Mediaculture

Week 7 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Feminist Media Strategies for governmental PerformanceWe live in a media centric world bombarded by the media images twenty four hours a day. It is so powerful that we often cannot distinguish the reality from the mediated reality. Media makes use of images around us to experience this rattling different wileiculated meaning. This often interludes with the notion of the people who control the media which can either be the proprietor or dominant groups through force or coercion that control the opinions. These viewpoints ar the factors that look on the in the altogethers values, of the modern media, which often tend to trivialize or sensationalize the issues, according to the ideological stance.Feminist Media humanistic discipline have formed as a unsusceptibility to this distorted media views, to convey the undistorted reality to the public. Its more than an information ladder and the same time new mode of protest to decry the hideo us stories media told about women. The feminist media kick the bucket as the activists say has three ultimate purposes first, to interrupt the incessant run of images that supports the established social order with alternative airs of thinking and acting second, to organize and activate viewing audience (media is not the only, nor necessarily most effective, way to do this) third, to create ruseful and original imagery that follows in the tradition of fine artwork, to help viewers see the world in a new way and learn something about themselves in relation to it. The authors in their essay point to the ways to attract the media to their campaign and force them to present their viewpoints. The authors say that to understand how media operates, observe it -with detachment -and be pragmatic. It doesnt matter what you think the media should cover, the quarry of the game (and it is a game) is to get them to play it your way. Mass media time is not a public table service it is a hi ghly valuable commodity that is purchased by corporations and individuals who promote products, ideas, attitudes and images. The stakes of this game are high, and as artists the best we can hope for is a kind of guerrilla foray into that system.Here it would be sensible to note the contri merelyions of the Glasgow University Media Research chemical group (GUMG) and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), engaged in research in the process of news production and the relationship between ideology and authority. The research of the GUMG has been very controversial since the emergence of Bad News in 1976. Bad News was concerned with the television coverage of industrial relations in 1975. The GUMGs analysis of television news led it conclude that the viewers had been given a misleading portrayal of industrial disputes, a portrayal that distorted the real situation. The descriptions attached to management were much(prenominal) that they persuaded the audience of the rightne ss of the management position against the demands made by the unions.Thus, it has become the inherent nature of the media to control things. In 1973 Galtung and Ruge analyzed foreign news in newspapers and found that for any event to become a news item, and therefore considered newsworthy, it had to pass through a selection process. If it conformed to a fact set of criteria, the news staff judged it newsworthy. Galtunge and Ruge c all(prenominal)s those criteria as news values.The essay tells different methods to persuade the media for the semipolitical performance. But the question remains, if the media conforms to certain pre-de barrierined news values, how can these campaigns succeed, despite the systematic efforts by the activists.Week 8 Jesse Drew, The Collective Camcorder in nontextual matter and Activism.The essay attempts to portray the role of the video makers collectives, in many resistance political campaigns. The invention of the video camcorder has in fact changed the ladder of history. These movements and the developments in technology when coupled with the ideology of chain armour modernism, took art and activism to new heights. From the efforts of independent artists to the collectives such as Paper Tiger and the Independent Media Center, the revolt has allot to resist the images presented by the mainstream media and tillage. So the environment was all set for a departure from the art-video, and experiment something new that reached the people.As the litterateur says, television is, after all, at the heart of our popular gardening, the culture of the everyday, and dominates the media landscape. Video, when all is verbalize and d champion, is a form of television, a media device that conveys information. It is innate(p) that video artists cross the boundaries of art and activism, and frequently tell apart to subvert the message, not just exploit the form. This artistic jujitsu, using the weight of television to fall upon itself, eme rged as a popular strategy among video collectives. Increasingly, video artists in the 1980s and 1990s embraced the necessity to study on, intervene, and challenge the contested terrain of television, mass media, and popular culture, and leave the art-video aesthetic behind.As Strinati called it post modernism is atheistic of any absolute, universal and all embracing claim to k nowadaysledge and argues that theories or doctrines which make such claims are increasingly open to criticism, contestation and doubt. The mass media are central to the post modern condition because we now take as real, is to a large extent what media tell us is real. We are bombarded from all sides by cultural signs and images in all aspects of media. According to Baudrillard, we have entered the world of simulacra. These are signs that function as copies or models of real objects or events. In the post-modern era, simulacra no longer present a copy of the world, nor do they pee-pee replicas of reality.Tod ay..social reality is structured by codes and models that produce the reality they claim to merely represent. From the 1960s forrad there was a revolt against the modernists. The post modernists thought believed in the breakdown of the distinction between culture and society, the break down of the distinction between art and popular culture, the confusion over time and space, and the sort out of the meta narratives. The pop art of the 1960s demonstrates this cl early on, for example, Andy Warhol presented soup tins and cola bottles as art, as well as contest the uniqueness of Da Vincis portrait of the Mono Lisa by silk screening her image thirty quantify Thirty are better than one. In fact post modernism has helped them to drift away from the so called artistic beliefs.In the words of the essayist video artists in the 1980s and 1990s embraced the necessity to contrive on, intervene, and challenge the contested terrain of television, mass media, and popular culture, and leave t he art-video aesthetic behind. The convergence of these new political, cultural, social, technological, artistic, and economic developments provided the pulse to the establishment of the counter movements like the Paper Television, and subsequently the Independent Media