Cultural theories in the contemporary research

In contemporary art ther is much discussion about what art should be, or what it should represent. One debate is the age old debate of whether art should be for it’s own sake or for a purpose.

Purpose in Art

A piece of art’s purpose could be many things. It could be that a piece of art should have a specific political or social meaning which, like an editorial in a newspaper or a chant at a protest, argues in support of certain political or social changes. I would describe this type of art as literal art. It could however have a looser meaning than this and instead simply ask questions about a specific subject, encouraging people to think more deeply about it. These questions could be biased or unbiased, but in order to be questions the answers should not be given. This is the majority of art. Many would also argue that art that is made for its own sake will usually (or always) ask these kind of questions unintentionally, even if this was not the intention of the artist.

Literal art

Making art that is the most obvious way of putting meaning into your work. Literal art works like a fable in the fact that it gives you a specific lesson about how you should behave or think. Perhaps the most famous type of art that fits into this category is the christian bible. It is possible that the stories in the bible were not intended to be assessed in this way when they were originally conceived, but regardless of this they are certainly thought of in this way now. The bible is a collection of different stories, whose morals give specific information about how a person should react to the world around them. Much visual art has also been inspired by the bible such as Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Super. However a piece of art depicting a story from the bible does not necessarily have the same meaning as the story it is based on.

Banksy

Banksy is a very literal artist. The majority of his works have specific moral messages, which if compiled could work in the same way as the bible, giving people specific lessons about the world around them. However Banksy’s art lacks one thing that made The Bible so successful and that is the carrot and stick method of motivation that the christian religion used to enforce the morals taught by the Bible.

In the subject of Business studies methods of motivation are researched and discussed with regard to how to get people to be as productive as possible at work. The main theories emerging from this debate could also be applied to the way that literal art attempts to make people follow its message. The Bible’s carrot and stick method of promising heaven to those who obey its morals and hell to those who don’t is similar to Taylor’s theory of scientific management. This was the most popular theory of motivation for businesses during the industrial revolution. Taylor’s theory works on the idea that people are essentially lazy and will not be productive unless their livelihood depends on it. Therefore scientific management is the idea that you should pay people by the amount of work that they do, rather than the time in which they take to do it. For example a coal miner may be paid per pot of coal that they produce rather than per hour. This is a very old fashioned form of motivation that suits an authoritarian form of management and there has been much research that points to problems with its effectiveness (and that’s before you even begin to consider whether it is fair to the workers or not).

Banksy’s method of encouraging moral values does not use punishment or reward in the way that the bible does. Therefore it cannot be compared to Taylor’s method of scientific management. Banksy’s method is still authoritarian however in the sense that it is Paternalistic. He believes that he knows what is best for the viewers of his art, in a similar way that a parent knows what is best for their children and that they should realise this themselves and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Unlike the morals of the Bible though, there is not punishment for not following Bansky’s moral values. In other words he is not angry, he’s just disappointed. If you interpret my criticism of Banksy’s work as being motivated by a disdain for what he represents, then you would be wrong. My problem with Banksy has very little to do with whether I agree or disagree with his moral values and more to do with the fact that I personally like art which takes longer than five minutes to reveal itself to me fully. I react to Banksy’s work in the same way that I react to an editorial on the website of a broadsheet newspaper. I’m glad that they’ve expressed their opinion and often I agree, but it’s rarely what I would refer to as challenging. In fact it often just seems to be opinions and theories that I have already heard, but expressed in a different way.

One of the problems with literal art is that it often isn’t very challenging, but that depends on your own idea of what it means to be challenging. For example, a piece of art which criticises your own social beliefs or the group of people that you identify with will always be challenging. For example, I myself would say that my political beliefs tend to be more Socialist than Capitalist. This means that a piece of work which promotes Capitalism and demonises Socialism will probably challenge me, but an artist with more of a left wing outlook like Banksy would normally only have the effect of self congratulation and, because I’m not really into the idea of having an artist suck my dick, I don’t really like his art.

