Hipster Olympics

After posting about fashion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and then posting about Kate Gilmore's public performance art. I thought of the hipster olympics video I watched years ago. There is some cool and creative fashion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but this video is also pretty funny because it's somewhat true (or at least used to be - maybe now more professionals in the area??). It's like mocking people walking around Williamsburg in a similar way that Kate Gilmore mocks mainstream society in midtown...

Pounding the Pavement From Up on a Pedestal - NY Times Article

This article in the NY Times is about Kate Gilmore's public art showing women walking wearing the exact same thing, which will be showing in Bryant Park. When I first saw this article I thought that it's such a great idea to express the ridiculousness of one type of beauty. My friend Gale and I ate lunch together the other day and talked about this. She was saying that she thinks there is becoming only one type of beauty; that this always existed to some extent, but it's stronger now than it was before. I asked her if she's been watching a lot of tv. For me, ignoring mass media and spending time in the subway are two ways that help me to remember that beauty comes in all colors, shapes and sizes. It was nice to have the conversation with her and talk about how there is not just one definition of beauty.

However, Kate Gilmore is more so mocking our post-modern life and the office workers' routines. These women will be up on a small platform walking back and forth for hours. I think the piece is great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/arts/design/08gilmore.html?hp

Women's Hair and J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere

I remember when I was in Tokyo and every weekend I was going to The Muse, a club/lounge filled with expats, mostly guys from Europe and America, and some Japanese. I went every weekend with my friend Tara. We had fun meeting different guys, especially Tara. I met my husband pretty early on, so I wasn't really dating. One night we went out and I straightened my hair. I used to like to do that sometimes, but rarely do it now. Tara noticed that guys were looking at me differently. I wasn't too surprised.

“Whether it is working backstage at Fashion Week or styling a client’s hair at the salon, straight hair has always been in-demand look for women,” says Rodney Cutler, owner ofCutler/Redken Salons. - http://talkingmakeup.com/haircare/redken-straight-collection-straight-hair-for-all-hair-types/- I think that this quote supports the idea that straight hair is a symbol of beauty in this country. Within all of the mass media influencing our lives, beautiful women are most often depicted with straight hair. I think some men are not conscious of why they prefer women with straight hair and other men are conscious of the whole issue and can see through that.

I used to hate my hair and wish I had straight hair. I remember one girl in my high school who burned her hair trying to get a reverse perm and damaged her long curly hair that went down to her waist. Some black women go through a lot to get their hair straight, adding chemical [reverse] perms and using hot irons, both can burn the scalp. When black women do style their hair with braids and dreads, I must say, I love it. There are so many cool things black women do with their hair, which brings me to what made me start this post.

When I went to the AIPAD I saw a book showing the work of - J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere - http://www.gallery51.com/index.php?navigatieid=9&fotograafid=12 - I was recently reminded of these pictures in sculpture class because Tina is making a paper mache wig for a sculpture of a black woman. I don't know how famous he is, but he photographed over 1000 women with different hair styles, depicting them as artistic sculptures.... so cool!

Dolls

Children's toys, in general, are loaded with gender concepts. I remember when I first became aware of gender differences in packaging design. Even the products themselves are most often created for either a boy or a girl. Numerous psychologists and a lot of money goes into marketing and creating children's products. I remember when I took psychology class we discussed this and this was also touched upon in a movie we watched in visual culture class.

It seems that traditional dolls are becoming less and less popular and that today dolls are becoming vintage memories or marketing tools for entertainment media. Dolls are often used to communicate messages about gender in fine arts. Barbara Kruger created a photomontage that showed a doll in pieces and it said, "Use only as directed." Cindy Sherman used dolls in her self-portrait photographs. Greer Lankton was an artist who was born male and became female, expressing her gender issues through fine art and dolls (see left). Meanwhile an entire world of doll making exists as an artistic craft. I love artistic dolls. There is something so beautiful, cool and creepy about them.

