White curtains quiver in the non-existent breeze that haunts
the clinical interior of the Hayward gallery. With that slight movement, too,
the image projected onto the curtain sways – Victoria Sin’s wide eyes flicker
involuntarily as the camera slowly zooms into their face. In sparkling lingerie and full drag inspired
by Cantonese opera, the model, laid out demurely across
a satin curtain, stares back at the starers; sometimes sultry, sometimes vulnerable,
always, somehow, piercing.
“Look. Look. Look – At her.”
Victoria Sin’s A View from Elsewhere, Act 1, and She Postures in Context, three film-art pieces projected onto a curtain-enclosure, embody the spirit of the Hayward’s latest exhibition Kiss My Genders. The exhibition, made up of over a hundred artworks by thirty different international artists, centres around gender identity and fluidity. Physically enclosing their viewers in the wavering medium of cloth and projection, Sin appears to comment on the insubstantiality of gender boundaries, but in subverting perspective and viewing experience, also draws attention to the role of performance, presentation and spectatorship in all elements of identity. Hayward claims the exhibition focuses on “content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender.” Paintings of hunter-gatherer tribes with drag elements question the West’s suppression of third-gender narratives, while sculptures made of artificial oestrogen and testosterone break down, biologically, what it means to be “male” or “female”.
But more than just gender identity, the exhibits are an expression of the individuality and the internal or cultural conflicts of the artists. Amrou Al-Kadhi teams up with Holly Falconer to explore what he describes as the “disorienting” experience of being drag as a person of Muslim heritage by modelling as drag persona Glamrou wrapped in a Persian carpet. Cloned in different poses through triple exposure to express the incongruence of these disparate cultures, Al-Kadhi demonstrates their successful unification in the persona of Glamrou. Meanwhile Juliana Huxtable’s photographic self-portraits deflect identity-labels entirely; using makeup, costumes and fantasy backgrounds, she deflects the reductive categorizations ascribed to her as a “black intersex artist” by creating personalized embodiments of mythology, sci-fi and super-heroes. Kiss My Genders thereby becomes an exploration not only of the boundaries perceived in gender – but of individuals’ cultural identity experiences.
With this exhibition, an art assistant explains, the Hayward is attempting to break the mould of LGBTQ+ and gender-related exhibitions, which often focus on the violence and oppression experienced by these communities. Instead they want to celebrate different identities. Nonetheless, the exhibition is palpably political: Zanele Muholi explores black lesbian and transgender experiences in South Africa through photography – and acts of violence are still an all too present component of that. In her series Crime Scenes she stages the aftermath of brutal murders, photographing the upturned feet of model corpses buried in sheets of plastic and litter. Paintings like YESSIR! Back off! Tell me who I am, again? combine illustration and collage to satirize the way gender transition is spoken about. The artist, Flo Brooks, depicts a fictional cleaning company scrubbing away at a therapist’s room, reflecting his experience of the “hygienic spaces” he experienced while transitioning; “spaces designed to clean, conceal and correct” things socially considered “dirty, abnormal or other” – but also addresses the way transgender issues are generalised and “sterilized” through neat clinical terms. Artists in Kiss My Genders marry the intensely personal with the social, emotional with the playful, and at the same time evoke all the contrasting feelings of pride, comfort, fear, frustration, belonging and exclusion.
The exhibition succeeds in its “celebration” and “expression” of identities – but the presentation, at times, is confusing. The works of some artists are split across multiple floors, the labelling unclear, and it is generally worth asking the art assistants to talk you through the rooms – difficult, when the gallery is at its busiest and a shame for an exhibition set on “opening doors.” Perhaps this is all the more noticeable as the exhibition appears to be catered towards an audience that identifies with binary genders – many of the artworks require the context of the theme or artist in order to be appreciated. Often, however, this is used in a positive way; many of the exhibits are truly thought provoking.
Most strikingly, Something for the Boys takes us through a spiral of ruched curtains in metallic pink – as if we are walking into a private adult show, yet at the same time, as if we were walking onto a stage. In the centre of the spiral we find ourselves in a circular womb-like room with a screen. Cutting between various LGBTQ+ spaces in Blackpool, the projected film shows an increasing disconnect between sound and image; a drag queen mouthing to “I am who I am” off-sync, interjected with a club-dance choreography, stills of gay clubs, the camera panning over pornographic videos and fetish-wear, and back to the drag queen – except this time she just mouths, and all we can hear is industrial sounds – once again connecting gender-identity and sexuality to cultural identity as a whole. But there is also something intimately performative about the display – the gesticulations and dances, unhinged from their appropriate music, seem to point to a theme of performance and spectatorship at large. And suddenly, that circular room no longer feels like a private theatre. It starts to feel like a stage, and the question crosses our minds – who is really the performer here, the drag act, or us, playing up to our female/male expectations? Just as Victoria Sin’s insistent murmurs, Kiss My Genders seduces its audience into truly looking – and becoming aware of the instability of their perspective in the process.