Questioning in Art

In an episode of the culture show a different graffiti artist known as JR said that “Art should ask questions, not give answers.” This is what the majority of good art tends to do. Art’s ability to do this is what makes art’s ability to inform behaviour different from other forms of human expression, like politics and social science. A piece of art can have an emotional effect on a person. This emotional effect can be very powerful and can change the way that someone thinks about a certain subject without the need for dictating to them how they should feel about it.

One piece of work that I recently saw which does this very well is The Marjane Satrapi directed film The Voices. The Voices features a protagonist who is a serial killer. This has been done before in other films, but the thing which makes The Voices so unique from other films I have seen is how it simultaneously makes you feel affection for the killer protagonist whilst also making you disturbed by his actions. The questions that this forces you to ask yourself about your reaction to the film are endless. It encourages you to think about political issues like the criminal justice system and moral issues, such as the humanity of people who have done bad things. A very personal thing that it can also make you think about is how you react when you have done something which you believe to be a bad thing yourself and your self crafted opinion of yourself as being a good person is suddenly challenged.

Meaning versus no meaning

The sixties counterculture band The Fugs had a song called, “I am an artist for art’s sake.” This title was not a reference to their own outlook on what they did in fact it was the opposite. In this song they insult art for art’s sake claiming it to be redundant. Tuli Kupferberg, the Fugs member who wrote the song and often sang it without accompaniment at poetry readings that he did at times when the Fugs were not gigging or were not together believed that the government of america had encouraged the post war abstract art movement, as it wished to make more politically motivated art redundant. Many people would argue that abstract art can actually be very meaningful however and, although I have a lot of respect for Tuli Kupferberg and like The Fugs, I am personally of this opinion.

The opinion that art for art’s sake is redundant is one which The Fugs may have shared with many other people, but there is a sizeable amount of people who would disagree as well. After all artists and art lovers alike can be so motivated by the surface aspects of art, such as colour and form, that this can give them enough joy to justify its creation. I personally think that any reason that someone has to creates art is valid and I sometimes enjoy art that has little meaning if it motivates me in other ways. I do however prefer art that says something.

Another problem with art for art’s sake however is that it may have meaning that the artist didn’t intend. This can also mean that the artist’s own ignorance, or the ignorance of their culture can come out in the work.

The film Pretty Woman, directed Garry Marshall, may have been intended as a simple love story, but it is a film about a prostitute falling in love with a rich businessman, so therefore there are many other meanings that may of may not have been intended such as class and gender. I see Pretty Woman as being a story about social climbing. Julia Roberts character is shown sneaking out of her house, due to not being able to pay her rent. When she goes shopping in high class clothes stores dressed in her street walker clothing, she is initially shunned by snobbish shop workers whose social attitudes make them believe that a person who presents themselves in this way is not worthy of their time. The eventual payoff to this subplot is another scene later in the film when Roberts has already visited other shops with Richard Gere’s character and demonstrates that she is worth more than they thought she was. The way that she does this however is by using money to present herself in a way which makes her seem as though she is of more economical value to them. This seems to be the central theme of the film, by acquiring the love of a wealthy man, she also acquires his wealth and status and is literally considered to have been, “Saved,” from her previous lower class life.

Taken, a film directed Pierre Morel, is another film which sets out purely to entertain, but also ends up having deeper meaning. The film is the story of a divorced father, who is worried about losing importance in his daughter’s life. He has concerns about his daughter’s safety which are not listened to by her mother and his daughter is depicted as being too naive and stupid to know how to keep herself safe. This means that she inevitably ends up getting into trouble. She is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring and almost sold into sexual slavery, but luckily, just as she is about to lose her apparent innocence by being sexually penetrated, her father swoops in to save the day. The whole situation proves that he was right all along and that naive young women should always follow the wishes of their fathers to avoid being taken advantage of by animalistic men. At the end of the film the daughter has luckily not been mentally affected by any aspects of the ordeal that she has just been through and we as the audience are lead to assume that none of the immoral sex traffickers at any point did anything that could be considered sexual assault. This of course is explained to a certain degree because of the fact that her virginity is seen as contributing to her financial value, but this raises the question of how they managed to check that this was the case. The friend that the daughter went travelling with unfortunately has to be killed in a mercy killing by the divorced father to save her from her life as the drug addled mess that she has become. Maybe this is because she has been pulled in the trafficking network much quicker that the divorced man’s daughter, due to the fact that she is less valuable because of her lack of virginity. Luckily though, the divorced man’s daughter does not care about her friend being dead and is therefore free to have singing lessons with Holly Vallance without any negativity ruining her time.

