into something satisfying before repeating the process when the male protagonist himself finally turns his gaze to Monroe.13

Crucial to the success of this unification, as Mulvey contends, is the extent to which the film elicits a form of “erotic contemplation” amongst its real life audience, which in turn is contingent on the integration of the ‘plot-delaying’ device – woman-as-sexual-object – within the linearity of the overarching filmic narrative, as well as the distracting quality of the ‘plot-delaying’ device itself. The quality of woman-as-sexual-object was to be found in fetishistic scopophilia and the voyeuristic tendencies of the male spectator. In Death 24x a Second, however, Mulvey herself optimistically wrote of evolving a “curious spectator” who was driven by factors other than voyeurism, namely, the innate human desire to “decipher the screen”; a process that corresponded to “the human mind’s longstanding interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles.”14 This fundamental human desire was not specific to any sort of gender (Mulvey had not specified any), and could be activated by an alternative form of “delayed cinema”, one that could potentially be extracted from the avant-garde silent film and its employment of the freeze-frame. In other words, rather than the woman-as-sexualobject essentially coercing the spectator into a state of erotic contemplation, the freeze-frame could evoke general contemplation in ways that would liberate him or her from the suffocating confines of sexual division.15

“The

“The

Stilled.”

Second:

Obscura 3, no. 24 (1990):

Image,

London: Reaktion Books,

https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-8-3_24-98

Fig. 1. The male protagonist, Matt Calder, combing the tent for his son, from The River of No Return (1954)

In Deleuzian terms, we could think of the freeze-frame as a privileged “any-instant-whatever”,16 albeit not a single pose or posture as in sculptures from antiquity, but rather an instant that so happens “cannot help but be remarkable or singular”; a ‘plotdelaying’ device that interrupts the flow of action and breaks up the linearity of classical cinema’s conventional narrative, via a “remarkable” privileged instant whose constituents are repeatedly revived throughout the film’s length.17 Raymond Bellour speaks of this phenomenon as a reintroduction of the ‘photograph’ into film, and more specifically, a re-representation of the photograph as a diffused collective of meaningful instants, which in itself also bears the added effect of unsettling the spectator’s perception of time.18 We might see this most prominently in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, where approximately 22 or so minutes into the film (the point at which the galloping horse just about constitutes the screen’s majority), the moving image stills itself into a series of ‘photographs’; the galloping horse lugging a carriage, two passing women having a chat, carriages juxtaposed with people on foot, both bumbling down the streets of Moscow alike, two women with the luxury of being ferried, to a more aerial instant of the streets in its entirety (Fig. 2). It is by virtue of the freeze-frames that the spectator retrospectively realizes the prior build-up to each one, with every ‘paralyzed’ subject traced back to a fragmented series of moving images injected intermittently since the beginning of the film.19

The ‘privileged-instant’ of the galloping horse for example, had been prefigured by the cycling doll in the window, followed by the faster moving trams; the increased energy channelled significantly into the sped-up movements of the man cycling with his cart, only to be halted abruptly with the considerably more laid back shot of people walking down the streets. Vertov, however, revives the moving image of the cycling man directly after, and following that we once again see the faster movements of the cargo train and the trams, then yet again the image of the train, this time zoomed in to one of its windows, and finally that of the trams again, with each consecutive movement faster than the last. Following two more shots of horses drawing carriages do we see the moving wheels of the same train, mirroring the speed of the fast-moving carriages in the next shot. And the finale of the seemingly languorous build up –the galloping horse – comes into the spectator’s view, halted momentarily by the reintroduction of the camera man, before returning to same frame and ultimately stilling into Bellour’s notion of a ‘photograph’ (Fig. 3).

and Barbara Habberjam.

This almost-obsessive repetition of action and its various speeds advanced by Vertov, distributed intermittently across the length of the film, veritably ‘delays’ the flow of action by taking apart the conventional linearity of traditional Hollywood cinema, in this case, the narrative of speed. Such a ‘plot-delaying’ device would produce “shifts of consciousness between temporalities”,20 or in Deleuzian terms, “a qualitative change in a whole”; a shift in the spectator’s perception of time, based off the introduction of new movement undertaken by the same matter within the film.21 Mulvey had concluded in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema:

The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.

There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest’, and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms.22

Then, the “Look”, so heavily dependent on the linearity of conventional cinema and the concept of erotic contemplation (which enraptured the spectator so), could be destroyed with the fragmentation of the former and the replacement of the latter – a more innocent, curious form of contemplation evoked by the freeze-frame and repetition of the same matter; that which was not predicated solely on sexual division. Mostly importantly, this was a spectatorship that the female audience could partake in, one that stemmed from the genderless “pleasure of decipherment” and the freeing of the camera’s gaze into the “materiality of time and space”.23

Mulvey, “The Pensive Spectator,” 181-96.

Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 8.

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 18.

Mulvey, Laura. “The Possessive Spectator.” In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 165. London: Reaktion Books, 2015; Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 18.

Fig. 2. [From left to right] Series of ‘photographs’, from Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

II. Destabilization and “Distanciation”

Post-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema scholarship, according to fellow feminist scholar Miriam Hansen, was to venture into complicating Mulvey’s rather Manichean analysis of spectatorial cross-dressing, that which bound female spectatorship to a binary system of “passive femininity” and “regressive masculinity”.24 Such an analysis indubitably held importance to the advancement of feminist film theory, particularly in establishing a biologically-rooted gendered aspect to the cinematic pleasure of looking. Yet as Mulvey herself regrettably admitted a decade or so later, in Unmasking the Gaze: Some Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History, the spectator, whether male or female, would inevitably lose his or her identity in the all-consuming erotic dynamic of traditional cinema’s “way of seeing” and the contemplation (of a similar nature) it evoked.25 Thankfully, this identity, according to Hansen and many other film theorists and critics alike, was – and continues to be – inextricably tied to sociocultural factors beyond the cinematic screen and auditorium; and like it or not, these factors in reality had already formed a reciprocal relationship with the cinematic realm, the latter, in particular, playing an integral role in “streamlining, reinforcing and recycling” the former.26

[From left to right] Jumbled up constituents of the ‘photographs’, from Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” 35.

