OT (and a bloody big post) :Attn Everyone Around Here: Pprbck Rtr Thesis on Cool
Paperback Rioter
A research project for the visual arts
Wannabe
The Proposal
My name is Danny Ford, I am a researcher.
In this study, titled 'Dead Cool', I will be researching the concept of
coolness; it's use as social currency, and the social and material
implications.
This will result in a wall and floor based sculpture and printmaking series
installation, following in the tradition of Western Pop artists.
Since the 1950's Pop artists have reproduced and represented the best and
worst of Western marketing techniques employed to sell mass-produced items
of life and leisure. A superficial reading of Pop art would arguably
emphasise the use of bright colours, bold fonts and highly stylised product
symbols. These of course were the techniques of 1950's marketeers and
advertisers; Pop art's blatant appropriation of these techniques was at the
forefront of their concept.
Human beings do not simply make and use objects; they appropriate them into
their culture, using them as the environment in which social interaction
takes place. A T-shirt is very much an item of material culture used to
communicate individuality and identification - by implication, a successful
T-shirt can communicate cool.
The way that products are marketed and advertised, however, has changed
substantially in the last 50 years. As Naomi Klein writes the advent of
'lifestyle marketing' as opposed to product marketing has not only changed
the face of advertising but the way that people value their own lives.
A significant factor in the success of an advertising campaign, a fashion
line, a young persons social integration is the achievement of the
intangible but socially determined standard of coolness. Coolness is a
rebellion, a mode of identification away from, and directed toward other,
certain groups and standards. Coolness has been very much an important facet
of lifestyle branding. Coolness is, or at least was, attached to the very
same value systems that dictate what is sexy, popular or morally righteous.
The coolness or popularity of consumer branding has to an arguable degree
been eliminated by both the work of anti-corporate campaigners like Naomi
Klein and Adbusters and the intrusive cool-hunting techniques of
corporations themselves. No one would disagree that the Coca-Cola bottles
Warhol painted in the sixties were recognized in a very different cultural
context than they would today.
On the other hand, post-modern theory, in its challenge of formulas,
certainties and rules, has changed, and arguably continues to change, the
nature of 'cool' forever. On a superficial level, 'cool' is not necessarily
young, white, fit and clean anymore. Cool in a post-modern, globalising
world can be literally anything.
It would seem that while Impressionists will never run out of landscapes, or
Neo-Classicists naked ladies, Pop art may be running out of easily
identifiable, popularly accepted images from which to develop artwork. It
would seem almost that the Campbell's Soup tin has finally reached its
use-by date.
As a Pop artist working in a contemporary art field the importance of
assessing these new phenomena is innate to my practice in Pop Art - what is
Pop when everything (and nothing) is cool? What are the subjects most
visually and culturally effective in a body of visual arts research and
practice in Pop art? Or maybe a more pressing issue is the value of
practicing the Pop art tradition in a paradigm that may challenge its
continued existence.
To answer these questions, and hopefully ask more, I will direct my research
into:
· The definition, history and future of 'Cool' - what is cool and why is it
important
· The physical and material implications of cool culture, especially the
T-shirt
· The cyclical nature of fashion and its cultural importance
· The definition, history and future of Pop Art
· The dialogue between 'Cool' and Pop.
I contend that the concept of Pop Art as a viable artistic avenue will stand
up to questioning in my research. I hope this study will inform my work on a
new kind of Pop, one recontextualised to a culture geared to reject the
subject material it represents. I am certain that my research will take me
in the direction of punk music and fashion due to the shared nature between
punk and pop of popularity and nihilism.
Techniques to be employed in this study should in my view be as varied,
encompassing enthusiastic inventive and fun as cool and pop themselves. I
have already completed a practical study in which I wore a T-shirt for a
total of fifteen days, 24 hours a day. The purpose of this study was to
identify and accelerate the personal and cultural processes of cooling and
uncooling and recognise the physical implications of an everyday T-shirt in
enhanced conditions. A journal kept over the period will be a primary
research material used in the wider study.
Joining this diary, my research literature will mainly be resourced at the
USQ Library in the form of books and periodicals. Literature will also be
accessed using the Internet.
