Canvas Journal XIII - Winter 2014

canvas The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Communication Studies Volume XIII | Winter 2014

Canvas The McGill Undergraduate Art History and Communications Studies Journal Volume XIII - Winter 2014

McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kathryn Yuen EDITORIAL BOARD Karly Beard Benjamin Demers Daisy de Montjoye Hannah Feniak Emily Friedman Anna Kanduth Sara Kloepfer Erica Morassutti Laura Segal Michael Zhang Special Thanks To: Amy Goh and Nouran Sedaghat

Cover Image Amy Goh, Spring Awakening, 2011.

Amy Goh is a Singapore-risen artist and weaver of worlds specializing in black and white illustrations in the surrealistic and sublime vein. Her ink-layered illustrations stitch together an encyclopaedic visual repository wherein she scrutinizes and navigates memories, dreams, and the nebulous crevices of the mind. Amy is currently based in Montreal where she is masquerading under the cover of a normal human mask, while actively exploring the potential for cross-medial artistic collaboration.

She is represented within North America by Coatcheck Gallery.

Her work can be found at www.atlantisdreaming.org or www.facebook.com/inkyapocalypse.

The Arts Undergraduate Society The Arts Undergraduate Society Journal Fund The Department of Art History and Communication Studies The Art History and Communication Studies Student Association

Table of Contents 9

Erica Morassutti Granting the Permission to Stare: Taking a Look at the Disabled Subject in Swim II

15

Eden Abramowitz Who Has What it Takes? Queer’s Strive To Be On Top in a Neoliberal American Dream

29

Daniel Fishbayn Trapped in Capitalism: The Techno-Libertarian Paradox of “What Would I Say?”

39

Lena Sarchuk My GPS Made Me Do It: In-Car Navigation Systems Intellect, Agency, Environment and Society

49

Nouran Sedaghat Factory Production and the Persistence of the Author in Contemporary Art: A Cross-Contextual Analysis

63

Alexandria Proctor The Visual Manifestation of “Qi” Throughout the Tang, Song, and Tuan Dynasties: A Case Study of the i-p’in Style

77

Camille Paly Neo-impressionnisme: quand le peintre rencontre l’anarchiste

83

Jeremy Keyzer Picturing Performance: Gendered Labour Practices in 19th Century Canadian Residential Schools

95

Rosalind Brady The Ideal Antique: Classicizing Architectural Motifs in the Jan de Beer Montreal Triptych

107

Katherine O’Malley Play and Place

Amy Goh, Apple Eye, 2011.

Pen and Ink drawing.

Letter from the Editors Dear Readers, As the only undergraduate publication within the Art History and Communications Studies Department, it is our responsibility and privilege to showcase this year’s outstanding academic writings at the undergraduate level.

For the thirteenth volume of Canvas, we really wanted to focus on ways of looking at visual culture – whether it be close analyses of artworks, paintings, media artifacts, or cultural artifacts. The ten authors featured this year effectively demonstrate this ability to look closely, to draw our attention to particular details, and to abstract poignant meaning out of them. It is for this reason that the editorial board felt that it would be appropriate to feature Amy Goh’s Spring Awakening (2011) for our cover, seeing that her intricate pen and ink aesthetic mirrors the level of complex detail in the ten selected essays, and that the focus of this artwork ties in so harmoniously with the theme of looking.

With this edition of Canvas, we take a peek at pop culture through reality television and emerging Internet apps. In contemporary culture, we also scrutinize the ways in which technology has become increasingly pervasive in our day-to-day lives, and furthermore, we examine the representation of disability and the methods of factory production in contemporary art.

Looking back to the past, we turn to France’s Neo-impressionist art movement, China’s representation of spirit resonance throughout the dynasties, but also to historical issues closer to home by highlighting the significant impacts of Canada’s residential school system. We conclude by focusing on two papers that give a nod to Montreal’s creative art scene, both inside and outside the gallery.

We would like to thank all our contributing authors, and we extend our thanks to the Arts Undergraduate Society Journal Fund and the Art History and Communications Studies Student Association for financially backing this project.

On behalf of the Canvas Journal editorial board, we hope that this collection of essays will help you consider new ways of looking at the visual world around us.

Sincerely, Kathryn Yuen Editor-in-Chief

Figure 1 - Chris Rush, Swim II, 2006.

Conte crayon on paper. Portrait is life size in scale.

Granting the Permission to Stare: Representing the Disabled Subject in Swim II Erica Morassutti

It is not polite to stare. This rule of etiquette creates the paradox encountered by one who stumbles upon something arresting in an otherwise mundane visual field, wants to look at it, but must refrain from doing so in the name of tact. Swim II,1 first exhibited as part of a portrait series named “Permission to Stare” by artist Chris Rush, deliberately invokes this paradox. First shown in 2006 at an art gallery in Brooklyn, the series of seventeen portraits is based on studies done from life while Rush volunteered at a facility for people with mental and physical disabilities, sketching the patients during quiet hours.2 Swim II depicts a young woman with Down syndrome, a disability that is visually evident in her facial characteristics. Noting the social pattern of visual avoidance that masquerades as tact when a disabled person is encountered in everyday life, Rush desires to portray his subjects as “original” and “natural, rather than pathological.”3 He strives for a representation that is deliberate in its visual engagement with the subject in order to renegotiate understandings of the disabled body. As he engages with such issues of representation and subjectivity, Rush questions the practices of visual engagement with the disabled body by manipulating its representation in an artistic context. Essentially, Rush’s representation of a disabled woman in Swim II guides the viewer to a new understanding of the disabled subject by framing her as a work of art, and implicitly inviting us to stare.

In her text “Sexualities and/in Representation: Five British Artists,” art historian Lisa Tickner discusses art as “a practice of representation and hence ideology.”4 Stating that ideology manifests itself in social practices, Tickner contends that representation, in its constant mediation of reality, is an inherently political act that can be used to both enable 1 See opposite page, Figure 1.

2 Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” in Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81.

3 “Exhibitions and Publications,” Chris Rush, accessed October 18, 2013, http://www. chrisrushartist.com/html/publications.html.

4 Lisa Tickner, “Sexualities and/in Representation: Five British Artists,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 223.

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and dismantle systems of power.5 Rush’s artistic representation of the disabled subject attempts to deconstruct socially entrenched discourses of disability through its adoption of the conventions of portraiture. Similarly, in her essay “Looking Away, Staring Back,” disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thompson discusses the use of a conventional artistic tradition to represent an unconventional subject, noting its power to “announce that their subjects are worthy of public commemoration, important enough to look at, even beautiful.”6 Garland-Thompson remarks that upon first glance, the profile view and regal pose of the woman featured in Swim II resembles that of the commemorative Florentine portraits of the early Renaissance – the hair of the subject is wrapped in a vividly patterned beach towel which mimics an aristocratic headdress, and the straps of her bathing suit resemble the top of a simple gown.7 By using a tradition of representation sanctioned by the art historical canon and notable for its exposition of beauty and social status, Rush suggests that the disabled subject is worthy of visual engagement and appreciation as an aesthetic object.

The representation of the disabled body in the context of an art gallery also challenges dominant ideas of socially appropriate 5 Ibid., 222.

6 Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” 80.

7 Ibid., 82.

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visual interaction with a person who has a disability. The institutional aesthetic of an art work has the potential to influence how its viewers absorb its meaning, and thus frames the understanding of its subject. As a space in which observation is encouraged, the gallery engenders a degree of scrutiny that might not be permissible elsewhere. By exhibiting his work in a such a context, Rush provides the viewer with an acceptable space in which to explore the disabled subject – a space where the socially learned and enforced attitudes of deliberate non-acknowledgement that constitute barriers to the social integration of the disabled body do not intervene.

Socially entrenched prescriptions of behaviour dictate public interactions. As physical difference is typically discerned through visual observation, any perceived abnormality draws negative attention. Garland-Thompson notes the paradox articulated by our desire and inability to stare, stating “the guilty retraction of the gaze from a stimulating sight is rooted in our distress at witnessing fellow humans so unusual that we cannot accord them a look of acknowledgement.”8 Avoidance – or, as it is problematically considered “tact” or “discretion,” to feign not having noticed – is so prioritized that we forego acknowledgement and, in doing so, sacrifice opportunities for rela8 Ibid., 79.

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tional equality. Rush’s work, confrontational in its ability to transform a reaction of discomfort and avoidance to one of sensitivity and engagement, questions whether society’s perceived “tact” is the only manifestation of sensitivity in interactions with the disabled.

The artistic nature and exhibition context of Rush’s representation therefore manipulates how we respond to seeing someone with a visually evident disability by granting viewers the permission to look at them. Garland-Thompson argues that the voyeuristic guilt which compels the viewer to immediately avert his or her gaze upon seeing a disabled person ultimately compromises his or her ability to “accept them as fellow human beings.”9 The high art authority conferred

by Rush’s adoption of portrait conventions, as well as the gallery context in which his work is presented, allow Swim II to establish a visual relationship that allows the viewer to appease his or her own curiosity with a degree of empathy and sensitivity. This act ultimately transforms the gross etiquette breach of staring into an act of appreciative interaction, enabling a sentiment of common humanity and creating a circumstance in which visual engagement can be maintained rather than rejected.

By presenting an image of the disabled body that encourages engagement rather than dis9 Ibid., 81.

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engagement, Rush reframes the visual relationship of the viewer with the subject herself. Representation has the ability to construct a narrative based on the subjectivities implicated in the work. Swim II, for example, is an art work mediated through one subject (the artist himself, an able-bodied person who brought to bear his own experiences of visually interacting with and documenting the disabled body), which portrays another subject (the disabled body), and is relayed to viewers, whose interpretation of the work involves a further subjectivity of their own and which is influenced by personal identity and experience.

Subjectivity is further implicated in Swim II as it challenges the “precarious level” on which social structures are seen as an integral part of identity.10 The association of the disabled body with ideas of weakness, victimization, and disfigurement elicits reactions of pity, revulsion, or discomfort from viewers and renders the disabled condition abnormal, alien, and undesirable. Rush’s portrait, however, undermines these stigmatizing myths of disability as he frames the disabled subject in a dignified, majestic way, rather than as the site of a deficiency for which he or she must be assisted to compensate or a difference he or she must feel compelled to hide.

The bathing suit and towel of the 10 Lisa Tickner, “Sexualities and/in Representation,” 222.

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subject suggest that she is about to go swimming – an activity thought to be “normal” as it is also enjoyed by the able-bodied. GarlandThompson notes that his subject refuses the role of the pitiable victim, as “her likeness emerges from the sharp line her stately features form against the background; her nose and chin lift imperially; her eyes gaze impassively down on the world beneath her.”11 Rush’s portrayal of a subject typically not expected to project an air of authority is instead depicted as dignified and graceful, given that people “expect such an imperial gaze to come from a monarch” rather than from those that we have “learned to see as pitiable or repugnant.”12 Garland-Thompson scathingly defines the concept of pity as an alienating force, an “emotional cul-de-sac” which is hardly more than “repugnance refined into genteel condescension,” and is ultimately responsible for the prevention of relational equality from occurring.13 Art, as a mode of ideological representation, has the power to mediate social reality.14 Returning to Tickner’s argument that representation is an inherently political act that can be used to both enable and dismantle systems of power, it is evident that Swim II represents the disabled subject in 11 Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” 82.

12 Ibid., 85.

13 Ibid., 93.

14 Lisa Tickner, “Sexualities and/in Representation,” 223.

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a way that is entirely deliberate.15 The dignified construction of the subject of Swim II works to dispel pity and allows for a recuperative assertion of dignity, renegotiating the power relationship between the disabled subject and her observer.

Finally, Rush’s representation of a subject who is clearly unique dismantles the homogenization of disability by addressing diversity. Despite her portrayal in the familiar conventions of portraiture, the face of the woman in Swim II is not recognizable – her anonymity suggests that she possesses an identity that is simply her own. The distinct features of the simple heart tattooed on her left shoulder, the colourful towel with which she has presumably wound around her head, and the inscrutability of her contemplative gaze are intimate details that render the subject unique.

Swim II allows for the respectful, graceful, intimate, and beautiful representation of a subject not commonly portrayed in such ways.16 Though anonymous, the subject insists upon mutual recognition as a fellow human being, rather than being perceived as a victim of unfortunate circumstances. Swim II exists as a valuable contribution to discussions of contemporary art as it engages artistic conventions to consider not so much the spectacle of disability itself but the strange15 Ibid., 222.

16 Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” 83.

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ness of observing such pride and comfort in the expression of one whose life is socially deemed to be undesirable. Indebted to both traditions of portraiture in the art historical canon and dominant understandings of social interactions today, Rush’s representation of the disabled body grants viewers the “permission to stare.”

Rush successfully reconceives the representation of the disabled subject and challenges the viewer to think differently and challenge his or her own relationship to the subject as he presents her physical existence as a worthy work of art.

Erica Morassutti is an Art History major with minors in Communications and English Literature. She enjoys researching beauty culture and disability studies, and was eager for an opportunity to combine the two.

B i b l i o g r a p h y Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie. “Looking Away, Staring Back.” In Staring: How We Look, 79-94. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Tickner, Lisa. “Sexualities and/in Representation: Five British Artists.” (1984) In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 220-238.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

“Exhibitions and Publications.” Chris Rush. http://www.chrisrushartist.com/ html/publications.html. Accessed October 18, 2013.

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Figure 1 - Cory Hindorff 3rd place on America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20

Who Has What It Takes? Queer’s Strive To Be On Top in a Neoliberal American Dream Eden Abramowitz

The American Dream is imbued in contemporary public consciousness, and represents the equal opportunity to freedom, success, and wealth for all who demonstrate hard work. This notion of equal opportunity is epitomized and perpetuated in American pop culture.

However, a queer analysis of the American Dream reveals that gendered hierarchies govern U.S. social consciousness, and are thus reinforced through pop culture. For the purpose of this paper, I do not simply wish to propose that the American Dream requires a reiteration of heteronormativity to endure. Instead, I intend to further this argument by suggesting that a more harmful and destructive method of maintaining the American Dream exists in the form of staged sexual and racial tolerance. As proposed by scholar Kathleen Stewart, the construction of collective identity in contemporary U.S. culture is activated during moments when the American dream meets its nightmare.”1 The “winners” as those who are granted the potential of attaining the American Dream, and “losers” those who are not awarded this privilege because they are not part of the white, heterosexual, upper-classes of society.2 The winners occupy the central space in society, whereas losers are consigned outside its borders. Stewart argues that the moment when losers appear in close proximity to the epicenter does not erase difference, but engages difference.3 Thus, whereas the American Dream seems to have been relegated and replaced by a more liberalized society, this impression, in reality, is what allows for its quiet vindication, and for the gender and racial stratification of American society.

An evaluation of American reality television series America’s Next Top Model will reveal how the inclusion of a diversity of contestants does not liberate, but rather strengthens the American Dream. Whereas the show proclaims to be an innovator in pushing the boundaries of normalized race and gender categories, its attempts are superficial. Instead, 1 Kathleen Stewart, “Real American Dreams (Can Be Nightmares),” in Cultural Studies & Political Theory, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 246.

2 Ibid., 243.

3 Ibid., 249.

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the show constructs and reiterates gendered and racial normativity as defined by American societal values. The modes in which the show articulates inclusion, in reality creates the effect of exclusion that is necessary for the sexual and racial hierarchies, and the myth of the American Dream to endure.

More specifically, an investigation of contestant Cory Hindorff’s journey on America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20 will reveal how the process of exclusion, expressed through the lens of inclusion, creates the same effects of heteronormativity as the concept of the American Dream (fig. 1). This paper will first explore ideas proposed by Judith Butler concerning gender performativity, and the strengthening of difference through queer liberation. Secondly, it will demonstrate how fashion and fashion modeling are inextricably tied to the politics of consumerism, which are built on a set of discourses that demand both gender and racial conformity. Models represent cultural icons, as defined by capitalist market demands. Thirdly, this paper will investigate the notion of androgyny and its place within the fashion modeling empire, corporate, and popular culture.

Finally, this paper will examine specific facets of America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20 that operate to reinforce standards of gender and race, and how this compares with the American Dream.

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Produced and hosted by American television personality, producer, author and supermodel Tyra Banks, America’s Next Top Model relays the competition of several contestants fighting for a career in the modeling industry.

The series has consisted thus far of 20 cycles spanning over the course of one decade. Contestants are put through a series of challenges and photo shoots each week, and their progress is critiqued by a panel of judges who, until recently, were solo agents in voting off one competitor at a time, until left with a single winner. Introduced in cycle 19, however, fans are able to vote from home, thus creating a place for American consciousness to influence the outcome of the competition. America’s Next Top Model has both popularized the modeling industry and attempted to push the limits of beauty in an industry with strict definitions of physical and psychological character. The show welcomes a diversity of competitors from various racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. Furthermore, Cycle 20, which premiered on August 2, 2013, opened the competition up to both female and male aspiring models. In this particular cycle, contestants battle to win the title of top model, with a prize package including a contract with Next Model Management, a photo spread in Nylon Magazine, and a national campaign with GUESS. The three finalists of cycle 20 were contestants Jourdan

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Miller (fig. 2), Marvin Cortes (fig.

3), and Cory Hindorff (fig. 1), each finalist representing a different type of person as defined by western social standards: Jourdan epitomizes the all-American sweetheart; Marvin the poor latino from the Bronx; and Cory the gay androgynous figure trying to overcome gender guidelines. Although the show seemingly endorses sexual and racial acceptance, its dependency on popular demand of both broadcasting, fashion markets and public opinion- compels its participation in the construction and reiteration of social norms.

The outcome of this contest is pre-determined by specific forces, which are married to conventions of race and sexuality in contemporary America. As such, the myth of the American Dream persists within the context of America’s Next Top Model, as opportunity is not equal but awarded only to those who can satisfy market demands.

American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler defines gender as a type of performance, and therefore merely a social construct. She explains that gender is “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” in which individuals become, or appear to become, male or female.4 Gender is therefore a corporeal identity that is affixed onto the body through continu4 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519.

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ous execution of acts. Moreover, gender identity “is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.”5 This performance, then, is a manifestation of social demands that authorize and prohibit forms of sexuality. Most problematically, these social demands have been constructed upon a male-female dichotomy that ostracizes any form of otherness or queerness.

Although modern scholars and activists have destabilized the rigidity of gender binaries, the modes in which queerness become visible in contemporary society are not as transparent as they seem.

The notion that queerness, conceptually, exists to strengthen and regulate the boundaries heterosexual supremacy was first proposed by Butler.6 In her article “Critically Queer,” Butler questions if the term “queer” represents a “discursive occasion for a powerful and compelling fantasy of historical reparation.”7 In other words, Butler proposes the idea that the term queer, which has been transformed over time to signify new possibilities of sexual social acceptance, in reality empowers the hegemony of heterosexuality. She explains that the citation of “queer” engenders a fantastical vision of inclusion, 5 Ibid., 520.

6 Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 2011 [1993]): 169.

7 Ibid.

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and the false expiation of its past wrongdoings. Moreover, Butler reifies this point by suggesting that the main premise of contemporary activism is its exclusionary force.8 This idea is evident in America’s Next Top Model, as the show campaigns a nondiscriminatory contest of equal chance. However, its mission is another fruitless attempt for inclusion as it helps to fortify heteronormativity in practice.

A contest to become a fashion model is, by nature, implicated in the construction and regulation of accepted gender identities.

Both fashion and fashion modeling exist as industries that bind the biological body with manufactured personalities to create a gendered ideal image of beauty. Each industry is dictated by hegemonic conventions of beauty, which, as expressed by Patricia SoleyBeltran, are “a mechanism defining and regulating the normative standards for acceptable identity.”9 However, there are multiple agents ordaining these dominant beauty standards in the United States.

One method by which beauty standards command the modeling industry is through the individuality of models, who act to recapitulate ideals of femininity and masculinity.10 Models possess performative power, as they are role models for identity, or 8 Ibid., 173.

9 Patrícia Soley-Beltran, “Modelling Femininity.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 11, no. 3 (2004): 323.

10 Ibid., 310.

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“symbolic containers of cultural values” that define and regulate gender, class and race identity.11 Models are commodities that represent a uniform ideal of beauty typically contingent upon the preferred looks of the Caucasian, wealthy classes.12 These ideals are cunningly mistaken as prototypes of success, and it is this imaginary success that sanctions conformity.13 The role of models is made clear in a statement

by Norwegian top model Kristin Clotilde Holby declaring “I am an optical illusion”14 This indicates that although she appears real, she is simply a scripted body. Models are thus the medium through which the myth of the American Dream is communicated. Moreover, Soley-Beltran suggests that models “are both performers and subjects of performativity.”15 They are actors because it is their professional duty is to act out accepted definitions of beauty, and subjects because they, in turn, amount to the reiteration of these standards.16 Most significantly, the public personas of models are “a reference for prestigious imitation and desirability as if they were attainable and real when, in fact, they are nothing but fiction.”17 The artificiality of models’ physical appear11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 317.

14 Ibid., 316.

15 Ibid., 323.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

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ance and personality are both an object of desire that is menacingly unachievable, and yet marketable to the capitalist consumer society.

The fashion industry is also a factor that contributes to the construction and performance of gender identity. Fashion modeling combines the normalization of performing gender with market imperatives.18 These market demands - a product of capitalism - comprise of “networks of people who are motivated by taste preferences, artistic creativity and ultimately, money.”19 Moreover, scholar Ashley Mears explains that clients, bookers, producers and models are all bound and constrained by floating norms.20 Although the industry seemingly controls the construction of beauty ideals, the fashion market is a business predicated on commercial revenue that relies on popular demand. Products sell successfully when buyers recognize familiarity with the goods they are purchasing, and thus “where gender identity of the model matches the consumer’s gender identity.”21 The public consciousness of American fashion 18 Ashley Mears, “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modeling,” Ethnography 9 (2008): 430.

19 Ibid., 450.

20 Ibid., 453.

21 Brett A. S. Martin and Juergen Gnoth, “Is The Marlboro Man The Only Alternative? The Role Of Gender Identity And Self-construal Salience In Evaluations Of Male Models,” Marketing Letters 20, no. 4 (2009): 355.

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markets is locked in a male-female gender binary. As such, the familiarity that drives capital inevitably operates to command and perpetuate beauty as defined by heteronormative standards. This process is particularly evident in America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20, in which one main prize is a national ad campaign with the company GUESS. The company partakes in the commercial fashion business, which is based solely on profits and not the artistic side of fashion. Because it is not implicated with the avant-garde, the company does not symbolize a vehicle of social progress. Since GUESS will broadcast the campaign across the United States, it must therefore appeal to American consumers and their heteronormative tastes.

The outcome of this competition was therefore no surprise.

Between the three finalists, it is obvious why Jourdan would inevitably win over opponents Marvin and Cory. Each character has their own pity saga to gain support.

Jourdan is the young and vulnerable American sweetheart who is tall, thin, blue-eyed, and blond. Recently divorced from her abusive ex-husband, she attracts sympathy from all Americans who have experienced feelings of vulnerability.

Marvin is the hispanic son of a janitor who grew up in the Bronx. He represents all Americans who, as he describes, come from nothing and work hard to make something of themselves. Finally, Cory sym-

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bolizes the androgynous underdog striving for social acceptance in American society. Although it appears that Jourdan, Cory and Marvin each have an equal chance at winning, market demands dictate the image required to sell. Because consumers are attracted to the familiar, Jourdan’s the ideal candidate to represent GUESS as she is the only contestant to represent normative gender and race.

