A bucket of chicken and a 40z

This was easilly one of my favourite pieces from the new contemporaries, I found there was a lot of REALLY exciting work there but this was just so funny and simple and really really exciting.

Presentation...

(or... Every day and Pop Culture 'sticks it to the man'. or not)

 I am pleased with how our presentation went. It almost came out of a burst of stereotypical art school 'fuck the system we ain't gonna give them what they want' sort of rebellion. We, as a group, felt that there was perhaps too strong a corporate element in the nature of the presentation of the tate due to the link with BP and the emphasis that our ideas were 'fresh' and 'exciting'. We decided to reverse the expectation and create something more banale and empty, much like a corporate presentation full of graphs and slides and monotone voice. We delivered it in a dull manner with The Vision One Gallery Theme playing in the background so emphasise the empty thinking space.

I think what we achieved was beyond what we had planned, I was initially worried about it being funny incase it was a bit of a one liner, or a way around it not being about a anything else but I think it brought attention to the mundanity of the corporate life. It satirised enough but far enough from the subject it wasn't insulting but perhaps turned a mirror.

As for the day itself, I really enjoyed the other presentations, particularly those from Chelsea, but was dissappointed as the first four groups (ours included) didn't have our presentations discussed, even though we had thought that the tate staff were going to in turn discuss ours.

I built the set of the Simpsons and dressed up as Marge for a video performance in which I sat still to "End of The World" by Skeeter Davies.
I'm fairly fascinated by the depiction of the housewife in contemporary culture ranging from th for my essay , I think it holds resonance to the every day and pop culture, so here ilassic 1950's archetypal model to the satirical. I did a lot of thinking and researching on the matter for my essay , I think it holds resonance to the every day and pop culture, so here it is.

To What Extent is it Important that Marge Simpson Echoes the Traditional 1950’s Housewife of the Domestic Sitcom?

The traditional role of the housewife in American post-consumerist culture is clearly rooted in a mythology of a woman who cooks, cleans and dotes on her family without a single complaint.  The role of satire in the Simpsons turns a mirror on the traditional nuclear American family and presents a stereotype that we escape into for comfort.  We are offered a flawed representation of the American Dream rife with failures similar to our own in which family members conform to expected roles and live out amusing scenarios identifiable on some level within our own lives, numbing the pain of reality by offering humour as an anesthetic.

 In Nina Leibman’s book ‘Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television’ she describes the fifties familial sitcom as the “domestic melodrama”(Leibman 1995) Archetypal examples include “Leave it to Beaver”, “Father Knows Best” “Ozzie and Harriett” and generally revolves around “middle-class nuclear families living in suburbia which feature a professional father and a full-time stay-at-home mother.  Humour is found in the interrelationships of family members.”(Leibman 1995) These original sitcoms are centralised around a doting, strong father figure who forms a stable family base for a perfect representation of the American dream. The mother always fulfills the role of a housewife or has an inconsequential dead-end job; she never has much worth especially in comparison to the nobility of the father figure. The maternal figure “now held a questionable position as the operative force in domestic life, wherein they were expected to perform the necessary domestic duties but continually upheld their husbands as more important.”(Leibman 1995) This constructs a gendered divide in domesticated roles, and a clear sociological system in which the nuclear American family was known to operate. In the post-feminist age of The Simpsons there became enough distance between the gender binary American lifestyle, and because being a housewife became a choice rather than a necessary lifestyle, the fifties sitcom housewife began to be viewed as a flawed and increasingly obsolete ideal.

The satirical American family cartoon such as The Simpsons echoes the 1950s formula, the archetypal familial roles are presented clearly; the doting and attractive housewife blissfully trapped into a marriage she is too good for, a buffoonish, inconsiderate husband whose charming idiocy makes him exempt from consequence, a similarly idiotic son whose stupidity directly echoes that of his father, a lost or misunderstood daughter who dreams of an escape from her embarrassing family, and of course a baby and a dog to complete the portrait of the American dream. This portrait of eschewed conventionality provides an escape for us from the uncertainties of our own lives; we find comfort in the fact that the characters never age, and are firmly anchored in their sociological roles for us to continuously lose ourselves in. One might even say that we rely on the steadiness of these characters to anesthetize our own emotional instability in life. The Simpsons presents to us a cyclical, stuffy world into which to escape, and presents us with animated versions of our own problems, nullifying the pain we feel with humour. In ‘Life and How to Survive it’ the self-help psychology book written by therapist Robin Skinner and comedian John Cleese, it is mentioned that one of the most positive coping mechanisms available to us is humour. “You feel things to the full... but you master them by turning it all into pleasure and fun”(Cleese 1994 , 53-6). It certainly could be said that The Simpsons in this way teaches us a lot about ourselves and helps us cope with the bleak reality of life.