Gaze:

Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History.” Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, no. 7 (2001): 5. https://

Hansen had earlier convincingly suggested, in her study of the wildly popular 1920s film star Rudolph Valentino, a purposeful ambivalence in – or ‘feminization’ of – his on-screen persona, undermining traditional patriarchal hierarchies by functioning as both object and subject of the “Look”.27 Insofar as sexual difference is a cultural construct that can be commodified and subject to wider consumer patterns, Valentino, a male character whose gaze was perennially advertised by tabloids and fan magazines, himself eventually became erotically commodified by millions of female gazes. This partial flip in the conventional erotic dynamic, termed female scopophilia by Hansen, was then absorbed into Blood and Sand (1922), where upon fixing his eyes on Carmen, Valentino’s character enters a momentary stasis, entranced by her beauty and “behaving like the rabbit rather than the snake”, the timid rather than the aggressor (Fig. 4).28 During the period of the camera’s oscillation between Valentino’s own gaze and Carmen’s, the latter blocks and suspends the former’s flow of activity, trapping him within a trance that lifts only with her tossing of a flower to him, a symbolic gesture that effectively transfers power (resumption of narrative flow) into her feminine hands. It is in this moment that Valentino’s gaze, diluted once already due to his foreground positioning on stage (a gendered flip of Monroe’s positioning as the show-girl in The River of No Return), undergoes a veritable feminization, in so destabilizing and diluting conventional conceptions of the male protagonist. A strong female gaze within diegesis, such as that of Carmen’s, would ultimately grant legitimacy to that of the female spectator.29

Mulvey,

Fig. 4. Juan (Valentino) captivated by Carmen’s (Lila Lee) beauty, from Blood and Sand (1922)

Spectatorship in

Silent Film

Fig. 5. The Olympic Team’s roll call cut short by the entrances of Lorelei (Monroe) and Dorothy (Russell), from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

This thesis of destabilization was later broadened by Mulvey (to include female protagonists), who in response to theorists such as Hansen, acknowledged the limitations of psychoanalytic integrity and the concomitant necessity to approach cinema from its particular socio-economic zeitgeist.30 Arguing through the lens of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Mulvey wrote of the “feminization of spectacle”, that which accompanied the advent of “mass entertainment and its commodification in the twentieth century”, granting the modern female spectator more fluidity and experimentation with various spectator positions. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes then, existed as a perfect exemplification of the phenomenon not only due to the film’s inherent satirising of the feminine spectacle, but Monroe’s own embodiment of Hollywood glamour and eroticized femininity.31 Shortly past the beginning of the film, we see the Olympic Team in the midst of a roll call, only to be interrupted by the collective entrance of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe; in this sequence, both actresses transform the stairs upon which they descend into metaphorical stages, making the Team (embodying also the real-life audience’s gaze) spectators of their spectacle. As they register the Team’s gazes, Dorothy puts on a knowing smirk, strutting with Lorelei down their second stage – the aisle created by the parting of the Team into two parallel lines. It is through this overt expression of satisfaction that the female protagonists demonstrate their willing participation in cinematic voyeurism, at this point satirising and comedising their positions as recipients of the voyeuristic gaze (Fig. 5). The female spectator, postulated to be conscious of the zeitgeist’s obsession with woman-as-object, undergoes a process of “distanciation” caused by the film’s satire and heightened control over her own gaze, in so destabilizing the conventions of visual pleasure.32

Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007-) take this exposition further. As woman-as-spectacle continues to hold enormous emphasis in the twenty-first century, the Kardashian/Jenner family, with their excesses of female audience, satirises and capitalizes on a brand of obfuscating glamour and arguable female empowerment.33 The fundamental precondition of the “postdocumentary” genre itself serves as the most obvious indicator of “distanciation”, that is, the necessity for a sort of contrived theatricality and performance built on the inherent self-consciousness of the reality series’ participants.34

“Unmasking

“Unmasking the Gaze:

Catherine

Corner,

on

on New

“Keeping Up with the Psychoanalysts:

Lacanian

“Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions.” Television & New Media 3, no.

to Reality Television.” University of Vermont, 2018,

(August 2002):

https://doi.org/10.1177/152747640200300302

Accordingly, in Episode 9 of Season 2 (2008), Kim Kardashian intentionally poses in lingerie for a photoshoot (her stage for spectacle), earlier revealed to be part of her plan in crafting a personalized calendar for her then-boyfriend Reggie Bush. The spectacle she stages implicates a total of four different spectators; her photographer, the intermediary for whom she poses; the camera man, whose gaze tellingly coincides with that of the television audience the minute Kim proclaims, “As long as it’s [her breasts] not too coming out”; Bush, who makes his entrance halfway into the shoot, positioned in the background; and last of all, the television audience. Reggie, rather than being riveted by Kardashian’s beauty, displays silent concern (across the three times his gaze is captured on camera) regarding his girlfriend’s overt display of feminine sexuality, seemingly powerless to stop what he believed to be a typical magazine photoshoot (Fig. 6). This perceived powerlessness, first and foremost, somewhat recalls Valentino’s suspension of action and display of non-aggression in Blood and Sand. And so like Valentino, Bush’ persona undergoes a destabilization, undermining gendered conventions of visual pleasure and loosening the camera’s metaphorical control over the female spectator’s gaze.

As well, Kardashian’s deliberate performance of the spectacle – in the context of her photoshoot – satirises the notion of cinematic voyeurism, just as Russell and Monroe had earlier done in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In further establishing the need for “distanciation”, one might refer to Mary Ann Doane’s writings on the “overpresence of the [female] image” and the narcissismspurred “closeness” between the female spectator and the on-screen female protagonist; the former characterized by a constant need to relate the latter’s feminine body.35 Because this phenomenon effectively spatially restricts the position taken on by the female spectator, performances such as that of Kardashian’s function as subversions of this “closeness”, in so according more control to the female spectator through the notion of satirical “distanciation”.