What consequences emerge when figures who do no adhere to the stringent expectations of sexuality participate in the fashion modeling industry?

How does their presence ratify, rather than debunk, the hegemony of normative beauty? More specifically, what results from the involvement of androgyny in fashion modeling? As defined by Joy and Howard Osfosky, androgyny denotes a utopian society with no sex-role differentiation in which “there are no stereotyped behavioral differences between the roles of males and females on the basis of their sex alone.”22 Early understandings of androgyny are contributed to American psychologist Sandra Bem, who articulates that androgyny implies a possibility for individuals to be both masculine and feminine, and potentially “blend these complementary mo-

22 Joy D. Osofsky and Howard J. Osofsky, “Androgyny as a Life Style,” The Family Coordinator 21, no.4 (1972): 411.

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dalities into a single act.”23 Nevertheless, recent discourse challenges this model, and androgyny has come to embody transcendence.24 As described by Larin McLaughlin, the term now indicates an absence of masculine and feminine characteristics and behaviors.25 Moreover, Bem also posits that traditional sex roles produce patterns of avoidance, which prevent androgyny from becoming a reality.26 In present-day American pop culture, this type of avoidance manifests itself in the form of a fictional idea of social progress and acceptance. The apparent democratization of androgyny in fact propagates a heteronormative desirability, and does not allow the promise of refashioning individual and collective psyche.27

McLaughlin critiques the appearance of androgyny in corporate and popular culture because individuals do not transgress boundaries of gender identities for social change, but rather, to maxi23 Sandra Lipsitz Bem, “Dismantling Gender Polarization and Compulsory Heterosexuality: Should We Turn the Volume down or up?,” The Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 4 (1995): 1016.

24 Larin McLaughlin, “Androgyny and Transcendence in Contemporary Corporate and Popular Culture,” Cultural Critique 42 (1999): 193.

25 Ibid.

26 Bem, “Dismantling Gender Polarization and Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 1017.

27 Maithreyi Krishnaraj, “Androgyny: An Alternative to Gender Polarity,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 16/17 (1996): WS11.

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mize profits and productivity.28 He argues that the “dominance of a ‘cultural diversity’ agenda that is fully aligned with the values of late capitalism” takes shape for corporate goals, and not social justice. This creates an important site of inquiry in which androgyny functions to naturalize racial and gendered class hierarchies by making them visible, and in the process androgyny becomes invisible.29 Furthermore, McLaughlin suggests that racial differences become figured as obstacles that need to be overcome.30 He explains that the “logic of liberal racism, which individualizes and universalizes difference in the service of ‘color-blind’ multiculturalist ‘meritocracy,’” creates a gendering of racial difference in which “white androgyny becomes the prerequisite for valuing racial diversity, and thus (white) gender flexibility becomes the vehicle for overcoming the obstacle of racial discrimination.”31 In other words, the androgynous figure is imbued with racial rhetoric: whiteness and androgyny are bound in popular imagination to necessitate the idea of progressive social change and tolerance in American corporate and popular culture.

Within the context of America’s Next Top Model Cycle 28 McLaughlin, “Androgyny and Transcendence in Contemporary Coporate and Popular Culture,” 189.

29 Ibid., 190.

30 Ibid., 195.

31 Ibid., 196.

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20, the commitment to progressive social change crystallizes in the form of racialized de-gendering. The show models itself to be tolerant of “queer” sexualities.

However, in the process, it implicates race in the othering of sexual difference. The scripted battle between men and women, tasks to model weddings and the opposite gender, a voyage the Bali, social media scores, and the language used in the show all demonstrate ways in which racial and gender hierarchies are solidified.

The show’s goal to break gender boundaries was made explicit in the very first episode, with the incitement of a battle between male and female positions in the modeling industry. A gender divide was strictly drawn between competitors; the men described their wants to show that women do not dominate the playing field, while women sought to defend their positions as leading models (fig. 4). Competitors were split up into two groups, women and men, and were given advice by judges Tyra Banks and Rob Evans. The show’s tactic to fracture gender boundaries therefore relied on a staged battle between male and female contestants, in which male oppression in the modeling industry was to be renegotiated.

Nevertheless, this episode presents Cory as different from all the other male contestants; he stands out in that he is not the “all american muscle bound manly man,”

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rather, androgynous. His character within the show’s script is not only defined as sexually different, but racially alternative. Cory identifies himself as a “hafrican american,” a term he employs to describe his half caucasian, half african american background. He describes that his sexuality and racial identity give him an edge because he is multifaceted, whereas the other contestants embody stereotyped personalities such as the muscle man and the all-American sweetheart. Cory’s seditious character therefore challenges both sexual and racial norms, and is a symbol of change. His strength in the competition, however, relies on his will to capitalize on this uniqueness.

Within the show, although his character hints at being a vehicle through which change can occur, Cory must work within a malefemale dichotomy that hinders his androgynous potential from flourishing. This constraint, then, operates to reinforce that which Cory attempts to defeat because his success can only be achieved by dramatizing difference.

The task of modeling a wedding scene was particularly controversial in that it forced Cory to exude masculinity, as defined and endorsed by the show’s power figures: the judges. In this episode, contestants were matched up to model different “types” of weddings. The show advertised itself as approving different genres of marriages, such as the heterosexCanvas Journal

ual, gay, and lesbian weddings, the objectiphilia wedding, and the polygamous wedding. This task therefore allowed America’s Next Top Model to introduce alternative definitions of love and lust that flout heternormative standards of acceptability. Cory was given the task of modeling a heterosexual wedding, in which he took on the role of the groom (fig. 5). During panel, judge Kelly Cutrone asked if he was playing a man or a woman in his shot, and then criticized his performance by advising him to work on his “straight guy act.”

Throughout the entire series, Cory is constantly critiqued for being too effeminate, and he incessantly tries to overcome this weakness by trying to fit masculine ideals.

In regards to this marriage scene, he explains the importance of selling masculinity in order for people to believe him and his partner are in love, and thus feel something when looking at the photo. The industry therefore requires him to emanate a specific type of masculinity that adheres to the demands of his audience. What is most problematic about this situation is that if Cory cannot comply with these commands, he is described as unsuccessful. In fact, his effeminacy is often regarded as a weakness or flaw that inhibits his performance. If, as already mentioned, gender is a performance demarcating human identity, the rhetoric used suggests Cory’s inability to successfully be human.

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Another task that induced problems concerning the incorporation of androgyny in the fashion modeling industry was that of modeling the opposite gender in a sexy fragrance commercial (fig.

6). Cory is excited about the idea of role reversal, and explains that for the entire competition he had been posing as something he’s not, and forced to combat feelings of discomfort. Once again, he encourages the idea that androgyny is unfit for the reality of modeling in contemporary America. The method of showcasing Cory’s unique edge implies that his success can only be realized through difference. In this specific context, Cory has an advantage over the other competitors as he has experience and training in acting out identities that are not his own. This implies not only that Cory is perpetually locked into a language of malefemale binaries, but that the location of social activism exists only within this context of difference.

This relates to Stewarts arguments about the heteronormative center and queer periphery. In relegating the potential for social change into a condition of role reversal, or a peripheral space, America’s Next Top Model secures the hegemony of heteronormativity.

The locality of transgression is also expressed across national borders. At one stage of the competition, contestants are brought to Bali for a photo-shoot and challenge. This episode is Canvas Journal

framed as a spiritual journey in which the models can get in touch with nature to learn and improve.

Whereas all previous tasks had demanded competitors to perform identities that meet market demands, in Bali they are encouraged to get in touch with their true selves. In defining Indonesia as the exotic site of sexual freedom, the United States insidiously emerges as its opposition. America becomes defined, once again, as the location of heteronormativity. The only way in which difference is accepted is through travel. Cory is free to fully express his androgynous identity in a location that is, historically, imbued with exoticism and sexual desire. The judges’ feedback on Cory’s photo in Bali was positive, and commended him for embracing and encapsulating androgyny (fig. 7). This enriches the conception of Bali as a place where Cory was free of binding heteronormative standards, and as a site for his success. Outside the confines of the United States, Cory was not critiqued for his lack of masculinity, but complemented for expressing his true identity.

The audience of America’s Next Top Model also contributes to reinforcing gender norms.

Each week, competitors obtain a social media score, which is one factor in deciding who remains in the competition and who is eliminated. As such, popular demand takes part in determining the outcome of this competition.

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Because individuals feel more connected to those they can relate to, normalized gender and racial identities benefit most from fan support. The masses will vote for competitors that share affinities with their own lifestyles, and the heteronormativity is therefore strengthened in American culture.

The language utilized by America’s Next Top Model also enforces the American Dream. In relation to Butler’s aforementioned hypotheses on the effects of citation, two phrases that are repeated throughout the series reinforce gender norms. First, the competition’s motto, “You wanna be on top?” hints at the idea of equal opportunity in which those who successfully “make it” are considered winners, while those who fail to do so are losers. However, for reasons already explicated - such as market demands, collective consciousness and consumer culture - only the dominant sexual and racial classes are granted the opportunity to be on top in a heteronormative dominated society. Thus, although the competition is framed with providing equal chance to each contestant, this stance of tolerance secretly functions to further establish the supremacy of heteronormative classes. Second, the repeated phrase, “Do you have what it takes to be America’s Next Top Model?” suggests a particular criteria for winning. In order to win the competition, one must possess specific physical and Canvas Journal

personality-based traits that meet market demands. The notion of equal opportunity is therefore a myth, as not all competitors are, in actuality, given a fair chance.

The show functions to resurface the American Dream within the context of a neoliberal society. Although androgyny is precisely the figure that is meant to disrupt racial and gender structures, the modes in which America’s Next Top Model embraces difference operate to other Cory. The construction of collective identity therefore occurs at the moment when androgyny threatens to challenge the rigid hierarchies that dictate the fashion modeling industry.

The predetermined outcome in which Jourdan is able to “make it” and become a top model demonstrates that one can only make it if they adhere to heteronormative standards. Furthermore, the show makes clear that in order for Jourdan to win, she must defeat Cory. In other words, in order to solidify her place at the top of this hierarchy, the all-American sweetheart must demonstrate triumph over the androgynous figure. Androgyny can therefore only exist as the symbolic nightmare to the American Dream.

Eden Abramowitz is a U3 undergraduate student at McGill University majoring in Art History and minoring in Italian Studies. Her inspiration for this essay stemmed from a communications course she took with Professor Robert Benidicto on the subject of Cultural Industries and Global Sexualities. Professor Benedicto in-

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spired Eden to reflect upon the images that insidiously enforce a specific understanding of humanity, and about the vital necessity to deconstruct the social structures that create and perpetuate these realities.

B i b l i o g r a p h y “America’s Next Top Model.” Guys & Girls. The CW. Produced by: Tyra Banks.

United States. August 2, 2013 - November 15, 2013. Television.

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “Dismantling Gender Polarization and Compulsory Heterosexuality: Should We Turn the Volume down or up?.” The Journal of Sex Research 32, no.

4 (1995): 329-334. Accessed October 11, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3813357 Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex,’169-185. New York and London: Routledge, 2011 [1993].

Mears, Ashley. “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modeling.” Ethnography 9 (2008): 431456. Accessed October 10, 2013. http:// eth.sagepub.com/content/9/4/429.

Osofsky, Joy D., and Howard J. Osofsky.

“Androgyny as a Life Style.” The Family Coordinator 21, no. 4 (1972): 411-418.

Accessed October 20, 2013. http://www. jstor.org/stable/582684.

Soley-Beltran, Patricia. “Modelling Femininity.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 11, no. 3 (2004): 309-326.

Stewart, Kathleen. “Real American Dreams (Can Be Nightmares).” In Cultural Studies & Political Theory, 243-257.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”

Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519-531.

Accessed October 10, 2013. http://www. jstor.org/stable/3207893.

Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. “Androgyny: An Alternative to Gender Polarity.” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 16/17 (1996): WS9-WS14. Accessed October 11, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4404054.

Martin, Brett A. S., and Juergen Gnoth. “Is The Marlboro Man The Only Alternative? The Role Of Gender Identity And Self-construal Salience In Evaluations Of Male Models.” Marketing Letters 20, no. 4 (2009): 353-367.

McLaughlin, Larin. “Androgyny and Transcendence in Contemporary Corporate and Popular Culture.” Cultural Critique 42 (1999): 188-215. Accessed October 17, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354596.

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Figure 2 - Jourdan Miller, 1st place on America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20

Figure 3 - Marvin Courtes, 2nd place on America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20

Figure 4 - America’s Next Top Model Cycle 20: Guys vs. Girls

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Figure 5 - Cory Hindroff modeling a heterosexual wedding

Figure 6 (left) - Cory modeling in a sexy fragrance commercial Figure 7 (right) - Cory Hindroff modeling in Bali

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Figure 1 - The “What Would I Say� Online Interface.

Note the Equifax advertisement banner and prompt to donate to the Philippines.

Trapped in Capitalism: The Techno-Libertarian Paradox of “What Would I Say?” Daniel Fishbayn

On the weekend of November 8th, 2013, Princeton University hosted its annual HackPrinceton event, which centres on a teambased programming competition called a “hackathon.” In the days following the hackathon, one of the competition entries, a Facebook app called “What Would I Say?” (WWIS) designed to “automatically generate Facebook posts that sound like you” became an Internet sensation.1 I argue that the Princeton graduate students who created WWIS conceived the app with a techno-libertarian attitude, initially resisting pressure to sell ad space or user data to corporations despite the app’s success. The creators of WWIS underestimated the potential sociocultural benefit of this approach, overlooking the app’s ability to provide a cybersocial version of both the “engineered embarrassments” and impressional control that Erving Goffman claims are essential to healthy human sociality. However, despite the inclusive, anti-corporate philosophy of the app’s creators, WWIS was wrapped up in corporate capitalism from the beginning. The creators’ failure to prescribe a definitive function for WWIS enabled journalists to frame the use of the app in a way that generated market value for corporate news outlets. Likewise, WWIS’s creators inadvertently donated their labour to corporations by providing positive publicity for HackPrinceton’s numerous corporate sponsors. Even the creators themselves eventually turned WWIS into a revenue stream, having no choice but to run advertisements on the website in order to maintain it. Thus, the case of WWIS demonstrates the impossibility of creating a genuinely non-commercial and anti-corporate piece of technology within the Internet’s capitalist framework.

The creators of WWIS designed the app with the ambitious techno-libertarianism of the “Netizens” in mind. According to Tarleton Gillespie, the Netizens were users of the early Internet who wanted

1 Przytycki et al., “About: What Would I Say?,” http://what-would-i-say.com/about.html, Accessed 20 November 2013.

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to develop the Web into a “decentralized network… distinctly open in both its technical workings and its cultural ethos.”2 These users wanted to manage the Internet through “the interaction of tools rather than by authorized institutions,” and felt that media should circulate on the Internet “according to a gift economy rather than strictly commercial imperatives.”3 The WWIS website, in its original form, demonstrates the creators’ subscription to this anti-authority, anti-commercial vision for the Internet. The creators of WWIS make it expressly clear that they do not participate in the practice of selling user data to advertisers, a practice that has become the norm among corporations that provide online services. “Don’t worry,” the “About” section informs us, “We don’t store [sic] any of your personal information anywhere.”4 Moreover, in an interview conducted by New Yorker writer Ian Crouch after the app went viral, co-creator Ugne Klibaite insisted that “[Making WWIS] was just for fun… We never thought we would get further than showing this off at the Hackathon and to

2 Tarleton Gillespie, “The Copyright Balance and the Weight of DRM,” in Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 34.

3 Ibid.

4 Przytycki et al., “About: What Would I Say?.”

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our friends on Facebook.”5 Thus, like the Netizens, the creators of WWIS see their app not as a commodity to be capitalized upon, but rather as a non-corporatized tool to be offered as a gift to users.

This inclusiveness is particularly commendable given the important social function WWIS can serve. WWIS takes two important and related social rituals from face-to-face interaction and adapts them for cyberspatial communication. First, as Goffman states, “When an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation.”6 Yet while individuals desire this impressional control, Goffman also notes that the loss of impressional control can sometimes have a valuable social benefit. According to Goffman, it is healthy for a social group to have “practical jokes and social games… in which embarrassments which are to be taken un-seriously are purposely engineered.”7 These engineered embarrassments strengthen social bonds by providing “a source of humour, a cathar

5 Ian Crouch, “The Story Behind ‘What Would I Say?’,” Culture Desk, The New Yorker, 12 November 2013.

6 Erving Goffman, “Introduction,” to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 15.

7 Ibid., 14.

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sis for anxieties, and a sanction for inducing individuals to be modest in their claims and reasonable in their projected expectations.”8

Although the desire of individuals to maintain impressional control directly conflicts with their need for engineered embarrassments, WWIS has the unique ability to satisfy both social needs. First, the app can engineer an embarrassment for you by generating a status that satirizes your personality. For example, Crouch noted in his New Yorker piece, “As I played with the app, an embarrassing number of iterations looked something like this: ‘My short essay, up this morning.’ Self-promotion is an ugly game, and, so, mea culpa.”9 Yet the clever design of WWIS keeps these embarrassments within the user’s control by separating the status-generating function of the app from its status-posting function. Only when the user clicks “Post to Facebook” will the status be seen by anyone aside from the user. In this way, WWIS harnesses the atomizing nature of cybersociality—the fact that individual Facebook users, unlike face-toface interlocutors, are isolated in space—to give the user discretion as to whether she wants to share an embarrassing WWIS status.

Through WWIS, she can engineer an embarrassment that seems to represent a loss of impressional 8 Ibid.

9 Crouch, “The Story Behind ‘What Would I Say?.’”

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control—and carries all of the corresponding social benefits—while in reality she remains securely in control of how others perceive her.

Yet despite the potential social benefits of the app and the anti-corporate, anti-commercial intents of its creators, corporations seized upon the app as soon as it became an Internet sensation. For example, a number of journalists writing for corporate news outlets capitalized upon the popularity of the app to draw in readers. Because the creators’ explanation of WWIS is sparse, comprising just a few sentences in the website’s “About” section, journalists had free rein to prescribe their own functions for the app. Bruno Latour defines prescription as a “role expectation [for actors]… encoded in the machine.”10 To a loose extent, the creators of WWIS do prescribe the app’s entertainment function as its proper one, as the WWIS website’s description of the app states that the status updates it generates “are often hilarious (and sometimes nonsensical.)”11 This implicitly prescribes a role expectation for the user: to laugh at the app’s failure to perfectly imitate the user rather than criticizing its incompetence.

Journalists, however, recognize that highlighting the fail10 Bruno Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer,” Social Problems 35, no. 1 (1988), 306.

11 Przytycki et al., “About: What Would I Say?.”

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ures of a given technology is not an effective way of enticing people to use it. Thus, the majority of journalistic reports on WWIS recommend the app for its practical value rather than its entertainment value. These reports highlight the app’s ability to perform a kind of delegation, which Latour defines as the use of a mechanism to “[transform]… a major effort into a minor one.”12 Most journalists writing about WWIS have emphasized the app’s ability to transform the Facebook user’s major effort of formulating a status update into the minor one of simply clicking a button. For example, Adam Withnall wrote on the Independent’s website: “Ever wished you could instantly pop up on Facebook as your usual funny, inspirational and urbane self without the bother of actually coming up with the words?”13 Likewise, Tori Floyd wrote in Yahoo News Canada, “If the tedium of updating your status across all social media is just too much to handle, don’t worry: there’s an app for that.”14 Latour defines “des-inscription” as the tendency of “actors… to extirpate themselves from the prescribed 12 Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together,” 299.

13 Adam Withnall, “What Would I Say?: A Facebook App that Generates Statuses So You Don’t Have To,” The Independent, Accessed 20 November 2013.

14 Tori Floyd, “‘What Would I Say?’ App Generates Facebook Statuses For You… sort of,” The Right Click, Yahoo! News Canada, Accessed 20 November 2013.

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behavior” of a technology.”15 Since the app’s creators prescribed a usage for the app only indirectly and implicitly, journalists were able to easily des-inscribe from it.

In its place, they re-inscribed a different function that makes WWIS seem more relevant and useful for Internet users. As a result, users became more likely to click on the article, ultimately increasing the website’s value for advertisers. In this way, WWIS has inadvertently generated market value for corporate news outlets.

In addition, WWIS’s popularity produces value for Facebook and the other corporate sponsors of HackPrinceton.

Despite the WWIS creators’ anticorporate attitude, the success of the app has ultimately enhanced these corporate brands by endearing users toward them. WWIS and the HackPrinceton event where it was created—the former a piece of social networking technology created by techno-libertarian students and the latter an event that I would describe as utopically cyberphilic—both carry positive connotations of youthful vigor and bleeding-edge innovation.

Moreover, at the bottom of the WWIS web page, the creators note that the app was created at HackPrinceton 2013.16 Users of the app who trace this attribution to the 15 Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together,” 307.

16 Przytycki et. al., “What Would I Say?,” HackPrinceton, 2013, http://what-would-isay.com, Accessed 20 February 2014.

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HackPrinceton website will find a prominent list of the twenty-seven corporations who sponsored the event.17 If a user has enjoyed using WWIS, her realization that these sponsors indirectly supported the creation of the app endears her to the brands on a subconscious level. Samantha King defines causerelated marketing as the way that “companies and brands associate themselves with a cause… to build the reputation of a brand, increase profit… and add to their reputation as a good corporate citizen.”18 Using this technique, the corporate sponsors of HackPrinceton sought to boost their respective brand images by virtue of association with such youthful, cyberphilic “causes” as HackPrinceton and WWIS.

The strong corporate presence at HackPrinceton is also evident on the event website, which gives prime advertising space to sponsors. In the months before and after the hackathon, the site’s main page – not a subsidiary page for sponsors – prominently displayed the logos of each of the twenty-seven corporations who sponsored HackPrinceton 2013, although the site was updated in 17 Princeton University Entrepeneurship Club, “HackPrinceton,” 2013, http://hackprinceton.com, Accessed 20 November 2013.

18 Samantha King, “A Dream Cause: Breast Cancer, Corporate Philanthropy and the Market for Generosity,” in Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 9.

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mid-February of 2014 to promote HackPrinceton 2014.19 Among the 2013 sponsors were none other than Yahoo! and The Huffington Post, two of the same media outlets that published online reports raving about the Internet sensation of WWIS. In fact, Yahoo! published two different pieces about it, while HuffPost first published an article recommending WWIS and then, three days later, added a video segment in which two HuffPost pundits gushed over the app.20 We can conjecture that these media outlets may have had such high praise for WWIS because they already had a financial stake in the success of the app as sponsors of HackPrinceton.

This media bias supports Foster and McChesney’s claim that we are living in a “golden age of propaganda” since, as of 2011, the “public relations people [who] attemp[t] surreptitiously to doctor the news” outnumber journalists 19 Princeton University Entrepeneurship Club, “HackPrinceton,” 2014, http:// hackprinceton.com, Accessed 21 February 2014.

20 Alexis Kleinman, “Your Facebook Statuses Are Gibberish. Here’s Proof,” Huff Post Tech, The Huffington Post, 12 November 2013, Accessed 20 November 2013.

Tori Floyd, “‘What Would I Say?’ App Generates Facebook Statuses For You… Sort Of,” The Right Click, Yahoo! News Canada, 17 November 2013, Accessed 20 November 2013.

Jordan Valinsky, “Booting Up: Blame Princeton Students For Creating That ‘What Would I Say?’ Facebook App,” Yahoo! News, 14 November 2013, accessed 20 November 2013.

