Mad Men and the Appeal of Mid-Century Modern

November 26, 2010 in "Mad Men", "visual arts"

Don and Betty Draper in a re-imagined version of
Roy Lichtenstein's In The Car (1963) by Jayne Tunnicliffe

I have contemplated sitting down to post about Mad Men about a hundred different times since I started my blog. But it has proven very difficult since I have yet to fully digest just how and why the show's strong aesthetic vision has connected with contemporary audiences. No doubt, the critically acclaimed television show that takes place in New York during the 1960's and follows the world of commercial advertising executives and the intersections of their private and personal lives (hence the "Mad" for Madison Avenue) exposes just how closely the world of advertising and the world of modern art were connected in the formative stages of the image-selling industry. In this sense, there is something both revealing and critically important to the underlying themes of Mad Men and the way the show examines mechanisms of need, desire, and visibility.

For example, there is a terrific scene in the first season of Mad Men when the show's main character Don Draper pitches an ad for the new Kodak slide projector to his client (click on image below to link to copyrighted clip). Instead of creating a straight forward and predictable ad that details all the features of the machine, Draper engages in the evolving technique of Madison Avenue ad executives to tap into the emotional sensorium of the audience. The entire pitch hinges on selling the idea of nostalgia gained through viewing illuminated visual images. As Draper suggests in the boardroom, "Nostalgia....it's delicate, but potent."

This is a fact not lost on the show's writers and set designers who have worked to cleverly reference the alluring visual art and design context in Mad Men's driving narratives and even directly insert many modern art pieces into the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Ironically enough, the show's final effect, much like Draper's pitch, delivers a kind of potent and desirable nostalgia of its own. I have personally collected some screen shots illustrating specific moments when modern art and design are featured on the show (see pictures below) and then discovered there is even a dedicated blog to this very subject which can be found here.

As a result, Mad Men has been deeply influential as of late in the contemporary world of fashion and design-- inspiring a renewed interest in all things modern and pop translating at a mass market level in the recent Banana Republic Mad Men inspired line of clothing from this past Spring/Summer, the popular MadMenYourself application (that I must admit I used to create a 1960's version of myself), all the way to the world of high-end interior interior furnishings where "mid-century modern" is currently all the rage. Commodity culture responding to a show representing the mechanisms of its master manipulators-- it is a postmodern mine field to say the least.

What then are we to finally make of this phenomenon and the idea some critics are describing as the "Mad Men effect" on the world of visual art and culture? And where do the connections begin and end? Does the recent record sale of a Roy Lichtenstein painting for example have anything to do with this interest? What about the already important influence of Andy Warhol that permeates the show? Is this a learned nostalgia or a market-driven one? etc.. etc.. This takes me back to opening remark of this post and my strong sense that the answer to the Mad Men craze demands far more careful consideration than a mere blog post or two. In fact, I am pretty certain there is a decent doctoral dissertation in it all somewhere. In the meantime, I will continue watching Mad Men with a critical eye-- both to the important questions about the intersection of art and commerce the show raises, but also to the wonderful aesthetic world that the show inhabits.

I am as seduced by it as many of you.

Quick Compare| Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovic on "Limits"

November 23, 2010 in "Lady Gaga", "Marina Abramovic", "performance art"

Love or hate her, Lady Gaga continues to pop up in conversations about performance art. And I must admit that I find a recent interview with her concerning performance artist Marina Abramovic and the notion of limitless art oddly compelling—the way she stumbles to find the right “art school” words to describe a personal hero is even a bit charming.

This past September I posted about the Lady Gaga meat bikini controversy and its connection to Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), and then a few weeks later I wrote about my visit to Marina Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition The Artist is Present at MoMA, so I was thrilled when a student from my “Issues in Fine and Performing Arts” class posted this video clip on the blog's Facebook page of Gaga responding to a question about performance art from Abramovic herself! See the clip embedded below followed by a video describing Abramovic’s landmark performance Rhythm 0 (1974) mentioned in the interview. Compare and consider!

*caution* some viewers may find the content of the Abramovic video difficult or even disturbing to watch.

Focus on Research| Top 10 Common Student Mistakes When Preparing Research Essays (PART TWO)

November 22, 2010 in "Focus on Research"

In Part One of this post, I introduced the first five common mistakes I have encountered while evaluating student research essays. Listed below are the remaining five problem areas to avoid when completing written assignments for submission.

6. Failing to properly format a publication or work of art

This is a problem area that relates to some basic formatting rules that are often mixed up by students of different disciplinary backgrounds. The trick is to determine if the work is a "stand alone" work of art/literature or "part of a collection" work of art/literature.

As a basic rule, any work of art or literature that can stand on its own as an independent work is italicized OR underlined. Books, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, plays, and music albums or CDs are therefore italicized or underlined, i.e. War and Peace, Mona Lisa, The Godfather, A Hard Day’s Night. The trick is to keep the choice consistent so that you EITHER italicize OR underline throughout the essay-- just choose one and stick with it. It is also preferable to cite the PRODUCER and DATE of publication in brackets the first time you introduce a work, so that your audience is presented with an immediate context (in this example I am choosing to underline instead of italicize), i.e. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503), Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972), The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). In subsequent mention of the work, you can easily shorten the title if need be, i.e Stanley Kubrick, 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) can become Space Odyssey.