Fig. 6. Kim’s photoshoot in preparation for Reggie’s surprise calendar, from Season 2, Episode 9 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2008)

Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,”

Finally, Kardashian’s iconography also deserves mention; in the same vein through which Hansen discussed destabilization using Valentino’s popular iconography,36 and which Mulvey discussed Monroe’s embodiment of Hollywood glamour,37 virtually all the cast members of Keeping Up with the Kardashians “have long passed the point where one can tell the difference between scripted and “reality” events in their lives.”38 The blending of the gossip and scandal surrounding the Kardashians both in the real world and the scripted, inherent to the nature of the “postdocumentary”, amplifies the effect generated by the iconic traditional Hollywood actors, in that a star of, for instance, Monroe’s status, and even more so the Kardashians, could be “grafted only tangentially onto a fictional persona.”39 An extra-diegetic presence – in Kardashians’ case, spectacle for profit – of this magnitude ultimately serves to augment the female spectator’s consciousness of woman-as-spectacle, strengthening her control over her own gaze.

III. The “Look” and Spectator Identification

Any discussion of scopophilic eroticism in film should necessarily entail that of its fundamental preconditions; in the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Mulvey had written of the centrality of the “Look” to the plot, as well as “the recognition of established morality”.40 This morality manifested in the very roles Hitchcock had set out for his male protagonists – James Stewart as police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson in Vertigo (1958), or Sean Connery as Mark Rutland, the wealthy owner of a publishing company in Marnie (1964), in contrast to their female counterparts each respectively falling on the errant side of the law or being forced into submission due to the severe monetary imbalance between both genders. In both instances the imbalance is played up to the point of perversion, where the females’ established guilt features as a major part of the narrative, pandering to the castration fears of the male protagonists and thus generating a male gaze of relative unease.41

Such a gaze is married directly to that of the spectator’s via the camera; “the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees”, so much so that for Rear Window (1954), the film itself could effectively be taken as a “metaphor for the cinema”, with Jefferies functioning as one for the audience, and Thorwald’s apartment block as one for the cinema screen (Fig. 7).42 Paul Willemen, in his article Letter to John, emphasizes this absorption of the cinema spectator’s gaze into diegesis as one of the key attributes to increasing the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the object; in Jeffries’ case, that of Lisa, his socialite girlfriend who immediately gains renewed appeal as a distant erotic image when she eventually crosses over to the ‘cinema screen’ (Fig. 8).43 The constant back-and-forth between Jeffries’ (spectators’) gaze through his binoculars and the events in Thorwald’s apartment (cinema screen) – an almost obsessive compulsion toward circumscribing the same field of vision – acknowledges the presence of the invisible viewer yet denies his autonomy at the same time.44

Hansen, “Patterns of Vision, Scenarios of Identification,”

Mulvey, “Unmasking the Gaze: Some Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History,”

Kavka, Misha. “A Matter of Feeling: Mediated Affect in Reality Television.” In A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 460. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118599594.ch25

Mulvey, “The Possessive Spectator,”

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”

Willemen, P. “Letter to John.” Screen 21, no. 2 (June 1, 1980):

https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/21.2.53

Fig. 7. Jeffries’ habitual gaze directed at Thorwald’s apartment block, in Rear Window (1954)

What subverts this mediated identification of the spectator’s gaze with that of the camera then, according to John Caughie, would be the dilution of an overtly marked point of view, coupled with a relative resistance against established morality tropes.45 The women of Grey Gardens (1975) – Big Edie and Little Edie – themselves were perceived to be eccentric social outcasts at the time of the film’s release, whose unabashed transformation of their rather dilapidated home into a stage for performance led critic Molly Haskell to brand them “travesties of women” and evoked in many feelings of “consternation and disgust”. Further, Grey Gardens made its debut at the time of second wave feminism, yet fell supremely short of what most feminists had demanded to see, that is, “positive” images of inspiration and empowerment. Rather, it constituted a whole different order; women that, due to Big Edie’s divorce, were marginalized and entrapped within a domestic space (a filthy one, no less), each trying to live out their escaped dreams of cabaret dancing and opera singing within the home’s confines.46 Albeit not quite equivalent to the castration-pandering evil-good dynamic that characterized Hitchcock’s protagonists, Big Edie and Little Edie’s way of living questioned conventional notions of propriety, what was worthy of being aired in public and what was not, a bid to move away from majoritarian representations of women subjects (or objects) in film.

Caughie, J. “Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ - Dreams of Leaving.”

(December

https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/22.4.9

Backman Rogers, Anna. “The Crisis of Performance and Performance of Crisis: The Powers of the False in Grey Gardens (1976).” Studies in Documentary Film 9, no.

(May 4,

https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2015.1031565

8. Constant back-and-forth between Jefferies’ binoculared gaze and the events occurring in Thorwald’s apartment, in Rear Window (1954)

Crucial also to the undermining of conventional on-screen morality is the ostensible lack of guilt (its presence typically essential to the quelling of castration anxiety) on both the Beales’ ends. Recalling Rear Window, Lisa’s exhibitionism – established prior to her crossing over into Thorwald’s apartment and owing to her image of visual perfection relating to her manicured beauty and dress style – was greatly amplified by her eventual transformation into “guilty intruder” in the eyes of both Jefferies’ and the male spectator, by way of Thorwald’s position as the male aggressor.47 Then, insofar as the invisible male spectator’s gaze was heavily, if not fully absorbed into Jeffries’ diegetic version, the Beales as female protagonists could also be posited opposite a similar (imaginary) male gaze. In light of such an assumption, however, none of the Beales bother exhibiting any sort of visual perfection close to the level of Lisa’s, despite recognizing themselves as figures within a narrative.48 Little Edie’s exhibitionism, in particular, revels in a relative lack of shame and aging “sagging flesh”, coding herself as spectacle through a series of creative sartorial constructions she unabashedly proclaims “costumes” – a shirt morphed into a skirt via a single safety pin, an all-red combination, or the leotard-esque outfit she dons for her patriotic dance performance (Fig. 9).49 Combined with the obvious lack of a male (protagonist) aggressor to induce guilt, the females of Grey Gardens thus subvert the scopophilic eroticism inherent to the mechanism of male spectator identification. More importantly, via the weakening of an identification so catered to male spectatorship, the female spectator is also granted more freedom from the sexual confines of classical cinema space.50

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”

Backman Rogers, “The Crisis of Performance and Performance of Crisis: The Powers of the False in Grey Gardens (1976),”

It should be mentioned that the Beales are acutely aware of the camera’s presence throughout the film. Little Edie, in particular, repeatedly makes eye contact with the camera throughout the film, and occasionally even addresses the Maysles brothers. In this light, we can acknowledge the relative performativity undertaken by both Beales and therefore posit the happenings within the film as narratives or “melodramas”.