To say that the Kronos Quartet have been influential in contemporary classical music would be an understatement; they have defined the genre since their founding by violinist David Harrington in 1973. Over their incredibly successful career thus far the San Francisco-based quartet have sold over 1.5 million records, won two Grammy awards, have had over 900 works written for them, and even appeared on Sesame Street.
What characterises Kronos is their commitment to performing
works from outside the European classical tradition and of which they are the
first performers, from composers from Malawi to the Congo to Israel. They also
reach a global audience; I speak to Kronos’ founder and Artistic Director David
Harrington fresh from a sound check in Detroit.
He is friendly and gracious and immediately puts me at ease over the phone, as I was nervous, having been a massive Kronos Quartet fan for years. I ask him about his vision for Kronos, and whether it has changed over the 40 years spanning their career.
Famously the founding of the quartet was catalysed when Harrington
heard George Crumb’s Black Angels, which
is considered by many to be an anti-war piece, and the quartet was founded with
the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
“What I’ve noticed is there have been other wars since the
American war in Vietnam, and it seems like my country just tends to get into
conflict. The experience of hearing Black
Angels was extraordinary having grown up playing Haydn and Mozart and
Beethoven and Schubert. That was the music I knew about and then around age 15
I heard Bartok for the first time and the next year I started playing music by
living composers. The backdrop to all of this was the war that was going on and
it was on our television every night. At a certain point every young man my age
had to deal with the draft.
“Do you know the story of why we didn’t record Black Angels for 16 years? The reason we
didn’t record it is that I always wanted Black Angels to be the first piece on
an album. In those days you couldn’t just go onto Spotify and hear whatever you
wanted; I wanted people to have to confront that piece; to not be able to get
away from it, to have no preparation, just like when I heard it. I just turned
on the radio and a moment later there it was; I wasn’t ready, I had no idea
what it was I was hearing, it just grabbed me. It was so physical.”
I question whether Harrington thinks that music has a different energy or meaning during wartime, especially music that was composed around the time of the Vietnam War for Americans.
“One thing that you need to know is that when I called George Crumb (the composer of Black Angels) before our album came out, I wanted the programme notes for that piece to be in his words. I explained to him that for me this was an anti-war piece and I said, “in your opinion, is this what it is?”. And he would not say that. That taught me that music belongs to each one of us and the way we interpret it is very personal and yet it is just as valid as what the composer thought. If you look in the score it does say “in tempore belli” (in the time of war). I asked him if this was his response to the Vietnam war and he would not say yes or no; what he said was “there were strange things in the air”.
We moved on to the topic of why music compels Harrington and he brings up a quote that stuck with him from composer Henryk Gorecki:
“I remember when I was twelve years old; we went out on a school visit to Auschwitz. I had the feeling the huts were still warm. (this was in 1945)… The paths themselves—and this image has never left me—the paths were made from human bones thrown onto the path like shingles. We boys—how to walk on this? This is not sand, not earth. We were walking on human beings. This was my world. The only way to confront this horror, to forget—but you could never forget—was through music… The world today, it’s the same. Also a nightmare, crushing us. Somehow I had to take a stand, as a witness and as a warning… The war, the rotten times under Communism, our life today, the starving, Bosnia—what madness. And why, why? The sorrows, it burns inside me. I cannot shake it off.“
Harrington reflects on this.
“This experience shaped his entire life and the only thing
he could do as a response was music. I think there are these moments in life
that are so huge that we don’t recover from them; we absorb them, we deal with
them, we listen to them and I kind of think that is what musicians do. Is that
our job? I’m trying to figure out what my job is every day!
“What is the purpose of music? What is it for, what are we doing; what is a musical experience? For me these are fluid questions and the answers keep changing and perhaps each new piece is an answer to that.”
Kronos are notable partly for their collaborations with musicians
from all around the world; one of my favourite albums of theirs is Pieces of Africa, which features African
composers from across the continent. I ask Harrington how he decides on his
collaborations and what makes them successful.
“I’m interested in learning new things about music and there
are so many people in the world that can teach us things that we don’t know. I heard
marvellous recordings when I was in high school from places in Africa; and I
just noticed a feeling and I realised that I’d never heard a violin or viola or
cello have that sound and I filed that away and realised that someday, I wanted
my instrument to sound like this. And eventually it became clear that my
instrument is not the violin; it’s the string quartet.
