“At a time when everyone is rightly asking about the "freedom of expression" and the political role of the media in our society, it would surely be a good thing if we were also to ask ourselves about the individual's "freedom of perception" and the threats brought to bear on that freedom by the industrialization of vision and hearing.”
—David Levi Strauss Word and Image in the Information Age, 1999Riot grrrl and visual culture
(Circa 1996, from my personal archives)
If somebody has not yet done it, there is definitely enough material out there for a paper on the visual culture of riot grrrl. So much imagery of little white girls!
(Circa 1996, from my personal archives)
Lorna Simpson @ Brooklyn Museum
Who’s coming with me to see this? Lorna Simpson’s exhibit “Gathered” is running until August at the Brooklyn Museum…a must see! According to the website, Simpson found a collection of photos of a woman, and occasionally a man, posed pin-up style. With no other information about the photos or their subjects, Simpson created a series of photos in which she mimics the poses of the subjects, perhaps in an attempt to bridge the gap between the time period of the photos, the 50s, and today.
Lorna Simpson’s body of work is incredible. I love that she is playing with the idea of a photograph as historic/cultural evidence and I’m interested to learn more about inserting ones own body/subjectivity into a photograph, especially one that has already been posed and framed, and how that impacts our understanding of/relationship to the photograph.
Learn more here.
“To elaborate, the discourse of a social media revolution is a form of self-focused empathy in which we imagine the other (in this case, a Muslim other) to be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a depoliticized instant in our own becoming. What a strong affirmation of ourselves it is to believe that people engaged in a desperate struggle for human dignity are using the same Web 2.0 products we are using! That we are able to form this empathy largely on the basis of consumerism demonstrates the extent to which we have bought into the notion that democracy is a by-product of media products for self-expression, and that the corporations that create such media products would never side with governments against their own people.”
—From “The Twitter Revolution Must Die”
More from the '90s riot grrrl archive
More examples of riot grrrl visual culture. These are stickers and flyers that we’d send to each other through the mail. The last two featuring Ramona Quimby and Suzuki Beane were made by me and a friend, what seems like a lifetime ago.