Ibid., 123.

Caughie, “Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ - Dreams of Leaving,” 28.

Fig. 9. Little Edie’s ‘costumes’, in Grey Gardens (1975)

Fig. 10. ‘Pink Room’ sequence, in Grey Gardens (1975)

For the most part, Grey Gardens exemplified all the fundamental requirements of Direct Cinema:51 it seemed unplanned, did not include any didactic voice-overs, and bore minimal interference save for the infamous ‘pink room’ sequence (Fig. 10), in which the Maysles brothers (directors) would pan their cameras away from the squabbling Beales at the height of conflict and zoom in on either one of the Edies’ old portraits, giving the conflict a rather ambiguous resolution. Such conflicts are recurrent throughout the film’s length, centred around different topics, and point toward a different sort of narrative structure: where the ‘climaxes’ (conflicts) are scattered across the film, and constructed abruptly by the characters’ ‘natural’ performativity rather than a continuous build-up of protagonist-spectator gaze identification patterns (as in that of Rear Window).52 Discounting the directors’ gazes, which remain constant throughout, the film remains largely devoid of overtly mediated spectator identification mechanisms; in one of Big Edie’s operatic sequences, her gaze is never once directed at the camera, looking forlornly to her left and downwards as she sings. An immediate cut to one of her old portraits seemingly informs the spectator of her field of vision, yet the next appears to be shot from a slightly different angle , zooming in almost eerily to circumscribe her face and transitioning abruptly to a totally different narrative fragment – Little Edie’s own dance performance (Fig. 11). By this sequence, Big Edie’s marked field of vision is purposefully made ambiguous, weakening the spectator identification mechanism that so suffocatingly binds spectators to the protagonist’s point of view. Further subverting the process of spectator identification is the refusal to provide a “reverse-field” (what would likely be a shot of Big Edie’s gaze following that of her field of vision) that completes the typical exchange of views. The lack of a close identification with the characters’ gazes on the spectator’s end ultimately binds him or her less tightly to filmic space and accords more freedom in selecting a point of view.53

Concluding Remarks

The decision to incorporate Mulvey’s later reflective texts – namely, Unmasking the Gaze and Death 24x a Second – might come across strange to some readers, given that my premise hinges on the critique of her initial theoretical frameworks. Yet these writings, after having processed multiple criticisms of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and her subsequent Afterthoughts, including those made by prominent scholars such as Koch, contain wonderful insights and musings regarding potential framework improvements, most of which I have referenced throughout this essay and attempted to further. Mulvey, in her concluding call for alternative modes of visual pleasure within the cinema, had crucially broken down the “Look” into three different gazes; “that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watched the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.”54 Alternative theorizing of female spectatorship emerged through the likes of Doane and Hansen, the latter in particular broadening the concept beyond its governing binary system of sexual division. Crucial as these emergent theoretical grounds were, much relevant scholarship persisted in critiquing the same specific typology Mulvey had critiqued in 1975: the classical Hollywood film.55

Backman Rogers, “The Crisis of Performance and Performance of Crisis: The Powers of the False in Grey Gardens (1976),” 120.

Caughie, “Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ - Dreams of Leaving,” 27-9.

Ibid.

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 17.

Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 5 (September 3, 2015): 893. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1075275

Smit, Alexia. “‘On the Spectator Side of the Screen’: Considering Space, Gender, and Visual Pleasure in Television.”

Fig. 11. One of Big Edie's operatic sequences, in Grey Gardens (1975)

It was this gap I sought to address in my essay. A sheer diversity of film typologies have emerged since the traditional linearnarrative films of the 1940s and 50s; Direct Cinema, the “postdocumentary”, and even the extant Kino Pravda series launched in the 1920s (way before Mulvey had even conceived of Visual Pleasure), all of which play an integral role in the further dissection of each respective gaze. Through the re-evaluation of fundamental elements such as spectator identification, ‘plot-delaying’ devices, and feminine “closeness”, a reconceptualization of female spectatorship could be made possible, and eventually, a new plurality of female spectators might just be able to emerge.

Total Word Count (excluding name, headers, figure captions, figure numbers, and footnotes) = 4500

Bibliography

Backman Rogers, Anna. “The Crisis of Performance and Performance of Crisis: The Powers of the False in Grey Gardens (1976).” Studies in Documentary Film 9, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 114–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2015.1031565.

Bellour, Raymond. “The Film Stilled.” Camera Obscura 3, no. 24 (1990): 98–124. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-8-3_24-98

Caughie, J. “Rhetoric, Pleasure and ‘Art Television’ - Dreams of Leaving.” Screen 22, no. 4 (December 1, 1981): 9–31. https://doi. org/10.1093/screen/22.4.9.

Corner, John. “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions.” Television & New Media 3, no. 3 (August 2002): 255–69. https://doi. org/10.1177/152747640200300302

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. 5th ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, 17–32. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hansen, Miriam. “Male Star, Female Fans.” In Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, 245–68. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.

———. “Patterns of Vision, Scenarios of Identification.” In Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, 269–96. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Hawks, Howard. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. United States: 20th Century Fox, 1953.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Rear Window. United States: Patron Inc., 1954.

Kavka, Misha. “A Matter of Feeling: Mediated Affect in Reality Television.” In A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 457–77. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118599594.ch25

Koch, Gertrud. “Ex-Changing the Gaze: Re-Visioning Feminist Film Theory.” New German Critique, no. 34 (1985): 139–53. https:// doi.org/10.2307/488342.

Leary, Catherine E. “Keeping Up with the Psychoanalysts: Applying Lacanian and Feminist Theory to Reality Television.” University of Vermont, 2018.

Maysles, David, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer. Grey Gardens. United States: Portrait Films, 1975.

Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Repr. Language, Discourse, Society. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1982.

Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” In Visual and Other Pleasures, 29–38. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9.

———. “Preface.” In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 7–16. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.

———. “The Pensive Spectator.” In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 181–96. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.

———. “The Possessive Spectator.” In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 161–80. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. ———. “Unmasking the Gaze: Some Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History.” Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, no. 7 (2001): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.2436/LECTORA.V0I7.42932.

———. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1, 1975): 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Niblo, Fred. Blood and Sand. United States: Famous Players-Lasky, 1922.