Center.In fact, video art has surpassed all other art forms in interpreting history.Week 9 Carole S. Vance, The War on Culture.The essay follows the corking discussion in the world of art whether a self-censorship is inevitable when it comes to sexual images. Vance quotes instances where public ire overlooked the artistic value when morality was questioned. Vance says that the fundamentalist attack on images and the art world must be recognized as a systematic part of a right-wing political program to fix handed-down social arrangements and reduce diversity.The right wing is deeply committed to symbolic politics, both in using symbols to mobilize public sentiment and in understanding that, because images do stand in for and inspire social change, the arena of representation is a real ground for struggle. He says that it is high time that a vigorous defence of art and images should be made. The author has given a new dimension to the culture war.This is not isolated with art or artistic movements. Representation of sexuality in media is more coordination compound than in art, for example, counting the number of times that women appear on the screen because we cannot immediately identify a persons sexual orientation in the way that we can identify markers of sex and race.Observations by Dyer on gay behavior can be more illustrative here on the representation of sexuality in media. He says a major fact about being gay is that it doesnt show. There is nothing about gay peoples physiognomy that declares then gay, no resembling to the biological markers of sex and race. There are signs of homosexualism, a repertoire of gestures, stances, clothing and even environments that bespeak gayness ju st now these are cultural forms designed to show what the persons person alone does not show that he or she is gay.There are signs of gayness, for example gestures, accents posture and so on, but these markers of sexuality are socially constructed and are both historically and culturally specific. Media texts often rely on stereotypical narratives to indicate that characters in a story line are gay. These may include childlessness, loneliness, a mans interest in arts or domestic crafts, a womans in mechanics or sports. ..each implying a scenario of gay life. Both lesbians and gays have been to use Tuchmans term symbolically annihilated by the media in general. The representation of these two groups has been particularly limited on television.The media has been very careful on such sensitive issues, but has not been so. Media has been overtly criticized primarily on its representations, but when coming to issues of morality, media tended to be very much conservative, and there of cou rse has been a lot of self-censorship.As the essayist says symbolic mobilizations and moral panics often leave in their wake residues of law and policy that remain in force long after the hysteria has subsided, fundamentalist attack on art and images requires a across-the-board and vigorous response that goes beyond appeals to free speech. Free expression is a necessary principle in these debates, because of the steady protection it offers to all images, but it cannot be the only one. To be effective and not defensive, the art community needs to employ its interpretive skills to unmask the modernized rhetoric conservatives use to justify their traditional agenda, as well as to deconstruct the difficult images fundamentalists choose to set their campaigns in motion. Artists can of course look at the way media behaves in this respect.Week 10 Kester Grant, A Critical Frame work for Dialogical Practice.Revolt, is word usually associated with the art movements and the biographies of art ists themselves. Thus a shift from the galleries to community based installations is a natural course of the artistic history. The author explores these transitions as an inherent revolt that pervaded the artistic community.When the artists themselves began to question the gallery itself as an appropriate site for their work. At a time when scale and the use of natural materials and processes were central concerns in sculpture, the comparatively small physical space of the gallery seemed unduly constraining. Further, the museum, with its fusty, art historical associations, appeared ill supply to provide a proper Context for works that explored popular culture or quotidian experience. many another(prenominal) artists saw museums, with their boards of wealthy collectors and businesspeople, as bastions of snobbish elitism in an era that demanded a more doorwayible and democratic form of art. There are many ways to escape the museum. In some cases artists chose to work in sites that were empty or depopulated (e.g., Gordon Matta-Clarks cuttings in abandoned buildings, Michael Heizers or Robert Smithsons land art projects in more or less inaccessible locations), suggesting a certain anxiety about the social interactions that might occur upon venturing beyond clear art institutions.One strand of this work is represented by the agitational, protest-based projects of Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), the Black Mask Group, and Henry Flynt in New York. Drawing on the energies of the antiwar movement and the traditions of fluxus performance and siruationism, these groups arranged actions outside mainstream cultural institutions (Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, etc.) to call attention to the complicity of these institutions with broader forms of social and political domination.A different approach, and one more directly related to dialogical practices, emerged in the collaborative projects developed by artists associated with the Womans Building in Los Angeles d uring the 1970s. Artists, fuel by political protests against the Reagan administrations foreign policy (especially in Central America), the antiapartheid movement, and nascent AIDS activism, as well as revulsion at the market frenzy surrounding neoexpressionism, with its retardaire embrace of the heroic anthropoid painter. A number of artists and arts collectives developed innovative new approaches to public and community-based work during the 1980s and early 1990s.The late 1980s and early 1990S witnessed a gradual convergence between old-school community art traditions and the work of younger practitioners, leading to a more complex set of ideas around public engagement. This movement was also catalyzed by the controversy over Richard Serras Tilted Arc in the late 1980s,Community art projects are often centered on an exchange between an artist (who is viewed as creatively, intellectually, financially, and institutionally empowered) and a given subject who is defined a priori as in need of empowerment or access to creative/expressive skills. Thus the community in community-based public art often, although not always, refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially different from the artist.References1. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Feminist Media Strategies For Political Performance2. Jesse Drew, The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism.3. Carole S. Vance, The War on Culture4. Kester Grant, A Critical Frame work for Dialogical Practice