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by a ratio of nearly four to one.21 Indeed, some of HackPrinceton’s sponsors did not end up generating value through WWIS incidentally. Rather, both Yahoo! and The Huffington Post simultaneously exploited and orchestrated the success of WWIS through the media outlets at their disposal.

While some sponsors employed their media channels to promote WWIS, Facebook went so far as to play an active role in the creation of the app itself. The way that Facebook lured hackathon contestants into performing pro bono labour for the social network epitomizes Andrew Ross’s claim that, in today’s hypercompetitive labour market, corporations frequently pressure passionate and creative workers into working for free. According to Ross, as many corporations have turned to practices like “crowdsourcing… [and] unpaid, near-obligatory internships,” we are now witnessing the “[transformation] of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hardluck swag for everyone else.”22 Although the team behind WWIS were hacking voluntarily, the work they did closely resembles that of unpaid interns at Facebook. Face21 John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (2011), 11.

22 Andrew Ross, “In Search of the Lost Paycheck,” in Digital Labour: The Internet at Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17.

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book hosted an API (application programming interface) seminar on the first day of the hackathon entitled “Introduction to Web Development;” it seems likely at least some of WWIS’s creators attended it.23 Moreover, according to an interview with the creators in The Daily Princetonian, after winning the competition they “met a Facebook employee” who later “[contacted] them about improving [WWIS] and its Facebook integration.”24 Given that WWIS’s creators received training from Facebook, produced an app for the site, and then received feedback from Facebook, the difference between the students’ work at the hackathon and that of an unpaid intern at Facebook is only nominal.

Yet the team behind WWIS seem to have no problem with this arrangement. In their Princetonian interview, the creators reveal that they actually designed the app in the hopes of winning a prize – namely, four laptop bags, two Facebook hats, and some hoodies – that Facebook announced would be awarded to the “HackPrinceton project that best used Facebook information.”25 The fact that the creators of WWIS did not see Facebook’s role in the hackathon and the development 23 Princeton University Entrepeneurship Club, “HackPrinceton.”

24 Joseph Sheehan, “HackPrinceton site What Would I Say passes 1 million hits, gains national attention,” The Daily Princetonian, 13 November 2013, Accessed 20 February 2014.

25 Ibid.

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of WWIS as being inherently exploitative points to the free-labourdriven state of the creative industry as a whole: even the “winners” who created WWIS were happy to donate their extremely valuable labour to Facebook as long as they received a few pieces of clothing in return. As Klibaite confesses in the interview, “We wanted swag.”26 Clearly, Ross’s depiction of swag as a consolation prize gives too much credit to an industry where unpaid labour has become the norm and there are no longer any winners. Today, for creative workers like the WWIS team, winning corporate merchandise represents not a “hard-luck” pat on the back for runners-up but rather the highest modicum of success available under the circumstances.

Yet the creators of WWIS are equally complicit in the marketization of the app: although their decision to include advertising on the site makes financial sense, it completely undermines their anti-capitalist values. This is not to suggest that the students lack a sense of social responsibility; on the contrary, in designing the WWIS website they included a link to the website of the humanitarian organization CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) at the bottom of the main page, along with an entreaty for the user to “Please consider donating to typhoon relief in the Philippines.” As of February 2014, 26 Ibid.

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however, there sits above this text a page-wide block of advertising space, which cycles through ads for companies including American credit agency Equifax.27 Attached to the advertising block—and ironically intersecting with the “Please Donate” text—is a small button labelled “Advertise Here,” which brings the user to a page on the website BuySellAds featuring a profile of the WWIS website (fig. 1). This page, designed to sell the WWIS website itself to advertisers, lists WWIS as a “Member Since November 2013 [sic],” indicating that it was less than a month after the app went live on the weekend of November 8th that WWIS opened its doors to advertisers. At the time of my research, the WWIS website’s 145,000 estimated impressions-per-month are being sold in bundles of 70,000 impressions, with each bundle costing $87.50.28 The creators’ decision comes as no surprise, since they indicated early on that they might be forced to introduce advertisements on the site just so they could break even. “The site is actually losing money right now…

Server costs are cheap until you start getting like 600,000 hits,” co-creator Edward Young told the Princetonian. Added co-creator Alex Furger, “We don’t want to have ads, but we might need to do 27 Przytycki et. al., “What Would I Say?.”

28 BuySellAds.com Inc., “What Would I Say,” Accessed 21 February 2014.

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something small.”29 Although the students had no intention of turning a profit and were in a sense forced to incorporate advertising into WWIS, this only reaffirms the inescapability of the capitalist system. WWIS may hold only use value for its creators, but it holds significant economic potential for capitalist agents—not only advertisers like Rackspace, but also the server that hosts WWIS and seeks to generate a profit from its business. For WWIS to exist as a popular website without losing money, its incorporation into the market as a commodity was inevitable.

We should commend the students who brought us WWIS for their refusal to engage in any of the exploitative practices that many corporations employ today, and for offering the public a valuable sociocultural tool for free.

However, the students failed to recognize that WWIS is inextricably implicated within a larger capitalist framework. The creators’ egalitarian vision for the Internet is incompatible with the reality of a capitalist system where media corporations engage in biased journalism, manipulative labour practices dominate the tech industry, and the Internet itself operates according to a profit-seeking logic. Despite the best efforts of the students who created WWIS to keep their app outside the reach of capitalism, their project was 29 Sheehan, “HackPrinceton Site Passes One Million Hits.”

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doomed from the start. The case of WWIS proves that every useful cultural object created within a capitalist framework necessarily contributes to the market— even one created “just for fun.”

Daniel Fishbayn is a U2 Cultural Studies Major and Communications Minor. He was inspired to write a paper on “What Would I Say?” when he noticed last November that many of his friends seemed to have become addicted, long before Flappy Bird ever took flight, to a quirky gadget that was filling up his Facebook newsfeed with absurd automated statuses. While doing research for this paper, he definitely did not become addicted to the app himself. This is his first paper to be published in a student journal.

B i b l i o g r a p h y “About: What Would I Say?.” Przytycki et al. http://what-would-i-say.com/about. html. Accessed 20 February 2014.

Crouch, Ian. “The Story Behind ‘What Would I Say?’.” Culture Desk. The New Yorker. 12 November 2013. http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ culture/2013/11/the-story-behind-whatwould-i-say.html. Accessed 20 November 2013.

Floyd, Tori. “‘What Would I Say?’ App Generates Facebook Statuses For You… Sort Of.” The Right Click. Yahoo! News Canada. Last modified 17 November 2013. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/ right-click/app-generates-facebook-statuses-sort-215938829.html. Accessed 20 November 2013.

Foster, John Bellamy and Robert W. McChesney. “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism.” Monthly Review 62, no.

10 (2011).

Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Copyright Balance and the Weight of DRM.” In Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital

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Culture, 21-64. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

es-1-million-hits-gains-national-attention.

Accessed 20 February 2014.

Goffman, Erving. “Introduction.” The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1-17. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.

Valinsky, Jordan. “Booting Up: Blame Princeton Students For Creating That ‘What Would I Say?’ Facebook App.” Yahoo! News. 14 November 2013. http://news.yahoo.com/booting-blameprinceton-students-creating-facebookapp-133421127.html. Accessed 20 November 2013.

“HackPrinceton.” Princeton University Entrepreneurship Club. 2013. http://hackprinceton.com. Accessed 20 November 2013.

King, Samantha. “A Dream Cause: Breast Cancer, Corporate Philanthropy and the Market for Generosity.” In Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, 1-28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Kleinman, Alexis. “Your Facebook Statuses Are Gibberish. Here’s Proof.”

Huff Post Tech. The Huffington Post. 12 November 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/what-would-i-sayfacebook_n_4262464.html. Accessed 20 November 2013.

Latour, Bruno. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35, no. 1 (1988): 298-310.

“What Would I Say.” BuySellAds. com Inc. http://buysellads.com/buy/ detail/219496/zone/1292197?utm_ source=site_219496&utm_ medium=website&utm_ campaign=cpmadhere&utm_ content=zone_1292197. Accessed 21 February 2014.

Withnall, Adam. “What Would I Say?: A Facebook App That Generates Statuses So You Don’t Have To.” The Independent. 13 November 2013. http://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/americas/what-wouldi-say-the-app-that-generates-facebookstatuses-so-you-dont-have-to-8937575. html. Accessed 20 November 2013.

Przytycki, Pavel, Vicky Yao, Ugne Klibaite, Daniel Jiang, Harvey Cheng, Edward Young, and Alex Furger. “What Would I Say?” HackPrinceton, 2013. http://what-would-i-say.com. Accessed 20 February 2014.

Ross, Andrew. “In Search of the Lost Paycheck.” In Digital Labour: The Internet at Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz, 13-32. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Sheehan, Joseph. “HackPrinceton site What Would I Say passes 1 million hits, gains national attention.” The Daily Princetonian. 13 November 2013. http:// dailyprincetonian.com/news/2013/11/ hackprinceton-site-what-would-i-say-pass-

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A conceptual GPS map of Manhattan, New York.

My GPS Made Me Do It In-Car Navigation Systems: Intellect, Agency, Environment and Society Lena Sarchuk

Initially introduced by the US Department of Defense, GPS technology was predominantly designed for navigation. GPS uses satellites as reference points to calculate geographical positions that are accurate to a matter of meters. Today, however, GPS technology has been made available for personal use.1 GPS devices have been miniaturized, and are now commonplace in boats, planes, construction equipment, cell phones, and – as this paper will investigate – cars. In-car GPS devices allow the user to input their desired destination, then calculate the best route to that destination from the driver’s current location. The device reads the directions out loud to the driver, progressing in real time as directions are followed.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the message of any medium or technology is the change in scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”2 In-car GPS devices have initiated these kinds of changes. In addition to preventing drivers from getting lost, in-car GPS devices have impacted the individual user, their relationship with their environment, and society at large in several profound ways. These devices impact the individual user by acting as an extension of human mental capacity, and by minimizing human autonomy and choice. The devices have affected users’ interactions with their environments by representing the physical world through numerical representation and encouraging disengagement from the physical environment. Finally, the proliferation of in-car GPS devices is indicative of several features of our social environment, including society’s valuation of the individual over community, as well as the automobilization of society. GPS devices also raise questions about the implications this technology has on surveil1 Cheryl Pellerin, “United States Updates Global Positioning System Technology,” The Washington File, produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, published February 3, 2006, last accessed November 20, 2011, http://www.america.gov/st/washfileenglish/2006/February/20060203125928lcnirell ep0.5061609.html.

2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 8.

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lance and privacy. This investigation has found that while certain aspects of the driving experience are altered while using GPS devices, none of these outcomes are harmful to the user. However, the broader social implications of GPS technology are more ominous.

Extensions of Man and Augmenting Intellect

McLuhan writes that “any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies.”3 With this statement, he examines the idea that media artifacts are used to extend our human sensorium, and in this way become amplifications of our bodies. The ‘extensions of man’ ideology can be applied to the case of in-car GPS units, as these units have the ability to store and process an amount of information about the physical environment that far surpasses the mental capacity of any human genius. In this instance, the GPS unit is used as an extension of the driver’s mental capacity, allowing them to rely on information held in the device and reducing the need to gain navigation skills through driving experience. Rather than depending on their own capabilities of spatial visualization and navigation to locate a destination, drivers using GPS devices trust the system to do the work for them. In this way, the use of in-car GPS devices changes the skill sets necessary to 3 Ibid., 45.

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navigate in a vehicle. Instead of memorizing routes or using landmarks as memory aids, drivers need only to learn how to follow directions accurately. Orientation and navigation skills are offered as a commodity,4 giving consumers the ability to purchase these extensions of human intellect.

The notion of extending human intelligence through technology is furthered by Doug Englebart. Englebart’s ‘Augmenting Human Intellect’ provides a conceptual framework for the possibility of using technology to increase the mental capacity of humans. In his discussion, Englebart writes that a program aimed at developing human intellect would focus on increasing the capacity of individuals to solve complex problems and come up with speedier and better solutions to these problems.5 In several respects, this augmentation of human intellect is present in the in-car GPS systems used today. GPS units – conceived as extensions of human mental capacity – are able to solve complex problems of navigation and decisionmaking that pertain to route choice and other driving decisions. Their solutions are calculated faster and more completely than the driver herself would be able to manage.

4 Gilly Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement With and Disengagement From the Environment,” CHI 08 (2008), 1675.

5 Douglas C. Englebart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Stanford Research Institute (1962): 1.

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In its furthest reaching applications, the notion of extending human intellect through technology may be seen as an instance of posthumanism. Elaine Graham provides a definition of the posthuman as “a descendent who has been augmented to such a degree as to be no longer human… as a posthuman, [one’s] mental and physical abilities could far surpass those of any unaugmented human.”6 In her writing, Graham recognizes the idea that technology, when integrated with human bodies, may overcome “physical and intellectual finitude.”7 Since human intellect is relatively finite, intelligence-augmenting technologies like in-car GPS units allow users to overcome their intellectual limitations. In this way, GPS devices augment natural human intellect to a degree that renders their users ‘posthuman.’

Human Agency and Choice

By using in-car GPS devices to navigate, drivers suffer a limitation in the choices they may make, and in this way, the degree of human autonomy that is necessary while driving is diminished.

Matthew Fuller applies the idea of ennunciative frameworks to Microsoft Word, arguing that certain design elements of the word 6 Elaine L. Graham, “Nietzsche Gets a Modem: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime,” in Representations of the Post/Human (Toronto: Scholarly Book Services, 2002), 159.

7 Ibid., 154.

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processor limit the actions and shape the behaviours of the user.8 Fuller also brings up the notion that software is built with ideal uses and users in mind. To summarize his argument, the design of a media artifact determines, to some extent, who will use the artifact and what it will be used for.9 In-car GPS devices have ideal uses and users as well. If we take Fuller to be correct when he writes that the underlying grammar of a media artifact imposes certain restrictions on its potential uses, the underlying grammar of in-car GPS devices is their route-calculation programming. The programming of GPS devices makes certain choices for the driver. These include creating routes that follow only public roads, not accounting for the aesthetic preferences of the driver when selecting routes, and automatically calculating travel times based on the assumption that the user will follow all speed limits. These decisions are imposed on the driver, who loses a degree of her agency in the process of following GPS directions.

In a further application of the agency-loss concept, Gilly Leshed et al write that “users can blindly follow the visual and vocal instructions provided by the GPS

8 Matthew Fuller, “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” in Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 161.

9 Ibid., 147.

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and reach their destination.”10 To safely arrive at her destination, the driver feels no need to question the directions she is receiving, even though she has only her faith in the device as assurance that the information is accurate. One possible reason for individuals’ acceptance of GPS information as accurate is the generalized practice of individuals to depend on technology to carry out many of their dayto-day activities. Since individuals already rely on technology to provide them with the information and services desired, it is not much of a stretch to ask technology to guide them through the physical environment as well. This dependence on technology, to the point that it is relied upon to function at a basic level, fits into the logic of Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto.’ Haraway writes that we are all cyborgs11 because of the breakdown of the boundary between organisms and machines.

This breakdown stems from the idea that humans have become so integrated with the technologies they depend on that the technologies have become part of us, leading to a fusing of man and machine.

Though GPS navigation devices by no means make their users cyborgs, her argument gives 10 Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation,” 1678.

11 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150.

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a striking account of the lack of human agency necessary when heavily relying on machines. Haraway writes that “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”12 She speaks of the process by which actions previously performed by humans may now be performed by machines, or by fusions of man and machine. She also recognizes the individual’s inertness when relying on technologies.

In-car GPS devices may also be thought of as freeing the user from certain tasks and thus opening up opportunities for new kinds of engagement with the environment outside of the car, and with passengers inside of it.

Leshed et al found that “having orientation and navigation delivered as a commodity frees drivers and car passengers from a task that can be cumbersome and consuming, thereby offering added degrees of freedom and new opportunities for engagement with the outside world.”13 By not having to focus on map-reading and spatial navigation, drivers may be freer to enjoy scenery or engage in conversation. In this evaluation, the GPS device does not necessarily remove the agency of the driver, but allows them to give up a degree of agency in exchange for additional opportunities for engagement.

12 Ibid., 152.

13 Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation,” 1675.

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Understanding the Environment: Shift to Numerical Representation

Lev Manovich wrote that media become ‘new’ when they embody numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding.14 The shift from use of traditional paper maps to GPS units for the purpose of navigation is a paradigmatic example of this shift to digitized media, as well as an indication of the way society understands and represents the physical environment.

Manovich states that “all new media objects… are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations.”15 In this way, the information held by such devices becomes digitized and programmable. What is interesting about the use of digitization and numerical representation in GPS devices is the fact that this process reduces the global environment, with all its intricacies and details, into code that may be read by GPS users.

These users gain their information from a coded representation of their physical environment rather than through meaningful interaction or by active participation in that environment. Leshed et al write that “active participation in the physical modern world is much reduced…modern society is increasingly literate, depending less on physical objects in the environ-

ment and more on virtual symbols (such as books and the Web) to embody the value and meaning of our culture.”16 In-car GPS navigation systems, with their “coordinate systems, navigation directions, map displays and array of settings “act as an abstract representation of the physical environment.17 In using exclusively the GPS system for navigation, individuals embody the societal shift towards a focus on representations of reality, rather than on reality itself.

When we interact first and foremost through these abstractions of reality, the abstractions become quite real to us. Donna Haraway writes that because of our thorough dependence on technology, in this case our dependence on virtual interpretations of reality, “the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.”18 In this way, reliance on GPS devices for navigation profoundly alters the user’s understanding of their physical surroundings.

14 Lev Manovich, “Principles of New Media,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 49.

15 Ibid.

16 Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation,” 1677.

17 Ibid.

18 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 153.

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Relationships with the Physical Environment

Along with encouraging users to place value on codified representations of reality, in-car GPS systems alter their users’ relationship with the physical environment while driving. This is first seen in the lessened engagement with the environment seen in in-

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car GPS users. While paper maps forced drivers to engage with the physical environment by identifying landmarks, reading signage, and creating mental maps of their surroundings, GPS systems promote disengagement in each of these fields. A case study of in-car GPS users (conducted by researchers at the department of Communications and Information Science at Cornell University) made several interesting conclusions in their analysis. The researchers write that when using GPS, “you no longer need to know where you are and where your destination is, attend to physical landmarks along the way, or get assistance from other people inside the car and outside of it.”19 They go on to argue that reduction in these standard navigation processes inhibits the individual from experiencing and interpreting their physical environment.20

A further way in which in-car GPS systems alter individuals’ interactions with the environment comes from a change in the way drivers understand space.

When following verbal or visual directions from a digital source, drivers do not need to know where their destination is spatially located; whether it is north, south, or otherwise from their current location. In this way, the process of finding one’s destination becomes less of a task of correctly navigating the spatial environment, and 19 Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation,” 1680.

20 Ibid.

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more one of correctly entering the desired destination’s address.

Broader Social Implications

In-car GPS systems are a product of both the sociological and industrial institutions at play in society, as well as a casual actor in the establishment of these institutions and norms. The proliferation of GPS technology illustrates a shift in societal values to favour the individual. Lev Manovich summarizes the idea that the logics of new media generally support the post-industrial society, which values individuals over community by allowing “every citizen [to] construct her own custom lifestyle and ‘select’ her ideology.”21 In-car GPS devices reinforce this value by removing the need for interpersonal communication between passengers while using GPS, instead allowing individuals to travel unaccompanied with no disadvantage. With vocal directions from the GPS unit, no passenger is required to serve as navigator or map reader, allowing the driver alone to navigate while also operating the vehicle, thus promoting individual travel and modifying the traditional roles played by individuals navigating a car. The proliferation of new media technologies has often been attributed to the loss of human jobs (the replacement of assembly-line workers with automated 21 Manovich, “Principles of New Media,” 60.

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machinery, for example) and the disappearing of human navigation roles mark a similar phenomenon.

McLuhan notes this elimination of jobs as a result of technological developments,22 but adds that “positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed.”23 Though GPS devices do remove the necessity of roles like map-reading and spatial navigation, the devices also allow passengers to interact amongst each other with less focus placed on navigation. The social role played by the driver is also modified in that the skill set required to drive has changed. Leshed et al write “GPS navigation units have been identified as paradigmatic examples of Borgmann’s fundamental critique of technological devices: they demand less skill and attention by providing orientation and navigation as a commodity, with instant availability, ubiquity, safety, and ease of use.”24

In additional to altering the social roles played by vehicle passengers, GPS devices project certain societal values upon their users. This is first evidenced in the devices’ effect on drivers’ behavior. The programming of GPS devices promotes certain values, 22 McLuhan, Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man, 7.

23 Ibid.

24 Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation,” 1675.

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such as timeliness, cost efficiency, and abiding by the law. These values are seen in the devices’ programming to always use the fastest possible routes, avoid toll roads, and make calculations based on the assumption that drivers will follow speed limits and other rules of the road. The behavior of drivers is further modified by the feelings of safety instilled by GPS units. The study by Leshed et al. showed that people using GPS while driving felt safer to explore unknown areas than they would have without GPS.25 The technology increased their feelings of personal safety because they were able to rely on the device to ensure they always had a way home.26

The popularity of incar GPS systems also plays into the current “automobilization” of society. In the broader sociotechnological context, design and marketing of devices intended exclusively for use in cars normalizes the fact that cars continue to be the primary mode of transportation in our society. Leshed et al. also note that GPS devices highlight the role that automobiles always play, that of detaching passengers from their surroundings.27 Thus, the devices further proliferate the spread of these norms about automobile travel.

GPS technology, in general, raises many questions about surveillance, and the potential for 25 Ibid., 1679.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 1683.

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technology such as in-car GPS units to be used by centralized authority to monitor individual behavior. Danah Boyd writes that “implicit in any conversation about surveillance is the issue of structural power. Institutions and entities watch people.”28 In-car GPS units have the potential to give power to such institutions and people, assisting them in surveillance activities. Tarik Jallad’s investigation into the potential need for warrants when using GPS technology in policing found that “the privacy violations arising from governmental abuse of GPS data from cellular phones and vehicle tracking systems are vast, thus legislative intervention is imperative. The question becomes whether technology has eroded the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. So far, the answer seems to be yes.”29 Jallad goes on to discuss instances in which GPS tracking of vehicles was employed by police departments in the United States, and concludes with the finding that “GPS surveillance has the unquestionable ‘capability’ to instill the ominous privacy-less future, but that today’s ‘realty’ speaks of a disparate – albeit neighbouring 28 Danah Boyd, “Dear Voyeur, Meet Flaneur…Sincerely, Social Media,” Surveillance and Society 8, no. 4 (2011): 505.

29 Tarik, Jallad, “Old Answers to New Questions: GPS Surveillance and the Unwarranted Need for Warrants,” North Caroline Journal of Law and Technology 11, no.

2 (2010): 352.

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– truth.”30 Though the technology increases the possibilities for mass civilian surveillance, he believes that the technology has not as of yet been co-opted for such a use. The personalization features of many in-car GPS devices add to the threat of unwanted surveillance, since the devices allow input of information from the use about their driving preferences, favourite routes, et cetera, which are then stored by the device. This raises the issue of personal privacy, since the information gathered by a driver’s GPS unit could potentially be very informative about their habits and routines, thus leading to an invasion of their privacy.

Conclusions

This investigation has found that the societal and cultural implications imposed by in-car GPS use are foreboding, but will not necessarily lead to negative outcomes. The implicit link to ‘automobilization’ most certainly holds the threat of harmful environmental impact, while the continued societal focus on individuals over community could lead to isolation and personal unhappiness. The potential for centralized authority to co-opt GPS technologies is real, but has not yet been proven a tangible threat. As for the effects of GPS on the individual, it is clear that drivers using these devices are somewhat less en30 Jallad, “Old Answers to New Questions,” 360.