Preminger, Otto. The River of No Return. United States: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp, 1954. Seacrest, Ryan, and Jonathan Murray. Kim’s Calendar for Reggie. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. United States: Ryan Seacrest Productions, 2008.

Smit, Alexia. “‘On the Spectator Side of the Screen’: Considering Space, Gender, and Visual Pleasure in Television.” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 5 (September 3, 2015): 892–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1075275

Vertov, Dziga. Man with a Movie Camera. Soviet Union: VUFKU, 1929.

Willemen, P. “Letter to John.” Screen 21, no. 2 (June 1, 1980): 53–65. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/21.2.53

20.5.2020

Rachel Sim Jing Xi

National University of Singapore

Introduction

Peter Schoppert, quite humorously, began his 2005 review of the 50th Venice Biennale with an unusually fitting analogy of a Dominican monk resident in 15th century Venice, traipsing endlessly from pavilion to pavilion, obsessively engrossed in deconstructing the “allegorical potential, wondrous contents, sights, sounds, [and] odours” of each. As he filled himself with ever-increasing aesthetic discernment, and thought he might have reached the threshold of sensorial stimulation within a certain pavilion, he turned a corner and (lo and behold!) found himself in yet another one, threatening to push the limits of his previous threshold.2 Decidedly tongue-in-cheek, Schoppert then paralleled the Dominican monk, whose name coincidentally meant “Lover of the Manifold”, to the throngs of art enthusiasts in 2003 Venice, wandering from national pavilions to the eleven3 curated – by separate curators, no less –‘capsule’ exhibitions under the sweltering 200-year high heatwave.4 Unfortunately for the Director Francesco Bonami, the weather had vaporized any love for, or attention toward the “Manifold” of artworks on display. It was perhaps the dehydrated attention spans of reviewers and critics, that resulted in scathing reviews of The Dictatorship of the Viewer – Laura Cumming, who posed the harsh question, “But where’s the art?”;5 Schoppert, who criticized the larger-than-average scale of the exhibition in light of the “scarcity [of attention] in the economy of world art”; and not least Philip Auslander, who called Bonami’s edition a “marathon event”, with its surplus of seemingly disparate exhibitions.6

Beyond the irate criticisms of the heatwave and the ‘bursting-at-the-seams’ size of the Biennale, Schoppert maintained the age-old baggage of the “external gaze” remained, namely, the relative inadequacy in framing works that dwelled at the periphery of the Euro-American circuit.7 This was not for the lack of trying – the inclusion of more works from non-Western artists had already been portended by Harald Szeemann’s 2001 Plateau of Humankind, which featured a considerable number of Chinese artists. The Dictatorship of the Viewer’s Zones of Urgency, curated by Hou Hanru, comprised works from a good number of Asian artists.8 Yet the Asian National Pavilions betrayed no prominent inclinations toward Asianness, in that artists such as Bahc Yiso9 avoided overt frames of nationalism, choosing instead to proclaim “non-participation in participation”,10 unintentionally reinforcing their lack of visibility or identity on the global stage.11 Additionally, the dispersion of curatorial authority among the eleven Arsenale exhibitions to counter the ‘Grand Show’ of the 20th century – curated based on the “single perspective”12 of the Biennale Director – was criticized by Jerry Saltz to be a gargantuan boat of “warring philosophies, methodologies and aesthetics;”13 varying curatorial aspirations that unwittingly emphasized the “tyranny of many curators” over The Dictatorship of the Viewer. 14

I must contend, however, that a re-evaluation of the 50th Venice Biennale in light of crucial paradigms such as “Primitivism” and Magiciens de la terre reveal an earnest attempt to recast the discourse on the representation of non-Western art in art exhibitions.15

1 Cumming, Laura. “Venice Biennale: But Where’s the Art?” The Guardian. June 21, 2003, sec. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/ jun/22/1

2 Schoppert, Peter. “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (March 2005): 136. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462394042000326 950

3 Green, Charles, and Anthony Gardner, eds. “2003: Delegating Authority.” In Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta, 1st ed., 224. Wiley, 2016. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119212638.ch7

4 Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 137.

5 “Venice Biennale: But Where’s the Art?”

6 Auslander, Philip. “The Biennale and Its Discontents.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 26, no. 1 (January 2004): 51. https://doi. org/10.1162/152028104772624928.

7 Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 137.

8 Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 229-230.

9 Of Korea’s Pavilion.

10 Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 137.

Ibid., 138.

12 Bonami, Francesco, Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale, and Museo Correr, eds. Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer ; 50th International Art Exhibition

ed. Milano: Skira [u.a.], 2003.

13 Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 226.

14 “Venice Biennale: But Where’s the Art?”

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

“But where’s the art?”1 Revaluing Francesco Bonami’s curatorial delegation during the 50th Venice Biennale, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer (2003)

In addressing also the criticisms aimed at the multiplicity of artwork, we need recognize that the “wide-ranging variety” did, in Bonami’s words, embody the “new complexity [and scale] of contemporary reality, vision, and emotions” in the globalized world, arguably rendering the 2003 mega-exhibition a success.16 Lastly, to further revalue the 50th Venice Biennale, I evaluate the Biennale in terms of an individual exhibition – the Utopia Station, in particular – through the framework of Jacque Rancière’s Emancipated Spectator, as opposed to ‘traipsing through’ all eleven as if they came together to form one big show (which many critics had insisted on doing).17 Through this, we might come to see, perhaps somewhat more clearly, an experimental attempt to provide a platform for The Dictatorship of the Viewer to occur.