“It’s thrilling and amazing to be able to participate in
music from cultures that we’ve never had a chance to physically visit but
through our imaginations we can go there at will.
“Someone asked me once, “How can you do this? What do you know about African music?” and I remember saying: “I didn’t go to Vienna, Austria until I was about 35 and I grew up playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, who all lived there. They all were of the same religion, they spoke the same language, they were all white guys. I was from Seattle, Washington; what do I know about Vienna?”
“Music is an imaginative thing; it’s a way that we humans
have figured out to share information with each other and to express things
about our lives or cultures. So much can be embedded in music and none of us
own it; we just get to share it for a little while.”
One of Kronos’ most important new projects is Fifty for the Future, an educational venture of unprecedented scope in the contemporary music world. They have commissioned fifty new works from 25 female and 25 male prominent and emerging composers from around the world, designed to guide young professional string quartets in performance of 21st-century repertoire. All of the scores and recordings are available free to use for anyone around the world, and Kronos performs at least one of these works in all their concerts.
I ask why there such a need for it, and why young string
quartets are not playing more 21st century music.
“When I was 12 years old, I joined the Columbia Record Club;
you sent in a penny and got five or six LPs. I was reading a biography of
Beethoven and I read about the Late Quartets, and that month one of the
offerings was the first Late Quartet. I put on the recording and the opening
E-flat major chord just wiped me out. I thought it was the most incredible
sound I had ever heard in my life and I wanted to learn how to make that sound.
So what I did was made my way down to the Seattle public library and checked
out the score and parts. I called some friends and a couple of days later we
were in a room trying to play that piece. For a split second that opening chord
sounded like the record! It was really a split second but that’s all you need
to give you the confidence to show you that you can do this, that you love
this, that you want more of this. That’s what happened to me.
Years later whilst coaching we realised that no one could
get hold of the music we were playing, and the music schools were asking Kronos
to send Xerox copies of the parts of published music. We can’t do that; it’s
illegal, and we began thinking how can we solve this problem. The idea of Fifty
for the Future happened naturally out of this.”
I ask Harrington how he had the idea and got the quartet up
and running.
“I was not such a good student; I had trouble learning. I went to the University of Washington – this was in the time of the Vietnam War. I studied poetry, and latin for a little while, and at this point I’d stopped playing violin. I had to work so hard to learn latin that it got me back into the discipline of being able to play violin. I went back into the music school and there were these very wonderful high powered European male teachers, and I couldn’t learn a damn thing from them. They all had one set way of doing things, and I shrank. At age 21, I ran into the woman who became my teacher for the next 30 years, Veda Reynolds.
“Veda became my teacher and her approach to the violin was so beautiful and individual. She studied with Carl Flesch, had all the training she could have, and this made her infinitely flexible, not rigid, as a teacher.
“We had the most magnificent lessons. In our final lesson,
there was a sound I wanted to make and I couldn’t make my body do it and we had
a four or five hour lesson on this note, and the last thing she ever said to me
was “the great thing about music is it can always be better”. That was her
approach; you find a way, you use your imagination, you think about imagery.
“I was about 21 and I thought the US army was going to draft
me and I decided I was not going to be part of that war. I would not; they
could put me in jail, do whatever they want. I found out that the Victoria
Symphony in British Columbia had an opening for the violin, so I auditioned and
got the job. In the meantime I had my draft board appearance and the US army
didn’t want me! But by then I’d signed a contact with the Victoria Symphony so we
went to Victoria for a year and the conductor knew I loved playing quartets so
one day he asked me if I would like to be involved in setting up a series of
chamber music concerts at the Provincial Museum. So I got my first training in
setting up concerts and organising musicians in Victoria.
“We came back in the summer of 1973 and a few weeks later was when I heard Black Angels on the radio, and a week later than that was when Kronos had its first rehearsal. Everyone I talked to in the music business in Seattle said this will never work. In the first two years of Kronos we played in countless different venues; from classrooms to ferry boats to art galleries. At a certain point we realised Kronos was a West Coast group so we moved to San Francisco; we didn’t know anybody, but we decided that was the place we needed to get our energy from.
“That first year I went to a concert of a very prominent American string quartet; they even played Beethoven Op. 127 (the first Late Quartet), and I was invited to the party afterwards. I was talking to one of the members, and I said that I hoped one day that my group will sound like you and have the kind of ensemble you guys have. He put his arm on my shoulder and said “don’t worry kid, you never will”. That pissed me off so much!”
