art school flashback...like whoa...

Just came from a late night going-away party for a friend who is moving to Argentina for a year. Lucky her!

I met a guy at the party who is an aspiring film maker, Puerto Rican (I think), born and raised in the projects on the Lower East side then studied film at Vassar with a bunch of rich-ass drugged out white kids. Which for him, was posssibly an even more traumatice experience than my 3 years in the painting department at RISD.

The topic turned to gentrification and he talked about wanting to make movies about neighborhood gentrification, with white interlopers as villains and local community members responding in constructive ways (community activism and organizing) and not so constructive ways ("yo run me that wallet...") but basically his "mockumentary" would end in the community members going crazy and postal on the white interlopers. One of my classmates from Wagner made the good point that gentrification is a little more more complicated then his narrative would capture, "what about African American professionals returning/moving to Harlem or BedStuy? What about other people of color?" I think she took issue with his extreme caricaturization of good guys and bad guys. His point was that such extreme characterizations, even bordering on the cartoonish, was critical to his strategy because he felt it was the only way to get people to wake up to white dominance in Hollywood and the pigeon holes and carricatures that people of color have been relegated to in film, this grand tradition having begun with such fine films as DW Griffith's Birth of A Nation.


Basically, what I interpreted was that examining complications and nuances was not really of interest to him but more rather expressing an attitude that says "Fuck that! This is how you all treat us in your media, I'm going do the same shit right back and show you how ludicrous and exploitative it is."

It took me back to my own experience at RISD and how angry I was at how much more I had to go to explain myself and my motivations because I was a person of color. Back then, I basically had the same fuck you attitude as him. But for me what was frustrating was that my anger led me to make some art work that was more catharsis and blindly lashing out rather than work more honest to my interests. It didn't feel real, the overtly political and angry work I was doing. Not the content, because questions about privileged narratives, identity, desire and idealized images were always interests of mine but more my strategies, which didn't feel honest to me, not at first.


Artistically, I felt like I was just swinging wildly trying to hurt and piss of as many people as I could because I was so pissed-it took me a few years to step back and think about nuanced means of communication and different strategies for getting people out of their comfort zones. It was such a relief to leave RISD because I made work that was more true to myself because I didn't have to be so angry all the time and I finally felt a little free.

After the conversation, I talked with someone about admiring Felix Gonazlez Torres' cleverness in using piles of sucking candy as metaphors for his sexuality and how brilliant his matching analog clocks in Perfect Lovers was able to subtly, elegantly allude to our comfort/discomfort with homosexuality.

Sometimes pure anger can keep you from thinking about the beauty and effectiveness of visual metaphors. Torres just blew me away, especially with the candy, when I read his thoughts on his candy installation I was like, "gross man, I put that shit in my mouth and its about his gay lover?" Funny, but he succeeded in removing me from my heterosexist comfort zone and getting me to think about sexuality, masculinity, hetereosexism, intimacy-fuck, whats more intimate than caressing and sucking something with your tongue slowly and savoring it, even if its candy?

One thing Andrew used to tell me was that-if your message is going to make people uncomfortable and force them to question uncomfortable truths, assumptions and privilegs about their positions you'd best be strategic about doing it because if you don't want to hear the message you'll find a way to block it out. Thats what I loved about Torres' piece. He snuck INTO MY MOUTH-a most private of sexual spaces with something completely innocuous and chidllike-a wrapped sucking candy.

I mean, I see where dude is coming from with his films, when I saw Birth of a Nation, I wanted to walk out too-I was blown away that I could be asked to seperate the fucked-up racist imagery from the film's considerable pioneering accomplishments in editing. But I think its always important to remember the value of metaphor, something that Ernesto Pujol always talked about when I worked on his residency.

But, I do want to see the film when it drops.