Redefining Representations of Non-Western Contemporary Art

In a roundtable discussion conducted in 2003, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (who curated Utopia Station), Okwui Enwezor (of Documenta11), and Bonami unanimously agreed on the need to revise the antagonism between “central” and “peripheral” artistic circulation. Enwezor and Obrist, in particular, reinforced the significance of globalization in contributing to the rise of “peripheral” biennials (“Cairo, Dakar, Havana, and Sydney, the Fukuoka and Asia Pacific Triennials”) in the 1990s, invoking immense pressure on supposedly “mother” institutions such as Venice and Documenta to reform.18 Prior to Bonami’s edition, this reform had already been underway, with Enwezor’s destabilization and dispersion of the single-curator model during Documenta11, a move aimed at removing focus from his position as a star-curator and the traditional Western Biennale’s foundations in the Euro-American “contemporary artistic canon”.19 Like James Meyer, who relayed a more sceptical viewpoint in deeming “peripheral” biennials mere “suppliers of new goods”, Bonami had earlier conveyed his wariness of curatorial practice in a globalizing world becoming some sort of “cultural safari for [non-Western] contemporary souvenirs”, emphasizing the role of the biennale in preventing the “peripheral” from remaining “peripheral”.20 This we could possibly see in his racially-varied curatorial delegation – a network of eleven curators, including Obrist, art historian Molly Nesbit, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and Hou Hanru – a rather uneven mix of Western and non-Western curators, but a mix nonetheless.21 Hou, in his catalogue essay for Zones of Urgency (which had majority Asian representation),22 had perhaps deliberately sought to justify the non-Western contemporary art canon (or lack thereof), citing ‘residual colonial/post-colonial’ and ‘tradition/modernity’ tensions within the Asian-Pacific region as “active platforms” for the “most creative moments of innovation”; stating the proliferation of experimental, “more relevant playgrounds” as compensation for the lack of Western-style institutions.23

Hou had then swung attention unto the general phenomenon of “the global restructuring of political, economic and cultural power relationships,”24 quite literally translated into a dense and somewhat disorderly “centre/periphery”-blind spectacle that dizzied the senses.25 Jiang Zhi’s Please give me 50 cents, I know where Bin Laden is (2002) was a performative investigation of Chinese reactions toward the global issue of international terrorism, with Jiang Zhi himself taking on the role of a masked beggar in front of a series of supermarkets and shopping malls, in an area less scrutinized by the City Management Department, assimilating himself amongst other beggars, petty goods sellers and unlicensed cobblers. Imploring passers-by to give an opinion on Bin Laden, he veritably transformed his artwork into an experimental survey on international issues as viewed from within the Asian context, a general critique on the relative lack of care conferred upon issues perceived to be far away from home rather than a seeming exploration of centre/periphery curatorial tensions.26

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

Buskirk, Martha. Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace. International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, v. 3., 275. New York, N.Y: Continuum, 2012; Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 226.

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 222.

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 224.

Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 139.

Bonami, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 189.

Ibid.

Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 139.

Bonami, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 214.

Fig. 1. Jiang Zhi, Please give me 50 cents, I know where Bin Laden is, 2002, Performance and video, 5 minutes.27

Fig. 2. Shu Lea Cheang, Burn, 2003, Installation; installation elements: networked computers with CD burners, silkscreen-printed blank CDs, pirated CDs, digital photograph prints.28

Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang’s Burn (2003) addressed an issue on a wildly different wavelength – hers was a conceptual documentation of piracy in China; the celebration of burning CDs as a “common cultural practice in the age of digital reproduction”; and the somewhat gleeful cognizance of an endless array of illegal MP3 music files and the “file sharing practice of P2P (peer to peer)”, compressed into multiple silkscreen-printed blank CDs – representing all at once the “collateral damage of the international copyright regime”.30 Yan Pei-Ming too attempted to capture the burgeoning effects of urbanization in Self Portrait as Anti-Riot Cop (2003), asserting the unfettered “violence” of urbanization to be necessary in quelling human nature. Urbanization, posited by Yan as an implicitly authoritarian tool, was in charge of controlling the innate unruliness of mankind, personified as anarchy’s antagonist and thus, an Anti-Riot Cop 31

Albeit bound by a keen sensitivity toward globalization in the Asian context, none of these artworks explicitly addressed “centre/ periphery” curatorial tensions (perhaps a deliberate move on Hou’s part) – what Schoppert terms a “strategy of retreat”, or a deliberate avoidance of discussing the “othering” of peripheral regions.32 It may also be worth mentioning that Korea’s national entry (Landscape of Differences), in particular, sought to produce a “unique vision of the Korean”, and had indeed acknowledged the nascent wave of “postcolonial consciousness”, along with the “peripheralizing exoticization of Korea itself”.33 Recognizing that Western cultural imperialism had led to the current inauguration of Western-based artists (such as Nam June Paik) as official Korean representatives, Commissioner Kim Hong-Hee, in an act of implicit subversion, selected lesser-known mid-career artists who possessed the most “crucial and immediate effect on the long-term development of Korean art”.34 Startingly, despite this cognizance, Landscape of Differences was a rather unambitious display of non-representation – Bahc Yiso’s World’s Top Ten Tallest Structures in 2010 (2003) was a very apolitical scaling down of internationally-famous colossal structures, such as the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower, into a “row of rough clay models [standing] about two feet tall”. In other words, the viewer would be invited to imagine himself in proportion to the actual scale of the construction wonders as he “dream[ed] upward[s]” throughout his life (metaphorically represented by the scaled clay models), only to be subverted by his gaze unto the models, perhaps a statement on the insignificance of human dreams in the wider universe.35 Again, Bahc’s work reflected nary a commentary on the “othering” of Asia – as Joan Kee would put it, “there is no

Bonami, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 224.

Ibid., 221.

31 Schultz, Charles. “Yan Pei-Ming with Charles Schultz.” The Brooklyn Rail, June 4, 2012. https://brooklynrail.org/2012/06/art/yan-pei-ming-with-charles-schultz.

32 Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 137.

33 Kim, Hong-Hee. “Landscape of Differences.” In Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer; 50th International Art Exhibition, edited by Francesco Bona mi, 1. ed., 578–79. Milano: Skira [u.a.], 2003.

Ibid.