I remarked that they had the last laugh…
“No, it still pisses me off! This is part of music
education, and that was the underlying feeling I was getting from so many of
the authoritarian figures in the world of music at that point. A little pat on
the head, maybe someday you’ll sort of get it right…
“I have never ever wanted Kronos to be part of that conversation and that approach to music, that exclusive club of those who can and the rest of us that can’t. For me music is something we get to share with each other; the sound of the string quartet is one of the magnificent creations of humanity and the impact that it can have is something I want to celebrate. I want more of the world into this sound, that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert created the foundation for and I think a great way of celebrating them is for this art form to be more and more vibrant. “
Kronos Quartet present Sight Machine at the Barbican on 11th July.
Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen: Sight Machine is part of the Barbican’s 2019 season, Life Rewired, which explores what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
A recent Guardian investigation into racism in the university sector has Oxford joint second for racism complaints recorded over the past five years.
Overall, Oxford recorded 39 official complaints, the same number as Cardiff. Only Cambridge, with 72 complaints, came higher.
The process for reporting complaints is not consistent across all British universities, with some only recording complaints against staff or students but not both. It is not known how many complaints of racism have been made to the University unofficially.
These results come in the wake of the recent access report, which showed a significant offer gap between UK applicants based on their ethnicities, which 25.5% of white applicants receiving an offer, compared to 15% of Asian British applicants and 17.8% of BME applicants overall. All college admit a greater proportion of white applicants than BME.
A spokesperson for the University told Cherwell: “Student welfare is our number one priority at Oxford, and there is no place for racism or discrimination of any kind. Excellence has no set race, background or gender and we are determined to build a more inclusive Oxford.
“We continue to make good progress towards this goal and are proud to be one of only 10 UK universities to hold a Race Equality Charter award.
“Specific commitments include increasing the ethnic diversity of all categories of staff, stronger representation of BME staff in decision making at all levels, and improving the overall experience of BME students.”
This investigation comes as students at Goldsmith’s University in London enter the 17th week of a protest against institutional racism.
Commenting on the figures, MP David Lammy said: “It is absolutely clear from these findings that many universities are not treating racism with the seriousness it deserves. If universities do not act fast to change the culture, form the lecture hall to the student union, talented students from BME backgrounds will continue to be locked out.”
Christmas Day
2017 consisted largely of me crying my eyes out at the ending of Toy Story 3
and vowing that a) I had been a cruel mother to many of my toys and b) no
cinematic ending could ever be as beautiful.
I was not happy
when I heard they’d be making a sequel. What need was there to continue the
story when the previous film ended so poetically, with toy owner Andy’s
bittersweet farewell, as he set off to university? Despite my reservations, I
still had to go to the cinema to investigate; you never know until you try.
I spent the
entire running time attempting not to cry at what was a wonderfully insightful
U-rated children’s movie. The opening scene transports knowing viewers nearly a
decade back to Andy’s childhood and an emotional parting between two favourite
toys. Yet we are soon firmly established in the present, in adorable Bonnie’s
bedroom of pastel hues and unbounded imagination. In a dusty cupboard her toys
restlessly await the most nerve-wracking part of their day: the crucial thirty
minutes of morning play-time when only the best toys will be chosen.
Controversy abounds:
Woody – the Toy Story franchise’s beloved hero and former owner Andy’s
treasured favourite – hasn’t been picked in weeks. It’s like not being invited
to your best friend’s bouncy castle party in primary school, but a million
times worse when it’s a fictional plastic cowboy you’re rooting for. Before the
audience has time to process this unsettling reality, poor Bonnie is in tears
at the prospect of going to an orientation day at her new kindergarten. Woody,
against the advice of his fellow toys, resolves to help: scrambling into the
toddler’s cute purple backpack, he accompanies her to school.
At this point
(and I promise you I normally have a heart of stone so this is unusual) I
really had to hold back the waterworks: at kindergarten Bonnie gets crayons
taken off her and sits alone crying. Heart-wrenching, honestly. Until Woody
comes to the rescue, discreetly throwing some trash on her table for her to
make art out of. Ingeniously, out of this trash Bonnie makes a new best friend:
Forky, a spork with googly eyes and pipe cleaner arms.
Forky is a troubled soul. He doesn’t understand he’s a toy and continues to leap joyfully into the warmth and comfort of every bin in line of sight. Like a weary granddad in the school holidays Woody is run ragged trying to ensure that, as Bonnie’s most beloved toy, Forky doesn’t go missing. When Bonnie and her parents end up on a road trip with a stop at the carnival and Forky gets lost, Woody must rescue him before Bonnie leaves, devastated.
This is where the
film really gets going, with Woody embarking on a brilliant solo escapade. On
the journey returning Forky to Bonnie he ends up in an old antique store in
hope of finding a long-lost friend, stumbling across faulty doll Gabby Gabby.