My own art practice will involve my preliminary observations on the
correlations between pop and cool - the shared foundations in advertising,
fashion production (especially that of the T-shirt) and the visual
representations of punk music and philosophy. I plan to create my own 'cool'
T-shirt, designed to be resilient to the challenges of the anti-corporate
movements critique of logoism and congruent with the global aims of
postmodernism.
Dead cool
The Literature Review
Thursday, Two days before Day One.
Today I finalize the image to spray onto the shirt. This has proven to be a
far more difficult encounter than I had anticipated. I have resolved that
the shirt should be iconic 'cool', without relying on any one cultural
reference, i.e. a yellow smiling face or a Simpson's character. For a long
time I considered simply writing the word cool, or similar, in the middle of
the front of the shirt, but I was not entirely convinced that a purely
benign 'cool' reference would stand up to serious challenge. Instead I have
developed a simple line image of a T-shirt and a large athletic 15 into
spray stencils. This follows preliminary research into the nature of cool:
theoretical research, but the everyday research involved in being informed
by what Douglas Rushkoff calls the 'mediaspace'. Coolness is a subject that,
without the slightest theoretical knowledge, I am well versed in - everyone
culturally active is, often without realising it. The T-shirt image on the
front of the shirt is a reflection of what I hold to be the popular notion
of cool - cool is new knowledge, cool is that which has never been done
before. Although superficial, the image of the T-shirt was one that I had
never seen printed onto a T-shirt, in a time when anything can be printed
onto a T-shirt.
The 15 is a reference not only to the history of the T-shirt as an athletic
uniform but personal identity ('this is my shirt because I am number 15').
The shirt is grey, the print black. It is best for cool to have no hard and
fast ideologies, anything so specific that any small percentage of the
population cannot support it. A tight grey T-shirt can be worn by skaters,
punks, surfers, and pony club exponents. Grey is sooo now. but it is also
symbolically 80's, 60's, 70's - grey is very Wartime but very Warhol as
well.
The above is an excerpt from the first entry in the documentation for what
has now come to be known as the 'Shirt Project'. For fifteen days,
twenty-four hours a day, I wore a self-designed T-shirt (fifteen is an
oblique reference to Andy Warhol's 'fifteen minutes of fame'). This involved
me wearing the shirt to work, to bed and in the shower (see figures 1 and
2). The aim of this experiment was to document the uncooling process - the
inevitable development of familiarity breeding contempt. However the most
important facet to this experiment was the observation and documentation of
the physical reality of a human being (me) in interaction with a physical
object (a T-shirt) infused with specific social values (coolness).
A human being does not simply make and manipulate material objects. Humans
interact with objects, collaborating with them to change social and physical
environments. Tim Dant introduces the idea of objects and their importance
to the context of social interaction in his Material Culture in the Social
World:
Man's creation and manipulation of material objects creates the context in
which social interaction can take place - this world of man-made things
modifies the natural world to provide a natural environment as the context
in which social interaction takes place. Things, both natural and man-made,
are appropriated into human culture in such a way that they re-present the
social relations of culture, standing in for other human beings, carrying
values, ideas and emotions. But unlike images, ideas, talk and text, things
are not just representations, but also have physical presence in the world
that has material consequences. (Dant 1999: p1-2)
Both Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and Sigmund
Freud, in his paper of 1927 Fetishism, critique the overvaluation of goods
as against their real value as inert, inanimate objects by using the
conceptual tool of fetishism. Fetishism is, in the works of Freud and Marx,
a term used to describe a misunderstanding of the world in which properties
normally only attributed to people are attributed to material objects (Dant
1999: p40).
These critiques, however, deny the importance of the object as a kind of
social agent. The way a person assess the value of an object in terms of its
physical and social importance is seen by Lipovetsky (1994: p29) as a
process of individuation:
.an instrument for enlarging the aesthetic cult of the self. the first major
mechanism for the consistent social production of personality on display
(Lipovetsky 1994: p29)
This process of personal individuation, vital to social development and
interaction, is met with the idea of identification in an interesting
dualism. The environment, the context of social interaction, must be shared
by social participants for interaction to take place. Therefore participants
identify with others attribute the same, or similar amount of, value to a
particular object or objects, and distinguish themselves from those who do
not. This pattern manifests itself most explicitly in clothes fashion. Georg
Simmel specifies this social dynamic in the value of objects to the
'mechanism of fashion':
The activity of individuals is motivated by two opposing social forces or
goals. On the one hand, they are willing to be integrated into a social
group by imitating others; on the other, they are willing to distinguish
themselves from others and emphasise their own individuality by adopting
something new, not shared by others. (Simmel 1971 [1904]: p296)
Mayntz and Nedelmann (1987: p654) argues that the resulting process is a
self-dynamic because these opposing actions directly follow each other,
novelty being adopted by everyone therefore requiring the supply of a new
novelty, perpetuating a cycle of imitation and innovation. The demand of
novelty is essential to fashion (Kant 1980: p572); it is the experience of
something new.
