Recently in Mediated Realities Category

"In China, a Headless Mao Is a Game of Cat and Mouse"
New York Times
6 October 2009
BY Jimmy Wang

(Left, Mao's Guilt / Gao Brothers)

BEIJING -- It's not the kind of sculpture of Chairman Mao you typically see in China. He's on his knees as a supplicant, confessing; his body language and facial expression indicate deep remorse. What's more, the head of this life-size bronze statue, titled "Mao's Guilt" and created by the artist brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, separates from the body -- by design.

I'm embedding this into the Social Etymologies blog because I never want to forget this.

I never want to forget the sound of a child's uncomfortable giggle as two-by-four hits young, black bone. I never want to forget the sound of a child saying "Damn!" over and over or someone saying plainly, in the background, "They beat him to death!" I never want to forget a child say with almost Fox News fascination, "Get closer! Get closer!"

I never want to forget a young voice scream desperately "Come on, Derrion! Derrion get up! Derrion, get up!"

I never want to forget that we produced these children. I never want to forget the process and practice of that production.

I never want to forget what we have done to the kids. I never want to forget what we have not done for the kids.

Beating death Of Derrion Albert, age 16, by his peers (24 September 2009, Chicago, IL)

Miru Kim's body-image-space work exposes the forgotton-ness and vulnerability of vacant, vacated, abandoned sites. Kim photographs herself nude in an attempt to eliminate all cultural representations in these spaces:

The New York Times
30 July 2009
Television Review | 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta'

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Thanks to the arrest of the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his house in Cambridge, Mass., two weeks ago, we are now in the midst, we are told, of a national dialogue about race. So it seems as suitable a moment as any to gripe about the profiling instincts of television programmers who in recent years have given us a tight, binary vision of what it means to be black in America in the new millennium.

A few years back in the Twin Cities, I was fortunate enough to see writer/actor Anna Deavere Smith twice in one week. This was just after she concluded her study, or what she calls her "search for American character." I found an excerpt from her show on the TED site, which I think is important for my students to see, particularly Smith's word for word performance of her interview with inmate Paulette Jenkins, which she titles "A Mirror to Her Mouth" (at 6:00 in the video below).

Here, Jenkins's telling of her experience witnessing then covering up the murder by her partner of her child Myisha illustrates for us the complexity of what it is to be human within a complex world of social and emotional imaginings regarding "the right," "the good," secrecy and notions of privacy, sacrifice, gender, poverty, race, and the ultimate varied effects of often purposeful social differentiation. Smith states that several people recommended that she remove Jenkins's story from her show, but of course she did not. For Smith, Jenkins' story is a way to fathom the "negative imagination" (a reference from Smith's talk with Maxine Greene); it is about risk, "what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be."

"On the Road: A Search for American Character" (23:05)

It appears that 'race' remains one of realityTV's greatest commodities.

The following is taken from The Learning Channel's (TLC) "series description" of its new show, Guess Who's Coming Over, which attempts to explore "racism in modern America." The show aired Sunday 3 May:

Self-described 'redneck,' David hosts Chuck, an African-American from New York. Will this experience leave a lasting impression on David and eradicate his preconceived notions about African-Americans? Or is he too set in his ways to change?

Memphis Journal
28 April 2009
By SHAILA DEWAN

Chicago artist Jeff Zimmerman's "A Note of Hope" mural in Memphis, TN.
Photo by: Lance Murphey for The New York Times

MEMPHIS — Wearing a lilac suit and rhinestone earrings fit for an Easter service, Savannah Simmons made a grand entrance on Sunday at AutoZone Park, a minor-league baseball stadium in the center of downtown. News photographers clustered around her as she smiled broadly enough to broadcast a single gold tooth amid her pearly whites. On the wall behind her, a portrait of Ms. Simmons, an 80-year-old black former factory worker, in a giant mural showed that same gold tooth in a slightly more restrained version of that same smile.

“I have no pictures from my childhood . . .’’

-Samuel Fosso, "A Man of a Thousand Faces," by Leslie Camhi, NYT 2009

From the Jack Shainman Gallery fall 2003 exhibition of photographs by Samuel Fosso:

Samuel Fosso’s self-portraits, which went unseen for many years, are among the more remarkable bodies of work to come to light in recent years. Fosso’s self-portraits are immediately engaging, even disconcerting for their directness and the powerful means of individual expression to which he turns the tradition of studio portrait photography. Born in Cameroon, Samuel Fosso opened his own photography studio at the age of 13 in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, where he had moved after leaving his parents’ home in Nigeria in the wake of the Biafran War. He began making self-portraits in 1978 at the age of 16. Initially the impetus was to have images to send to his family, though in time the photos became their own justification.

Working at night when his studio was closed and inspired by photographs in magazines (which were themselves scarce in Bangui), Fosso became both photographer and model. The excitement of seeing himself dressed in the styles of the day – bell bottoms, platform shoes, oversize sunglasses or with props such as white gloves and flowers, further encouraged him. Whether striking a pose in a karate outfit, talking coolly on a telephone, or imagining the cold as he wears a ski parka in 100-degree heat of his studio, Fosso imagined a new life. The backdrop to these remarkable images of self-transportation is the post-colonial history of the Central African Republic, a scene of frequent strife. Multiple coups have torn the country apart--as did the tyrannical reign of the self-declared “Emperor” Bokassa, who was eventually deposed and convicted of both murder and cannibalism (and whose image is among those that appear on a shirt worn by Fosso in an early image). Fosso continued working throughout this period and recent years have found him working in color, on images that show Fosso as a pirate, a drag queen, and a sailor.

Though often discussed in terms of Western photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Pierre et Gilles, these comparisons are ahistorical, as are readings which assume Fosso to be homosexual. Working in isolation from the contemporary art world, Fosso’s earliest images were made without the thought of an audience. Yet Fosso, continues to engage us in this one sided dialogue, setting forth his images in order to express not only his own pride but that of a contemporary and underrepresented African sensibility. Fosso was included in “Photo Espana 2003,” Madrid, Spain, curated by Olvia María Rubio, as well as “The Short Century” traveling exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and P.S.1 in Long Island City, NY.