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gaged with their environments, understand space differently, and give up a degree of their autonomy while driving. However, thus far it is hard to point to any serious negative impact of these trends. While negative outcomes are probable for those drivers who follow navigational directions too blindly, the average in-car GPS user is not at any great risk. Nevertheless, when using such technologies so consistently in our daily lives, it is important that we remain conscious of their effects on our choices, behaviors, and conceptions of reality.

Graham, Elaine L. “Nietzsche Gets a Modem: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime.” In Representations of the Post/Human, 154-175. Toronto: Scholarly Book Services, 2002.

Lena Sarchuk is a Political Science Major, with minors in Communications and Sociology. She was inspired to write this paper because the subject matter was well outside of her usual area of study, and challenged her to dive into material and consider concepts that were quite foreign. Her association with AHCSSA is limited to taking classes in the department, but she has enjoyed these greatly.

Leshed, Gilly et al. “In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement With and Disengagement From the Environment.” CHI 08 (2008): 1675-1684. Accessed online November 18, 2011. http://delivery.acm. org/10.1145/1360000/1357316/p1675leshed.pdf

B i b l i o g r a p h y

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message” and “The Gadget Lover.” In Understanding the Media: the Extensions of Man, 7-47. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

Englebart, Douglas C. “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”

Stanford Research Institute (1962). Accessed online November 18, 2011. http:// www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/ full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html.

Pellerin, Cheryl. “United States Updates Global Positioning System Technology.” The Washington File, produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.

Published February 3, 2006. Last accessed November 20, 2011, http://www.america. gov/st/washfile-english/2006/February/200 60203125928lcnirellep0.5061609.html.

Boyd, Danah. “Dear Voyeur, Meet Flaneur…Sincerely, Social Media.”

Surveillance and Society 8, no. 4 (2011): 505-507.

Fuller, Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter.” In Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, 137-165.

Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.

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Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Jallad, Tarik. “Old Answers to New Questions: GPS Surveillance and the Unwarranted Need for Warrants.” North Caroline Journal of Law and Technology 11, no.

2 (2010): 351-376. Accessed online November 18, 2011. http://www.ncjolt.org/ abstracts/volume-11/ncjltech/p351.

Manovich, Lev. “Principles of New Media.” In The Language of New Media, 49-65. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

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Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, 2010. Porcelain.

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.

Factory Production and the Persistence of the Author in Contemporary Art: A Cross-Contextual Analysis Nouran Sedaghat

From the beginnings of the art historical discipline to its present manifestation, there has been a prevailing valuation of the author.

This has been notably persistent despite changes in modes of artistic production that have occurred in the postmodern and contemporary periods of art. With the cross-contextual reemergence of a decentralized, factory mode of collaborative production, the idealized role of the individual artist has transformed, corresponding with changing ideas of what constitutes an art object in the contemporary market. Interestingly, however, the heroization of the individual artist continues.

This paper seeks to engage in a cross-contextual examination of these relationships. Using the artists Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei, as well as the works of Giorgio Vasari, Michel Foucault, and Caroline A. Jones, among others, it demonstrates how the reemergence of factory production in postmodern and contemporary art has coincided with a shift in the role of the artist, from the single, technical creator of a work to its conceptual auteur. This is further concurrent with changing ideas of what constitutes art, from existing as a tangible object to a conceptual process. And yet, as this paper will show through an investigation of issues related to authorship and Foucault’s author function, despite changes in interpretive method, the interpretive framework of contemporary art historical discourse remains grounded in tradition. Rather than restructuring an authorial ideal that goes beyond the myth of the singular male genius, the art world has simply restructured its value systems to allow the myth to persist.

Section I: Models of Authorship from the Pre- to Postmodern Eras

Traditional ideas of authorship assign agency to the individual artist as the technical creator of the work. This has prevailed throughout Western art history. Laurie Adams notes that the earliest written references to artists associated them with gods due to their shared role as

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creators – while gods created life, artists created lifelike figures.1 Meanwhile, beginning in the early fourteenth century, the Italian Renaissance and the advent of humanism brought the dignity of man and the idea of the individual artist to light. This led to a reemergence of the artist’s biography with a special emphasis on individual achievement.2

As exemplified by the writings of Giorgio Vasari, individual artistic achievement during the Renaissance was synonymous with technical ability. Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptures, and Architects (1550) delineates the role of the master artist based on his ability to innovatively and accurately apply the aesthetic qualities of rule, order, proportion, draftsmanship, and manner to his renderings of nature.3 The author specifically lauds Michelangelo for his superior technical prowess – it is in part by means of his draftsmanship, Vasari argues, that the artist is able to surpass nature in his art.4 Thus, it is through his technical ability that he is designated the artistic author of his works.

This connection between artistic authorship and technical

creation was also manifested in the increasing emphasis on the artist’s hand. In the early sixteenth century, ideas of the importance of “the painter’s touch, the touch of the hand, and sprezzatura,” began to circulate within art historical discourse. As a result, painters began to make their brushstrokes more evident to display their maniere.5 Similarly, works of sculpture were taken to be “traces of the handiwork of their makers” and the “gestures of the hands.”6 Evidently, Renaissance artists placed great emphasis on being technically and identifiably responsible for the execution of their works.

It should be noted that production was not always centralized in the singular figure of the artist, as Renaissance artists often employed workshops to assist in the production and completion of works that were attributed to their authorship.7 However, this method of production still promulgated the notion of artistic authorship as embodied in technical ability and creation. In the first instance, the master artist was positioned as the head of the workshop, and was thus responsible for the stylistic particularities of its products. As

1 Laurie Adams, The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction (New York: IconEditions, 1996), 102.

2 Ibid., 109.

3 Giorgio Vasari, “Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22.

4 Ibid., 25.

5 Paul Barolsky, “The Artist’s Hand,” in The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, ed. Andrew Ladis, Carolyn H. Wood, and William U. Eiland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 6.

6 Ibid., 17.

7 Donald Preziosi and Claire J. Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 24.

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Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago claim, the Renaissance workshop was careful to stress the originality of the work it produced, and to advance the idea of the artist as the primary agent of the work’s appearance.8 Moreover, the workshop was primarily the place where the assistants, or apprentices, could train under the tutelage of the master.9 As such, the master’s authorial position was maintained despite the decentralization of production. It is finally interesting to consider that Michelangelo, who Vasari designates the epitome of the Renaissance master, was known to employ helpers only to carry out menial tasks like grinding colours.10 Hence, the most original master of art historical discourse is, in fact, the one artist who fully centralized production in himself.

The valuation of individual, technical artistic authorship can be linked to two far-reaching societal developments: the rise of early capitalism and the advent of the colonial project. In the case of the former, the burgeoning market economy led to the acknowledgement of the individual artist as a profit-making strategy.11 Patrons seeking artworks of the highest quality would attempt to ensure that their commission was ex8 Ibid.

9 Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 310.

10 Ibid., 312.

11 Preziosi and Farago, Art Is Not, 25.

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ecuted by the master artist, rather than his workshop.12 The intrinsic value of the work was thus linked to its exhibition of the artist’s particular perfection and originality.13 In the case of the latter, the ability to bring to perfection the technical aspects of artistic production for the sake of creating high art objects was seen as a skill distinguishing the European colonizers from their “less developed” colonies.

This notion of artistic authorship only grew stronger as the pre-modern period gave rise to modernism. In its most canonical form, this paradigm of artistic authorship led to the construction of the “singular, unique, inspired (and usually male) artist.”14 This identity was embodied by figures such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Jackson Pollock. It persisted relatively unquestioned until the postmodern period, when a sense of disillusionment with this model of authorship arose in the circulating literature. For instance, Michel Foucault’s “What Is An Author?” elaborates a relationship 12 Hayden B.J. Maginnis, “The Craftsman’s Genius: Painters, Patrons, and Drawings in Trecento Siena,” in The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, ed. Andrew Ladis, Carolyn H. Wood, and William U. Eiland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 29.

13 Wackernagel, Florentine Renaissance Artist, 295.

14 Donald Preziosi, “Authorship and Identity: Introduction,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 317.

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between author and text that goes beyond the linear path from single creator to his object. Foucault describes the author not necessarily as a single individual, but rather as an abstract function that elucidates a variety of subjective positions that anyone may occupy.15 As such, authorship is related to how the work is interpreted – dependent, for example, on how viewers classify and differentiate art objects.16 Although there is an element of individuality, as the author-function is a subjective experience that differs from person to person, authorship notably is not derived from the identity of the object’s physical creator.

Section II: Postmodern and Contemporary Forms of Collaborative Production

This postmodern shift in ideas of authorship can be further correlated to the reemergence of collaborative methods of artistic production. Taking the workshop aesthetic of the Renaissance era one step further, artists engaging in this factory mode of production during the postmodern and contemporary periods employ everything from assistants and artisans to found imagery and machinery to achieve a near-complete decentralization of both the technical and stylistic elements of artistic

authorship. As will be evidenced by the following case studies, this is a tendency that has been enacted across the various temporal and geographic contexts of the postmodern and contemporary periods by the artists Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei.

Andy Warhol is perhaps the most infamous advocate of the factory mode of production in recent history. Gaining popularity in 1960s New York, the height of postmodernism, decentralized production was very consciously foregrounded in both his discourse and aesthetic. It is implicated firstly in his studio – called The Factory, the space was designed to enact and mimic a nineteenth-century assembly line. Warhol stipulated that everything be covered with tinfoil and that the windows be darkened, while labour was assigned non-hierarchically, such that anyone could carry out any task and humans could effectively be interchanged with machines.17

Depersonalized, mechanized production was also manifested in the artistic technique for which he became famous – the silkscreen print, chosen by Warhol because it lent itself well to the assembly-line effect.18 The screens themselves were designed such that any one of Warhol’s assistants could pick them up and “carry on

15 Michel Foucault, “What Is An Author?” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 329.

16 Ibid., 325.

17 Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197.

18 Ibid., 206.

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his ‘kinetic business’” to (re)produce an identical image without him.19 Warhol was disconnected from the production of the screens themselves, a task that initially fell upon his assistants before eventually being outsourced to local print shops.20 Moreover, as demonstrated by pieces such as Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (fig.

1), Warhol’s application of the technique relied on found imagery sourced from tabloids and newspapers that he would simply have enlarged or cropped to his liking.21 Thus, there is a second degree of depersonalization, as Warhol’s project was not merely one of simple reproduction, but rather reproduction of reproduced content.

Although emerging in the 1990s in contemporary Britain, Young British Artist Damien Hirst nevertheless employs a similar technique of decentralized factory production, boasting four studios and forty assistants who drive the creation of the art objects now known as “Hirsts.”22 Like Warhol, many of Hirst’s pieces involve the use of found objects and employ techniques that require the outsourcing of labour. This is exemplified by one of Hirst’s most famous works, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of 19 Ibid., 233.

20 Donald N. Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008), 76.

21 Jones, Machine, 210.

22 Thompson, Shark, 66.

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Someone Living (fig. 2). The piece, completed in 1991, features a real shark that was caught, preserved and encased in formaldehyde within a large glass box. Although the work was mounted under Hirst’s direction, the artist was dissociated from every stage of physical production – the shark was caught in Australia and purchased by Hirst before being shipped to England where it was preserved and mounted by English technicians.23

Despite requiring a less specialized set of technical skills to create, Hirst’s series of “Spot Paintings” take a similarly decentralized approach to artistic production. The works, such as Acetic Anhydride (fig. 3), consist of multicoloured dots painted in a grid formation on a plain white canvas.

The physical production of the works is undertaken entirely by assistants – while Hirst directs them on what colours to use and where to paint the spots, he does not dictate the style in which they must be painted, nor does he touch the final work of art at all.24 In fact, in stark contrast to the Renaissance workshop, there is an acknowledgement that the assistant may be responsible for the stylistic virtues of the work – Hirst himself has noted that the best Damien Hirst spot painting one can own is one painted by an assistant simply known as Rachel.25 In any case, Hirst is careful to ensure that his artworks are 23 Ibid., 1-3.

24 Ibid., 65.

25 Ibid.

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always produced by a team, such that no one person is ever wholly responsible for one work of art.26

The factory mode of production is finally being applied to artistic creation in the present day

by Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei. His most recent works have taken the form of large-scale installations that require the work of either local Chinese artisans or hired studio assistants to bring them to completion. For instance, 2010’s Sunflower Seeds (fig. 4) consists of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, handcrafted by workers in the Chinese town of Jingdezhen, famous for producing porcelain in the imperial age. The project was a truly collaborative effort, as Ai notes nearly everyone in the town had some degree of interaction with the project, amounting to some 1600 people molding and painting the tiny objects. Meanwhile, Ai was largely dissociated from the production, merely stopping in from time to time to inspect the progress of the seeds and make suggestions.27

Similarly, the twelve eponymous centerpieces of 2011’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (fig. 5) were crafted in Ai’s studio by the assistants who refer to themselves as “his hands” and “hired assassins.” When interviewed for Alison Klayman’s 26 Ibid., 66.

27 “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds,” YouTube video, 14:41, posted by “Tate,” Oct 14, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PueYywpkJW8.

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2012 documentary Never Sorry, they jovially noted that they simply carry out the tasks as he directs without asking questions.28 Like Damien Hirst, Ai is very open about the fact that he has very little involvement in the actual production of his works, stating his preference for developing the ideas instead.29 Despite the varied temporal and geographic contexts in which the three aforementioned artists – Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei – produce(d) art, their methods have in common an evident subversion of traditional models of authorship put forth in the pre-modern era. Though the factory mode of production manifests itself differently for each artist, they uniformly display little of the conventional concern for the art object as a means of conveying technical skill and the specificities of the artist’s hand. In line with postmodern notions of the author function, authorship does not come from being the singular origin of a work’s technical specificities.

Section III: Implications for the Art Object

However, the traditional emphasis on authorship has not by any means been eradicated, as these artists have each still been designated authors by popular culture and the media alike. While not technically authoring most of 28 Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alyson Klayman (2012, USA: Mongrel Media, 2012), DVD. 29 Ibid.

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their major works, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei have each been afforded ownership of a larger, conceptual artistic project.

Thus, what emerges instead is a shift in the constitution of the art object, from a tangible, material good to a conceptual process. In this model, the tangible object is afforded a secondary role in view of the conceptual framework it serves. A Duchampian notion of authorship is invoked in that, despite the so-called “indifference,” here taken to mean a lack of physical engagement with the production of a work, the object nevertheless relies on the authority of the artist to render it an art object.30 In this case, this is accomplished by placing the tangible object within a conceptual framework, creating a conceptual process of art-making.

As Andy Warhol emerged as an artist with clout during the height of postmodernism, his artistic project was largely concerned with radically distancing art from the Abstract Expressionist version of modernism.31 He sought to interrogate this movement’s notions of originality and value by subverting the dichotomy between high and low culture. Warhol’s Factory, for instance, marked a turn toward collectivism that was intended to overturn the myth of solitary male artist-genius working in the 30 Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108.

31 Jones, Machine, 189.

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ivory-tower studio.32 This was in line with ideas of artistic production that emerged in the 1960s, which opted for the manufactory over the artist’s studio for its social and political implications.33 Meanwhile, Warhol’s silkscreens signified a deliberate attempt to erase the trace of the artist, aiding his subversion of traditional notions of high art in the face of mass consumer culture.34 Originating in mechanized production, the pieces rejected the idea that the art object was a source of aesthetic legitimation, and that its imperfections, the accidental product of a mechanical process, could evidence individuality or a painterly mark.35 Thus, Warhol’s artistry was not dependent on the objective aesthetic quality of his pieces, but rather the manner in which they were produced, the banality and accessibility of their subject matter, and the implications of these aspects for traditional notions of artistry. It is of this conceptual framework that Warhol was able to claim at least partial authorship.

Damien Hirst’s pieces are similarly entrenched in a larger conceptual framework – that of art, and the artist, as a branded product. Hirst’s name has been likened to a high fashion label, 32 Ibid., 198.

33 Ibid., 189.

34 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 4.

35 Ibid., 22.

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while his pieces are denoted the carriers of his literally branded name, earning them their high valuation.36 His celebrity is seen as a driving force of his artistic project, the instrument that allows his objects to be art objects.37 Pieces such as the spot paintings function primarily to signify the Hirst brand – entrenched in the business world model of commodification and copyright, as evidenced

by Hirst’s lawsuit against British Airways for using coloured spots in an advertisement.38 Thus, the value of a Damien Hirst art object as an aesthetic and technical object is secondary to how it affirms his branded identity. Hirst exemplifies the notion that the actual hand of a famous artist is not nearly as important as the association with his name.39 Although not necessarily an intentional initiative on his part, the project has nevertheless been attributed to him in the authorial sense, effectively affording him authorship in the public eye.

Finally, the works of Ai Weiwei contribute to a larger conceptual project centred on activism against the corrupt and unjust practices of the Chinese Communist Party. Ai has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government for many years, and is one of the 36 Thompson, Shark, 66.

37 Damien Hirst, Ann Gallagher, Michael Craig-Martin, Damien Hirst (Millbank: Tate Publishing, 2012), 200.

38 Thompson, Shark, 66.

39 Ibid., 70.

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few who dare occupy this role.40 His art is said to have “merged with his vociferous campaigning” for basic rights such as governmental transparency and accountability, and freedom of expression.41 It is important to note that Ai’s activist activities have a life of their own independent of their artistic manifestation – for instance, he launched a citizen’s investigation into the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes, which had resulted in the deaths of 5200 schoolchildren following the collapse of their schools, largely attributed to government corruption and the waiving of proper building codes.42 Although the project spawned commemorative art objects such as 2009’s Snake Ceiling, these products are secondary to and motivated by the artist’s activist ambitions.

Section IV: Implications for the Authorial Identity

In all three case studies, there is a demonstrable shift in the constitution of the art object from tangible to conceptual. Despite this, however, there has been little effect on the conventional need to designate and heroize the artistic author. This is evident in the vocabularies used to describe each of the three named artists in popular culture. Across the three cases, the artists are held up as singu40 Barnaby Martin, The Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (New York: Faber and Faber, 2013), 4.

41 Ibid., 5.

42 Klayman, Never Sorry.

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lar origins. Furthermore, they are given identities that imply authority, machismo, and uniqueness.

Andy Warhol, for instance, is referred to as the primum mobile of his project, the individual without whom none of it could have existed.43 He is implicated as the authority figure in his Factory, the image manager who set himself distinctly above the position of the lineworker.44 It is noted that his managerial authority was needed to approve the output of the factory.45 Most importantly, Warhol himself persisted in referring to the objects as “my objects” denoting that he himself designated authorship irrespective of physical creation.46 Meanwhile, Damien Hirst’s authority stems from his perceived position as head of the brand. Jonathan Schroeder notes that successful artists may be thought of as brand managers, who develop, nurture, and promote themselves.47 This can certainly be applied to Hirst, whose name holds the same commodified weight as high-fashion labels like Gucci and Prada.48 Hirst is also frequently hailed as an entrepreneur in the art market,49 a term that by definition connotes indi43 Jones, Machine, 198.

44 Ibid., 264.

45 Ibid., 233.

46 Buchloh, “One-Dimensional Art,” 4.

47 Jonathan Schroeder, “The Artist and the Brand” European Journal of Marketing 39 (2005): 1292.

48 Thompson, Shark, 66.

49 Hirst, Gallagher, Craig-Martin, Damien Hirst, 7.

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vidualism, masculinity, and ideas of a single figure as the managerial origin point of an enterprise.

Lastly, Ai Weiwei’s position of authorship is bound up with his identity as both an individual and an activist. His contemporaries remark that he is distinct from them because he trained in New York City, instead of going through the governmentsanctioned Academy, which gives him a mark of individualism that is particularly weighty considering his immediate societal context.

In view of his activism, moreover, he is referred to as an agent provocateur, given authority as a spokesperson for the average citizen and a voice against the government.50 Given Ai’s international recognizability, he has come to be a symbol of contemporary China for the everyday foreigner.51 Though this is an evidently superficial association that is ironic in view of his politics, the designation nevertheless speaks to the level of authority Ai Weiwei holds as an individual in contemporary Western society. As with Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, there is an evident element of heroization that accompanies his authorial identity within Western discourse.

Conclusion

Across these three cases runs a common thread of conceptual authorship. Despite the 50 Klayman, Never Sorry.

51 Martin, Hanging Man, 12.

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fact that Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei have each dispensed with the traditional notion of authorship as technical creatorship by employing various methods of factory production, they are nevertheless each designated as artistic authors. Attributed to these authorial identities instead are conceptual frameworks – from Andy Warhol’s subversion of modernism to Damien Hirst’s artistic branding to Ai Weiwei’s activism.

These artists command authorship by developing these frameworks and situating within them the tangible objects whose creation they direct but rarely engage with. As such, the conceptual process becomes the true art object, while the tangible object is secondary.

Correspondingly, the author no longer designates the physical creator of the art object, but rather the orchestrator of the concept.

In spite of these shifts in authorial identity and the constitution of the art object, however, the project of artist heroization notably persists, as evidenced by a discussion of the vocabulary used to describe each of the three artists. This has implications for the interpretive framework of the contemporary art historical discourse. Given that the conventional heroization of the “singular, unique, inspired (and usually male) artist” continues despite the apparent redefinition of artistic values, it would appear that rather than altering the structures of traCanvas Journal

dition, the art world has simple altered its structure to allow tradition to persist. As such, the interpretive framework of contemporary art historical discourse may not be so contemporary after all.

Nouran Sedaghat is a U3 student who is in her final semester of a joint honours degree in Art History and Political Science.

With this paper, Nouran accomplished one of her degree-long dreams: to immortalize her love for Andy Warhol in a piece of academic writing. That she was also able to explore Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei was just the Oreo scoop on the top of the ice cream cone, another true love that she enjoys immortalizing in writing wherever she can.

B i b l i o g r a p h y Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Directed by Alyson Klayman. USA: Mongrel Media, 2012. DVD. “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds.” Youtube video, 14:41. Posted by “Tate.” October 14, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PueYywpkJW8.

Adams, Laurie. The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction. New York: IconEditions, 1996.

Barolsky, Paul. “The Artist’s Hand.” In The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, edited by Andrew Ladis, Carolyn H. Wood, and William U. Eiland, 5-24.

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Andy Warhol’s One Dimensional Art: 1956-1966.” In Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Farago, Claire J., and Donald Preziosi.

Art Is Not What You Think It Is. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

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Foucault, Michel. “What Is An Author?”

In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hirst, Damien, Ann Gallagher and Michael Craig-Martin. Damien Hirst. Millbank: Tate Publishing, 2012.

Jones, Amelia. Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: New York, 1994.

Jones, Caroline A. Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Maginnis, Hayden B.J. “The Craftsman’s Genius: Painters, Patrons, and Drawings in Trecento Siena.” In The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, edited

by Andrew Ladis, Carolyn H. Wood, and William U. Eiland, 25-47. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Preziosi, Donald. “Authorship and Identity: Introduction.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited

by Donald Preziosi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Schroeder, Jonathan. “The Artist and the Brand.” European Journal of Marketing 39 (2005): 1291-1305.

Thompson, Donald N. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008.

Vasari, Giorgio. “Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited

by Donald Preziosi, 22-26. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Wackernagel, Martin. The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Martin, Barnaby. The Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei. New York: Faber and Faber, 2013.