Encircled by her creepy ventriloquist doll henchmen (all called Vincent) she
clearly seems the villain, but the tragedy of her predicament – a lost toy
never loved – soon hits home. Aching for completion via Woody’s working voice
box, which could replace her own broken one, she captures the naïve (and
honestly pretty dim) Forky, knowing heroic Woody will return for the sake of
his beloved Bonnie.
And so Woody
teams up with a motley crew of lost and broken toys in a hopeful rescue
mission. But the enterprise throws up some agonizing questions for his inner
voice (which Buzz Lightyear thinks is just his factory-installed voice panel):
is there any point returning to Bonnie when she just isn’t interested in him?
Initially
incredibly dubious about this film, I was wholly overturned by the end. In a
conversation about it with my Dad, I realised I’d entirely missed the point of
the franchise: it’s not about the owners, it’s about the toys. I realise how
obvious this sounds, but it struck me that it’s about the concept of ownership
and the loyalty you feel you owe others versus yourself. Toy Story 4 is about
both owners and toys growing up in the comfort that friends will always remain
so if you’re making decisions that are truly right for you. I realise how deep
I’ve made this sound, as it is essentially an extremely funny,
light-hearted children’s film, but the charm of the franchise (and kids’ movies
generally) is its ability to translate into adult life. And if it can make me
cry it must be good.
Last week the Oxford Union played host to the Oxfordshire
finals of the Debating Matters championship.
The competition for sixth-form students took place as part
of the Oxford Festival of the Arts, a city-wide festival which ran from the 21st
June to the 7th July.
The student debating section of the program ran throughout the day, involving a number of local schools in the area. The event concluded with the main schools’ debate on whether ‘populism is a threat to democracy’ in the afternoon.
The public debate, taking place in the evening, held the title ‘From sexting to screen addicts: should we be afraid of online harms?’ Participants included Jess Butcher MBE, a technology entrepreneur, and Professor Victoria Nash, the deputy director of the Oxford Internet Institute.
Professor Nash said: “At a moment where mainstream politics is becoming increasingly polarised and emotive, it was so encouraging to see these young debaters using evidence, logic and respect to make their case. Free speech is certainly not without its limits, but we will need more, not less, open and honest debates on big societal issues if we’re going to tackle populism and intolerance.”
Debating Matters is run by BOI (Battle of Ideas), an
‘educational and citizenship charity’ founded in 2018, but it was originally
run by the Academy of Ideas, of which the debate chair, Claire Fox, is a
founder.
The University and College Union (UCU) has accused Ruskin
College in Oxford of “victimisation” of its members following several
disciplinary and redundancy threats directed at members of the union.
Three reps from the UCU face disciplinary investigations. Dr
Lee Humber was suspended days after the local branch passed a motion of no
confidence in college’s principal.
Ruskin College insisted that there were “spurious reasons”
for his suspension, but the events were unrelated.
A rally was held in April outside the college to call for Dr
Lee Humber to be reinstated by the Headington College.
The college revealed its intentions to launch an
investigation into what the UCU considers to be the trade union duties, as well
as the activities of the other two UCU reps.
Alongside the three staff under investigations, a further
two members of staff, also members of the union, are at risk of redundancy. The
college aims to axe four of the posts and move the other to a fixed-term
contract.
According to the UCU, poor management has left the college’s finances in a challenging position, with course closures and financial deficits.
The union said that management needs to work with staff to
resolve the situation, rather than attacking trade unionists and “shooting
messengers raising concerns.”
In light of this “victimisation”, the UCU has warned the college to stop pursuing what it considers to be unfounded disciplinary action, saying it will otherwise have to consider strike action.
Paul Cottrell, the UCU acting
general secretary, said: “The college has to step back from these attacks on our members otherwise
we will have to step up efforts to resolve this mess and that may well include
strike action.”
“Ruskin College boasts of its working class, trade
union and social justice history, but in reality our reps are being harassed
and victimised.”
The European Commission has announced the funding of a new
Innovative Training Network, which will train PhD students in Machine Learning Skills
to address Climate Change.
The network, known as iMIRACLI, will bring together leading
climate and machine learning scientists across Europe with partners, such as
Amazon and the MetOffice, to educate a new generation of climate data
scientists.
The project will start in 2020 at a summer school held in
Oxford, funding 15 PhD students across Europe.
Each student will have a climate science and a machine
learning supervisor as well as an industrial advisor.
Machine Learning, underpinned by AI, has advanced rapidly in
recent years and offers new tools to study, analyse and learn from the mass of
data being collected by Earth Observations.
While there is a general acceptance that Climate Change is influenced by human activity, many aspects of climate change are still not fully understood. This is largely due to the uncertain role of clouds in the climate system.