35 Saccoccia, Susan. “The World’s Fair of Contemporary Art.” Christian Science Monitor, June 20, 2003. https://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0620/p20s01-alar.html

Fig. 3. Yan Pei-Ming, Self Portrait as Anti-Riot Cop, 2003, Oil on canvas, 350 x 350 cm. Berlin, Galarie Max Hetzler.29

indication that Bahc has a position from which he speaks, or that he is even speaking at all” (quoted by Schoppert).36

Fig. 5. Poster for “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art”. At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1983.38

Nevertheless, despite teetering quite dangerously between being “accomplices of First World cultural imperialism”39 and postcolonial ambassadors (presumably the ethical responsibility of the curator),40 I would assert a certain value in such an approach of “retreat”. We need only journey back to MoMA’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (1984) or Magiciens de la terre (1989) to witness the stark contrast in approaches (as opposed to The Dictatorship of the Viewer).41 Thomas McEvilley, upon viewing the literal paralleling of Modern works alongside tribal artifacts in “Primitivism”, remarked rather dryly in Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief, “How brilliant to attempt to revalidate classical Modernist aesthetics by stepping outside their usual realm of discourse and bringing to bear upon them a vast, foreign sector of the world.” This scathing review was not unwarranted, for William Rubin, main curator of the exhibition, had tried his hardest to draw an “affinity” between the “mythic universals” illustrated by a Kwakiutl split mask, for example, and Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932), a logical fallacy devoid of anthropological basis (refer to Fig. 5).42 First of all, absolutely no information on the displayed tribal objects was disseminated to the viewers; secondly, by positing the “primitive” as validating the Modern was

36 Schoppert, “Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003,” 138.

37 Korea, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories.” National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018. http://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/exhibitions/exhibitionsDetail.do?exhId=201807020001066

38 Korea, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories.” National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018. http://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/exhibitions/exhibitionsDetail.do?exhId=201807020001066

39 Green, Charles, and Anthony Gardner. “1989: Asian Biennialization.” In Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art, 1st ed., 130. Chicester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2016.

40 Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

41 Ibid.

42 McEvilley, Thomas. “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief.” “ “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, 1984. https://www.artforum.com/ print/198409/on-doctor-lawyer-indian-chief-primitivism-in-20th-century-art-at-the-museum-of-modern-art-in-1984-35322

Fig. 4. Bahc Yiso, World’s Top Ten Tallest Structures in 2010, 2003, Clay and aluminium foil. Seoul, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.37

to prematurely answer the rhetorical question that Rubin had seemingly tried to ask through his curation: “Did primitive influence precede the birth of Modernism, or did it ingress afterward, as a confirmatory witness?”

The supposed “affinity” between tribal artifacts and contemporary Western works would later be repeated in Magiciens de la terre, where once again, no contextual information was given about the ‘geographically-peripheral’ works, leaving the average naïve viewer to “attribute functions” to the “primitive” object, now rendered “democratic and mute” via the curators’ silence. Cesare Poppi asks, in his review of Magiciens de la terre, “Where could the snake-eagle [Aguila Serpiente (1989)] have been produced? (refer to Fig. 6)” Indeed, the curators had, like in “Primitivism”, heavy-handedly imposed the Western non-referential tradition of “the work refers to itself” unto all the artworks, making the fact that Aguila Serpiente had been produced in Mexico a mere incidental guess. More infuriating were the supposed attempts to “equalize” centre and periphery by Western curators, through the arrangement of non-Western traditions alongside Western ‘equivalents’ – S. J. Akpan’s Portrait of a Chief (1989) and two statues in Nazi salute nearby, shockingly thought to be part of Akpan’s work despite not being one of the exhibits on display (refer to Fig. 7). Who would have known? For the ‘primacy of the object’ approach and the purposeful withholding of historical differences had glossed over any historical inequality between the geographies, lulling the exhibition into a state of false egalitarianism.43

In light of these paradigm-shifting ‘failures’ of representation, the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale, with the previously discussed approach of ‘understated’ nationalism (bolstered by Bonami’s act of delegating curatorial authority to non-Western curators), could be seen as – according to artist Martha Rosler – a recognition of “the genuine wish of artists to join the international conversation about the nature of civilization” and to correct romanticized notions of the periphery.47 Enwezor too asserts that past the 1990s’ rise of more “peripheral” biennales, Western biennales preferred to take on a more “inverse logic”, knowing that having the Western gaze constantly ordering “peripheral” art in a world subject to global market forces would effectively presage the demise of the international biennale. What “inverse logic” referred to was a “counterstrategy of disinterest”, allowing “peripheral” nations

Poppi, Cesare. “From the Suburbs of the Global Village: Afterthoughts on Magiciens de La Terre.” Third Text 5, no. 14 (March 1991): 85–96. https://doi. org/10.1080/09528829108576304

Ibid., 91.

Dodd, Philip. “Content Is Nothing without Context.” Financial Times, January 8, 2014. https://www.ft.com/content/8c2e5f08-77bd-11e3-afc5-00144feabdc0

Poppi, “From the Suburbs of the Global Village: Afterthoughts on Magiciens de La Terre,” 93.

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

Fig. 6. Felipe Linares, Leonardo Linares-Vargas, and David Lineres-Vargas, Serpent Eagle, 1989. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Magiciens de la terre;44

Fig. 7. [Left] S. J. Akpan, Portrait of a Chief, 1989. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Magiciens de la terre;45 [Right] Two statues in Nazi salutation, coincidentally placed nearby and was thought to be part of Akpan’s work, but was not part of the exhibition.46

the autonomy to propagate their own notions of modernity – a manoeuvre conscious of the subjectivity of biennale funding to free-market capitalism.48 In other words (and addressing Schoppert’s criticism of a “strategy of retreat”), however understated the nationalistic frames in “peripheral” nations’ entries and Zones of Urgency may be, the curators behind these pavilions had intentionally chosen to recast and brand contemporary non-Western art as such, which was in itself successful insofar as it was not an attempt once more by the Western curator and his superimposed preconceptions (as in “Primitivism” and Magiciens de la terre). Thus, we cannot posit such a branding strategy to be indicative of the Biennale’s total failure as a platform to explore “centre/periphery” discourse. In evaluating the above as part of an ongoing exploration to redefine representations of non-Western contemporary art on an international platform, Bonami’s Biennale had indeed achieved measurable success.