 The Simpsons stay the same age as the outside world ages around them, the children who were once with what would now be retro gaming gear have gained smartphones and laptops, Homer has worked in a nuclear power plant for over twenty years and still hasn’t developed cancer, and Maggie still hasn’t spoken her first word. It could even be argued that the creators satirize this lack of room for change via Snowball, the family’s beloved cat, who dies multiple times, only to be replaced by a completely identical cat (as mentioned in Lisa Simpson’s poem; “Meditations on turning eight … I had a cat named Snowball, she died, she died, Mom said she was sleeping, she lied, she lied. Why oh why is my cat dead? Couldn’t that Chrysler have hit me instead?” – a satire on becoming aware of mortality and seeing through the slippage of our parents lies to protect us) There is no opportunity for progression within the model of the beloved sitcom, the chance for change is always born and extinguished within the space of one episode, particularly in the case of Marge. We seek comfort in these well-known characters and fear change, and know that when our own lives go awry we can return to these comforting figures of familiarity.

 Characters in the archetypal American sitcom seem to be anchored to their roles within the mechanics of the American dream. The housewives, in particular, may deviate from normativity as the plot of an episode unwinds, but by the end they are charmed back into the arms of their family and deterred from any hope of a career or affair. The most archetypal example of this formula is in Lucille Ball’s “The Lucy-Desi comedy hour” in the 1959 season 2 episode 4 entitled “Lucy wants a career”. The episode opens with Lucy doting upon her husband and son, asking them what they want her to cook for them to only be met by male brutish apathy. In reaction to her complaining about the stuffiness of domesticity her husband describes it as “The popular record ‘The Housewife’s Lament’ by Lucy Riccardo, I know the last line; ‘For two cents I go out and get myself a job’” Rebelling against her husband’s disbelief, Lucy goes out into the workplace, at first finding it liberating, but, of course, after a number of incidents proving her incompetence away from her family she is found in a hysterical state by the end of the episode, sobbing “I don’t like having a job, I’m lonesome without you and little Ricky, I wanna be a housewife again!” This demonstrates that a life outside of housewifery or secretarial work was so unusual in the 1950s that the very notion of escaping normativity into this world of progression was a joke for all the family to laugh along to on TV. Now, in post-feminist post-choice society, this stuffy portrayal of a career as a home-wrecker is an absurd caricature of an increasingly obsolete societal norm.

 The archetypal 1950s housewife was born in post-war consumerism; new technologies and progression in industry meant that household labour saving appliances like the vacuum cleaner became commonplace. As televisions became the centerpiece to any American family household and advertisements and sitcoms burgeoned into ubiquity, the American Dream, and the image of the perfect housewife, became a sellable commodity. In her essay entitled ‘Housework’, Germaine Greer argues that these labour saving devices create more work, and that new, almost neurotic standards of hygiene brought to our attention by advertising are “tightening the headlock on the ‘housewife’” (Greer, 1999 p166) and with the excessive amount of appliances being available in the home, they have “brought anything but increased leisure for the houseworker.” (Greer, 1999 p166)  The presentation of a housewife is often one of constant drudge with little reward, but with the indication that the household will fall apart without her.

  

 The Simpsons repeatedly displays these patterns of non-escape from drudgery. By her repeated return to her regular state of dissatisfied ennui, Marge Simpson becomes a caricature of the lamentation felt universally by housewives. As was written in the 1947 Modern Woman: The Lost Sex; “the social development which created the physical slum also created throughout society what may be termed the emotional slum.”(Lundburg, 1947) In other words, the environment in which she is trapped causes the mental and sociological dissatisfaction of the housewife. The ennui becomes apparent enough to be rife for turning a caricature presented within a satire for universal post consumerist society to relate to.

 In The Simpsons’ Season 8 Episode 2 “You Only Move Twice.” We are presented with the alternative to the suburban Springfield trap. Homer gets offered a job in Cypress Creek, a Utopian, futuristic town where everything seems perfect. At first, Marge is reluctant to make the move, defending her love of her stuffy life; “Homer, I don’t want to leave Springfield. I’ve dug myself into a happy little rut here and I’m not about to hoist myself out of it.”. This shows Marge’s own comfort in her routine which echos our own comfort that we find in watching The Simpsons. They move to Cypress Creek and everything seems perfect, Homer’s job is perfect, there’s plenty of beautiful wildlife for Lisa to enjoy and the school system seems unflawed, however the characters are just unfit to function outside their own comforts. Lisa becomes allergic to everything around her, Bart gets moved into a special ed class, and, although Homer is enjoying his new job, Marge finds the self cleaning futuristic kitchen to leave her bored and without purpose, so she turns to alcohol in the hope it will fill the time she would usual fill with drudgery. Some might argue that this proves that Marge as a character cannot exist without her role as a housewife, and outside of her domestic hyperactivity she has nothing to justify her as a character. “I’ve been so bored since we moved here that I’ve found myself drinking a glass of wine every day.” She laments, “I know doctors say you should drink a glass and a half but I just can’t drink that much.” So of course, order is restored and The Simpsons move back into their rut in Springfield and once again thrive under their own comforting dysfunctionality.