Malcolm Barnard writes at length in his Fashion as Communication on fashion
and adornment as signifying practices of everyday life in which the social
order is experienced, explored, communicated and reproduced (1996: p36).
Fashion can be seen as a collective hierarchal system of valuing material
objects (items of clothing) and as such 're-present the social relations of
culture' as Dant (1999: p1) suggests of all material culture. Of fashion
specifically he details the social interactions that take place as a result
of fashions appropriation into the culture:
Within the family, in peer groups and among friends, ideas about what is
appropriate clothing are passed on, criticized, refused and revised. These
ideas moderate the influence of culture-wide forms of mediation - magazines,
newspapers, television, film - and of style leaders - actors, singers,
models, designers and so on. (Dant 1999: p102)
The T-shirt very much a part of this social individuation and
identification. Helen Walters, in 100% Cotton (2000), argues that the
T-shirt is the most significant evidence of personal individualisation:
More than any other item of clothing it is directly indicative of a
person's individuality, the graphic indication of a person's inner life.
From 'Slipknot' T-shirts on teenagers to Hackett on football hooligans, the
words on our chest project an image of who we want to be. After years of
logomania, fashion is seeing a backlash against the brand. Customisation,
DIY graphics and small labels are all ways the T-shirt is being used as a
vehicle for personal expression. It is not just the shirt off your back.
(Walters 2000: p3)
This concept is presented quite entertainingly in W Miller's drawing
prefacing Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes (1983) (figure 3).
Saturday, Day One, 3.00pm
The shirt is on. The collar feels snug around my neck; the sleeves subtly
cling to my arms. I go to have a look at myself in the mirror and see that
the shirt looks very new. It feels soft and thick, and looks equally
impressive with dress trousers, jeans and board shorts. Comfortable,
versatile, a little bit rebellious. It is a cool shirt.
I show my brother the finished product first and ask his opinion of it. His
one word response is, 'Cool'.
As this study will elucidate, the concept of coolness, a part of fashion, is
a specific tool of identification and individualisation, with its unique
name is a unique system of aesthetics, language, music and politics. A
literal treatment of the word presents it as a temperature, albeit one
without much authority: somewhat cold, agreeably cold, almost cold;
moderate, not hot. However the word also has figurative implications, both
positive and negative. Coolness is on one hand a relaxed, confidant and
tactful constitution but on another a dispassionate impudence, without
enthusiasm, warmth and cordiality. However cool may have remained a term no
more socially important than 'cold' or 'warm' if not for a jazz movement,
beginning with a group of recordings made in 1948 and 1949 by young
musicians like Miles Davis and John Lewis. The recordings emphasised a
lagging beat and produced unusual orchestrations that included the first
successful use in modern jazz of the French horn and the tuba. These
experimental and innovative approaches are regarded as the birth of 'cool
jazz', a movement characterised by a sophisticated, unemotional, relaxed
style, rendition or technique (Gridley 1985). Detachment was given appeal.
Stemming from this is a number of definitions of cool as a rejection of the
dominant social program - 'alternative, young, hip, the counterculture'
(Klein 2000: p75), 'unique, spontaneous, compelling' (Lasn 1999: p113). It
is important at this point to stress that cool is not synonymous with
popular, even though these concepts often correlate. Cool, like the jazz
style that first adopted cool as a label, is sophisticated, unemotional and
relaxed, innovative and unattached to accepted social norms.
Cool was then applied to any attractive detached or subversive activity.