It is this understanding of the role of clouds for climate
change that the association of nine Universities will focus on with a pioneering
programme of study.
Philip Stier, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, is the lead PI for the project.
TW: references of rape and sexual violence discussion.
In Summer of 2016 I attended ‘Savage Beauty’ – the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the V&A in London. Of course, the exhibition was fascinating- it was both informative and beautiful, and it goes without saying that I was in awe of McQueen’s talent. Nonetheless, McQueen’s work troubles me. It’s no secret- and nor has it gone without criticism- that throughout his life, McQueen was fascinated by violence against women. Specific historical events- the Jack the Ripper murder, the Battle of Culloden- featured as artistic inspiration for various of his collections. His graduate show was entitled ‘Jack the Ripper stalks his victims’; he later produced the infamous runway show ‘Highland Rape.’ The interest shows itself just not thematically in McQueen’s works but also in their construction. Further shows demonstrate McQueen’s interest in dissecting the female body, then reconstructing it- such as with the anthropomorphic ‘Jellyfish ensemble’ shoe from ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, or the bird-woman costumes in ‘Nihilism’. I was troubled by this not merely because it was out of the ordinary, or thought-provoking, but because it struck me as misogynistic: What business did a man have playing about with women’s bodies, even in the artistic sphere? Chopping off noses and replacing them with beaks, adorning spines with wings, adding a claw here, a feathered protrusion there? My worry was naturally not that McQueen was not a great artist, but rather that his work played into a greater tradition of the role of women’s bodies in art; one in which women’s bodies are spitted on a two-horned dilemma. Either women’s bodies, in their natural state, are inherently pathological and ‘deformed’, in which case they are an object of male disgust, or female bodies may be ‘supernaturally’ deformed; in which case they are the object of male fascination. Either way, the ‘deformity’ never serves as an advantage to the woman herself.
I feel the need to
defend my use of the word ‘deformity’ here, even though I take care to use it
only in parentheses. The more appropriate term is naturally ‘bodily
difference’, but this fails to capture the lens through which bodily difference
in women has been viewed throughout history; as a marker of the abject, the
other, of moral depravity. It’s well known that Anne Boleyn’s rumoured extra
finger was interpreted as a sign of her allegiance with the devil, meanwhile,
in the Early Modern period, women were even held accountable for bodily
difference in their children- a child born with bodily difference was viewed as
evidence of its mother’s moral misdemeanours.
The association with
the devil led of course to female bodily difference playing a crucial role come
the advent of horror literature. Academic Adharshila Chatterjee in a recent
article ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned: The Violent Fetishism of
Female Monsters in Hollywood Horror Culture’, has pointed out that female
characters in horror literature are typically either perfectly good or
perfectly evil, those in the latter camp are often marked by bodily difference,
whether supernatural, as applies to vampires, banshees, harpies, or natural, as
the result of decay or violence. For an example of the latter, one need only
refer to the bathroom scene in Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’. As such,
‘deformity’ is a word with an inbuilt ‘male-gaze’; I use it here because it
tells us something interesting about the society has historically
felt about the way women’s bodies should appear.
Of course, if the
essence of misogyny around ‘deformity’ in women surrounds fear of female
perceived ugliness, then McQueen is the opposite of misogynistic. He by no
means fears bodily difference in women, he in fact glorified it. Mid-20th
century design is characterised by designs which emphasise a traditionally
‘feminine’ figure; a small waist, fuller chests, they are often floral,
delicate, and impractical- in other words, not designed for working women.
McQueen’s graduate show, and indeed his subsequent designs have often been
interpreted as a rejection of this: his designs enable us to view women not as
wallflowers, but in fact attempt to portray women as fierce and strong. What is
more, the collections ‘Highland Rape’ and ‘Jack Ripper Stalks His Victims’ were
never ready-to-wear, and indeed, McQueen refused to sell the pieces on any
terms, so McQueen never profited, at least monetarily, from his artistic exploration
of sexual violence.
Nonetheless,
regardless of profit, whether sexual violence is ever an appropriate source of
artistic inspiration seems doubtful. This is not intended as a tirade against
men or Alexander McQueen specifically, since the use of sexual violence and
violence against women as inspiration for art is by no means limited to
McQueen, or to men. The Mulready sisters of Rodarte were widely critiqued for
the Mac x Rodarte Autumn Winter 2010/2011 collection, which used the Mexican
border town of Juarez, a city which has the highest homicide rate in the world
and from which hundreds of women have gone missing, as inspiration. A
blusher from the collection bore striking resemblance to a standout tailcoat
from McQueen’s degree show; bright red pigments were streaked across pale
powder in such a way as to unambiguously resemble bloodstains on pale fabric,
whitewashed walls, bones. Rodarte and Mac apologised, pulled the collection
from production and MAC pledged a portion of profits, and Rodarte $100,000, to
the women of Juarez.