Figure 1 - Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, 1963. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on two canvases, 268.9cm x 416.9cm.

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Figure 2 - Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, glass, painted steel, silicone, monofilament, shark, and formaldehyde solution, 217cm x 542cm x 180 cm.

Figure 3 - Damien Hirst, Acetic Anhydride, 1991, household gloss on canvas, 168.9cm x 200cm.

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Figure 4 - Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, porcelain.

Figure 5 - Ai Weiwei, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, 2011, bronze.

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Figure 2 - Guo Xi, Early Spring, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk.

National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

The Visual Manifestation of “Qi” Throughout the Tang, Song, and Yuan Dynasties: A Case Study of the i-p’in Style Alexandria Proctor

The discussion of qi (“spirit consonance,” “spirit vitality,” “spirit breath”) as the characteristic of a “good” painting has dominated Chinese painting criticism from the Tang (618-907) through to the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties. As one of the most prevalent properties associated with Literati painting, it remained throughout the dynasties the key distinguishing feature that separated the highest class of artists from lower styles of painting and groups of artists. Yet, there is no concrete definition. Owing to the abstract quality of qi, this paper aims to answer the question of what constitutes qi by locating it visually. The exploration of the visual manifestation of qi from the Tang to the Song to the Yuan will reveal the different ways it is expressed by the masters of each dynasty, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the i-p’in (“untrammelled”) style, as defined by Shimada in his article Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting, is the absolute embodiment of qi.

Though rarely discussed as a separate style throughout Chinese painting criticism, this paper will demonstrate the style’s ever-lingering presence within the shadows of the Literati and traditional styles of painting, even when thought by most to be extinguished. Its survival owes to its ability as a style to most easily allow for the expression of qi. The i-p’in style’s gradual development starting from the mid-Tang to the Ming and even Qing dynasties, provided the foundation for other styles to arise, for example, the Yuan Literati and Chan Buddhist sect. That it could do so was, as this paper proposes, due to the i-p’in style’s absolute embodiment of “qi.”

Qi has most commonly been translated to denote “spirit consonance/resonance,” “spirit vitality,” and “spirit breath.” The first and arguably most important law of Hsieh Ho’s Six Laws, which governed much of Chinese painting by providing a standard of classification, speaks of attaining “spirit resonance.” The importance and difficulty of expressing qi within one’s painting is expressed by what was seen as the primary goal of the artist within Chinese painting traditions: to

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“catch the fleeting phase of eternality rather than of imitation.”1 Its high status was owing to the difficulty of achieving qi, for it was often seen as “a matter of innate knowledge, immanent in the artist’s mind rather than through refining technical skills” (Guo Johsu).2 Thus, qi became the marker between the few who were able to wield their brush to express the “spirit” of the objects depicted, and those who merely imitated and copied the works of past masters.

Critics of the Tang, Song, and Yuan periods agree the presence of qi within a painting elevates the artwork to the highest class, typically attributed to artists whose works fall outside of the traditional painting methods and orthodox school. There existed the idea that only certain (exceptional) men could convey the spirit of things (achieve qi-yun).3 Su Shih (1037-1101), one of the most well-known and powerful Chinese painting critics, separated scholar-painter from artisan-painter by the presence or absence of spirit (qi).4 Scholar-artists upheld “spirit consonance” as the essen1 John Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I: Hsieh Ho Revisited,” Anthropology and Aesthetics No.6 (1983): 100.

2 Shujiro Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” Oriental Art 1 (1964): 22.

3 Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati On Painting: Su Shih (1037-1101) to Tung Chi’i-ch’ang (1555-1636) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 22.

4 Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” 22.

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tial element in painting and during the Song it was considered a necessity for a painting to become “a treasure of the age.”5 “Spirit consonance” did not depend on the skillful representation of form, which anyone could come to learn through artistic training.6 For the purposes of this investigation, the exploration of the visual manifestation of qi will be limited to the most recognized (pre-dominantly Literati) artists of each dynasty rather than the inclusion of court painting and other styles, owing to the agreement by Chinese painting critics of the presence of qi within the works of these masters.

Critics of the Tang dynasty described qi as the “breath of life,” a vitality that is inherent to an individual’s nature.7 The qiyun reveals the nature of the artist, making the artist himself visible within his work.8 Thus, qi corresponded to the temperament of the artist.9 It was linked to the use of the brush in Tang critics’ association of skillful painting with excellence in calligraphy.10 The naturally spontaneous, deemed by critics as belonging to the highest class of artists, exhibited the characteristic of qi within their works.11 5 Susan Bush, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 96.

6 Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” 22.

7 Bush, The Chinese Literati, 16.

8 Ibid., 20.

9 Ibid., 21.

10 Bush, Early Chinese Texts, 54.

11 Ibid., 78.

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According its placement within the Six Laws as the most important law, the production of a lifelike representation was achieved in part through a lively qi-yun, with structural brushwork.12

Through a description of Wu Daozi’s (8th century) paintings, we are able to extract key qualities of the visual manifestation of qi in painting during the Tang dynasty. Considered as “the sage of painters, illustrious for eternity,”13 Wu’s “spirit was there as soon as his brush descended.”14 His visual manifestation of qi was achieved through his ability to affect the audience through his paintings, as one critic records: upon viewing Wu’s murals, “one’s mind was turned to the creative powers of Nature.”15 When he painted a hell cycle in a temple, “the capital’s butchers and fishmongers were terrified for their sins on seeing it and occasionally changed their trades.”16 The images he painted of people doing good deeds “became models for men of later generations.”17 He left spaces between his dots and strokes compared to his contemporaries who “took pains to join the ends of strokes.”18 The latter aimed to achieve exact and detailed brushwork rather than the incomplete12 Bush, The Chinese Literati, 16.

13 Bush, Early Chinese Texts, 247.

14 Ibid., 55.

15 Ibid., 56.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 61.

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ness that was viewed by Tang critics as ‘divine.’19 His goal was not verisimilitude and therefore his lines were not created using rulers.20 This free expression of brushstrokes, compared to exact and detailed lines, becomes a key characteristic in the expression of qi.

Many critics have accorded Wu the status of a genius, a divine being, speaking in awe of his ability to “magically” paint images so that they come to life.21 The life-like quality of his paintings was achieved through movement, for example, his dragons “moved in flight.”22 His wall paintings were sometimes carried out in ink alone, signaling the beginning of the ink-wash style that would come to form a key characteristic of the i-p’in style.23 One Chinese art critic of the period stated that the evolution of landscape painting began with Wu and was perfected by Li Ssu-hsun (651-718) and his son Chao-tao.24 As will be discussed in the latter half of this paper, Li Ssu-hsun’s paintings coined the term “i-p’in.” This allows us to postulate that the i-p’in style’s basic foundations originated from Wu Daozi, as Li Ssu-hsun’s landscapes followed Wu’s style.

During the Song dynasty, art critics more thoroughly defined “spirit consonance” to represent 19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 56.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 64.

24 Ibid., 66.

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an innate talent that reflected a man’s character and social condition.25 Proper use of the brush was linked to the production of spiritual character: “from beginning to end the brush was responsive, the connecting links were interdependent and the flow of energy uninterrupted.”26 Here again we see the importance of brushwork in achieving qi. During the Song, the “untrammelled” began to take form as a class of its own, referring to a specific descriptive style.

Characterized as abbreviated brushwork, they were considered the most difficult to group. Despite their style of brushwork, their “forms are complete” because they were attained through spontaneity.27 Thus the idea of spontaneity as a valued characteristic in painting became more coherent during the Song. The style of the untrammelled class was attributed to a process that saw the formulation of concepts before the brushwork so that when the brushwork was complete, the concept would be embodied within the painting.

When the concept is within, “the painting is finished, the concept will be present, its images will correspond and its spirit will be whole.”28 The “untrammelled” class was inimitable due to the presence of qi within their works, obtained through their emphasis on the expression of concepts,

as opposed to formal likeness.

Spirit vitality in the Song possessed the quality of movement.29 ‘Sketchiness’ was valued as a way to convey the spirit of the landscape. It was in this dynasty that the divide between scholarpainter and the artisan-painter came to form. The main difference between the two groups of artists was the spontaneity of the brushstrokes of the scholar-artists.30 According to Su Shih, scholar-artists are able to go beyond mere likeness to capture the spirit (qi) of the object. His description of scholarartists emphasizes movement and the spontaneous process of art production, motivated by a desire to express inner emotions.31 Thus scholar-painters were accorded a position higher than artisan-painters as a result of their ability to express the spirit of the depicted object and the ideas from one’s mind.

As the most celebrated artists of the Song Literati, Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (fig. 1) and Guo Xi’s Early Spring (fig. 2) were revered owing to their ability to visually manifest their own spirit as well as the qi of the mountains, streams, and trees. Fan Kuan’s work is described as achieving a perfect balance between “texture dabs and brush-drawing.”32 This can be interpreted as achieving a harmony between substance (tex-

25 Ibid., 91.

26 Ibid., 97.

27 Ibid., 100-101.

28 Ibid., 97.

29 Ibid., 127.

30 Bush, The Chinese Literati, 56.

31 Ibid., 56.

32 Bush, Early Chinese Texts, 118.

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ture) and form (outline drawing), creating an object that not only possesses formal likeness, as is easily achievable by all painters, but also the texture that gives the mountain its life (its spirit). Spontaneity is shown by Fan’s “weld[ing] [of] his brush as one with his spirit…unaware of the way forms were developing and expanding, they came into existence themselves…all of a sudden the T’ai-hang and Wangwu mountains would rise before him.”33 When he was inspired, he is said to “have left behind a few brushstrokes,” again emphasizing the spontaneous nature of expression.34 His landscapes were noted for their strong effects of snowstorms or shifting clouds, affecting the viewer in a manner similar to Wu Daozi’s images.35 Fan did not ornament his paintings, another key characteristic of paintings that exhibited qi, since ornamentation is a distraction that accounts for a lack of substance or an empty spirit within the painting.36 Guo Xi “ha[d] the proper concepts,”37 conveying the moods of nature within his paintings. That he was able to produce moods that affected the viewer speaks to his capturing of the spirit of each season in nature.

Both Fan and Guo established their own style. Thus we can infer from this that the establishment of one’s own style is a prerequisite 33 Ibid., 217.

34 Ibid., 238.

35 Ibid., 305.

36 Ibid., 117.

37 Ibid., 251-52.

for the visual manifestation of qi, for expression of emotions and ideas is unique to each individual.

Critics of the Yuan dynasty also discussed qi in terms that equated spirit resonance with movement: describing qi as something that stems from natural accomplishment,38 emphasizing brushwork as the vehicle to convey the spirit. In calligraphy, the painter must first become “one and the same” with painting in order for the expression of spirit resonance to occur.39 We can abstract from this statement that the visual manifestation of “calligraphy” in a painting does not simply refer to characters in the form of poetry written on the paintings, but rather to the presence of a calligraphic nature in the brushstrokes that comprise the painting.

Zhao Mengfu (12541322), the most famous calligrapher and painter of the early Yuan dynasty, valued rough brushstrokes, depreciating likeness to nature.40 He valued spirit over formal likeness, displaying the spirit of antiquity in his paintings. Despite his masterpiece, Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains (fig. 3) exhibiting color as opposed to ink-washes, he advocated for the connection of calligraphy and painting, asserting that they “have one origin.”41 Further, he describes the sketch38 Ibid., 246.

39 Ibid., 245.

40 Bush, The Chinese Literati, 122-23.

41 Ibid., 279.

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ing of bamboo, a common symbolic subject of the Literati, as “includ[ing] the Eight Strokes of calligraphic technique.”42 As one of the four great Yuan Literati masters, critics have agreed that Ni Zan’s (1301-1374) landscapes exemplify the expression of qi owing in part to their sparse and simple composition. His own painting theory espouses the idea that painting should not go beyond “careless sketching [of ideas] with the brush.”43 Free brushwork done sketchily is the defining characteristic of Ni’s landscapes, as exemplified in his most celebrated work: Rongxi Studio (fig. 4).

Painting to express his “untrammeled spirit,” Ni’s bamboo paintings portray his spirit in their lack of verisimilitude; as ink-play, they also possess an affinity to rushes.44

The heavy emphasis on brushwork in critics’ discussions of what constitutes qi and its role in separating the artists discussed above from lesser artists leads to the conclusion that brushwork is the primary technique of visually expressing qi. “Spirit vitality” as produced by the brush is discussed by art historian John Hay in his examination of the brush as the channel for both the qi of the artist and the subject matter.45 He describes the patterns of qi as articulated by the movements of the brush 42 Ibid.,139.

43 Bush, Early Chinese Texts, 270.

44 Bush, The Chinese Literati, 134.

45 Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I: Hsieh Ho Revisited,” 104.

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and their traces that remain as ink upon the surface.46 Extraordinarily responsive to every psychological and physiological inflection of the artist, the Chinese brush allows for the “product [to] vividly embod[y] process, in which the user, the usage, and the end result are singularly unified.”47 This unification allows for the artist to become one with his tool (brush), as exemplified by Wu Daozi’s concentration on his spirit —which we can assume to mean that he was aware of it, cultivated it, and then concentrated it towards painting— until it could “borrow Master Wu’s (Wu Daozi’s) brush.”48 Thus, artists used the brush as a vehicle to convey their emotions, ideas and spirit.

As the key transmitter of the artist’s spirit, brushstrokes served as a balance between form and idea. The attribution of Wu Daozi, Fan Kuan, Guo Xi, Zhao Mengfu and Ni Zan as belonging to the highest of classes is owing to their ability to utilize the Chinese brush to produce strokes that balanced between form and idea, allowing for the expression of qi.

Fan Kuan’s texture strokes countered his outline-drawing strokes to achieve a harmony that provided his mountains with a life-like spirit. Wu’s Daozi’s brushstrokes were “incomparable…varied and untrammelled.”49 Ni Zan’s sketchy brushstrokes expressed 46 Ibid., 104.

47 Ibid., p.85.

48 Bush, Early Chinese Texts, 62.

49 Ibid., 61.

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his emotions and ideas, yet retained a rough formal resemblance to mountains and trees. The relationship between brush and ink is one that represents the process to product, of interior to exterior.50 It is through this relationship, of artist to brush and brushstrokes to ink, that the visual manifestation of qi is achieved.

The general trend of defining “spirit consonance” transformed from objective drawing (depicting the spirit of the object) during early Tang to a new means of spontaneity.51 As the remainder of this paper will demonstrate, the i-p’in (“untrammelled”) style most completely embodies the visual manifestation of qi due to its foundation as purely on spontaneity and brushwork, whereas the masters discussed above incorporated other aspects – formal elements, varied compositions, certain features from the orthodox methods – into their painting aside from qi.

These artists displayed an “untrammelled” manner that was a measure of their quality and artistic value, but this manner was not their actual style, as it was for the i-p’in.

The first to establish the “untrammelled” as a class of painting was Li Ssu-chen. In esteeming this class of artists, Li stated their defining characteristic to be an innate talent that could not be contained within the framework 50 Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I: Hsieh Ho Revisited,” 117.

51 Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” 37.

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of the other classes of artists, that is, the Three Classes and the Nine Grades.52 The attribution of this style to innate talent accords with Song critics in their discussion of the necessary characteristics for the portrayal of qi in painting. The i-p’in style designates painting that is liberated from the standard method of painting; however, it is more than a measure of quality and artistic value.53 It refers to the evolution of an artistic style. The definition of “i-p’in” as a class came into being once the i-p’in techniques that artists had incorporated into certain aspects of their works were extended to the entire work.54 The first to re-name the three classes from “upper, middle, lower,” to “divine, excellent and competent” was Chang Huai-Kuan.55 The artists he placed in the i-p’in class were: Wang Mo, Li Ling-sheng, and Chang Chihho.56 Wang Mo was known for his spattered ink landscapes. This technique represented the utmost spontaneity, for the ambiguity of his ink puddles implied that only the artist could know what the shapes were to represent, as opposed to the fine lines and distinct shapes of the orthodox painting method.57 I-p’in artists captured the “spirit vitality” of the objects depicted through the splashed ink 52 Ibid., 66.

53 Ibid., 67.

54 Ibid., 71.

55 Ibid., 66.

56 Ibid., 67.

57 Ibid., 68.

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and “dropping on the ink” style.58

Features characteristic of the i-p’in style are an unrestrained manner in brushstrokes, with emphasis placed on the use of ink.59 This allows for spontaneity and the seeking of a means of expression for the artist’s thoughts through the use of ink as substance that is difficult to control. For example, Wang Mo would, when inebriated, “respond to the movements of his hand and follow his inclinations.”60 The following of one’s hand accords with the Song idea of concept preceding the brush in order for the end product to possess spirit; this technique also produces sketchy brushwork similar to the manner of Ni Zan. The elimination of detail and ornamentation in i-p’in paintings is in accord with the Song critics description of qi and the Literati masters’ visual manifestation of qi. Through lack of detail, they are able to capture the essential nature of the object rather than hide the essence of the object behind elaborate ornamentation. Not bounded by precise, firm lines, the objects the i-p’in artists depicted came into existence through a process that retained their inherent and natural characteristics.61 Their abbreviated brushstrokes capture the forms spontaneously and engender a sense of movement.62 58 Ibid., 20.

59 Ibid., 71.

60 Ibid., 68.

61 Ibid., 69.

62 Ibid., 74.

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The evolution of the ip’in style developed from the incorporation of traditional painting methods with representational abbreviated brushstrokes, to the eventual absence of anything but such brushstrokes. Through the latter, the i-p’in style accomplished absolute visual representation of qi. Shih Ko’s Patriarchs, (fig. 5) are comprised mainly of abbreviated and rough brushwork for the garments, which hint at the bodies beneath.63 Liang Kai’s Li Po Intoning Lines of Poetry (fig. 6) is even more abbreviated than Shih Ko’s but there still lacks a complete arbitrariness in the brushstrokes as seen in the later development of the i-p’in style.64

Shimada’s article presents evidence to suggest that the i-p’in style was always present within traditional Chinese painting. He attributes Wu Daozi’s ability to “give life to an image with only one or two brush lines” and his depiction of the vitality of forms through movement as a preparation for the i-p’in style.65 This attribution suggests the existence of an “i-p’in” style in artists who attained the highest class within their dynasties even before the term was coined as a class of 63 Ibid., 130. Painting method is defined as: a representational manner of drawing in fine brushwork.

64 See as an example: Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” 24.

Anonymous, late Sung dynasty, Feng-kan.

Inscribed by Shih chiao K’o-hsuan. Tokugawa collection, Nagoya.

65 Ibid., 70.

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its own. From the late Tang to the Song, when landscape painting saw a complete transformation by artists such as Li Cheng, Fan Kuan, and Dong Yuan, there existed elements of the i-p’in style. For example, Chu-jan, Dong Yuan’s artistic heir, depicted trees with clusters of dots and when seen up close the elements of his pictures scarcely took on the forms of objects.66 His way of depicting trees is similar to the i-p’in painter Mu Qi’s use of dots on his mountains to denote trees. Further, Mi Fu’s style has been considered by Ming critics as developing from the splashed-ink landscape style of Wang Mo.67 Hsu Hsi, the foremost bird and flower painter of the early Song, painted in a “dropping on the ink” technique that is akin to the “splashed ink” technique of i-p’in artists; both styles make no use of fine brushwork for outlines.68

Shimada’s claim that the beginning of Song painting began in the mid-Tang with the advent of the i-p’in style69 and Su Shih’s claim that Yuan literati painting could not have reached its height without having had the i-p’in style to draw upon, provide evidence for the ever-lingering presence of the i-p’in style within the shadows of the Literati and traditional styles of painting.70 Thus i-p’in style was the foundation from which other 66 Ibid., 19.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., 20.

69 Ibid., 22.

70 Ibid., 24.

styles and movements were able to develop. The freedom from the restrictions of faithful depiction of natural shapes and fine lines allowed for the simple and direct expression of the artist’s spirit, which prepared the way for Literati painting.71 This new significance attributed to the i-p’in style is an outcome of its absolute embodiment of qi, as has been revealed through the analysis of the elements in the visual manifestation of qi. Contrary to what many critics believed about the extermination of the style, it still existed in the shadows owing to the status of qi as continuously allotted the highest of values within Chinese painting.

The character of what can be perceived in a painting changes with the method of observation.

As Hay states: “the observer is a creator of both form and meaning, through perceiving the structure and then establishing a level of significance.”72 An essential component of the conveyance of qi in a painting is the establishment of a connection between the act of viewing the painting and the painter. The ability of the i-p’in paintings to embody the expression of qi owes significantly to its viewer-painter relationship. The i-p’in style’s opposition to the laws of “bone method in use of the brush” and “fidelity to the object in portraying forms” produced ab71 Ibid., 23.

72 Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, II: The Hierarchic Evolution of Structure Hsieh Ho Revisited,” 124.

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breviated forms that call upon the viewer’s previous knowledge in order to interpret the image.73 For example, Yujian’s Mountain and Village in the Clearing Mist (fig.

7), requires the viewer to draw upon their previous experiences of villages amongst misty mountaintops to make sense of the splattered ink splotches and absence of forms. The painting is a shadow of the elements in a landscape painting, requiring the imagination to make sense of the whole image.

The ink-wash style common to ip’in landscapes caused the brushwork to take on a representational function. For example, Mu Qi’s Sunset Over a Fishing Village (fig.

8) is composed of barely-there ink-washes, evoking the artist’s impression of a mountain; something not actually in nature, but a cue for a series of emotional reactions. Movement is a crucial element of human perception and experience. In i-p’in painting, the viewer’s eye traces the movement of the brushstrokes, allowing the viewer to experience the artist’s qi. The argument could be made that qi is present to some degree within all works of art, regardless as to whether the artist possessed an “untrammelled” nature or not.

However, as the i-p’in artists clearly demonstrate, their ability to establish a powerful connection with the viewer through requiring their active presence in the process and 73 Shimada, “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” 70.

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interpretation of the work is essential for allowing critics and viewers alike to appreciate the absolute embodiment of qi. This is precisely what the i-p’in style achieves.

The exploration into the visual manifestation of qi has revealed the centrality of the brushstroke. Whether it be texture-dab strokes as exhibited by Fan Kuan, or sketchy and free brushwork such as Ni Zan’s, qi lies in the individual expression of a stroke. The free and abbreviated brushstroke, associated with spontaneity and the execution of ideas, manifested itself to the greatest degree in the i-p’in style of painting. A significant feature that allowed it to do so was its distinctly powerful subject-painter relationship. That the i-p’in style fully embodied the spirit of the artist and of the object depicted through the movement of brushstrokes established the style as a foundation that allowed for the continuous transformation of Chinese landscape painting. The techniques employed by the i-p’in artists leaves us with the thought: perhaps the visual manifestation of qi occurs when the artist is between having an intention and not having one.

Alexandria Proctor is in her final year pursuing a Joint Honors in Art History and East Asian Studies, with a minor in History.

Her art history degree has focused primarily on Chinese art, encompassing pre-modern, later, and contemporary. As one of her favourite seminars throughout her undergraduate career, the course that inspired The Visual Manifestation of “Qi” allowed her to

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explore in-depth a foundational concept of Chinese art. Through joyously deconstructing the many layers within the abstract concept of qi, Alexandria has seen the ideas explored within this paper permeate other areas of study and applied to successive academic papers. She hopes you enjoy reading it as much as she enjoyed writing it!