As a basic rule, any work of art or literature that is part of a series or collection is placed in quotations. Journal articles, chapters from books, newspaper articles/reviews, individual songs, short stories, poems, individual episodes of a TV show, and skits fall into this designation and are therefore placed in quotes, i.e. “Top 10 Common Student Mistakes”; “Review of The Godfather”; “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; “Poker Face” etc.. As with the major works of art or literature, make sure to include the PRODUCER and DATE the first time you introduce the title.

7. Inserting images directly into the body of the essay

Avoid wherever possible inserting images, tables, charts, and graphs directly into a scholarly essay written for an arts and humanities based course. Place them instead at the end of the paper, after the bibliography, and wherever possible include the ARTIST/PRODUCER, TITLE, and DATE of the work along with the notation Figure 1, Figure 2 etc.. In the text, you can then refer to the image and its notation figure 1, figure 2, etc.. and readers will know to look for the images at the end of the essay. Also note that works of art DO NOT NEED TO BE LISTED in the bibliography as sources.

8. Referring to authors/artists by their first name

NEVER ever refer to an artist, author, filmmaker, or any kind of producer by their first name in a scholarly paper. For example, if you are talking about Andy Warhol, refer to him as Warhol and NOT Andy in the paper. This is a personal pet peeve of mine, especially since most students end up personalizing a woman’s names three times more often than a man’s. Marina Abramovic is Abramovic and NOT Marina, Kanye West is West and NOT Kanye, etc… The only exception to this rule is if the artist/producer does not have a last name or is a group, i.e. Cher, Banksy, Lady Gaga, Beatles.

9. Providing a boring or uninspired paper title

As I mentioned in a previous post about planning and outlining your research essay, the title of an essay is like the icing on the cake and sets the mood for your argument. A good title can also boost the level of interest in your topic and set your paper apart from a stack of boring titles. In other words, avoid the lethal error of titling your paper something like: “Andy Warhol’s Pop Art” or “A Research Paper about Dada.” Make an effort instead to align the title of your paper with your argument or specific topic, i.e. “Warhol and the Art of Mass Consumption: A Case Study of Marilyn Diptych (1964)” or “Dada as Anti-Art and the Influence of Marcel Duchamp.”

10. Not proof-reading the essay (more than once) before handing it in

Quite simply, this is the easiest and perhaps most important mistake to avoid. I routinely tell students that the most important final step before handing in their essay is to sit down and READ THE ESSAY OUT LOUD. This will help you identify lapses in grammar, run-on sentences, nonsensical passages, and mistakes in argument and logic. Better yet, have a friend read the essay aloud with you so that you can hear the mistakes coming out of someone else’s mouth. Editing is a critical step throughout the writing process, but most important at the final hand-in stage. Imagine your professor marking stacks of essays at the end of a long semester. Now imagine that they have to struggle to understand your argument, however fantastic it is. At this point in the game, clarity will almost always win out and translate to a higher mark than dense and impenetrable language or sloppy, error-filled writing.

Also, some simple grammatical errors to check for visually: contractions (don’t should read do not, can’t should read cannot etc.), placing periods inside quoted passages (“this is correct.” “this is incorrect”.); making sure paragraphs do not run on for more than one typed page, and remembering to do a FULL SPELL CHECK before printing the final copy of your paper.

Good Luck!

Weekly Twitter Round Up

November 21, 2010 in "Twitter", "weekly round up"

Brrrrrrrrr........it is COLD here in Vancouver after a very early snow fall. Yes, that is the snow that should have arrived here for the 2010 Olympics, but decided to wait until this winter to make its appearance. I have also been a bit under the weather, so the cold seems all that more intense along with all of the looming deadlines, exam preparations and general end-of-term mania setting in. As I told my students the past several days, the next 2-3 weeks will separate the weak from the strong-- it is a time of character building and these will be the moments you probably remember most from your university years. All the hard work to make those deadlines will be worth it in the end I promise. You will also have the holiday season to celebrate and catch up on your sleep. In the meantime, a bit of a break (or moment of quick procrastination) is allowed to check out some picks from around the Twitterverse this past week.

Adbusters - The Production of Meaning (2006, video, 14:34)

The man who writes your students' papers tells his story

The last taboo: Why women artists are turning tables on art-historical tradition & depicting naked male body

Design: Putting the Chinese in 'Made in China': The graphic artist Liu Zhizhi is in the forefront

Why the working class have disappeared from Hollywood

'SNL' Nails The TSA Pat-Downs: 'It's Our Business To Touch Yours' (VIDEO)

The Louvre is encouraging the French public to "participate in the acquisition of a masterpiece"

Is the "Happening" All Over or Still Tantalizingly Ironic?