Nationality Identity politics and gaze Research

Anti Establishment, Identity Politics and Exploitation films

• MASH and anti-establishment
• Lone Wolf and Cub, Lady Snowblood, Hanzo the Razor and the Japanese establishment. “By the 1970s, the era of government corruption, left-wing urban terrorism, pollution scandals and the Vietnam war, the Japanese were constantly confronted with the fact that violence and social ills were inextricably linked, and many filmmakers were unwilling to whitewash this in their work. By adding nudity, sex and violence, the film studios hoped to appeal to lonely, frustrated young men, but the people who actually made the films - the directors, the scriptwriters and the actors - didn’t merely want to profit from them, like their bosses did. They were the same generation as their audience and understood them. They understood that the people in the theatres were frustrated with a social system that used them and then dumped them, frustrated with politicians and leaders of industry who made profits over their backs. At Toei, for example, Kinji Fukasaku’s gangster films cast serious doubts on who actually benefitted from the post-war reconstruction. The Female Convict Scorpion series starring Meiko Kaji and directed by real-life labour union leader Shunya Ito, are ostensibly women-in-prison exploitation flicks, but they ferociously attacked the country’s patriarchal power structure and its inability to owe up to its wartime past. One filmmaker who had long used violence as a tool to vent his social and political commentary was Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice director Kenji Misumi.” - Tom Mes, from the accompanying booklet to Eureka Entertainment’s 2012 release of the Hanzo the Razor trilogy. “In the late 1960s the Japanese film industry was in crisis. With film audiences encroached upon by the rising popularity of television, the major studios found themselves in financial trouble. In desperation they looked to reliably commercial - notably sex and violence - in order to draw audiences back. They turned to a new breed of younger film directors, keen to vent rage and frustration against the outmoded social conventions still prevalent in their country. So long as these directors delivered cutting edge, dangerous films, they were given complete licence to infuse movies with personal and often rebellious preoccupations. A subversive edge at first crept into and then completely gripped Japanese popular cinema. The result was a veritable goldmine of extravagant, unique cult classics.” - Matt Palmer. From the accompanying booklet to the 2006 Eureka release of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.
• Female Prisoner Scorpion, Comfort Women, Stray Cat Rock, Lady Snowblood and Japanese Patriarchy. “The cinematic beauty of Female Prisoner #701 is as alien to other films in the cycle as its ferocious, enigmatic heroine and its feminist critique of patriarchal society. A rare treat indeed, the film you now hold in your hands is both a subversive, radiant art movie and a down and dirty exploitation classic.” - Matt Palmer. From the accompanying booklet to the 2006 Eureka release of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion  

• Female Prisoner Scorpion, Sex and Fury, Female Yakuza Tale, Rape Revenge movies .
• Kill Bill
• Hanzo the Razor and his penis.
• Italian Giallo (Blood and Black Lace), The Evil Dead, Re Animator and gender in Horror movies
• Tenebre Dario Argento’s response to his critics
• Vera Chytilova’s Daisies

Racism, The Romance of the South, Blacksploitation, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino

D.W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation An example of a racist movie is D.W Griffiths birth of a nation, which portrays the ku klux klan as heroes and black people as bad guys. Since then there have not been many films that have been racist in such an obvious way, but many have displayed examples of racism. For example films like Gone with the Wind and Song of the South depict black people as simpletons who seem perfectly happy in their life of slavery. In Gone with the Wind the main character Scarlett O’Hara passes some of the slaves who work on her family’s land in the street and they reassure her, “We’ll get those yankees!” as if they are on the side of the confederacy. There is also a character called Prissy who is a twelve year old girl in the book, but in the film is a fully grown adult who still has the characteristics of a child. They may have decided not to change her characteristics because they believed that those characteristics would still work in a black slave adult character. In Jasper, George Pal’s series of short animations, the main character Jasper is a stereotype of a black person that is clearly problematic by today’s standards. He has a brown head with big white lips and lives in a farm with his stereotypical mother and he loves watermelons.   Jasper however is a very loveable character and the series as a whole tends to romanticise black culture, whilst also stereotyping it. Jasper seems like it is made from a perspective of admiration, but is racist because of the ignorance of the  time it was made in.   

Blacksploitation

In america black people are a minority, but they make up a larger percentage of cinema goers than their overall percentage in the general population. In the 70s there was a short lived cinema trend of films trying to appeal to this market, which was discovered after the success of Shaft. These films were called Blacksploitation films and included films such as the William Crain directed Blackula. These films were important in the fact that they had Black actors, Black directors and were aimed at black audiences (which was rare at the time and still is in many instances), but some black filmmakers, such as Spike Lee, have stated that Blacksploitation films do not represent their experiences as black americans.

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Do the right thing is a film which presents life in a largely black ghetto of New York city. It chooses to present the quirky side of life there and the uniqueness and humanity of the characters.There are no fire breathing bad guys in the film, as even the characters that cause some of the racial tension that the film explores are believable well rounded characters. At the end of the film there is a conflict in the street and the police show up to stop it, but they end up accidently killing a resident of the street when they are carelessly heavy handed and choke him to death whilst restraining him. This causes a riot.

Do the right thing explores the cause of similar riots, that have happened in the past and why there is often tension between police and black communities. It shows that the people involved in such riots are usually ordinary people with quirky and interesting characteristics and that it is often the way they are treat by authority and their social situation that would cause the anger which can drive ordinary people to participate in violence and destruction. This whilst also providing a social document of everyday life in the part of the city it is set in.

Jackie Brown, Django Unchained, Spike lee’s reaction and The Hateful Eight. “Django Unchained combines elements of the european Spaghetti Western - notably the bleak sensibility of Sergio Carbucci’s cowboy pictures - with the politicized edge of 1970s blaxsploitation films.” - p.926, 1001 Movies you must see before you die, Octopus Publishing Group Limited, 2015. “Tackling the topic of America’s slave-era history as a blood-soaked revenge western, Django Unchained was not without its critics. Nevertheless, the film’s angry, unblinking depiction of those brutal times clearly struck a chord, with Tarantino claiming - not without reason - that the film helped stimulate debate about slavery and race.” -  p.926, 1001 Movies you must see before you die, Octopus Publishing Group Limited, 2015. “I can’t speak about it because I’m not going to see it. I’m not seeing it. All I’m going to say is it would be disrespectful to my ancestors to see that film.” - Spike Lee in an interview with...

Representation and the self research

“The person that my fans think I am is just as important as the person I think I am.” - John Frusciante

In this quote guitarist John Frusciante, who is most famous for being a guitarist in The Red Hot Chili Peppers, expresses a few different ideas. One is the acknowledgement that a public figure or artist’s public image is not necessarily the same as who they are in real life. Then, regarding this, there is the expression of the opinion that both of these images are equally important in his eyes.

This is an interesting way of thinking and I guess in order to understand it we must first look at each of these images in isolation.

First of all, what does someone mean when they talk about a person as a specific thing? I suppose this would be a combination of two things, a person’s appearance and a person’s personality. These two things are also linked together. Our opinion of a person, for example, could make us notice certain physical characteristics more or less or change the way we think about those physical characteristics. For example, imagine somebody is bullied by a few people who have crooked noses during their young childhood. They may grow up to look upon crooked noses as an ugly feature on a person. Then however, during their teens they make friends with someone who has a crooked nose. As they grow to like, respect and trust that person the crooked nose may get less and less repulsive to them, due to the fact that their subconscious perception of a crooked nose representing the pain they felt at the hands of their crooked nosed bullies is changing and now the crooked nose also represents this individual who they now like and respect. The same could also happen in reverse.