Degree of Viewer Dictatorship Achieved

Next, in our quest to further revalue the 50th Venice Biennale, we might try to evaluate the curation behind an individual exhibition based on the degree to which the viewer’s dictatorship was achieved – one of Bonami’s key curatorial goals had been to have the viewer regain his “awareness of being a viewer”, and subsequently, his “curatorial control” over each exhibition.49 Yet, in order to properly discern an exhibition which conveys those qualities, we first must answer this: what curatorial implications did his intentions entail? The exhibition would require “starting points, intersections and junctions”,50 Rancière asserts in The Emancipated Spectator, that would allow the viewer (or spectator) to exercise an “unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations” based on their individual “intellectual adventures,” in order to produce a community of emancipated spectators, each one of them “active interpreters who [would] develop their own translation” with regard to the artworks on display.51 These “starting points”, according to Papastergiadis, refer specifically to more “metaphoric images (artworks)” possessing a certain level of “ambiguity”, as opposed to more “formalist innovations” which presuppose the passivity of the audience.52

Accordingly, the curators of Utopia Station, who had coincidentally referenced Rancière in their catalogue essay, asserted that the chosen artworks for the exhibition had to embody the idea of “utopia as a catalyst”, leaving the viewers to define for themselves the notion of utopia.53 The result was first evident in the architectural articulation of the exhibition (refer to Fig. 8), with arrangement of artworks interspersed by “a stage, small rooms for video projections, and seating for visitors to lounge and hang out.” This, along with functional artworks that took on forms like “eco-toilets, a communal shower, and a hut on stilts” strewn somewhat haphazardly within the space, generated a democratic, light-hearted atmosphere for viewers to “contemplate, to listen and see, to rest and refresh, to talk and exchange.”54 This interactive “hut on stilts” (refer to Fig. 9), Alicia Framis’ Billboardthailandhouse (2000), was a storage for “personal objects” constructed from billboards for Thailand’s monsoon season as part of Tiravanija’s The Land Foundation, now transplanted into Venice to lend refuge to weary visitors from the heatwave;55 Atelier van Lieshout’s Sportopia (2002) was a twostorey scaffold pavilion comprising three activity areas for “sports and for sex”, for “rest and recovery”, its star derived from the nonfunctioning shower and compost toilet on the first level (refer to Fig. 10).56 These artworks, despite being noticeably formalist, did not convey any fixed political ideal regarding the notion of “utopia”. Rather, in alluding to themes of refuge through user interaction, they invited the viewer to instead discover “utopia” as a form of comfort and respite specific to each, falling within Rancière’s criterion of “interpreters who [would] develop their own translation”.57

Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.”

Ibid.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. 1st ed., 17-22. London: Verso, 2009.

Ibid., 22.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. “A Breathing Space for Aesthetics and Politics: An Introduction to Jacques Rancière.” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 7–8 (December 2014): 11. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414551995

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. “Utopia Station.” In Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer; 50th International Art Exhibi tion, edited by Francesco Bonami, 1. ed., 333. Milano: Skira [u.a.], 2003.

Charles and Gardner, “2003: Delegating Authority,” 225.

Visual Arts. “Shelter,” 2007. https://mkpd.home.xs4all.nl/Shelter/Framis.htm

Atelier Van Lieshout. “Sportopia.” Atelier Van Lieshout, 2002. https://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/work/sportopia/

Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17.

in Utopia Station, artworks depicting varying

Buskirk, Creative enterprise: contemporary art between museum and marketplace

Obrist, Nesbit, and Tiravanija. “Utopia Station.” In Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer

“Shelter.”

“Sportopia.”

Obrist, Nesbit, and Tiravanija. “Utopia Station.” In Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer,

Fig. 8. Liam Gillick, Seating in Utopia Station, 2003. Venice, Venice Biennale.58

Fig. 9. [Left] Alicia Framis, Billboardthailandhouse, 2000, Wood and billboards, 396 x 396 x 375 cm. Antwep, Micheline Szwajcer Gallery;59 [Right] Installation photograph of Billboardthailandhouse.60

Fig. 10. [Left] Atelier Van Lieshout, Sportopia, 2002, Scaffolding, 18 x 6 m. Venice, Venice Biennale;61 [Right] Detail of Sportopia 62

Fig. 11. [Left] Liam Gillick, Utopia Staton: For a…functional Utopia, 2003, Poster. Venice, Venice Biennale; [Right] Julius Koller, “Atlantic” (U.F.O.), 2003, Poster. Venice, Venice Biennale.63

interpretations of “utopia” in the contemporary context

274.

arranged around circular benches (refer back to Fig. 8), an obvious gesture by Liam Gillick to “alter the status of the viewer” and to transform the exhibition into a “mere vessel” for the spontaneous dialogue curators had hoped would happen amongst viewers.64 With no artwork outrightly conveying each artist’s fixed intellectual stance, the curators managed to present a massive volume of over 160 open interpretations of “utopia”65 – Liam Gillick’s poster abstraction of the fragmentation amongst reactionary leftist movements, always detracting the world from ever reaching any state of “functional utopia”; Julius Koller’s “ATLANTIS” (U.F.O) [2003] emphasized the futility of an never-ending search to find the perfect “utopia”66 – to embody even more the chaotic ambiguity of a “utopia” (refer to Fig. 11). At this point, it was markedly clear that the exhibition was meant to encourage a form of undefined activism, with “metaphoric” visuals that fell well within Rancière’s framework.

Buskirk asserts the eventual outcome of the exhibition failed to match up to its curatorial intentions, for the sheer volume of artwork had prevented any coherent direction from taking place within viewer conversations. Yet I contend that the perceived failure was due to a theoretical discrepancy in Rancière’s framework, in that when applied to reality, required the fulfilment of certain pragmatic preconditions (such as the scale and setting of the exhibition) to achieve the expected outcome.67 In fact, Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija’s attempt fully counts toward a larger exploration to properly manifest Rancière’s framework on the global stage. Posited as such, Utopia Station could be seen as an success, insofar as Rancière’s framework was fulfilled.

Conclusion

In arguing for the revaluation of Bonami’s The Dictatorship of the Viewer, I am well aware that I have intentionally adopted a more theoretical method of evaluation – rather than focus on its reception in reality, I have chosen to evaluate the Biennale in light of curatorial intentions. While I do recognize the discrepancies in the translation from intention to outcome, and the vast number of negative reviews from dehydrated art critics, it is still crucial to find value in its curatorial experiments, from seeking to test Rancière’s framework on such a grand scale, to partaking in the ongoing quest to one-day perfectly represent non-Western art on the global stage. Who would know? Perhaps if the weather were a little more forgiving, and if critics had not insisted on bulldozing through all eleven exhibitions, they might even have found love in the “Manifold”,68 just as the Dominican Monk had.

Total Word Count (excluding all footnotes, full-length quotes, and words in parentheses) = 3000

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