B i b l i o g r a p h y Bush, Susan. Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Bush, Susan. The Chinese Literati On Painting: Su Shih (1037-1101) to Tung Chi’i-ch’ang (1555-1636). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Hay, John. “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I: Hsieh Ho Revisited.” In Anthropology and Aesthetics, No.6, 72-111 and 102-136, 1983.

Shimada, Shujiro. “Concerning the I-P’in Style of Painting,” Oriental Art 1 (1964): 66-74, 130-136, 19-26.

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Figure 1 - Fan Kuan, Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, ink on silk.

National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

Figure 4 - Ni Zan, Rongxi Studio, hanging scroll, ink on paper. National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

Figure 5 - 13th or 14th century copies after Shih K’o, Two Patriarchs Harmonizing their Minds.

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Figure 3 (above) - Zhao Mengfu, Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, handscroll, ink and colour on paper.

National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

Figure 7 (below) - Yujian, Mountain and Village in the Clearing Mist.

Figure 6 (above) - Liang Kai, Li Po Intoning Lines of Poetry, 13th century.

Figure 8 (right) - Mu Qi, Sunset Over a Fishing Village, 13th Century.

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Figure 1 Maximilien Luce, Les tanneries de la Bièvre, 1887.

Néo-impressionnisme: quand le peintre rencontre l’anarchiste Camille Paly

En 1865, dans Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, économiste et sociologue français et premier à se qualifier d’anarchiste, écrit : « désormais l’art travaillera pour l’amélioration physique et morale des espèces […] le devoir de l’art, je le dis, est de nous mettre en garde, de nous louer, de nous enseigner, de nous faire rougir en nous confrontant avec un miroir à notre propre conscience ».1 Ainsi, il est nécessaire de reconnaître les liens étroits, existants entre l’art et la société. Une reconnaissance qui est, selon Proudhon, un prérequis indispensable pour asseoir l’autonomie de l’artiste et celle de son esprit critique mais aussi un outil primordial pour libérer définitivement les individus de toute autorité répressive. Dès lors, l’artiste se doit de prendre position, d’établir un constat critique sur sa société et, ainsi, d’œuvrer pour son amélioration. Un engagement d’autant plus essentiel que la rapide industrialisation et modernisation, que connaît la France à cette époque, érodent progressivement les liens communautaires, substituent un mode de production capitaliste aux schémas traditionnels et engendrent une importante vague de paupérisation, tant urbaine que rurale.2 Cette mouvance anarchiste et contestataire, suscitée par la Commune parisienne de 1871, retrouva un souffle neuf dans les années 1880-1890 sous la plume des théoriciens Jean Grave, Pierre Kropotkin et Elisée Reclus. Un renouveau dynamisé, en outre, par la prolifération de journaux tels que Le Révolté, La Sociale ou Le Père Peinard. Des publications auxquelles des artistes, majoritairement des néoimpressionnistes, parmi lesquels Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac ou en1 “from now on art will work for the physical and moral improvement of the species […] the task of art, I say, is to warn us, to praise us, to teach us, to make us blush by confronting us with a mirror of our own conscience.”

“A Beautiful Dream, Courbet’s Realism and the Paris Commune of 1871” in Allan Antliff’s Anarchy and Art, From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 26.

2 Emmanuel Combe, Précis d’economie (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 9ème édition, 2007), 72.

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core Maximilien Luce apportèrent leur contribution.3 Une affiliation idéo-politique soulignée par Camille Pissarro, lui-même, dans sa correspondance avec son fils Lucien : « nos idées, imprégnées de la philosophie anarchiste, se diffusent à travers notre œuvre ».4 Dès lors, quelles sont les affinités tangibles entre l’anarchisme de Grave et Reclus et la démarche artistique et esthétique poursuivie par les néo-impressionnistes ? Je m’appuierai sur l’œuvre de Maximilien Luce, Les tanneries de la Bièvre (1887) (fig. 1), pour montrer qu’il est possible d’établir des recoupements tant thématiques, idéologiques que techniques entre ces deux mouvements français de la fin du XIXème siècle.

Là où ses prédécesseurs impressionnistes s’évertuaient à représenter une banlieue prisée par la classe moyenne parisienne pour ses loisirs lors des fins de semaine, Luce cherche, au contraire, à dépeindre une banlieue avant tout industrielle avec ses ouvriers et son quotidien.5 Il délaisse ainsi 3 “Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and Others” in Robert L. Herbert’s From Millet to Léger, Essays in Social Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 107-108.

4 “our ideas, impregnated with anarchist philosophy, spread through our work” in Herbert’s From Millet to Léger, 106.

5 “Dirty and Radiant, Depressing and Cheerful : The Neo-Impressionist Suburbs” in Robyn Roslak’s Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, Painting, Politics and Landscape (London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 115.

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le point de vue du citadin, venu se détendre, pour se concentrer davantage sur la nature intrinsèque de cet espace géographique, où nature et culture s’entrechoquent, formant un paysage hybride. En effet, le sujet ici abordé est celui des tanneries de cuire situées sur les rives de la Bièvre au sud-ouest de Gentilly. Un endroit notamment connu pour ses déversements chimiques de sulfate et autres agents détergents, faisant de l’endroit, un site extrêmement pollué aux eaux putrides et nauséabondes. Une situation particulièrement dénoncée par les politiciens anarchistes qui s’indignent contre cet asservissement de la nature à des fins capitalistes.

Ainsi, les couches épaisses de peinture et les couleurs terreuses utilisées par Luce se concentrent sur l’infrastructure de la tannerie. La présence matérielle du bâtiment en est alors accentuée, enracinant profondément l’usine dans la composition de son paysage. Une importance portée au caractère industriel de la banlieue qui est renforcée par un point de vue oblique sur d’autres usines situées, au lointain, sur la berge opposée.

De plus, comme le souligne le géographe Denis Cosgrove, une peinture de paysage n’est pas seulement la représentation morphologique d’un site.6 C’est aussi l’idée subjective que l’on se fait d’un espace contin6 Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 9.

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gent à des faits historiques et/ ou à certaines pratiques sociales.

C’est ainsi que le théoricien anarchiste Reclus considère cette banlieue industrialo-rurale comme l’emplacement propice à la réalisation de sa « Société du Futur ». L’avènement de celle-ci résultera, selon lui, d’une combinaison harmonieuse des avantages de la ville à ceux de la campagne.7 La banlieue parisienne apparaît, alors, comme le lieu privilégié pour conduire la société actuelle vers cette utopie agro-industrielle, où exploitations agricoles et usines coexisteront pacifiquement, garantissant la liberté individuelle et l’égalité de tous.

Dès lors, en représentant une banlieue où cette harmonie entre nature et culture n’est pas encore atteinte, Luce ouvre sa peinture à une critique sociale sur la situation contemporaine ainsi que sur les progrès à réaliser. Cependant, si cette harmonie n’est pas encore du domaine du réel, elle n’en reste pas moins potentielle.

En effet, la peinture de Luce fait échos à l’idéal de Reclus qui fait de la nature le moyen de métamorphoser la laideur industrielle en un paysage esthétique et équilibré.8 Une utopie accessible et réalisable qui se traduit dans la composition de Luce par la lumière naturelle 7 “Geography, Aesthetic Responsibility and Moral Improvement” in Roslak’s NeoImpressionism and Anarchism in Fin-deSiècle France, 108.

8 Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 127.

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du soleil qui baigne l’usine et la verdure environnante d’un halo doré, réconfortant et apaisant.

Au-delà des thèmes de prédilection des néo-impressionnistes (la banlieue, les artisans ou encore les rues parisiennes) qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les préoccupations sociales et économiques du mouvement anarchiste, leurs techniques et méthodologies artistiques feraient, elles aussi, étroitement échos aux idéaux anarchistes. Georges Seurat distingue le néo-impressionnisme du courant impressionniste par ce qu’il nomme la technique du pointillisme ou du divisionnisme.9 Un procédé artistique qui consiste à appliquer scientifiquement des touches de peinture issues d’une large gamme de couleurs complémentaires, et ce, de manière uniforme sur toute la surface de la toile. Dès lors, la juxtaposition des points de peinture de Luce ne repose plus ni sur son intuition ni sous l’impulsion de l’émotion qui le traverse. Elle repose, désormais, sur une vision structurée et rationnelle des phénomènes de lumière, permettant d’analyser et de déterminer au mieux ses composantes essentielles.

C’est sur ce principe même de créer une harmonie d’ensemble par la variété des spécimens utilisés que la fac9 Paul Tucker, “Monet and the Challenges to Impressionism in the 1880s” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and PostImpressionism : An Anthology (California: University of California Press, 1989).

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ture néo-impressionniste de Luce dresse un parallèle avec la nomenclature sociale anarchiste.

En effet, Grave prône une société juste et sans classes, où les individus seraient égaux, tout en restant autonomes les uns par rapport aux autres.10 Ainsi, tous deux visent l’unité dans la variété afin d’accéder à l’idéal suprême.

Dès lors, si les artistes symbolistes ont recourt à l’intensité émotionnelle de l’extase pour révéler cet Absolu, marque de la réalité ultime,11 les néo-impressionnistes, tel Maximilien Luce, ont, de leur côté, utilisé cette nouvelle vision scientificopicturale pour transcender l’ordre bourgeois et son matérialisme aliénant. Ainsi, tout comme les néo-impressionnistes pour qui la science est la base d’une harmonie esthétique, l’utopie anarchiste repose sur une réorganisation scientifique de la société. Les lois de la nature et les avancées technologiques neutralisant un capitalisme artificiel et aliénant.12

Maximilien Luce, et les autres néo-impressionnistes, se sont affirmés avant tout comme artistes et non comme militants. Cependant, ils ont découvert dans les écrits anarchistes de Grave et de

Reclus, un modèle social dont la structure et les bases scientifiques faisaient directement échos aux fins artistiques et esthétiques qu’ils poursuivaient. Tous deux poursuivirent la recherche d’un équilibre à travers l’autonomie individuelle, tous deux ont vu dans la science l’outil nécessaire au progrès social et esthétique et, enfin, tous deux ont oeuvré pour une vision du monde, nouvelle et alternative.

Camille Paly is originally from Paris and is in her final year at McGill with a double major in Art History and Economics. Her two main interests in Art History are the Russian Soviet avant-garde, and European propaganda art from the 20th century. Camille is also the VP Finance of the AHCSSA since 2012, and she enjoys helping to finance the diverse events within the department.

10 Jean Grave, « La Loi de la force et le concert pour l’existence, » Le Révolté, 1883, 1.

11 Patricia Mathews, Passionate Discontent (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009).

12 Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 3.

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B i b l i o g r a p h i e Antliff, Allan. Anarchy and Art, From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. London: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007.

Combe, Emmanuel. Précis d’economie.

9ème édition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007.

Grave, Jean. « La Loi de la force et le concert pour l’existence » dans Le Révolté.

1883.

Herbert, Robert L. From Millet to Léger, Essays in Social Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Mathews, Patricia. Passionate Discontent.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Roslak, Robyn. Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, Painting, Politics and Landscape. Vancouver: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007.

Tucker, Paul. Monet and the Challenges to Impressionism in the 1880s in Critical Readings in Impressionism and PostImpressionism: An Anthology. California: University California Press, 1989.

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Figure 3 (L) - “Thomas Moore, as he appeared when admitted to the Regina Industrial School,” 1896.

Figure 4 (R) - “Thomas Moore, after tuition at the Regina Industrial School,” 1896.

Both figures retrieved from: Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 11, Second session of the eighth session of Parliament, Session 1897 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896) Library and Archives Canada, 15f (fig 3) and 15 g (fig 4)

Picturing Performance: Gendered Labour Practices in 19th Century Canadian Residential Schools Jeremy Keyzer

In the 19th century, the Canadian Government implemented the Residential School System: a church-run, government-funded program aimed at educating and assimilating the country’s Indigenous peoples. For over 100 years, this mandatory schooling system operated across Canada until the last residential school closed in 1996.1 To monitor the program’s performance, the government required an annual report for each residential school to be included within the Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada. By unpacking representations, practices, and performances that establish and legitimize a political order concerning statecraft and Indigenous peoples, I will argue that the imagery found within the 1896 and 1897 Sessional Papers strengthens a colonial discourse of gender as tethered to specific labour.

Two sets of residential school photographs will in part define the state and missionary led imposition of Anglo-European gender norms on Indigenous peoples: (1) two respective scenes of young men and women engaging in sewing and carpentry; and (2) a before and after comparison of Thomas Moore, an Indigenous boy groomed into a ‘civilized’ body. Within these images, students experience procedural conformation to, and complete transformation by, Anglo-European societal norms, through the displacement of Indigenous values with capitalist ideologies of the productive family unit. With this framework, we may explore the naturalization of gendered divisions of labour by examining the effects of repeated performance on both the body and space.

The Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada

As the working papers of Parliament, Sessional Papers are a regulatory tool containing draft legislation, reports, and financial accounts for industries relevant to the state.2 Within the context of estab1 “A timeline of residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” CBC News, 16 May 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-timeline-of-residential-schoolsthe-truth-and-reconciliation-commision-1.724434, accessed 27 November 2013.

2 “Working with Sessional Papers,” York University, accessed 27 November 2013, http:// www.library.yorku.ca/cms/scottreference/govdocs/guides/sessional/.

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lishing and funding residential school operations, the papers historically informed government agents on matters such as building conditions, attendance, discipline, grading, and recreation. In addition, reports frequently discuss males and females separately performing specific work, highlighting a narrative of gendered labour connected to state discipline.

The inclusion of visual imagery portraying Indigenous cultures in the Sessional Papers became commonplace around 1890. Coinciding with colonial interest in ethnographic depictions, the publications following this date provide a wealth of illustrations of both residential schools and reservations. Images of Indigenous life are often tacked alongside written reports and financial statements with little contextual information or in-text referencing.

The haphazard insertion of these photographs into ‘scientific’ reports reveals the imagery’s power to operate relatively independently, suggesting that the photographs contain embedded meaning that dialectically informs the discourse found within the Sessional Papers.

Indigenous cultures and the British middle-class “There is no part of our work here that is more trying and yet more important than that connected with the young women of the place. They are exposed to particular temptations and up to this Canvas Journal

time there has been no restraint to their course of sin... They must be cared for, and in some cases the only way to save them is to take them to the mission house.”3 By the mid-19th century, the values of the British middle-class were tethered to moral reform that fused working-class women with domestic disorder and by extension disease and immorality. Consequently, Anglo-European gender norms were tied to notions of male breadwinning and female passivity.4 The ‘problem’ of Indigenous domesticity therefore emerged as Europeans were ethnographically observing and cataloguing the household arrangements of the non-western world. Indigenous cultures exhibiting relatively fluid definitions of gender in relation to labour were disturbing findings for white settlers, government agents, and missionaries.5

Guided by preconceived notions that held working-class women responsible for disorder 3 Carol Williams, “‘She Was the Means of Leading into the Light’: Photographic Portraits of Tsimshian Methodist Converts,” in In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada, eds. Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 127.

4 Adele Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge, Colonial Practice, and Indigenous Womanhood: Missions in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 121.

5 Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 114.

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and moral decay, Carol Williams asserts that Anglo-Europeans, fearing that employment might ‘masculinize’ women,6 experienced a moral panic in response to female physical labour, community leadership, and sexual commerce that violated ideals of femininity.7 Traders, travelers, Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) agents, and missionaries held the transgressive behaviour of Indigenous women responsible for the spoiling morality and purity of the Indigenous home.8 It then follows that the DIA deemed female participation in activities such as hunting, property ownership, and warfare a precursor to becoming “overworked drudges of their own society.”9

Drawing selectively from discursive knowledges of the Christian faith, European Enlightenment, and social imperatives of industrializing Anglo-America, missionary schools were first es6 Williams, “She was the Means,” 142.

7 Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender, and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 152.

8 Such danger was ‘confirmed’ by the moral degradation that missionaries thought of women who, for instance, went to Victoria for the sex trade. For a discussion on Indigenous female employment, see: Sherry Farrell Racette “Sewing for a Living” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005).

9 Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “Indian Affairs, Colonization, and the Regulation of Aboriginal Women’s Sexuality” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 162.

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tablished in the 1850s and 60s with a mandate to promote the domestic, conjugal, and labour roles falsely touted as natural.10 While constructing women as particularly likely to be promiscuous and immoral, repressive and culturally biased models of respectable, metropolitan femininity guided the state and missionary led transformation of Indigenous women.11 With the legislative support of the DIA’s 1876 Indian Act,12 instilling permanence on populations displaying relative (female) mobility was possible through institutional disciplinary action that formed female spheres separate from the public realm.13 “Sewing Room, Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School” (fig. 1)14 and “Carpenter’s Shop, Battleford Indian Industrial School” (fig. 2)15 illustrate the gendered performance of labour as girls and boys in distinct and contained environments endure procedural transformation into civilized bodies.

10 Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 111.

11 Brownlie, “Indian Affairs,” 163.

12 Williams, “‘She Was the Means of Leading into the Light’,” 129.

13 Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 112.

14 Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 10, Sixth session of the seventh Parliament, Session 1896 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896) Retrieved from: Library and Archives Canada, 14-200b.

15 Canada, Sessional Papers, 1896, 14124b.

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Residential school discipline and gendered labour divisions

With what is arguably a monopoly on violence, the apparatus of the state forms a particular spatial structure as it monitors, polices, and governs a population.

Geography plays both a symbolic and imaginary role within its materialization as the state reifies power, conferring it upon people, e.g., school principals, as well as object-institutions such as fences and landed property.16 These everyday agents displace attention from the state, thereby removing it as the source of discipline within the public’s imagination.

As residential school doors conceal the disciplinary acts targeting Indigenous peoples, punishment becomes increasingly abstract as it is imagined rather than watched.

This visualization strips authorities of responsibility as state discipline is safely supplanted by the publicly internalized motive to “correct, cure, reclaim, and improve.”17

Turning to a Marxist feminist discourse to read AngloEuropean divisions of labour, one finds the (re)production and maintenance of labour as a necessary condition to the production of 16 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of imagination: ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 10.

17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 10.

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capital.18 Considering the assumption that responsible motherhood entails forgoing physical labour,19 the domestic confinement of women serves to contain female sexuality and prop up the interests of the male capitalist, with his need for legitimate heirs and the efficient (re)production of labour.20 The disciplinary mandates of residential schools were therefore built around the restoration of female dependence, and the socialization of Indigenous peoples into appropriate labour roles that subscribed to patriarchal systems of control.

While gendered division of labour is often perceived as ‘natural,’ foregrounding the containment of Indigenous bodies within specific labour categories instead points to the particular economic conditions of early capitalist industrialization.21 By confining Indigenous women to the domestic sphere, federal policy—and by extension the ‘public’—explicitly invested in the (re)productive unit of man, wife, and children.22 18 Eva Gamarnikow “Sexual division of labour: The case of nursing” in Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, eds. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 98.

19 Oakley, Sex, Gender, and Society, 131.

20 Robin McDonough and Rachel Harrison, “Patriarchy and Relations of Production” in Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, eds. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 36.

21 McDonough and Harrison, “Patriarchy and Relations of Production,” 35.

22 Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 116.

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Reproducing photographic scenes of residential school labour within normatively descriptive, ‘scientific’ residential school reports validates such gender divisions as natural. For the government agents consuming images of women sewing and men sweating, the contributions of women to society’s visible economy would in-part be smothered by an educational focus that linked female domestic containment with morality. Similarly, N. Coccola, Principal of the Kootenay Industrial School, proclaims the progress of industrial instruction within the 1897 Sessional Paper: “In the shoemaking department, as elsewhere, the efforts of the boys were well marked. A shoemaker was engaged last August, and under him three boys have learned the trade and are now able to make shoes fairly well. A good deal of shoe-mending and harness repairing have been done by them both for whites and Indians. The parents felt proud of the work done by their children...While the carpenters were repairing the school buildings, two of the boys assisted them, thus acquiring a valuable knowledge of carpentry, and at the same time expediting the work.”23 Coccola continues, specifying the developments occurring in “girls’ industrial work”: “The girls are well trained in the different branches of housework.

23 Canada, Sessional Papers, 1897, 385.

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The three largest girls are able to compete with white girls of the same age at housekeeping...The others are doing well at the duties at which they are employed according to their age and strength.

Almost all of them show great aptitude for sewing and other needle-work. Some of the girls of ten years of age can make their own dresses and knit their stockings.”24 In demonstrating procedural conformation to Anglo-European norms, the production of knitted goods is appropriate; according to Adele Perry the significance of textiles and clothing in understanding women’s work signals the ‘intelligence’ of the maker, while simultaneously depicting her as childlike.25 For the members of parliament consuming images of women sewing, this binary renders her humanity as potential, evidently solidifying her soon-to-be successful conversion within the project.

Thomas Moore

The images of Thomas Moore construct a savage/civilized dichotomy while excluding the process of transformation.26 “Thomas Moore, as he appeared when admitted to the Regina In24 Ibid.

25 Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 124.

26 Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 76.

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dian Industrial School” (fig. 3)27 is depicted as emotional, feminine in desire for cloth and trinkets, and childlike.28 Likely motivated by scientific, moral, and philosophical discourses that portrayed the colonial empire as ‘realistically’ as possible, ‘natural’ elements such as a fur skin were selected by the photographer and/or commissioner to foreground Thomas.29 With contemporary Social Darwinist theories as a guide, this technique of scientific realism anchors the aforementioned characteristics to Indigenous cultures, thereby geographically and socially situating the source of the domesticity ‘problem.’30

Calling into question the objectivity of colonial photographers, Williams asserts that missionaries and school principals were in a continual state of dependence upon donors to “keep the sinner, or newly converted, within an ongoing spiritual embrace.”31 It was therefore necessary to convince supporters, including the federal government, of the success 27 Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 11, Second session of the eighth session of Parliament, Session 1897 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896) Retrieved from: Library and Archives Canada, 15f.

28 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in EighteenthCentury British Painting (London: Duke University Press, 1999), 59.

29 Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 26.

30 Ibid.,15.

31 Williams, “‘She Was the Means of Leading into the Light’,” 122.

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of educational measures.32 Standing confidently, “Thomas Moore, after tuition at the Regina Indian Industrial School” (fig. 4)33 conveys complete transformation, and therefore the efficacy of residential schools. As Thomas appears in sharp contrast to his previously uncontained body, Anne Maxwell indicates that such photographic evidence was used to assert that these (male) subjects were deserving of citizenship.34 By melding elements such as his new style of dress and neo-classical architecture, the viewer becomes aware of Thomas’ newfound masculinity and suitability for public life.35

Within the ecology of the Sessional Papers, both the images of labour performance as well as the images of Thomas inspire the viewer with hope for the missionary project, albeit in differing ways. On one hand, performance demonstrates capability. On the other, complete clothing and composure imbue Anglo-European comfort. We may order the images in a temporally linear manner to explore the ramifications of residential school discipline for the lived experience of Indigenous peoples. Considering performance as a transformative project in process and fixing Thomas to both 32 Missionaries such as Charles Tate turned to touring with his eight-year ‘project,’ Sallosalton, who was often dressed up and put on display. See: Williams, “She Was the Means of Leading into the Light,” 125.

33 Canada, Sessional Papers, 1897, 15g.

34 Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 121.

35 Brownlie, “Indian Affairs,” 2005.

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the beginning and endpoint allows us to see the Indigenous body’s actions grating against its physiognomical and biological traits.

Making this distinction supports a dual purpose: (1) allowing us to understand how performance shapes bodies by tending them toward certain objects, and (2) falsifying complete transformation through the notion of partiality.