This benign nature of cool existed until, as Thomas Frank would argue, the
counterculture explosion of the 1960's. Frank authored The Conquest of Cool:
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, which
questions the nature of the anti-consumerist philosophies of the 1960's,
putting forward a claim that it actually sponsored consumerist aims: 'The
counterculture's simultaneous craving for authenticity and suspicion of
tradition seemed to make it an ideal vehicle for a vast sea-change in
American consuming habits.' (Frank 1997: p9)
Witness, then, evidence of Dant's claim that 'things, both natural and
man-made, are appropriated into human culture in such a way that they
re-present the social relations of culture'. Many commercial objects and
products are infused with sophistication, innovation and a subversive
attitude. When a skater buys a skateboard, he or she does not want purely a
plank that rolls. Skateboarding, like coolness, is an attractive and
appealing perceived demonstration of disrespect for dominant social norms;
it is an attitude of defiant independence, a social interaction dependant on
85cms of balsa wood on rubber wheels.
McCracken (1998: p94) points out that it is only relatively few products
that act as status symbols at any given time. It is due to this hierarchy of
objects that coolness is attractive to marketers. Cool, like any fashion,
like money and celebrity, empowers. Attractive indifference, defiant
individualism is social currency. Simplistically, the right T-shirt can
garner you acceptance, veneration and sexual appeal. This is a fact that has
not been ignored by advertisers and marketers. The above diary entry
features a more than passing reference to advertising techniques:
'Comfortable, versatile, a little bit rebellious' is a collection of
buzzwords that could easily feature in an advertisement for a basketball
shoe or sports car. And, as stated earlier, cool sells, not just skateboards
but the shoes and jeans worn while on the skateboard, the music listened to
while skateboarding. Because skateboarding is cool, cool is a marketing
technique used to promote it and the products and ideologies attached to it.
The word skateboarding can be easily substituted with surfing, listening to
hip-hop or voting Democrat.
Wednesday, Day Five, 2.45 pm
Just got out of the shower. Starting to see a pattern in which I write in
the diary after bathing myself in the shirt. It seems that the most
conspicuous moments in this study are when I am in or just out of the
shower. The T-shirt is clingy and very, very cold. It smells very much like
a wet dog. The print is clearly starting to fade, the black giving way to a
furry, fuzzy dull stain. I'm getting tired of the shirt.
Last night I went to work at Bon Amici, so the shirt still smells of
cigarette smoke, and tonight I am going to the Uni Club with friends.
Usually when I go to the Uni Club I take advantage of their lack of dress co
de, wearing something intentionally confrontational like a blouse or
children's shirt. It occurred to me last night the extent to which the shirt
is limiting my self-expression.
If we are to believe Walter's (2000: p3) assertion that the T-shirt is
directly indicative of a person's individuality more than any other item of
clothing, why is this so? Scheuring (1989: p227) claims it was Marlon Brando
that established the T-shirt (along with denim jeans) as a counter cultural
icon -the dishevelled, torn and sweaty T-shirt adorning Brando in 1951's 'A
Streetcar Named Desire' (figure 4) came to embody the image of the angry
young man - sexy, violent and emotionally confused (Scheuring (1989: p227).
The T-shirt subsequently clad the anti-heroes in 1953's 'The Wild One' and
James Dean's 'Rebel Without a Cause' in 1955 (figure 5), and the T-shirt was
established as a fashion leitmotif, signifying rebellion, sexiness and
anti-establishment politics, or simply what is now called coolness.
Due to the focus this study has on the material object, it is important to
ascertain the physical consequences that seem to have led to this
attribution of cool to the T-shirt. Dant (2000: p103), in his analysis of
jeans as a fashion phenomenon, presents four oppositions in which the
material realities are contrasted against those of a tailored lounge suit:
Jeans went against the grain of the dominant clothes culture of western
modernity and reversed many established clothing signifiers. They were made
of cotton (vegetable) instead of wool (animal); fixed in shape instead of
tailored; had visible seams but no pressed creases; revealed the form of the
body rather than covering it. (Dant 1999: p103)
I would argue that the same four physical differences apply to the T-shirt
as opposed to a synthetic business shirt. The enhanced comfort of a T-shirt,
of course, is a further difference, along with the T-shirts history as a
uniform of military or sporting pursuits in hot, uncomfortable and highly
physically engaging conditions. Even further is the difference in human
activity putting on or removing the T-shirt - dragging the garment on and
off the body as opposed to the use of buttons. Although this is a seemingly
superficial difference, it is one that television commercials of the late
nineties advertising 'Diet Coke' have certainly taken full advantage of.