November 19, 2010 in "Allan Kaprow", "performance art", "visual arts"

Screen shot of a flash mob staged at a Los Angeles mall for the
ABC comedy mockumentary Modern Family

Sitting down to relax and watch a little television the other night (yes, I am one of those professors who actually admits to owning one—the others are lying) I was struck with an episode of Modern Family that featured a flash mob as part of the plot. Modern Family, a half hour mockumentary style comedy which follows the everyday lives of three families that are related to one another, has received critical acclaim for depicting the “real” dynamics of today’s complicated family relationships and situations. In general the show is quite provocative and hilarious in its delivery and the writers seem to have their fingers on the pulse of many contemporary pop culture references. In the episode I was watching, Mitchell and his partner Cameron (they are a gay couple who are raising their adopted Vietnamese daughter Lily) are out shopping for a birthday gift at a mall for their nephew Manny (he is the son of Mitchell’s father and his new Colombian wife Gloria—the family’s “modernity” is marked through such non-traditional familial relationships). Mitchell, who plays a somewhat uptight lawyer, is often accused in the show of needing to loosen up, and so he secretly leads Cameron to a site where he appears to spontaneously join a flash mob set to En Vogue's 1990's hit song "Free Your Mind." As we and Cameron quickly discover, Mitchell has been rehearsing with his co-workers for weeks to play the prank on his partner, and the apparent spontaneity of the situation is in fact part of a highly constructed and choreographed event (see YouTube clip below of the scene).

A Kaprow Happening from the 1960's

Watching the episode unfold, I immediately wondered if the writers of the show were completely brilliant in pointing out the ironic history and precursor to the flash mob through this episode or if they were simply referencing the fad as a current pop culture reference. What I am meaning to suggest here of course is that the flash mob is not new. The practice of assembling large groups of people into a public space to collectively participate and perform acts and then disperse dates back to the Happenings of the 1950’s and 60’s. At that time, the events were seen as a new form of participatory action where the line between life and art would be kept as fluid as possible. The origins of these events are also closely connected to the American artist Allan Kaprow, who many claim as one of the key pioneers in developing the theory around performance art, and the individual who coined the term “Happening” to reflect the inherently transgressive practice that he helped promote as an alternative to traditional art production. Through the 1960’s, however, the Happening was appropriated into other cultural contexts, often serving a political function through its use by the countercultural movements (particularly student groups) who staged Happenings as part of protests against war and social inequality. On the other hand, by the late 1960's and into the 70's, the Happening had also become increasingly absorbed into commercial and popular culture through the music, advertising, and film industries, which referenced the Happening as a way to appeal and appear “hip” to a new generation of baby boomer consumers.

Surf clothing advertised in the late 1960's
using the concept of the "Happening"

As Kaprow explained in a 1988 interview when asked to reflect on the shifting meaning of the Happening at that time, “I'd already repudiated the word, because many other people before that were using it. It was a catch word. You remember everybody went around going, "What's happening, baby?" Political uprisings on campuses and advertisements for butter and brassieres were all using the word "happening." I remember one ad showed a floating woman in outer space, a starry background, and the legend was, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere." So by that time movies and the Supremes and all were in general usage around the world in ways that had nothing to do with my original sense, which became so foreign to me that I just dropped it.”

Interestingly enough, the flash mob as the modern day Happening has gone through something of a similar trajectory. Flash mobs have been distinguished from the Happening through their use of social media and new technologies to broadcast and mobilize people into action, and so much of the recent flash mob phenomenon has been connected to the subculture of mobile raves and grass roots protest movements. In this sense, the flash mob has maintained part of the transgressive character of the Happening as theorized by Kaprow. But as with its predecessor, the flash mob has become increasingly mainstream and absorbed into pop cultural references, culminating with the “sponsored” flash mobs of T-Mobile and the highly choreographed flash mobs appearing more and more frequently as part of pop music concerts and paid promotion. In this sense, I was not surprised to see the flash mob finally make an appearance on a prime time American TV show—and at a mall no less.

Phone company T-Mobile sponsors flash mobs
as part of its advertisement campaigns

Still, I am struck by the ironic way that Mitchell’s calculated “performance” was exposed and received by his partner. Cameron’s reaction to the flashmob was one of fleeting interest (he had seen them on YouTube) and then complete indifference (he was more upset that he hadn't been let in on the secret), and the audience was not left with any sense that Mitchell had significantly transformed as part of his role in the event (beyond wanting to impress Cameron for personal reasons). As Kaprow suggests, the Happening was always envisioned as an opportunity for a human stand, for freedom, and for alterity, but once it became merely a new style or a fad something crucial changed, “the whole situation is corrosive, neither patrons nor artists comprehend their role...and out of this hidden discomfort comes a stillborn art, tight or merely repetitive and at worst, chic." Here is where the flash mob depicted on Modern Family did succeed--by revealing the flash mob fad in all of its banality and tantalizing irony. I hold out just a bit of faith that the show’s writers (perhaps some of them cynical baby boomers) understood what they were doing.

See the clip with the flashmob from Modern Family embedded below, and also some fantastic footage of Diana Ross and the Supremes performing their 1967 hit "The Happening."