The permeation of performance

I turn to an object-oriented queer phenomenology to demonstrate how performance shapes bodies and space. Examining how certain (gendered) actions may appear natural, Judith Butler highlights the relationship between performance repetition and a precipitating norm: “What bodies “tend to do” are effects of histories rather than being originary. We could say that history “happens” in the very repetition of gestures, which is what gives bodies their tendencies. We might note here that the labour of such repetition disappears through labour: if we work hard at something, then it seems “effortless.” 36 In other words, complete trans36 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitutions: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

As cited in Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: objects orientations, others (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 56.

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formation masks procedural transformation.

Continuously handing a mallet to a male will tend him toward that object in part through things like muscle memory. Similarly, as the needle increasingly takes residence in the hand of a woman, the tips of her fingers may harden and ‘naturally’ yearn to sew. As Sara Ahmed simply states, what we “do do” expands certain capabilities and affects what we “can do.” 37

As the body is moulded to have certain tendencies, the space surrounding the body changes as objects are carried nearer or further. Within this assertion, relationships between actions and space are significant as bodies are not merely “an instrument but a form of expression, a making visible of our intentions.”38 Spatial relations between objects and others are constructed through actions, which make certain objects available within reach more so than others.39 Objects in space thus concurrently orient the body, and take it in certain directions.

Notably, understanding how bodies evolve in relation to action allows us to consider something greater than the tendency toward physical things like mallets or needles: our definition of object 37 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 60.

38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, translated by James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill,: Northwest University Press, 1964). As cited in Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 53.

39 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 52.

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may expand to include language, attitudes, expressions, and aspirations. These are the layers in which gender norms are embedded.

It is of course no accident that residential school efforts primarily targeted children. “Killing the Indian in the child” was perceived as an effective means of civilizing nearly all aspects of Indigenous life through a rippling effect.40 For example, as part of civilizing efforts that first focused on females, missionaries and school leaders hoped that Indigenous girls would impart their newly acquired domestic skills to others upon return to their families and reserves.41 When we visualize the body retrieving and repelling objects in space it becomes clear how stateand missionary-led discipline disruptively permeates from the classroom to the home and from young students to everyone else.

Falsifying complete transformation

In an analysis of visual imagery portraying Indigenous life, it is reasonable to counter claims of oppression with those that destabilize imperial hegemo40 Mark Abley, Conversations with a dead man: the legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott (Madeira Park, B.C.: Douglass & McIntyre, 2013), 47.

41 Joan Sangster, “Domesticating Girls: The Sexual Regulation of Aboriginal and Working-Class Girls in Twentieth Century Canada” Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds.

Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 186.

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nies. For instance, as placement within middle-class homes was at times an option for students following a residential school education, Thomas’ adherence to middle-class behavioral principles may be a chosen strategy. The survival of Thomas and the other children undergoing transformation depends on their ability to maneuver within this system, to perform in varying ways and degrees as Anglo-European subjects.

Regardless of learned ability, a discursive environment of racial purity within the imposed capitalist mode of production continuously marginalized Indigenous labourers post-education. While displaying newfound abilities such as sewing and carpentry may mark their capacity for survival, the image of Thomas transformed speaks of the impossibility of containing physiognomical and biological characteristics in their entirety. As a result, students were expected to enter employment and remain at the level of unskilled or semiskilled. This reveals a degree of partiality within residential school discipline; Thomas is repeatedly told to take up the mallet while at school, then he is stripped of its presence, but not its normalcy, post-education. As his body and space are transformed, he may continue to tend toward that object as a subject within an increasingly market-based economic system, but the degree to which the mallet is reachable is in question.

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While complete transformation may appear attainable, it is only within the process itself that an ideal transformative endpoint is realistically imagined. In this light, the inability to completely contain identity is more damning for Thomas than the bodies pictured in action, because viewing performance leads us to believe that males might sweat away their skin colour and females may pale in the dim household light. Colonized bodies may therefore be represented with the capacity to become civilized, but political and economic agendas dependent on exclusivity and the myth of racial purity continuously disadvantage them in relation to white heteronorms. In other words, the version of Thomas following an industrial school education—or complete transformation—is an illusion.

Conclusion

Applying the notions of procedural conformation and complete transformation to the Sessional Paper’s visual imagery highlights residential school discipline as a project that focused on the body to construct the domestic unit in service to the male capitalist. Throughout residential school education, Indigenous peoples were imparted with the knowledge that certain objects are preferential within a capitalist mode of production; promoting tools such as mallets and needles in a gendered and ultimately racist manner furCanvas Journal

thered an exclusionary form of social mobility. The impossibility of complete transformation foregrounds the multiple layers of marginalization experienced

by Indigenous peoples as we see Thomas and his classmates struggling to grasp the objects they tend toward. A discursively racist economic environment that is in part nourished by the discourse found within the Sessional Papers continuously denies Indigenous peoples as self-governing agents.

By destabilizing normative notions of gender and revealing a degree of partiality within transformation we may be equipped with a critical repertoire when confronted with such practices.

Jeremy Keyzer - Drawing from his background in geography, he focuses on the intersection of art, architecture, and urban design. An aspiring farmer, he plans to pursue further schooling in design. For now, however, he is currently applying for government grants to turn his life into a science experiment.

B i b l i o g r a p h y Abley, Mark. Conversations with a Dead Man: the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Madeira Park, B.C.: Douglass & McIntyre, 2013.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” In Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, eds. Ed Gaurau Desai and Supriya Nair. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

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Brownlie, Robin Jarvis. “Indian Affairs, Colonization, and the Regulation of Aboriginal Women’s Sexuality.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Canada. Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 10, Sixth session of the seventh Parliament, Session 1896. Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896. Retrieved from Library and Archives Canada.

Canada. Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 11, Second session of the eighth session of Parliament, Session 1897. Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896. Retrieved from Library and Archives Canada.

Carter, Sarah A. “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives’: Prohibiting Polygamy in Prairie Canada’s Aboriginal Communities to 1900.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Gamarnikow, Eva. “Sexual Division of Labour: The Case of Nursing.” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, eds. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat.

States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Maxwell, Anne. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities. London: Leicester University Press, 1999.

McDonough, Robin and Rachel Harrison

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“Patriarchy and Relations of Production.”

In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, eds. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender, and Society.

New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Perry, Adele. “Metropolitan Knowledge, Colonial Practice, and Indigenous Womanhood: Missions in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Racette, Sherry Farrell. “Sewing for a Living.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford.

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Sangster, Joan “Domesticating Girls: The Sexual Regulation of Aboriginal and Working-Class Girls in Twentieth Century Canada.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford.

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Silversides, Brock V. The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 18711939. Winnipeg: Fifth House Ltd., 1994.

Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in EighteenthCentury British Painting. London: Duke University Press, 1999.

Williams, Carol. “‘She Was the Means of Leading into the Light’: Photographic Portraits of Tsimshian Methodist Converts.”

In In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada, eds. Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

“Working with Sessional Papers.” York University. http://www.library.yorku.ca/ cms/scottreference/govdocs/guides/sessional/. Accessed 27 November 2013.

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Figure 1 - “Sewing room, Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School.”

Retrieved from: Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 10, Sixth session of the seventh Parliament, Session 1896 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896) Library and Archives Canada, 14-200b.

Figure 2 - “Carpenters shop, Battleford Indian Industrial School.”

Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 10, Sixth session of the seventh Parliament, Session 1896 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896) Retrieved from: Library and Archives Canada, 14-124b.

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Figure 1 - Jan de Beer, The Adoration of the Shepherds, Center Pannel of the Montreal Triptych, c. 1510-1530. Oil on panel, 88.4 x 70.2cm, MMFA, Montreal.

The Ideal Antique: Classicizing Architectural Motifs in the Jan de Beer’s Montreal Triptych Rosalind Brady

Max Friedländer, in his article ‘Die Antwerper Manieristen von 1520,’ developed the largely pejorative label ‘Antwerp Mannerism’ to describe and categorize the elaborate and decorative style of painter Jan de Beer, as well as a number of mainly unknown masters working in Antwerp between 1500 and 1530.1 He describes the ornamental motifs and archaic architecture in his major work, Die altniederländische Malerei. He writes: “Capricious motives are used for decoration, their legitimate provenance remote, their original meaning forgotten. Unless reality be experienced visually the well springs dry up, the life juices stagnate, and only husks and shells are left.”2 Friedländer’s impassioned language perpetuates the long held notion that the Antwerp Mannerists applied these motifs meaninglessly and unimaginatively. It also participates in an art historical tradition occupied with the linear progression of an ultimately superior Italian formal language of the Renaissance inevitably replacing medieval gothic style. However, since Friedländer’s 1915 publication, a greater effort has been made to understand and appreciate the widespread use of these classicizing motifs through tracking the dissemination of visual models, as well as workshop practices of Netherlandish artists in the early sixteenth century. Using Jan de Beer’s Montreal Triptych: The Annunciation, The Adoration of the Shepherds, and The Flight into Egypt as an example, this paper posits that the inclusion of classicizing architectural motifs and structural elements by artists like de Beer and Jan Gossaert is more complex than a mere copying of the few available models from Italy. It is rather a complex process of assimilation and innovation, linked to the distribution and impact of printed image and treatises, the influence and changing tastes of noble courts, and the culture and authority of a thriving local art market. As such, this integration of motifs and architectural elements 1 Ian Chilvers, “The Antwerp Mannerists,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Art, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 143.

2 Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1967), 11-12.

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played a role in developing a unique and specifically Netherlandish visual language of the architecture.

Jan de Beer’s Montreal Triptych (fig. 1), housed in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, is dated approximately 1520, which, according to expert Dan Ewing, would place it in the late period of the artist’s working life.3 The scholar argues that this period gave rise to de Beer’s greatest technical and compositional achievements. It was also the decade in which a truly classicizing style began to emerge in the Low Countries.4 The Antwerp Mannerists dominated the market during this time. Their work often included garlands, swags,5 putti,6 oxheads, and decorative friezes and roundels, as well as classical columns, pilasters, and coffered ceilings as integral elements of standard religious scenes. Jan de Beer’s makes use of a number of these motifs. The triptych is comprised of the Annunciation on the left panel, the Adoration of the Magi on the center panel, and the Flight into Egypt on the right panel.

In the left Annunciation panel, the Virgin Mary, in keeping with typical Netherlandish 3 Dan Ewing, The Paintings and Drawings of Jan De Beer, thesis, University of Michigan, 1978, 108.

4 Oliver Kik, Imagining the Antique, thesis, University of Utrecht, 2010 (Utrecht), 34.

5 Ornamental festoons of fruit, flowers, foliage, and drapery.

6 The carved putti here are representations of young, cherubic boys, both winged and wingless.

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iconographic tradition, is kneeling beside her prayer bench with a vase of lilies. However, in de Beer’s visual rendition of the narrative, the archangel Gabriel visits her in a grand, antique palace. A large, rounded arch, supported by marbled pilasters and gold capitals, frames Mary and Gabriel. Beyond the framing arch, two more arches can be seen, supported by columns, both in the Corinthian style with intricate leafy capitals.

Above the arches, there is an ornate frieze decorated with arabesque reliefs and a large carved roundel. Carved putti, in various energetic postures fill the friezes and top the capitals. A pair on the left side pulls a verdant swag, laden with golden fruit, across the arch. Another lounges on the curvature of the topside of an arch.

One putto indecorously reveals a carved backside, while across the arch another kneels to exposes its genitals. The top half of the composition is visually frenetic, juxtaposing the figures’ static and solemn poses below. The chaotic architectural decoration, it seems, overwhelms the composition and distracts from the sacred event taking place in the foreground.

The central Adoration panel is more complicated in its mixture of architectural styles and temporalities. Mary is once again framed by a large, rounded arch.

Engaged pilasters with Corinthian capitals, as well free-standing columns, are all intricately carved

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with a confusing mix of tiny nude bodies, the horned and bearded heads of mythological deities, as well as urns, medallions, and plated armor. This foremost arch, along with three other supporting arches, forms what resembles a crossing for a dome. The base of a crumbling column is positioned at the forefront of the painting, physically obscuring the shepherds who have come to visit Christ. The carved, engaged torso of a mythical nymph-like creature, dressed in a leafy skirt and grasping a bow as he stretches languorously, competes for attention with the sober, kneeling angels. Beyond the antique palace, a typical Flemish cottage with a thatched roof is depicted at the base of a hill, on which sits the faint outline of a medieval stone castle, all within the same temporal landscape as the ancient palace. Similarly incongruous are the patterned tiles that cover the floors of the palaces in both the Visitation panel and the Adoration.

In assessing what might be interpreted as flamboyantly decorative, discordant confusion of styles and orders, as well an almost dismissive treatment of the sacred figures, it is easy to understand Friedländer’s criticism. The scholar sees de Beer tantamount to an unenlightened collector, hoarding priceless art objects without any way of understanding them. However, the means by which de Beer was able to apply these classical architectural elements and motifs Canvas Journal

to his paintings without ever having traveled to Italy and having no first hand knowledge of ancient Roman ruins, tells us a great deal about contemporary theories on the relationship of architecture to painting, which serve to undermine Friedländer’s claims.

As Antwerp’s economy developed, the circulation of prints became more mobile and architectural models became more accessible.7 We are aware that many workshops in the Low Countries were greatly influenced by and took inspiration from prints and treatises on classical architecture, including Durer’s Prevedari print and Virtuvius’ treatise.8 To meet the market’s demands, workshops employed methods of serial reproduction of stock motifs, which including tracing from cartoons and pouncing.9 As such, a networked system of guilds was able to copy and reproduce specific ornamental motifs and structural designs, often to the dismay of artists claiming to have created them in the first place.10 However, it can be argued that this copying of models was based on an appetite for novelty and inventiveness, rather 7 Yao-Fen You, “Antwerp Mannerism and the Fabricating of Fashion,” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (December 2006): 142.

8 Oliver Kik, Imagining the Antique, 54.

9 Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout, Brespols, 2002), 82.

10 Dan Ewing, The Paintings and Drawings of Jan De Beer, 44.

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than simple veneration.11 In particular, Jan Gossaert, perhaps the most eminent Antwerp Mannerist and de Beer’s fellow Antwerp St. Luke’s Guild member, came to exemplify a purely Netherlandish understanding of the antique through the appropriation of various architectural elements.12 In 1509, the artist accompanied his patron Philip of Burgundy on a diplomatic trip to meet Pope Julius II. During the trip, the courtly retinue stopped in Trent, Verona, Mantua, and Florence on its way to Rome. On the bequest of his patron, Gossaert sketched a number of different classical ruins in these cities, as well as the Coliseum in Rome. From this trip, Gossaert was able to study and document Roman antique architecture in situ. However, when it came to applying this formal language to his paintings, the artist did not slavishly imitate authentic antique architecture.13 Rather, he inventively combined elements from his sketches, humanist literature, likely his own imagination, and perhaps most importantly, from architectural treatises; most believe that he was using Fra Giacondo’s 1511 11 Dan Ewing, “Magi and Merchants: The Force behind the Antwerp Mannerists’ Adoration Pictures,” Aarboek Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (2005-2005): 279.

12 Oliver Kik, Imagining the Antique, 51.

13 Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Gossaert as Architect,” in Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, by Maryan Wynn. Ainsworth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 40.

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print of Virtuvius’ illustrated treatise De Architectura. Gossaert’s 1516 painting Neptune and Amphitrite (fig. 2) shows the creative liberties taken by the artist in its unorthodox combination of Greek Doric fluted columns with Roman Doric bases and capitals and unusual treatment of the bucranea.14

Scholars on the subject have reiterated that the word architect did not appear in the Dutch language until 1539 with the publication of Pieter Coecke van Aekst’s Vitruvian treatise.15 Ethan Kavaler notes that trained masons were responsible for stonework, but the privilege of designing architectural structures was usually conferred to sculptors and artists.

Most paintings of architecture were never taken up as plans for real buildings for obvious practical reasons. Rather, painting was regarded as a medium by which architecture could be represented in its ideal form.16 Gossaert was developing new methods of visualizing an idealized antique. In diverging from models of ancient authority and positing their own ideal architectural structures, artists like Gossaert and de Beer were engaging directly in discourse surrounding humanist paradigms on ‘artfulness,’ individuality and innovation.

14 Maria Bass, “Jan Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite Reconsidered,” Simiolus, Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 11, no. 2 (2011): 65.

15 Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Gossaert as Architect,” 40.

16 Ibid., 39.

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Ewing argues that the Mannerist’s preoccupation with classical ornamentation stemmed from the marketability of this perceived artful inventiveness.17 The sheer quantity of Mannerist paintings, the highest number of which were Adoration scenes like de Beer’s, which incorporated similar seemingly bizarre interpretations of architectural structures and motifs, attests to its high demand and commercial success. As Ewing notes, this phase in de Beer’s career produced his most compositionally balanced and technically innovative paintings. With access to more pictorial models through the proliferation of quick, serial copying, the innovative adaptation and use of arches and hybrid columns to frame the subjects and steady the many figures in de Beer’s triptych were perhaps the expression of his own ideal antique. However, beyond their artful inventiveness and decoration, it can be argued that many of these architectural motifs had iconographic and symbolic meaning, linked explicitly to local workshop practice and to political discourse on power.

Two particular Italianate motifs, the carved putti and the festooned swag, have particular significance. Decades before Antwerp became the dominant center for artistic production, these motifs were widely popular almost exclusively in Bruges, where they

were likely introduced by Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo.18 They were reproduced systematically, usually by hand, in the workshops of most the most successful artists of the time: Hans Memling, Gerard David, and Rogier van der Weyden. As Antwerp cemented its position as the world’s trading capital at the start of the sixteenth century, artists took up the putti and garland motif and adapted it to fit a local decorative language.

This phenomenon was perhaps the result of a large migration of painters from Bruges to Antwerp.

Oliver Kik, in his thesis on the subject, argues that Antwerp artists remodeled this successful decorative element in a “more elaborate manner,” asserting it as a symbol, in the same spirit of idealizing inventiveness, of Antwerp’s status as the center for cultural, economic, and artistic exchange.19

In comparing the putti in Jan de Beer’s Montreal Triptych to the sculpted cherubs in Gerard David’s 1498 Judgment of Cambyses (fig. 3), it is clear that Jan de Beer does indeed treat the motif more flamboyantly than his predecessor from Bruges. In David’s scene from Herodotus’s Histories, pairs of sculpted putti tug swags over Cambyses’ throne. One putto exerts himself so and must be steadied. Others anchor themselves while they pull, their feet digging into the stone capitals. In

17 Dan Ewing, “Magi and Merchants,” 276.

18 Oliver Kik, Imagining the Antique, 65.

19 Ibid., 38.

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total, eight putti are included in the scene. Jan de Beer’s putti exert a similar energetic effort, however, their presence is magnified by the way the artist has mimicked and multiplied their forms in low relief carvings, in column decorations in the Adoration panel and roundels in the Visitation scene, as well as in smaller statues atop capitals in both. At least fifteen putti, winged amorino, and putti-like mythical creatures are included in de Beer’s scene. Enhancing the primacy of the motif, the half nymph-like figure on the crumbling column at the very foreground acts as an intercessor between the viewer and the sacred scene. Although a comparison of only two works in isolation is limited in scope, it does seem to offer evidence that de Beer embellished the putti motif and makes Kik’s hypothesis plausible.

The visual expression of Antique architecture and decoration in painting was also a language of power, disseminated by the leading court artists of the era.

Long before the boom of the Antwerp open art market, court artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were incorporating antique architectural elements into their religious paintings to satisfy the humanist interests of their noble patrons. Classical ornamentation became a marker of status that linked patrons to imperial rulers of the past, and as such functioned to legitimize their own

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powerful positions.20 Philip of Burgundy, who enthusiastically encouraged Gossaert’s endeavors in classical architecture, was not alone in his admiration of the antique. Margaret of Austria, Henry III of Nassau, and even citizens with close ties to ruling families commissioned works in “the antique style” during this period.21

Sculpted antique and Roman armor as decorative motifs were part of an iconographic language that conveyed notions of imperial power. Anne Tayloe Woolett discusses in her dissertation representations of armor in altarpieces commissioned by militia guilds in Antwerp in the sixteenth century.

She hypothesizes that these very public representation of antique armor and weapons promoted the civic goals of the guilds as well as the social aims of their noble overseers, Emperor Chares V and Phillip II,22 who were also collectors of arms and armor.23 Tapestry cycles commissioned by Burgundian dukes depicting ancient battles and military processions may have further strengthened the visual link between classical armor and 20 Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Gossaert as Architect,” 33.

21 Ibid., 32.

22 Anne Tayloe Woolett, The Altarpiece in Antwerp, 1554-1615: Painting and Militia Guilds, thesis, Columbia University, 2004, 13.

23 Braden K. Frieder, Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 8.

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the Burgundian-Hapsburg court.24

Jan de Beer, in his Montreal Triptych, has indeed included what appears to be a piece of Roman body armor, which is carved into the central column in the Adoration scene, prominently positioned by the Virgin’s head.

Bulging muscles attest to its brute strength, while the accentuated, twirling pteruges, or leather skirt, emphasize its ceremonial decadence. Other imperial imagery, including a medallion with a profile portrait, as well as chiseled chalices, seem to corroborate this connection. It’s not clear if this decorative element was merely de Beer’s adoption of a fashionable and easily marketable motif.

It’s prominent placement, perhaps, acts as a symbol for Mary’s ancient biblical heritage. Whatever the indented meaning, the inclusion of the chest plate demonstrates just how far reaching and highly effective this visual idiom became for artists. While applying an iconographic program to a group of painters is always inherently inconsistent, it does provide insight into the perceived meanings and uses of antique architectural decoration, as well as how this language was shaped by courtly tastes and agendas.

In assessing criticisms of the ostensibly excessive decoration in Jan de Beer’s triptych and 24 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold,” Art Journal 48 (1989): 130.

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other Adoration scenes, seemingly at odds with their religious narratives, both Kavaler and Elizabeth Honig insist that this type of ornamentation was central to contemporary painterly discourse.

Ornament as an embellishment to buildings, Alberti wrote, was supplementary to beauty, and was fully expressed in abundance and intricacy.25 In this way, decoration served to simulate luxury products in the merchant city in the way that they seduced the viewer’s gaze in the Pand.26 Honig likens the seductive power of highly decorative art to a new type of moral economy that understood the market forces as part of God’s wish for commercial success, for the individual and the city.27 In this way, de Beer’s Mary, who seems dwarfed by the immensity and complexity of the classical structure above her, can be understood in a new light.

In the same way Jan van Eyck equates the physical figure of Mary with the holiness of Gothic architecture in Madonna in the Church (fig. 4), de Beer’s Mary is equated with mercantile abundance and economic good fortune.

Early sixteen-century painters such as Jan de Beer and 25 Rudolf Wittkower, “Alberti’s Approach to Antiquity in Architecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institute 4, no.

1/2 (October 1940), 3.

26 Yao Fen You, “Antwerp Mannerism and the Fabrication of Fashion,” 143.

27 Elizabeth A. Honig, Painting & the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 8-30.

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Jan Gossaert were the Netherland’s pioneers in architectural design.

They developed a new idea of the antique through the assimilation of structural elements and motifs, and were able to adapt and remodel them to convey new meanings, specific to their local and adjustable for their market. In this way, they were precursors to the first professional artist-architects in the Low Countries, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Cornelis Floris, Willem vand der Broeck, and Philips de Vos, whose Antwerp buildings “in the antique manner” were similarly adapted and hybridized.28 Rosalind Brady is a U3 student with majors in English Literature and Art History.