Thursday, Day 6, 9.05pm
Went to uni, worked, saw my grandmother. The T-shirt generally stayed out of
my way. The 'uncomfort factor' is almost non-existent. However the mental
familiarity of the visual image is definitely taking effect. Starting to
have serious regrets - why couldn't the image be cooler, what do other
people think?
Yesterday about five people had noticed I was wearing the same shirt they'd
seen me in the day before yesterday/a week ago/every time I see you. I feel
like a walking billboard.
No, it would be easier if I were a billboard. People are annoyed by
ambiguity - no one wants to be out of the loop. Everyone wants to know - if
it's on a t-shirt, what does it mean, where did you get it, how much did it
cost, what are you selling?
Was I always this cynical?
Another difference between the T-shirt and the business shirt, and the most
important in regard to this study, is the T-shirt's readiness to be
transformed by printing on its surface. Cullum-Swan and Manning (1994) look
at the simple T-shirt as an item of casual clothing that, after being drawn
through mass production and the fashion system, bears even more complex
codes - it becomes the surface on which language itself in the form of text
and image can be presented.
In 1965 Budweiser were the first to pick up on the T-shirt as a marketing
tool, although it has been used as a rather unpopular promotional item in
1939 for 'The Wizard of Oz'. (Walters 2000: p12). By the end of the
seventies, however, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren completely changed
the agenda (Walters 2000: p26). Their T-shirts became the ideological focus
for punk, fusing music, fashion and politics. These were highly dissident;
exposing the hypocrisy of the establishment, punk T-shirts and fashion in
general demonstrated the extremely seditious potential everyday objects
could have (Barnard, 1996). This subversive element has continued in the
rock/T-shirt relationship, a memorable testament to this is the hand
scrawled message 'Corporate Magazines still Suck' adorning the T-shirt of
Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain - on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Figure 6).
The T-shirt has arguably followed in these two modes since - portable
advertising for brands and individualised innovations of language and
graphic.
Saturday, Day Nine 7.00am
I am writing in the waiting room of Toowoomba General Hospital. Pretty
dramatic, obviously. Feeling very, very crook. I honestly haven't been this
sick this suddenly, and as a result haven't been this conscious of my body
in a long time. The shirt itches and smells. I ache to be clean.
The image is boring. The shirt is becoming very tiresome, I know I have
better clothes in my wardrobe, and I want to wear them. Mostly I want to
just feel better and I don't care about the shirt.
I look at myself in the mirror at the toilets in the hospital and my face is
pale and blotchy. The shirt seems to be sympathetic - paled out and stained.
I count three coffee stains, the bloodstain, a grass stain from frisbee. It'
s somewhat comforting to see that I'm hurting the shirt as much as it's
hurting me.
Since the 1950's Pop artists have reproduced and represented the best and
worst of Western marketing techniques employed to sell mass-produced items
of life and leisure. Tomas Kulka in Kitsch and Art (1996: p111) suggests
that although Pop art paintings can be seen as "monuments to fetish mass
culture" they can also be seen as critiques of this culture. He uses the
example of Mel Ramos's painting Val Veeta (figure 7) to detail the major
themes and goals of Pop Art:
. One can, of course, just look at the nude in this picture as one looks at
pictures on Playboy. But to see the painting in this way is to miss its
point entirely. Ramos didn't want to portray beautiful women; he wanted to
make a socially relevant statement about American culture. One of the aims
of Pop art was to comment on the impact of mass culture and popular art on
American society. (Kulka 1996: p109)
Kulka argues that a kitsch picture of a nude refers to a nude but that Mel
Ramos's painting uses the nude to refer to kitsch. Many of the Pop artists
utilised not only the likenesses but also the techniques of manufacture of
the objects or marketing they were critiquing. In adopting his mechanical
method, says Simon Wilson, Warhol seems to have simply been pursuing the
logic of art based on mass-produced imagery (Kulka 1996: p108). Pop art also
featured the use of bright colours, bold fonts and highly stylised product
symbols. These of course were the techniques of 1950's marketeers and
advertisers; Pop art's blatant appropriation of these techniques was at the
forefront of their concept. (Mamiya 1992: 63)
Mass culture, since the invention of the camera made it possible to market
images of beauty on a mass scale, has shaped popular notions of sex appeal
and beauty (Lakoff and Schorr 1984). If Mel Ramos critiques the popular
notion of beauty and sex appeal, and mass culture's influence on it, I would
argue that popular notions of cool could be given the same treatment.