This brings me to my
next point: by elevating violence against women to the level of aesthetic
appreciation, both Mac x Rodarte and Alexander McQueen engage in a historic
discourse in which the female corpse, and female deformity, has been
fetishized. The two are perhaps more closely linked than a first glance
suggests: violent attacks perhaps necessarily involve making the body
‘deformed.’ Indeed, in the same article mentioned above, Chatterjee points
out that female bodies in horror are often intended to simultaneously disgust
and arouse. Female monsters are highly sexualised: vampires are obviously so,
and harpies are also described as beautiful. Indeed, even outside of the horror
genre female deformity is on occasion portrayed as having aphrodisiac
qualities: in Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ the protagonist K. admires the webbed finger
of a character, Leni, exclaiming: ‘Was für eine hübsche Kralle!’ (‘What
a beautiful claw!’). That this is problematic is, in the case of the more
extreme examples obvious: by equating violence against women with beuaty as in
the Mac x Rodarte collaboration we seemingly sanction it, or at least fail
to acknowledge the gravity of those crimes. The problem with fetishizing
‘deformity’ is perhaps more subtle: but I suspect it has something to do with
the fact that the kinds of ‘deformities’ explored by Kafka, McQueen and others
are often borderline supernatural. The ultimate effect of this is
therefore not that female bodily difference is normalised, but instead it is
put on a pedestal; the attraction of these women is that they are not fully
human, not quite real. Needless to say, the association between bodily
difference and supernatural beings is also problematic.
So, the use of bodily difference as inspiration in art and literature is one which is ultimately problematic on a moral level, if not in artistic terms. When designers and authors use violence against women and ‘deformity’ as inspiration, the result is not the genuine inclusion of bodily difference on runways, magazine covers, or a safe sense of belonging within the socially defined term ‘beauty’. Instead, ‘deformity’ is dealt with through the fetishization of violence and the upholding of pedestals. This ultimately fails to recognise women for who they are: real people.
I don’t know if any of you have listened to Capital FM for eight hours straight, but I’m going to tell you here and now: they play about ten songs. Over and over and over again. Working in the admin office of my local GP surgery proved to me that ‘Sweet but a psycho’ only gets worse after it’s twentieth play in one afternoon. But there was one song that was still hopelessly overplayed, but somehow still enjoyable. That song was Someone You Loved by Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi. Even now, the song is one which I will choose to listen to, even though it’s been played a hundred times. It’s not only beautiful at the first listen, but it continues to be beautiful even after its continual playing: and that’s a pretty rare thing for a big chart hit to do.
Capaldi isn’t popular because he churns out catchy, generic pop songs (which have their own place in music: I’m not one to judge). His music is popular because it has intense, personal meaning to a lot of people: something that’s getting progressively rarer in mainstream music. More than that though, Capaldi is fucking funny. It’s difficult to scroll down Facebook without coming across a short comic video of the Scottish singer. A combination of self-deprecating humour, genuine wit, and an impressive sunglasses collection has meant that even the most ardent hipster finds it hard not to have a soft spot for him. His recent Glastonbury performance showcases this perfectly. Responding to Noel Gallagher, who has earlier said in an interview “who’s this Capaldi fella? Who the fuck is that idiot?”, he stepped onto the stage in the trademark Oasis bucket hat and parka, which he took off to revel Noel’s face in a big red heart on his t-shirt. The singer songwriter jokes about everything from his lack of sex appeal, to the time his mum stormed into a club to drag him home, and a scroll through his social media reveals a self-aware sense of humour that frequently makes me laugh out loud. This is a man living his dream, but refusing to see himself as better than anyone else.
So why then, is he getting such criticism? Admittedly, it doesn’t seem to be getting to him too much: he labelled one tweet which stated “Lewis Capaldi? More like Lewis Crapaldi!!! Cause he fuckin sucks” his ‘favourite tweet of all time’. Yet there is still an undeniable trend to criticise music, or any part of popular culture, which has become too ‘mainstream’. Sometimes this can be understandable – if a band chooses to value mass produced catchy hits over more meaningful productions then there are bound to be criticisms. However, Capaldi has neither sacrificed his musical integrity, nor tried to be someone he’s not in order to sell more records. He’s funny, down-to-earth, and unafraid of making fun of himself. I can’t be the only one who’d really quite like to go for a pint with him.