She thoroughly enjoyed Professor Henry’s class for which this paper was written, and she likes writing about works that one can see in person in Montreal. Although the research is a bit tougher for such artworks, Rosalind finds the process rewarding. She has been back to see Jan de Beer’s painting since, and still finds it wonderful.

B i b l i o g r a p h y Bass, Maria. “Jan Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite Reconsidered.” Simiolus, Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 11, no. 2 (2011): 61-83.

Chipps Smith, Jeffrey. “Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold.” Art Journal 48 (1989): 123-129.

Chipps Smith, Jeffrey. “Courts, Cities, and Collectors.” In The Northern Renaissance.

London: Phaidon, 2004.

Chilvers, Ian. “The Antwerp Mannerists.”

In The Oxford Dictionary of Art. 3rd ed.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Ewing, Dan. “Magi and Merchants: The Force Behind the Antwerp Mannerists’ Adoration Pictures.” In Aarboek Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 2005-2005, 274-99.

Ewing, Dan. “Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460-1460: Our Lady’s Land.” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 558-84.

Ewing, Dan. The Paintings and Drawings of Jan De Beer. Thesis, University of Michigan, 1978.

Filipczak, Zirka Zaremba. Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Frieder, Braden K. Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008.

Friedländer, Max J. Early Netherlandish Painting. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1967.

28 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Courts, Cities, and Collectors,” in The Northern Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 2004), 404.

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Honig, Elizabeth A. Painting & the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Horst, Carl. Die Architektur Der Deutschen Renaissance. Berlin: Im Propylaen, 1928.

Kavaler, Ethan Matt. “Gossaert as Architect.” In Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, by Maryan Wynn. Ainsworth, 31-43. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kik, Oliver. Imagining the Antique: The Use and Origin of Antique Motifs in the Visual Arts of the Low Countries. Thesis, University of Utrecht, 2010. Utrecht.

Wittkower, Rudolf. “Alberti’s Approach to Antiquity in Architecture.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institute 4, no. 1/2 (October 1940): 1-18.

Woolett, Anne Tayloe. The Altarpiece in Antwerp, 1554-1615: Painting and Militia Guilds. Thesis, Columbia University, 2004.

You, Yao-Fen. “Antwerp Mannerism and the Fabricating of Fashion.” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, December 2006, 141-57.

Schrader, Stephanie. “Drawing for Diplomacy: Gossaert’s Sojourn in Rome.” In Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance: The Complete Works, by Maryan Wynn. Ainsworth, 3645. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010.

Vermeylen, Filip. “The Commercialisation of Art: Painting and Sculpture in Sixteenth-Century.” In Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies,

by Maryan Wynn. Ainsworth, 46-61. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.

Vermeylen, Filip. Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.

Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.

Wood, Christopher S. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

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Figure 1 - Jan de Beer, Triptych, The Annunciation (left), The Adoration of the Shepherds (center), The Flight into Egypt (right), c. 1510-1530.

Oil on panel 90 x 31.2 cm (left panel), 88.4 x 70.2 cm, (central panel), 90.1 x 30.9 cm (right panel). MMFA, Montreal.

Figure 2 - Jan Gossaert, Neptune and Amphitrite, 1516.

Oil on wood, 188 cm x 124 cm. Gem채ldegarie, Berlin.

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Figure 3 - Gerard David, Judgment of Cambyses (left panel), 1498.

Bruge, Stedelijke Musea, Groeningemuseum.

Figure 4 - Jan van Eyck, Madonna in the Church, c. 1438-40.

Oil on oak panel, 31 x 14 m. Gem채ldegarie, Berlin.

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Figure 1 (top) and Figure 2 (bottom) 21 Balanรงoires, Place des Arts, Montreal, 2011.

Play and Place Katherine O’Malley

In the spring of 2011, twenty-one swings were built on the Promenade des Artistes, a small strip of urban space situated between two bustling streets, President-Kennedy and Maisonneuve, in the center of downtown Montreal. Creating a space of play in what otherwise would be another heavily-trafficked intersection of the city, the swings with their inviting colors and motion begged passersby to spare a few moments for pleasure before they crossed the street (fig. 1). With a design meant to facilitate communication and coordination among both friends and strangers, each moving swing produced its own musical tones which, when combined with surrounding swings, could create harmonious melodies and spontaneous songs. Entitled 21 Balançoires, the installation represents a larger movement of artists, architects and urban planners working to integrate interactive, participant-oriented spaces into the “beaten path” of the everyday urban landscape: in other words, “making play space PATH, rather than DESTINATION.”1 Accordingly, this sort of growing discourse of play makes one wonder: to what greater purposes do these mini-architectural works serve? Why are they becoming more important, more invested in than ever? To answer these questions, this paper will break down how the dissipation of interaction and the fragmentation of subjectivity within a postmodern, highly-mediated societal context necessitate these outlets for spontaneity, creativity and cooperation in more inclusive and readily accessible ways than ever. Looking at examples such as 21 Balançoires, the imaginative Belleville Park Playground in Paris and Malmo’s citywide park plan for place-making and place-keeping, I will argue that designing the city for play is crucial to restoring our society’s lost sense of place and community (fig. 2).

A study of the postmodern context of these emerging urban forms provides a necessary platform with which to understand the play initiative. The idea of postmodernity offered here is centered on the infiltration of media into all aspects of culture, to the extent that the 1 Paige Johnson, “Merging Path and Playground, “ in Playscapes - All the Best Playgrounds are Here, January 21, 2013, accessed April 16, 2013, http://www.play-scapes. com/page/3/.

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world is always experienced as mediated. Primary experience has been replaced with new priorities, such as speed and efficiency, which cell phones, the Internet, and other technologies satisfy.

According to Tajima, the convenience and widespread use of such media has conceived a global community in which location and time differences become obsolete: “New technologies have encouraged unrelenting time-less and location-less communication and information transfer. Asynchronous e-mail has allowed differences in time and place to disappear and the 24-hour global market or ‘global city’ to emerge.”2 As Tajima notes, today’s city is at any one time is synchronized with the rest of the world, functionally inseparable from the media that makes it possible, and so place is insignificant. This external shift towards global rather than local preoccupations is most obviously represented by the proliferation of advertisements and logos for global corporations that conquer the urban landscape, from high to low, but is also physically evident in the clearing of public spaces such as offices and plazas. Since conference calls can be accessed from home, private conversations can be instant messaged online and people can silently text each other whether they are three or 2 Noriyuki Tajima, “Tokyo Catalyst: Shifting Situations of Urban Space,” Perspecta 38 (2006): 81.

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three million feet apart, “this invading wireless network diversifies the topology of the urban space, dramatically changing the use patterns of both public and private realms.”3 In effect, the postmodern city dweller is cognitively present, more often than not, in spaces that he or she is not physically present in. While it provides a certain hyper-connectivity which is economically and materially advantageous, due to saved travel time, this sort of hyper-mediation does not come without its social disadvantages. Indeed, “people no longer share their public environment and enjoy its synchronous communication...With very little being shared, everyone now lives on a different plane.”4 The externalization of thought and activity and the resulting absence of the subject in the postmodern environment signals not only a problematic state of unanimous isolation in public spaces, but also an adverse departure from the affect that spontaneous chance encounters and lived experience provide to shape the subject.

Along these lines, the consequence of the mediated or planned reality that Tajima describes is the emergence of the postmodern subject whose contours are defined by the objects he or she integrates into the self.

This issue of uncontained subjectivity is outlined by Fredric Jame3 Ibid., 82.

4 Tajima, “Tokyo Catalyst: Shifting Situations of Urban Space,” 86.

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son in his writing on the “waning of affect.” He suggests that the displaced postmodern subject’s “Liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.”5 Accordingly, Jameson posits that postmodern subjects lack the presence, feeling and cohesiveness that used to either distinguish them from, or identify them with, other individuals and the built environment of the city. This inability to distinguish the individual from the mass is noted as he grimly calls the postmodern era “the end for example of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive brushstroke.”6 An example of this phenomenon can be summed up in Christy Wampole’s description of the archetypical postmodern subject, the hipster: “The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem 5 Frederic Jameson, 1984. “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 64.

6 Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 64.

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of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.”7 Rather than establishing and expressing identity through habits, or patterns of thought and action on a moment-to-moment basis, the hipster instead reaches to a variety of outside or past sources to construct oneself much like an artist would construct a collage.

Reconstituting diverse, discarded trends such as suspenders and bigframed glasses with an interest in artifacts of cultural nostalgia ranging from Nietzsche to Pokémon, these subjects at once represent and contribute to the disparate, over-saturated visual information of the postmodern landscape.

The instability of producing an identity as such is that these material signifiers of individuality counterbalance and cancel each other out to the extent that any understanding of what makes the subject “in-dividual,” or whole, is far out of grasp. This ironic attitude towards the formation of identity, according to Wampole, “Signals a deep aversion to risk.

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competi7 Christy Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony,” The New York Times, November 17, 2012, accessed April 16, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/ how-to-live-without-irony/.

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tion to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep.”8 As Wampole asserts, the decentralization of the subject via everquickening distancing devices, such as irony and cultural, rather than private, references, has produced a society in which genuine, slower communication based on patience and interpersonal depth is frequently avoided. Whether this shift comes out of simple convenience, or is the symptom of a larger emptiness felt by a demystified society, the message is clear: the postmodern population faces culture in fear of raw interaction and risk, to the extent that variation and diversity have been limited to culturally defined items and ideas that mediate individuals’ ability to think for themselves, to think outside of the consumerist “box.”

The over-programming of the individual outlined above is the current situation that urban planners, architects and artists are responding to when they construct pieces such as 21 Balançoires. By incorporating a loosely-interpretive structure, like the online interface that postmodern subjects are used to, into the urban landscape, the designers are hoping to redirect the population’s media fixation if only temporarily onto the physical world. With its lure as a respite from the controlled capitalist activity of everyday life, like 8 Ibid.

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a form of embodied media, the co-designer of the work Melisa Mongiat explains that, “Each swing is an instrument for you to discover. Depending on how you swing, it generates different notes.”9 In effect, the swings facilitate a social experiment with unknown outcomes and possibilities that depend on the unique, unplanned participation of each individual. In this way, the formation of the project can be described as an exercise of relational aesthetics, or what Bourriaud defined as “art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space.”10 Originating in the 1960s as a form of protest against “the passive modes of engagement encouraged by late-capitalist, consumer-driven economies,” these works are partially-mediated, audience-activated to the extent that the contingency lies within the individuals.11 For example, Situationist International, the politically engaged avant-garde group of the 1960s, 9 Marie-Pierre Bouchard, “21 BALANÇOIRES| Quartier des spectacles,” Quartier des spectacles, April 21, 2011, accessed April 15, 2013, http://www.quartierdesspectacles.com/en/2011/04/21balancoires-a-musical-collaboration-fromandraos-mongiat-at-the-promenade-desartistes/.

10 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 160.

11 Anna Dezueze, “Introduction,” The ‘doit-yourself’ artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010), 16.

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arranged bizarre “Situations” that had participants spilling out of galleries and onto the streets, unifying art and life. The goal as such was to provide un-commodifiable, one-time experiences that facilitated “alternative models for social or political interaction” for its participants.12 Like a contemporary “Situation,” Mongiat describes how creative and alternative experiences are inherent in 21 Balançoires’ design: “We install strange instruments, that people don’t know, in a public space and we try to see how they intuitively use it following the clues that we give them.”13 Through experimentation, the users become active, rather than passive, consumers of culture. What the users will eventually learn through this process is the benefit of engaging with their social context, which becomes apparent when strangers collaborate alongside each other to make pleasing chords and songs. In effect, this work, like those of the Situationists, intends to show individuals how they can “take control of their own social and political existence.”14 Along these lines, co-designer Mouna Andraos of 21 Balançoires was excited to see “The reflection that it sparks in people, like how we can work together in this context to create something beautiful, that could 12 Ibid., 15.

13 Bouchard, “21 BALANÇOIRES | Quartier des spectacles.”

14 Dezueze, “Introduction,” 15.

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maybe apply a lot of other contexts where we want to come together to make something better.”15 By providing individuals the instant gratification of the power of collaboration and of working in harmony, the swings motivate and teach the individual to engage and contribute to the social fabric of the city. The theory behind relational artworks ranging from “Situations” to the present-day 21 Balançoires illustrates how embodied participation can break down the barriers between art and its context, and therefore be an impetus for social communion and change.

Tangibly, these cases are situated within a larger discourse of artists, joined with urban planners and architects, who see embodied participation and play in particular as essential to the future of their cities. Why focus on cities, and why play? Franck and Stevens assert that cities are emergent with “loose spaces,” or spaces that exist in between constraining, commercialized spaces (i.e. offices, stores, apartments) and lack any restrictive purpose, definition or use.

These spaces range from parks, waterfronts, and parking lots to flat rooftops and abandoned warehouses, and offer “opportunities for exploration and discovery, for the unexpected, the unregulated,

15 Bouchard, “21 BALANÇOIRES | Quartier des spectacles.”

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the spontaneous and the risky.”16 As such, both the participants and the physical infrastructure contribute to how loose spaces begin to mean. These spaces are open to interpretation, and may be appropriated in both beneficial and harmful ways. The effort by designers to fill these loose spaces with positive connotations and inclusive activity is where the idea of play—for all-- becomes involved.

In his book Play, Stuart Brown argues for the benefits of prolonging the desire and capacity to play, like children, into our adult lives: “Many studies have demonstrated that people who continue to play games, who continue to explore and learn throughout life, are not only much less prone to dementia and other neurological problems, but are also less likely to get heart disease and other afflictions.”17 As Brown states, the self and world discovery that comes with the relentless boundary-testing of play proves to be psychologically, and even biologically, advantageous. With this in mind, it makes sense that designers are looking to break down the metaphysical “fence” around the playgrounds of the city and begin to incorporate structures that harbor play of all 16 Karen A., Franck and Quentin Stevens, “Tying Down Loose Space,” Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2007), 3.

17 Stuart L Brown and Christopher C. Vaughan, Play: how it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul (New York: Avery, 2009), 25.

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ages into “loose,” generally adultdominated spaces. If accessible and inclusive, urban play spaces can attract and encourage the postmodern subject to connect with his or her environment in honest ways in which gravity and the unknown are the only known order. The unconventional Belleville Park Playground in Paris, for example, merges a freely-interpretive, sloped wooden climbing course (with obstacles) into winding paths that lead to the summit of this hilltop inner-city park (fig. 3). With its abstract design, the playground has been described in terms of “a mountain landscape, building site, flying carpet, machicolation, medieval fortifications, pirate ship rails, etc…”18 Rather than experiencing the world from a safe mediated distance, one who decides to play in the Belleville Playground opens him or herself onto the realm of infinite possibilities, of learning, risk and the imagination (fig. 4). Of course, the ability to facilitate such authentic experience, as Franck and Stevens touch on, is dependent upon how inspiring and stimulating the spaces or structures in question are. Thus, designing for the most fascinating, beneficial sort of play is crucial to the city’s process of place-making, or “Creating high quality places 18 Joseph Clancy, “Playground in Belleville Park by BASE Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architects Network, August 25, 2012, accessed April 16, 2013, http://landarchs.com/playground-belleville-park-base-landscape-architecture/.

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that people want to visit, experience and enjoy. It implies a people-centered approach which emphasizes designing spaces that promote health, wellbeing and happiness. Such spaces engender a sense of belonging and connection for those who use them.”19 This definition, put forth by Liv Sonntag in an assessment of Malmo, Sweden’s citywide playground project, asserts how activity and community come together to make “place.” As a world-class destination for play, Malmo’s investment in twenty-two themed parks throughout the city provides the backbone to its distinction of “place,” to its unified “master plan,” which aims to create a sustainable and attractive city.20 Encouraging place-making as well as place-keeping, the designers of the parks of Malmo engage with the social context of each particular park by allowing individual communities to choose the theme of their respective playground and discuss the ways they would like to use it (fig. 5). By aligning the city’s investment with the investment of the individuals involved, the plan promotes a lasting “positive response to the project,” in which users take it upon themselves to produce a space of mutual respect, spontaneous gathering, 19 Liv Sonntag and Nicola Dempsey, “Transnational Assessment of Practice: Theme Playgrounds, Malmo,” Making Places Profitable 1 (2010): 2, North Sea Region, Web, 11 Apr. 2013.

20 Ibid.

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and pleasure.21 Essentially, play turns “loose space” into invaluable, productive experience for its participants, and thus resituates the importance of interaction and physical place within the subject.

In conclusion, the changes in our built environment should reflect the changes we want to see inside of ourselves. As Durkheim once posited, great movements of feeling “‘do not originate in any of the particular individual consciousnesses,’” but originate from “‘without’ (1966: 4).”22 In this sense, the collective spaces of the city should be seen as the groundwork, the starting point, for re-integrating subjects into their physical communities and places.

Dealing with a postmodern crisis in which “man mentally isolates himself from the surrounding context until he reaches his destination” and hipsters (as walking reminders of consumer culture’s conquer over the individual) dominate the urban landscape, it is evidently more pertinent than ever to create spaces of genuine, rather than mediated, experience.23 Borrowing ideas from the relational art movement of the 1960s, urban planners, architects and artists are responding to this crisis by building participant-activated structures, such as 21 Balançoires and 21 Ibid.

22 Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impression Left by Others,” Theory, Culture, Society (2004): 28.

23 Tajima, “Tokyo Catalyst: Shifting Situations of Urban Space,” 84.

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the Belleville Park Playground, that facilitate the play, risk and meaning that postmodern subjects lack in their hyper-programmed lives. Replacing the safe distance that communication technology provides with hands-on, embodied interaction, the play initiative unifies individuals and the community at large by teaching people the benefits of putting down one’s cell phone and engaging with a context or cause bigger than oneself.

Clancy, Joseph. “Playground in Belleville Park by BASE Landscape Architecture.”

Landscape Architects Network. August 25, 2012. Accessed April 16, 2013. http:// landarchs.com/playground-belleville-parkbase-landscape-architecture/.

Katy O’Malley is a U3 Art History major with minors in Communications and Cultural Studies, and chronically suffers from “Peter Pan Syndrome,” or the (very legitimate) fear of growing up. Thus Katy writes “Play and Place” as a manifesto, calling upon people of the “real world” to address play as a serious issue which demands practical consideration and institutional support.

Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”

New Left Review 146 (1984): 64.

B i b l i o g r a p h y Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impression Left by Others.” Theory, Culture, Society (2004): 25-42.

Bouchard, Marie-Pierre. “21 BALANÇOIRES| Quartier des spectacles.”

Quartier des spectacles. April 21, 2011.

Accessed April 15, 2013. http://www. quartierdesspectacles.com/en/2011/04/21balancoires-a-musical-collaboration-fromandraos-mongiat-at-the-promenade-desartistes/.

Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. 160-167. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002.

Dezueze, Anna. “Introduction” to The ‘doit-yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, 11-20. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010.

Franck, Karen A. and Quentin Stevens.

“Tying Down Loose Space.” Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, 1-12. Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2007.

Johnson, Paige. “Merging Path and Playground.” In Playscapes - All the Best Playgrounds are Here. January 21, 2013.

Accessed April 16, 2013. <http://www. play-scapes.com/page/3/>.

Sonntag, Liv and Nicola Dempsey. “Transnational Assessment of Practice: Theme Playgrounds, Malmo.” Making Places Profitable 1 (2010): 2. North Sea Region.

11 April 2013. Web. Tajima, Noriyuki. “Tokyo Catalyst: Shifting Situations of Urban Space,” Perspecta 38 (2006): 81-87.

Wampole, Christy. “How to Live Without Irony.” The New York Times.

November 17, 2012. Accessed April 16, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-withoutirony/.

Brown, Stuart L and Christopher C. Vaughan. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009.

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Figure 3 - Belleville Park Playground, Paris.

Figure 4 - Belleville Park Playground, Paris.

Figure 5 - Malmo, Swedenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Citywide Playground Project.

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editorial board Karly Beard is a double major in Art History and English Literature at McGill. This is her first year editing for Canvas, and she is very excited to be a part of the team. Free Tilikum!

Benjamin Demers is from Massachusetts, U.S.A., and studies English - Cultural Studies with Minors in Communications and Operations Management. He’s especially interested in both Queer and Hispanic art and Queer theory in communications, and enjoyed the array of works Canvas exposed him to.

Daisy de Montjoye is half-French, half-English (making Montreal the perfect place for her!). She is studying Art History and Communications Studies, hopefully switching to Honours this year.

Daisy chose to be an editor for Canvas in order to be more involved in the AHCS department and in the end it was a great success for her: after reading so many papers by other students, she hopes that she can start writing better ones herself!

Hannah Feniak appreciates McGill’s welcoming, tight knit community and jumps at every opportunity to get more deeply involved in it. Additionally, she loves writing, art and theory, so editing Canvas followed naturally. Hannah looks forward to graduating in this semester with a major in Art History and a minor in Communications.

Emily Friedman is an Art History major and English Literature minor originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Please don’t ask her how she ended up here/why she doesn’t have an accent; she honestly doesn’t know. She chose to join the team at Canvas because she thinks it’s an important forum for students to get published, and to see what their peers are working on. Emily moonlights as the VP internal for AHCSSA and interns at the MMFA. Anna Kanduth is in her final semester at McGill completing a Joint Honours degree in Art History and Political Science. As a third-time Canvas editor, she has a passion for editing and publishing, which she also pursues outside of McGill as a publicity assistant at an academic press in Montreal. Congrats to the talented authors and editors who contributed to this year’s amazing edition of Canvas!

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Sara Kloepfer is a third year Cultural Studies major with a double minor in Art History and Communications. Canvas fulfils her love of modern art, cultural analysis of trashy television, and free wine and cheese! Being an editor is the one job that Sara can legitimately name when people ask her, “What are you going to do with that degree?”

Erica Morassutti is an Art History major with minors in Communications and English Literature. She has edited for Canvas for the past two years. An avid reader and amateur painter, Erica is infinitely more articulate on paper than she is in person. She loves Russian literature, medieval architecture, and the Oxford comma.

She will graduate from McGill next year, and hopes her last year in Montreal will be a beautiful one.

Laura Segal is an Art History major and Women’s Studies minor, with a future specialization in women artists, women’s representation art, and fashion history. She is involved in Canvas because she loves the idea that students can have their excellent work featured in a publication, just like scholars with PhDs can, even at the undergraduate level. Laura loves volunteering with McGill’s student-run Fridge Door Gallery for these same reasons. She hopes you enjoy reading this edition of Canvas!

Kathryn Yuen will be graduating this spring with a double major in Art History and English (Cultural Studies), and a minor in Communication Studies. In her spare time, Kathryn enjoys volunteering at Redpath Museum, and curating with the Fridge Door Gallery as co-president.

Her burning curiosity to read others’ theoretical opinions on art history and communications, in addition to her passion for creating simple yet elegant design layouts, makes Canvas her ideal project. Although she holds the position of Editor-in-Chief, Kathryn is constantly inspired by all the hard work, dedication, and attention to detail that this year’s editors have put in, as she could not have done it without them.

Michael Zhang is in his last semester at McGill. When he was in first year, he was very intimidated by terms papers, as he had no idea how to expand an idea to ten pages. He didn’t even know what a good paper even looked like! The papers published in Canvas serve as model essays that are structurally well-written, and can hold a reader’s attention. Michael hopes that this collection will make your academic career easier.

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The opinions expressed by the contributors do not necessarily reflect those of McGill University, our financial sponsors, or the collective editorial board of Canvas Journal.

If you wish to contribute to Canvas Journal in the future, or if you have any questions/concerns, please feel free to contact us at ahcssacanvas@gmail.com