Thursday Day 13, 2.50pm
In two days the shirt is gone. Almost ridiculously, I think that I'm going
to miss it. Looking forward to seeing my own body, and wearing something
more colourful. This, I suppose, should be the time for me to reflect on
what I have learnt, summing up the last fifteen days. But I think I'll wait.
Mostly at the moment I feel like I haven't learnt anything, just smelt worse
and put myself out for two weeks. I'm over it. It's like a disgusting second
skin that I cannot quite grow into.
Cool's fallibility is even more evident in light of recent efforts in the
anti-corporate direction, writers like Douglas Rushkoff and Naomi Klein are
deconstructing what is perceived to be irresponsible conduct in advertising
and market research and by association, cool. Cool hunters feed what
Rushkoff terms the "giant feedback loop" (Rushkoff 1994: p35) by studying
teenage specimens, sometimes in their natural habitats, then transforming
the research into a consumable product. To this end, marketers have to find
a way to seem real; true to the lives and attitudes of teenagers; in short,
to become cool themselves. In a speech delivered to a group of marketing
experts in 1998 and published in the online magazine Tetrica.com, Rushkoff
addresses the impossibility of pre-packaged cool:
'.you were fighting a losing battle. The minute a cool trend is discovered,
repackaged, and sold to kids at the mall, it's no longer cool. So the kids
turn to something else, and the whole process starts all over again. The
better you get at cool hunting, the faster the cycle goes, and the harder it
is for anyone to keep up. Making matters worse, kids were becoming
increasingly aware of this process. They knew that their own claim to a
trend is challenged by its adoption into the mainstream, so they looked for
ways to hide from your researchers' hunting scopes.' (Rushkoff 1998)
Due to the scope, integrity and popularity of the campaigns of Rushkoff and
others, the social capital of a Nike or Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt has suffered
depreciation in value. The commodification of culture presents serious
problems when analysed with regard to a globalising society. John Tomlinson
(1999: p 85) argues that the commodification of cultural practice is so
prevalent in Western society that it effectively precludes a global society
to share knowledge without selling it first, 'representing a high point in
homogenisation of cultural experience' (1999: p86).
Informed by these insights, problems and images, it is my aim to create my
own 'cool' T-shirt, designed to be resilient to the challenges of the
anti-corporate movements critique of branding and congruent with the global
aims of postmodernism. Tomas Kulka, in his book Kitsch and Art, describes
postmodernist artworks as having familiar techniques:
'Post-modern works typically employ rich, complex symbolism with frequent
allusions to other works. The elements of irony, parody and complex metaphor
are very central. The ironic and metaphorical meanings presuppose the
literal meanings.' (Kulka, p112, 1996)
In conclusion, it may be a useful correlation to draw between the
institutions of cool and art. Both are highly visual and tactile mediums,
objects, both infused with value systems and commodities. Both empower
people to challenge, innovate and inform. Both are reflections of their
cultural context. Both are less industries and more unique ways of thinking,
seeing and living. Most importantly, however, is the fact that neither can
be underestimated in terms of influence and adaptability. Cool, like art,
will change with the values of those who create, view and are influenced by
it.
Sunday Day 15, 2.55pm
I feel like David Bowie's Major Tom, reporting back to base. I'm about to
take of the shirt. The project has been a lot of fun. I've got a great idea
for a resonant Pop shirt. I'm not as nihilistic as I thought I would be. I
actually regret having to take the shirt off a little.
I can't wait to see it on a gallery wall actually. It's like a stretched,
smelly cultural artefact. But I guess in time all cool is.
(.)
Sunday, One minute after Day 15, 3.01 pm
The shirt is off. And now I'm standing in my room wondering what to wear
next.
Way Cool
The Studio process
My approach to making an artwork starts with an acknowledged witnessing of
the social program - the process by which constructed genders appropriate
objects products and ideas. Identifying these loaded items is a genuine
benefit of living in a paradigm shift - it reminds me of an abandoned
showground, participants in culture have free reign to appropriate or
admonish anything within their ever-widening cultural experience.
