Alexander McQueen : Taste and consumption

When discussing the phenomenon of consumption, Jean Baudrillard (1998) argues that popularization of a need or product can only occur after it has been first formed at an elite level of society. It then flows down to the lower and middle classes in their unending quest for improvement of status. Baudrillard refers to this pattern as a structured social field. It is a law that governs the introduction of new distinctive commodities and needs.

This theory may not always be true. Alexander Mc Queen who is from a working class background was a fashion designer, artist and showman. His innovation with design was unique. It was only after he gained popularity with the public that Givenchy employed him. This example shows how new ideas can form and grow in approval from any level of society.

McQueen's Autumn/Winter 2007 show was inspired by Elizabeth Howe, an ancestor of his who was murdered in the Salem witch trials of 1692. His shows were like performance art, his clothes were an alchemy of imagination, skill and passion.

Baudrillard, Jean (1998), The social logic of consumption. In, The consumer society: myths and structures (pp.49-68). SAGE. ISBN 0-761956921.

The value of video

In her essay 'Indigenous media: faustian contract or global village?' Faye Ginsburg discusses the use of video as cultural mediation by Indigenous people in Australia and Canada. Ethnographic filmmaking is a practice associated with Anthropology. Some filmmakers began addressing questions of ethics and agency in the 1950s and 60s. Indigenous people in Australia and the U.S. Began making their own film and media in the 1970s. The popularity of VCR's and the launch of communication satellites in the 1980s brought Western mainstream media into remote Indigenous settlements in Central Australia and Alaska. These communities used the technology to insert some of their own cultural content into the programming. (Ginsburg 1991)

Small community media groups (Warlpiri) and larger organizations (CAAMA, Imparja) began programming Australian Indigenous content in the 1980s. Works being produced were addressing historical injustices, dreaming stories, dances, music, food hunting techniques and biographies of elders. The vision and audience is local and the culture includes contemporary life. Ginsbergh (1991 105) proposes that in this way culture is preserved and also evolving at the same time.

“They [Australian indigenous produced films] are not based on some retrieval of an idealized past, but create and assert a position for the present that attempts to accommodate the inconsistencies and contradictions of contemporary life. For Aboriginal Australians , these encompass the powerful relationships to land, myth and ritual, the fragmented history of contact with Europeans and continued threats to language, health, culture, and social life, and positive efforts in the present to deal with problems stemming from these assaults.”

Francis Jupurrula Kelly is one of the key founders of Warlpiri media and he is still producing work there today. This clip shows him directing actors for a documentary co-produced by PAW media and Rebel films. He speaks two languages on set and has his own vision of how the story will be recreated. The resulting work 'Coniston' is very powerful because many people got to tell their story of the 1928 massacre for the first time. A historical crime is told from an Australian indigenous perspective. This is part of the process of identity construction through culture.

Co-writer/director Francis Kelly interviews one of the descendants of the survivors of the Coniston massacre. Ginsburg, F. (1991). "Indigenous media: faustian contract or global village?" Cultural Anthropology 6(1), 92-112.

Pussy Riot and the politics of fear.

Elizabeth Groeneveld (2009) argues that the feminist magazine BUST takes a neo liberal approach to feminism in a 2006 article titled "Be a feminist or just dress like one." Six important feminists served as the inspiration for a fashion spread that, although playfully ironic, clearly stripped the historical and political meaning of these figures. Groeneveld proposes that this is an example of a neo liberal approach to feminism- Lifestyle feminism. Women can choose what aspects of feminism they want to adopt and which ideas they'd like to discard. While this falls under the movement of 'third wave feminism' it is ultimately ineffective because it doesn't encourage women to examine the role of social institutions and larger organisations in regards to inequality.

"While lifestyle feminism arguably provides a version of feminism that is friendly and accessible, it does not offer an analysis of collective injustice and cannot serve as a basis for activism beyond individual acts of consumption." (Groeneveld 2009)

I read a letter from Nadezhda Tolokonnikova printed in 'The Guardian' newspaper today and I was deeply moved by her courage and conviction. She was arrested in February 2012 with members of the feminist group "Pussy Riot'for performing a song with Lyrics asking the Virgin Mary to get rid of Putin. Her group claims they are sick of the patriarchal rule in Russia making life hard for women. They ask for true democracy and better opportunities for women. I hope that Pussy Riot eventually achieve these aims. There is still a need for feminist actions that challenge institutions and demand change. These aren't always comfortable questions but they must be encouraged. These women are true heroes,standing up to injustice and oppression. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/23/pussy-riot-hunger-strike-nadezhda-tolokonnikova ‘Be a feminist or just dress like one’: BUST, fashion and feminism as lifestyle. Elizabeth Groeneveld, Journal of Gender Studies Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2009, 179–190

The Pastiche of moments.

Vincent Van Gogh, A pair of shoes, 1886. "I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them." (Jameson, p.58)

Andy Warhol, diamond Dust Shoes, 1980. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject. (Jameson,p.64)

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysyeries of duree and of memory (something to be understood fully as a category of literary criticism associated as much with high modernism as with the works themselves). We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper. (Jameson, p.64) Jameson,Frederick, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press Books, 1990.

The Global Fishing Crisis

How the United Socialist Party of Venezuela is improving the lives of the materially poor.

MacMaster + Leahy play the fiddle | Video on TED.com

MacMaster + Leahy play the fiddle | Video on TED.com