TOW #27 - Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

                Marcel Duchamp was raised in Normandy and was surrounded by artists. Growing up, Duchamp became interested in symbolism and how it was used to create themes of sexual identity and desire. But what Duchamp mostly enjoyed was challenging the definition of art. He believed that essentially anything could be art and that no one could really decide besides the artist themselves what was truly art and what wasn’t. Many people were very outraged about Duchamp’s opinion and during most of his surrealism period he faced harsh ridicule from other artists around him.

                Duchamp’s most popular surrealism piece that questioned the definition of art was Fountain from 1917. Two years prior to this piece Duchamp first coined the term ‘readymade’, he used it to describe the mass-produced everyday objects that were had taken out of their usual context and then promoted as a works of art. Fountain, which is a standard urinal Duchamp bought from a manufacturer, was highly criticized for not being an original work of art by Duchamp since it was a mass produced urinal that he bought and then wrote a fake alias on as a signature.  When Duchamp anonymously submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, they rejected the piece, even though the submission rules stated that all works would be accepted as long as the artist paid the fee. The Society felt as if the piece was someone playing a prank on them since technically the piece was just a urinal.

                Duchamp’s main purpose of ‘creating’ Fountain was to make people question what is art. During his time period, Duchamp wasn’t very successful at achieving this because most people were just frustrated about the piece and didn’t even think to consider the deeper meaning behind it. However, today Duchamp’s message is one of the main themes of art and is constantly used by artists and students to justify their pieces that are often criticized for being too unoriginal.

                                        

TOW #26 - Serving Goffman by PWR BTTM

                Ben ‘Bean’ Hopkins and Liv Bruce are the singers, guitarists, songwriters, and drummers to the garage punk band PWR BTTM. They met in college at a party for their school’s queer association and immediately hit it off. They bonded over their love of punk music and overall queerness. In 2015, the band came out with an album titled, Ugly Cherries. All of the songs written on this album are about Ben and Liv’s personal struggles with their own gender-identities and a few about their sexualities.

                Ben identifies as queer male. He uses he/him/his pronouns and sometimes dresses in really cheap drag during their shows. Liv identifies as genderqueer. They use they/them/their pronouns and has been taking estrogen for a little over a year. The song ‘Serving Goffman’ on their album Ugly Cherries, was written around the time Liv first started identifying as genderqueer. Liv titled the song after Erving Goffman, a sociologist and author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he theorizes that when an individual comes in contact with another person they will try and control the impression that the other person will form by either altering their appearance or their manner. The song very heavily refers to gender expression, ‘I held my breath in a suit and tie/Because I didn’t know I could fightback/I want to put the whole world in drag/But I’m starting to realize it’s already like that’.

                Though Liv primarily wrote this song about themself, they didn’t want their experience to be the main message that their fans got from the song. In an interview Liv commented on the meaning of the song saying, “It was like, I don’t know what I am, but it’s not what people are calling me. It’s not what people are seeing me as. It’s not the way I’m presenting myself every day. I didn’t know what was going on with my gender, and I didn’t feel like I could until I did some kind of change”. Liv wanted this song to inspire the band’s listeners to not be afraid to question their gender-identity and then experiment with pronouns and style until they found what felt right.

                As someone who is currently going through a gender-identity journey, I can say that I’m constantly feeling like maybe I shouldn’t be questioning myself , maybe this is just a phase I’m going through but when I hear this song, it reminds me that it’s okay that I’m question myself and who am I.

IRB Intro #4

The "book" I have decided to read for the last marking period is Of  Love and Death written by Miriam Shnycer. Currently, the book isn't published and is actually a manuscript. The manuscript is written by my maternal grandmother and it's the story of how my grandfather and a few other family members of mine survived living in concentration camps during the Holocaust. I chose to read this book because I'm interested in learning about my family history, growing up my grandfather never really wanted to talk about his time in the concentration camps so I figured this might be my only opportunity to find out his story.

TOW #25 - OMG Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu

On the surface, the web-comic OMG Check Please! Appears to be about a young, southern, gay, baker, hockey player, who video blogs about his life at college. However, once someone begins to look deeper the story becomes about the struggle of not knowing what to do for the rest of your life, what it’s like to fall in love, homophobia in the NHL, and even a couple baking recipes. Ngozi Ukazu started the web-comic in August of 2013 while earning her sequential art degree at Yale. She has never played hockey, has never baked a pie, and has never fallen in love.

                As a comic book artist, Ngozi’s primary purpose is always to entertain and make money off of her work. And she is very successful with this, typically when Ngozi restocks her online store that sells physical copies of the comic, pins, shirts, and prints everything pretty much sells out within a few hours. However, the reason her comic is so poplar is because she very successfully achieves her secondary purpose which is to create a comic that people can relate to. She does this in many different ways but the most prevalent on is by writing characters that are very diverse and three dimensional. Every one of Ngozi’s characters has at least one aspect someone can relate to. The main character is a closeted gay man, this helps Ngozi appeal to the queer community because almost every queer person, even if they don’t identify as gay, has experience being in the closet. Then the comic largely revolves around hockey which opens her up to the sports community. There are many more characters I could go through but that would just become redundant.

Ngozi’s achieves both of her purposes very well. She gets to make money by selling her work while also creating a lovely store about the struggles of a college student. Even though I’m not a college student I still feel very much represented in a lot of her characters throughout the comic, especially because in the newest update the hockey team hired a new manager who is also the stage manager in the drama department.