There are so many interesting dolls on the internet. On www.etsy.com (a website where people can sell hand made products) there are over 50,000 dolls [and miniatures]. Some people who have fully developed their craft and line of dolls have their own websites. For my sculpture class I've decided to make paper mache dolls. I looked for hours on the Internet and found some great stuff. I love what people call "art dolls". There is even a magazine called "Art Doll" (http://stampington.com/html/adq_summer10.html). Below are a few examples:

The Camera Obscura's Influence on History

It's been a while since we watched David Hockney's Secret Knowledge in visual culture class and I just realized I never blogged about it. I remember when my father brought me to the MET for the first time when I was 12. We walked through the European paintings and I could not understand what was so great. I knew that the skill level is hard skill to achieve, but I didn't make the connection between these paintings and art that offered deep/interesting communication. As I got older, I continued to appreciate the difficulty of creating a painting with such a realistic image, but never really got into that type of painting.

I really enjoyed the Secret Knowledge and its emphasis on the technique involved with traditional European painting. I knew that people used the grid technique, I knew of perspective techniques, and I even knew of the camera obscura; but I did not know about using the camera obscura for painting. This movie stuck in my mind and I don't think I will ever forget it.

For my research in Professor Jiesemfoek's class I am part of a group that will be making a presentation on technological advances affecting the ways artists use materials. We are focusing on painting. My group members are investigating aspects of tempera, oil and polymer paints. I am investigating the way photography affected painting. I am including Hockney's research, but expanding on it and taking a slightly different perspective.

One interesting finding was that Hockney was not the first to discuss this technique and there have been numerous writings analyzing paintings by Johannes Vermeer, assuming he must have used the camera obscura.

I found another finding to be even more interesting. Louis Daguerre was a set painter for the opera in Paris and often used the camera obscura for painting. His paintings were so striking that they gained the reputation of being able to stand on their own without the theater. He soon created the diorama which became theater entertainment for Parisians in the early 1800s. The diorama included large landscape paintings, with lighting effects and I think the floor moved. Daguerre wanted the image projected by the camera obscura to be permanent so that he could create dioramas quicker. He sought out the inventor, Charles Niepce, who was also interested in making the image from the camera obscura permanent. Niepce loved lithography, but had difficulty drawing and tracing the images created by the camera obscura. So, he was also motivated to make the image from the camera obscura permanent. Niepce first made the image semi-permanent using sulpher chloride and paper and after a few years of working with chemicals he created the first photograph (below). Together Daguerre and Niepce wanted to perfect the process and commercialize it. After they started working together, Niepce died suddenly and Daguerre soon created the first Daguerreotype. He eventually got the exposure time down to a minute, as compared to the 8 hour exposure of Neipce's heliograph, or sun drawing, which is what he called the first photograph.

Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph taken with a camera obscura:

View from the Window at Le Gras. 1826

The first successful Daguerreoytpe:

L’Atelier de l'artiste. 1837 by Charles Daguerre

Curious George Saves the Day

My mother and I both grew up on Curious George children's books. We never thought much about who created them, we just enjoyed them for what they were. They were stories about a monkey who would get into trouble because it was so curious about everything. Each story was usually an adventure about the trouble he got into. As the New York Times describes, "He was a mischief maker, an innocent, born in the jungle and lured into the strange world of humans." The art was good and the stories were nice, but they weren't so phenomenal that we would consider them to be extraordinary. They were just a popular children's book series.

In fact, I didn't know that my mother read them as a child until recently when she sent me a New York Times article reviewing the exhibition of the artwork from the book. She was excited to send me the article because she knew I read them as a child, because she read them as a child and because of the life story of the authors. The authors were actually Jews in Paris during the time of the Nazi's. The New York Times article touches upon the possibility of Curious George's adventures paralleling their experiences running and hiding from the Nazis, but overall, there are no clear explicit connections. It could have been an outlet for them during hard times, but even the NY Times is unsure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/arts/design/26curious.html

Visual Culture of Gentrified Brooklyn

Brooklyn has become one of the trendiest places to live in the country and possibly the world. Brooklyn has always been something special, but it has evolved into what is special for generation x and generation y creative types and others. I guess the neighborhoods I'm referring to are Williamsburg, Park Slope, Dumbo, Carroll Gardens/Borem Hil, Forte Greene and even parts of Bed Stuy. Ditmas Park has always been really pricey with big mansions, but there are even similar cultural changes happening there also. For this post I'm going to focus on Williamsburg.