There is also something which some psychologists refer to as attractions of deprivation, where someone may be attracted to someone who could potentially harm them because of a subconscious need to recreate troubling experiences and put a happy ending on them, in the hope of being healed. In this instance the weariness that the aforementioned person may feel towards crooked nosed people may make people with crooked noses more appealing to them sexually or in another way.

Personality

Talking about a person’s so called, True personality is very confusing for me, but not as confusing as talking about my own personality. A person does not have a true personality. A person’s personality is a creation that they has been made as a collaboration between the person concerned and the world around them. A person’s brain works in an instinctual, unpredictable and completely un-understandable way. A brain works in much the same way as all natural things work in the environment. It changes according to the way other forces act upon it and it is unknown what those changes will be until the force acting upon it has taken effect. This means that there is absolutely no way of predicting with certainty how you will react in certain situations. When a situation arises, nature will decide what your reaction will be. You will react the same way a cliff reacts when it is repeatedly hit by waves. You will react the way a plant reacts to sunlight. You will react the way a wild animal reacts to hunger. You will react the way a dog reacts to fear. This is a frightening thought however, and that is why we create a personality for ourselves in an attempt to logically explain these instinctual decisions.

(Totoro, a physical example of nature’s presence)

In this respect Frusciante’s quote is true in a sense because the fact that our opinion of ourselves is self constructed means that it can be easily influenced by others opinions of us. A public figure therefore would probably end up unconsciously using public perception as part of their own identity.

Colour theory research

Colour in art is not just used for it’s visual appeal. It is also used to give meaning to the piece. Colours are often given meaning and this can be utilised to give extra layers of meaning to the work of art. The colours that are chosen can say various things about the work.

Colours are often given cultural value. For example flags use specific colours, along with patterns, to represent a specific political state. Sometimes the colours in flags can also be used to represent aspects of the country that the flag represents. Many americans associate the colours Red, White and Blue with their national identity. French people also sometimes have the same attachment to red white and blue, as their flag is just three stripes in these colours.

One example of a series of films which use Red, White and Blue to speak about France and French culture is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three colours trilogy. This trilogy consist of the films, Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White and Three Colours Red. On the box set of the trilogy, released by Artificial Eye, the three films are each represented by a strip of their title colour with images from the film inside that strip. These strips are laid out like the French flag.

If you put the boxes inside the main box in order they also resemble a french flag as the spines of the cases are also the same colour.

The three colours trilogy is supposed to represent three concepts of the french revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. The colour of the title of each film is also used in the production design and lighting of each film as well. Such as in this shot from three colours blue when flashes of blue lighting synch with music which is playing in the head of the main character.

There are also many painters that use strong colours. These painters include Rothko,

(in an ideal world when you were reading this part of this essay the room would suddenly go pitch black and an entire wall in your office would suddenly be taken up by the above painting. Forcing you to do nothing but stare at it. This isn’t an ideal world however, so instead I’ve included a big picture of it), Matisse,

and many more.

Kevin Bacon is sometimes colourful in the way that he dresses, but a lot of the time I just assume that he hasn’t really thought that much about the colours he wears from an ideological point of view and has perhaps just thrown something on because he thinks it looks good.

I like colours a lot lot because they are pretty. Ooooohhh!

For more detailed information about colours please consult my visual culture research from last year that was done on the same subject.

Blue has often been thought of as the colour of sadness. For example there is a music genre called the Blues which is often an outlet for expressing sadness. Miles Davis has an album called Kind of Blue. Paintings done by Picasso in one period of his career are referred to as being part of his Blue Period. These paintings are often of a melancholic and sombre tone which suits this particular meaning of the colour blue.

This painting of a guitarist. Shows the subject with his head lowered, which suggests sadness. He may have lost enthusiasm for his music, as you may have lost enthusiasm for marking this piece of work, but I don’t think that that is the case. I think that the old man is actually expressing his sadness and hurt by playing his music.

Black & White film versus colour film.