So this is a tribute to Lewis Capaldi. He hasn’t got a six pack, or a jawline sharp enough to cut glass – and he doesn’t care. Whether it’s handing out sausage rolls at Greggs, or wearing ridiculous sunglasses, he makes people laugh, and he’s genuine in a way that not many people in the industry feel that they can be. He loves music, he’s good at what he’s doing, and honestly he just seems like he’s pretty happy to be here. I think many people in the industry could take a leaf out of his book – and so could we.
In the world of reality TV, exploitation is a feature, not a bug, and Love Island is no exception. The competitive element of Love Island is only one aspect of its appeal – the couple that eventually wins is less important than the drama, the heartbreak and the memes. Contestants exposing their vulnerabilities to the audience is essential to formulating a clear emotional arc and, ultimately, a good story line. Participants become almost like fictional characters, compelled to fulfill the archetypes and roles assigned to them by the producers. Consequently, the audience learn to treat them as such – which can prove just as damaging as the show itself.
Of course, Love Island contestants consent to this manipulation when they sign up for the show – but whether they’re aware of the extent to which this will occur to them is another matter, while the editing is completely out of their hands.
For the most part, the effects of
reality TV on participants’ mental health during and after production has been
explored little. However, recent events have prompted a discussion about the
morality of its emotional exploitation. The Jeremy Kyle show, perhaps the
epitome of exploitative reality TV, was canned after one suicide – but Love
Island, now on its fifth series, is thriving despite the suicides of two former
contestants, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis. The difference between here is
that in the case of Jeremy Kyle, the suicide was directly linked to the show’s misleading
use of the lie detector test. Both Gradon and Thalassitis, meanwhile, had a
history of depression and addiction and died at least a year after their
respective stints on the show. This allowed Love Island’s producers to absolve
the show of any wrongdoing, claiming there was little they could have done to
help.
This is patently false. Love Island may not be wholly
responsible for the deaths of Gradon and Thalassitis, but the impact of the
show on its’ contestants’ lives is undeniable. The internet age has granted a kind
of quasi-longevity to reality TV stars that previously did not exist. Contestants
who would have faded into obscurity after their stint on the box, now maintain
a social media presence that allows them to become influencers and promoters –
at least during their initial fifteen minutes.
It also allows them to read and receive thousands of abusive
messages from strangers based solely upon their appearance on TV. Embarrassing
moments or confrontations become an easily-accessible part of TV history –
contestants who have sex on the show, for example, may find the video being
viewed by potential employers, family members, and people too lazy to search
for pornography for years to come. The adjustment to this newfound fame is mentally
taxing enough for most people; the subsequent loss of this fame, coupled with
persistent abuse can be emotionally devastating, especially for those with a
history of mental illness. Though producers claim that all contestants undergo
psychological evaluation before entering the villa, these tests clearly seem to
be insufficiently rigorous.
The abuse of contestants could easily be dismissed as an
unfortunate symptom of the modern age and the price of fame – but Love Island
doesn’t just expose its contestants to the vitriol of the public, it actively
encourages it. A now staple challenge of the show involves islanders reading
tweets from members of the public – often cruel and judgemental in nature. In
the 2016 series, Gradon was so distressed by one of the tweets targeting her
that she ultimately chose to leave the show. Though none of the tweets are
directly abusive, this year’s selection included tweets accusing contestants of
being gold-diggers, fake, and manipulative. The show’s social media platforms encourage
viewers to tweet their thoughts on the contestants, resulting in the adoption
of Thalassitis’ nickname ‘Muggy Mike’ as a meme. After Thalassitis’ death,
fellow islander Chris Hughes begged people to stop referring to him with the
nickname.
In the wake of Gradon and Thalassitis’ deaths, producers
have assured the public that there will be more comprehensive aftercare for all
the contestants to help them adjust– though the actual details of this alleged
new plan remain murky. In the wake of the Jeremy Kyle show’s axing, it’s hard
not to see this as at least slightly cynical – suicides, after all, are
terrible for PR. But mental health care goes far beyond suicide prevention. Though
Love Island is to some extent based upon its contestants’ emotional
ups-and-downs, the show at times seems to actively thrive upon their misery –
as does its audience. When Zara Holland lost her Miss Great Britain title for
having sex on TV in the 2016 series, that was just one small part of the drama
– but for her, it was a self-destructive action that changed her life. Holland
is still undergoing therapy as a result of her trauma from the show.
Improved aftercare is not enough – producers need to avoid
selecting highly vulnerable people as participants and facilitating their
self-destructive behaviour. Furthermore, and crucially, the show needs to stop
actively encouraging the public to bully cast members for the sake of
entertainment. Until that happens, it’s difficult to not see Love Island as deeply
exploitative – regardless of the producers’ mental health platitudes.