I remember living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1998. Rents were cheap, but they were already going up. I was paying 800 dollars a month for a 2 bedroom basement just a few blocks from the L train which was slightly more than a friend was paying for sharing a space in a loft two years earlier (300 dollars a month). A little bit more than 10 years later the rents have about tripled and that's even after the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. In 1998, my grandmother, who came to NYC from Russia in 1910 and spent her life in Manhattan and Brooklyn, came to visit me and we went to eat on Bedford Avenue and her first reaction was, "This is Brooklyn?" Bedford Avenue was a quiet strip of low-rise buildings with a few cute shops and restaurants. Today Bedford Avenue is increasingly getting more crowded, while the shops and restaurants continue to multiply. Bedford still remains the main strip, but locals often spend their time on other main streets as well, such as Grand Street. Williamsburg has extended into Bushwick as well and real estate brokers now seem to be calling as much of the area Williamsburg as they can. My husband recently read an article that gave the statistics of the increased passengers on the subway lines that go through Williamsburg and Bushwick, the L, J, M and Z lines. The J, M, and Z lines were only inhabited by local New Yorkers in the 90s.

When you walk the streets of Williamsburg, one of the most noticeable things is the fashion. Women are often wearing dresses and both women and men either have the latest fashions or unique styles. There are numerous vintage stores in the neighborhood that have already sifted through second hand clothes to bring shoppers fashionable things to wear at decent prices. There are also numerous boutiques that sell the work of local artists and designers. A weekend market called Aritsts and Fleas is close to Bedford Avenue and anyone can rent a space to sell crafts and clothes. Local fashion sends a message that creativity is close by. Although many new inhabitants of this thriving neighborhood are young professionals that are far from the arts, artists and designers still linger. There are galleries and studios in the neighborhood, as well as music and performance art spaces. Almost the whole neighborhood is filled with middle class, mostly white, people between 20 and 45.

Well, this is all true in the gentrified world of Williamsburg. North Williamsburg still has some older people who have lived here for much longer than the mid 90's. There is also a hispanic population on the south side of Williamsburg, and further south the neighborhood is filled with Hasidic Jews. The area that borders Bushwick is very industrial and has more African-American residents. Williamsburg borders Greenpoint, which is also gentrified, but is filled with Polish immigrants. Since the boom of gentrification in Williamsburg and the banking bubble, many condos have been built around the neighborhood. These condos are in buildings with multiple units and are as expensive as houses (500,000 to over 1 million). Houses in Williamsburg are well over 1 million dollars, even after the financial crisis. Although Williamsburg had more foreclosures than all of the Bronx, people are still slowly moving in and purchasing the abundance of new homes in the neighborhood. People come here, mostly from outside New York City, and do not want to leave.

In the past few years, I've noticed that this type of gentrification is not only happening in Brooklyn, but seems to be happening in major cities throughout the world. Within the past 2 years I've traveled and noticed similar neighborhoods (young professionals, cool fashion, and condos in formerly working class or run down neighborhoods) in Paris, Barcelona and Chicago.I'm not sure about other cities, but gentrification is not very new to New York.

This was going on in the East Village/Lower East Side in the 90's when similar gentrification was taking place in that part of Manhattan. I remember seeing a show by Penny Arcade (http://www.pennyarcade.tv/biography/index.html) in which she told stories of people who were displaced due to the gentrification in the neighborhood. In fact, Williamsburg is the spill-over gentrification from the East Village in the 1990's. Last semester when I observed the art teacher in the elementary school in my neighborhood, she explained how the student population is decreasing because students' families are leaving. It's too expensive to live here. There is also an art show going on in Fort Greene until May 16, 2010 about the gentrification of Brooklyn and how it affects New Yorkers (http://www.mocada.org/).

Artists are the ones who typically start these trends of gentrification. They move into neighborhoods that are low-income and cheap. They beautify the space and it draws in young professionals who want to live a similar life. Soon, the rents, and the neighborhood prices overall, rise. This forces the original low-income residents, as well as some of the artists who have contributed to the changes, to leave. As the years pass by, I am becoming more interested in having a decent job and a stable lifestyle. I understand the issues of gentrification from one point of view; get these people to go back to where they came from and leave our neighborhood as it

was. However, there are some original residents who enjoy the beautification and increased socio-economic level of their neighborhood. There is also the point of view of the people who want somewhere to live and enjoy living in these environments. As the article below points out, it's a complex issue. I'm assuming that the talks The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (http://www.mocada.org/) will address these issues, but will they come up with a solution? I'm not sure, but I do know that they've created art that will add to the beautification of life that drives gentrification.

http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/artists-reflect-on-role-in-gentrification/