There was a time when colour film was too slow to expose and therefore could not be used in motion picture. There were various different methods of shooting colour film in motion picture invented before a method was invented that recreated the colours of real life to a satisfactory level. Even when this method was invented however, it took a few decades for it to become the norm in theatrical films. When it finally did become the standard, it was still very common for people to shoot films in Black & white for artistic reason. This continues to this day, despite the fact that in many geographical areas, such as the UK, there is no longer a cost advantage to shooting black & white. In fact in the UK it has actually become more expensive to shoot on black and white film. If people shoot digitally, there is almost no practical differences between making a film in black & white and making one in colour. The way that digital filmmakers often work is making footage black & white, simply by selecting an effect on editing software. This begs the question, why do people choose to shoot in black & white over shooting in full colour when there is virtually no practical advantage?

Modern films using Black & White and shot digitally

• A field in england - Directed by Ben Wheatley..
• Melancholia - Directed by Lav Diaz.
• Frances Ha - Directed by Noah Baumbach.
• Much Ado About Nothing - Directed by Joss Whedon.

I think one of the reasons why making black and white films is so appealing to digital filmmakers is that sometimes, if footage is not colour graded very well, digital video can look extremely harsh and flat. It almost has the vibe of CCTV footage. It can be almost too real. This stark realism often seems unemotional and flat and can therefore hinder a person’s ability to get lost inside the world of the film. A film made digitally needs to have better acting, in order to get people invested in it. This is because the flatness of the footage can make it too obvious that you are watching actors and not real people. Therefor it seems that, in order to get fully involved in a film, a certain level of artistic distance must be put in between the world of the audience and the world of the film. This is why I believe black & white is so appealing in the world of digital filmmaking, as it is a very easy way to add in this artistic distance.

One filmmaker who uses black & white with digital cinematography to good effect is the filipino director Lav Diaz. Lav Diaz’s films are the kind of films that could only be made digitally, as he has found a way to use the practical benefits and limitations of digital video in a unique way. This means that his films are very different to the way they would be if they were shot on film. He uses long static shots that are often held for longer than a 16mm camera with a 400 foot load of film could shoot. The length of his films is usually much longer than a standard film. Melancholia (not to be confused with the Lars Von Trier film of the same name), for example is eight hours in length, Evolution of a Filipino Family is twelve hours long and even Norte The End of History, one of his shortest works and perhaps his most accessible, is four hours long. More interesting than this however, is that he uses the imperfections of the medium to his advantage. He often uses very cheap microphones, that are built into the camera.  

Conversation piece research

The Conversation piece

‘The Reading From Moliere’ is an example of an eighteenth century conversation piece. The conversation piece was a type of painting that was popular in the eighteenth century. It depicted people from the upper classes having conversations. These paintings depicted an idealised version of reality that emphasised the type of communication that was expected of polite society.

The aforementioned painting depicts a group of young people collectively enjoying poetry. This staged picture of young members of high society behaving in the correct and proper way seems slightly ridiculous when looked at through modern eyes, but does that mean that there is no modern equivalent of this kind of imagery and the ideas it represents?     

’The Reading From Moliere’ Jean-Francoise de Troy, 1730

(http://www.slideshare.net/aguinternational/agu-student-brochure)

Flash forward to the modern day and this type of imagery is still commonplace, most often in the pictures that decorate university brochures. These images showing young people (presumably students) sitting around on the grass enjoying each others company are similar in that they depict an idealised version of young life and the way young people communicate with each other. I would hazard a guess, for example, that the implication in this picture is that the young woman in the light blue top on the left of the picture is sharing some sort of university related research material with the checked shirted young man sitting next to her and probably not sharing a snuff movie that she’s just found on the dark web. This puts across certain ideas about what type of lifestyle a person can expect when attending university. A lifestyle where everyone has lots and lots of friends and studying is done together as a sort of fun social activity.   

(http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/money/consumeraffairs/article3531656.ece)

(http://www.southwales.ac.uk/news/2016/usw-student-films-used-blood-bikes-wales-campaign/)