All implications of this experience should be assessed and explored. Often
there will be interesting, sometimes humorous patterns, correlations and
contrasts. These observations are the basis of an art concept.
The works themselves should always maintain a direct link with their subject
matter, a small design element or process. Pop Art maintains the same
processes and subject matter, through this direct visual appropriation the
messages presented in the works are lend further authority and subversive
potential.
A certain amount of egotistical concern resides in the decision-making
process, consequence of my personality. The work or works should embody a
certain defiance and cynicism. Anarchy should not be disregarded but be
thoughtfully directed.
An important part of self-analysis is determining if the work is guilty of
the same dictation of knowledge that the work sets out to challenge. The
work should challenge the idea of knowledge as infallible and concrete.
Keep it Cool
Collection and analysis of the data
I see Tomas Kulka's treatment of post-modern arts as a fitting criterion for
my response to the changing nature of cool in a body of work, especially in
my development of a cool, or neocool, T-shirt. To this end I have explored
use of symbolism and colour, and recognized major themes in the nature of
cool, pop and the post-modern. I have adopted the image of skull and
crossbones that I have found to be a highly complex image indeed.
The image of the skull and crossbones identifies a finite limit, a mortality
of cool: as soon as anyone declares something to be cool, its death is
inevitable. It is also a reference to the Jolly Roger, the flag of the
pirate ship, symbolic of the post-modern ethos of looting and plundering
disparate elements from culture and society seemingly indiscriminately. The
image of the skull and crossbones is also used in medical and safety
warnings as a symbol of threat. To me it can also represent the potential
hazards or hazardous potentials of a sincerely challenging, innovative and
post-modern cool. It is more than a passing reference to the notion of
paring back of commercial, fashionable and social 'skins', and the
arrogance, innovation and cool of the punk movement. It can also mean the
literal image of death as being the only true way to 'check out' of the
social program. It is an image widely regarded by culture jammers - skulling
is a culture jamming technique in which the features of a skull are sprayed
over a models face on billboards, especially those of Calvin Klein and Tommy
Hilfiger. Its appearance on a T-shirt parodies the famous 'Smile' shirt,
while sharing its benign symbolic nature and Pop optimism. It is also a
globally recognizable symbol, without representing or referencing a global
brand identity.
In my studio process I recognize a strong reliance on subversion and
dissidence. I work often but not exclusively with spraypaint stencils,
mostly onto MDF panels, clothing or wallspace. To me the stencil walks a
clear line within the practice of vandalism without the cultural
implications of graffiti. Rather than having a direct hip-hop and music
influence, stencils reference both industry and social activism.
To demonstrate the ambiguity of cool and its bastard twin corporate cool I
have cut two 2m stencils in my own naked likeness to create a
billboard/clothes dummy effect in the installation. I think it is necessary
to reference the body directly due to the human interaction evident in my
research. Two of these stencils will have freehand spray adorning them with
clothes, the rest will remain naked. Lining the walls of the installation,
hung over and slightly obscuring the stencils will be 30 - 35 T-shirts,
framed behind glass but left loose at the back.
The challenge of the work is to effectively fill the space while giving the
viewer a sense of comfort - much like the challenge of merchandising.
Neocool
Conclusion
Significantly, I can't wait until the project and subsequent critique are
over - the 'dead' shirt which has been kept preserved in its unclean state
is destined to become a wardrobe favourite of mine. It represents a genuine
participation in culture, an act, in my opinion, worth commemorating more
than a Calvin Klein fragrance or Motley Crue tour. All fashion is social
currency, but participation in culture without the disguises of logos and
slogans sustains under conditions in which novelty wilts.
The study also raises serious questions for me on the nature of 'alternative
' culture and the potential myth of its existence. When cool is so
marketable, all outsiderhood is prone to commodification. Even Naomi Klein
has been approached, in earnest, by a multinational company to produce a
line of No Logo clothing (She gracefully declined).
The self-stencils have forced me to confront the way I present myself (with
or without clothing). These stencils will for the basis for some interesting
experiments with the idea of fashion and taste, as well as the evolution of
objects potentially at the devolution of the human being.
