Textbook Quotes and Responses:
Chapter 3:
“Unlike a list of grievances or demands, easily understood and just as easily ignored, the parables asked listeners to puzzle through their mysteries and meanings.”
He asked listeners to think, rather than giving them the answer, making the conclusion they come to more impactful and personal. They weren’t given the answer, they had to work for it; it allowed the idea to sit in their minds for longer. Connecting this to art activism, you can’t simply give observers the answer, it should be some sort of question or idea that stays in the back of their mind for them to decipher for themselves.
“When we act in order to bring about social change, it’s important not only to ‘demonstrate’ what we are against in the here and now, but also to create a vision of the world we would like to bring into being in the future. It is not enough to merely criticize the way things are. This, perversely, can actually reinforce the status quo by recentering what is.”
Change can’t be made without an idea of how to change, and the hope for it to happen.
Chapter 4:
“Art is powerful. It’s a way we can express our understandings of the world as it is, and articulate our visions for how it could be. In this way, all art is political, whether the artist intends it to be or not.”
“Through art, the ways of seeing of the rich and powerful are presented as the way of seeing for everyone; the elite set the standards to which we all feel we must conform.”
Because of this, any art that deviates from that perspective politically challenges the status quo. When we make art, it’s a reflection of our inner workings, how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive others, how we communicate with the world. Therefore, when we view art, it allows us to see into the artist and their identity. And, in our current day and age our identities themselves are political.
Artwork From Textbook:
In Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, she sits still in front of an audience with a pair of scissors next to her and invites the audience members to use the scissors on her clothing however they want. Some people simply cut off little, unsubstantial pieces of her clothing that didn’t affect her too much, while others would cut large parts of her clothing off or purposely cut off pieces of clothing that would leave her exposed. The purpose of this performance was to reveal how womens’ bodies are viewed by society. By allowing the audience to do whatever they wanted to her, it revealed something about their own psyches.
For my performance art piece I dressed up in a suit, something stereotypically masculine, and I had my dad wear a dress, something stereotypically feminine, and then we walked around our neighborhood. The purpose of this was to initiate a question in the minds of those who may have passed us on the street: What is gender, really? What defines it? What defines what’s masculine and feminine, and who decides what rules we have to follow?
In our current society, the idea of gender is one that is dismissed all too often. No one really thinks about gender or what it means to them; we’re simply assigned a certain gender at birth and are told not to question it. As a nonbinary person, gender is something I’ve thought a lot about, but I think it’s important for cisgender people to question our society’s standards for gender as well. Gender identity is not just a trans issue. Our patriarchal society is built upon a construct of gender that’s very restrictive and ‘one size fits all.’ While my father and I were walking around, my father specifically received strange looks from pretty much everyone that we passed. As we crossed the street, people in cars stared at him like he was a spectacle. Even my own mother, who I asked to record for us, couldn’t help but laugh at the image of my father in a dress. I was expecting some confused reactions to my father’s appearance, but the outright looks of disgust that a lot of people gave him were a little surprising to me. It just goes to show that our society really is not in favor of anything that deviates from our constructed idea of gender.
Your dad is awesome and so are you!
ReplyDelete