This study has greatly affected the way I view myself and my social
interactions with my environment, and the objects I bring into that
environment. I have also garnered a different respect for the pioneering Pop
artists for their insight into the way objects collaborate with humans to
make a social world.
Most importantly this study has informed me that the only way to keep cool
is to keep observing. And to take your shirt off in the shower.
Bibliography
Barnard, Malcolm: Fashion as Communication 1996 Routledge, New York
Cullum-Swan, B. and Manning, P.K.: What is a T-shirt? Codes, chronotypes and
everyday objects, in S.H. Higgins The Socialness of Things: Essays on the
Socio-Semiotics of Objects Mouton de Gruyter, New York
Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool 1997, the University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Mark Gridley, Jazz Styles 1985, Vintage Books, New York
Gronow, Jukka: The Sociology of Taste 1997 Routledge, New York.
Klein, Naomi: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. 2000, Picador, New
York
Kulka, Tomas: Kitsch and Art, 1996, The Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania.
Lakoff, R, and Scherr, R.: Face Value: The Politics of Beauty 1984 Routledge
& Kegan Paul, Boston
Lasn, Kalle Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America 1999, Eagle Brook, New
York.
Lipovetsky, G: The Empire of Fashion 1994, Princeton University Press,
Princeton.
Lurie, Alison: The Language of Clothes 1983, Vintage Books, New York
McCracken, G: Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to Symbolic Character
of Consumer Goods and Activities Indiana University Press, Bloomington
Mamiya, Christin J: Pop Art and Consumer Culture 1992 University of Texas
Press: Austin
Mayntz, R, and Nedelmann, B: 1987, 'Autodynamic Social Processes' Kolner
Periodical for Sociology and Social Psychology 39,4: 648-68
Rushkoff, Douglas: Media Virus 1994, Quebecor Publishing, Martinsburg.
Scheuring, D: Heavy duty denim: 'quality never dates' in A McRobbie (ed.)
Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An anthology of Fashion and Music 1989,
Macmillan, London.
Simmel, G Georg Simmel: On individuality and Social Forms 1971 (1904)
University of Chicago Press, London.
Stallabras, Julian: Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture 1996, Verso, London
Tomlinson, John Globalisation and Culture 1999 Polity Press: Oxford
Walters, B: 100% Cotton 2000, Picador, New York.
Mr Pibb
<q102...@mail.connect.usq.edu.au> wrote some newfangled jargon that
sounds a li'll somethin' like this:
<SNIP>
That's a beautfiul job you've done. Good luck with it, I'd like to
hear what happens when its reviewed.
--
Joseph Parise
AIM: JoePABLOParise
Now playing: Pink Floyd - Speak To Me - Breathe
Composed by Mailer Signature (http://www.unusualworks.com)
Everyone Around Here
news:3d09...@news.connect.usq.edu.au...
> Dead Cool
> A research project for the visual arts
Phew! That was a long one. I like the bit while you were in the hospital.
I think you should've work one of those "I'm with stupid" shirts though.
Naomi Klein can suck it though, big whiner. So are you the coolest person
at yer school now?
--
www.buy-clones.com
Ermm... has problems
400 + mp3 albums of music and counting
"Anyone with a name like "Can" isn't as good as Pink Floyd." -
Televisionfoot
"The ignorant youth of today, appalling." - Jim Jones
Paperback Rioter
"Everyone Around Here" <everyonear...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:T2tO8.9981$9b.6...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
> "Paperback Rioter" <q102...@mail.connect.usq.edu.au> wrote in message
> news:3d09...@news.connect.usq.edu.au...
> > Dead Cool
> > A research project for the visual arts
>
> Phew! That was a long one. I like the bit while you were in the
hospital.
> I think you should've work one of those "I'm with stupid" shirts though.
> Naomi Klein can suck it though, big whiner. So are you the coolest person
> at yer school now?
>
Everyone Around Here
> > > Dead Cool
> > > A research project for the visual arts
> >
> > Phew! That was a long one. I like the bit while you were in the
> hospital.
> > I think you should've work one of those "I'm with stupid" shirts though.
> > Naomi Klein can suck it though, big whiner. So are you the coolest
person
> > at yer school now?
> >
> No. I'm the least cool person at my university.
Well you are now dumbass! :P