 Another important episode in which Marge satirizes the limitations of the life of the housewife is in the episode entitled “A Streetcar named Marge” in which Marge lands the part of Blanche Dubois in an amateur dramatics rendition of “A streetcar named desire” and homer is profoundly unsupportive vocally refusing to feign interest in her “kooky projects:” (i.e., endeavours outside of her familial role). During the casting process, the director disregards all people auditioning for Blanche, but catches Marge crying on the phone to Homer (“You were right, Homer, Outside interests are stupid”) and within her finds his star. Marge approaches the role with her trademark bumbling feminine gingerness and when asked to threaten her Co-Star with a broken bottle she sighs; “I’m sorry… I just don’t see why Blanche should shove a broken bottle in Stanley’s face… couldn’t she just take his abuse with gentle good humour?”. At this moment the satire is used as a plot device to gain empathy for Marge’s character and we are left to feel pain for Marge and her uncompromising passiveness. The formula of the Simpsons portrays the female characters as kind and moral and the male characters as buffoons. Joan Williams writes in “Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About it.” That themes in domesticity are “men are selfish, women are selfless, women are more moral than men.”(Williams, p149 1999) Could this vulnerability intrinsically written in to Marge’s character be a ‘by the women, for the women’ comment of collective empathy and understanding? By the end of the episode, of course, Marge is fueled to do well under her husband’s negativity so much so that she reduces him to tears as he sees the error of his ways, they make up and normativity is restored.

 

  Marge Simpson breaks the mould of the perfect housewife figure, she’s beautiful, yet she’s got these unusual trademarks of her big blue bouffant and her gravelly voice. In Jessamyn Neuhaus’ essay ‘Marge Simpson, the Blue Haired Housewife; Defining Domesticity in The Simpsons’ it is stated that in the moments of defeat at the end of an episode at which she returns to normativity, she shows discontent and disheartenment, meaning that she “pointedly refutes the myth of the TV housewife; she belies the image of the eternally cheerful, content, utterly domesticated wife and mother.”(Neuhaus, 2010) She is emotionally sapped by the limitations of housewifery yet must continue on to return to Homer’s unconditional yet dissatisfying love. He consistently soothes her in her defeated state of acquiescence with lines such as “You’ll always be the best cook in our house.” which once again limits her to domesticity and presents the satire of the stuck American family to the viewer to which an alternative life exists. The Simpsons is progressive in the way that it satirises the role of the traditional gender roles, making us question their validity in everyday society, and although they stifle change, each return to normativity provides us with great comfort and a happy ending which distracts us from the pain of real life.

 Nina C Leibman (1st June 1995). Living Room Lectures: Fifties Family in Film and Television. Texas: University of Texas Press.

53Skynner, Robin; Cleese, John (1994). Life and How to Survive It. London. pp. 53–6. ISBN

Germaine Greer (1999). The Whole Woman. Great Britain: Double Day. 164-173

Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham (1947). Modern Woman: The Lost Sex . -: Harper and Brothers. -.

Joan Williams (1999). Unbending Gender: Why family and work conflict and what to do about it. -: Oxford University Press. 149.

NEUHAUS, J. (2010), Marge Simpson, Blue-Haired Housewife: Defining Domesticity on The Simpsons. The Journal of Popular Culture, 43: 761–781. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00769.x

Jennifer Reed (2003);  Beleaguered Husbands and Demanding Wives:

 The New Domestic Sitcom http://www.americanpopularculture.com/archive/tv/domestic_sitcoms.htm

“A Streetcar Named Marge” The Simpsons, Fox, 1992, television
“You Only Move Twice” The Simpsons, Fox, 1996, television
“All’s Fair in Oven War” The Simpsons, Fox, 2004, television

“Lucy Wants a Career” The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, Desilu Productions, 1959, television

My feelings on the tate presentation.

BP violations of human rights

"Company failed to respond to alleged intimidation by Turkish security forces along its UK-backed Caspian oil pipeline

Ruling places BP in breach of loan agreements, say campaigners

A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled today [Wednesday 9 March 2011]. Environmental and human rights campaign groups, who filed an official complaint against BP, say the ruling puts the oil giant in breach of loan agreements – including a multi-million pound loan from UK taxpayers.

Villagers living along the flagship oil pipeline owned by the consortium have had an eight-year struggle to hold the companies accountable for alleged human rights abuses associated with its development. The controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline brings up to one million barrels of oil a day from the Caspian Seaa, cross Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey from where supertankers ship it to Europe.

The UK government has ruled that BP’s consortium broke international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies.

The ruling follows a Complaint lodged under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises lodged by six public interest groups in April 2003. The UK government backed the pipeline in 2004 through its Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD).

The ruling states that BP failed to investigate and respond to complaints from local people of intimidation by state security forces in Turkey guarding the pipeline. Local human rights defender Ferhat Kaya, for instance, was detained and allegedly tortured by the paramilitary police for insisting on fair compensation. Villagers allege that they are routinely interrogated when they raise concerns over the pipeline.

The pipeline passes through an area of north-east Turkey with a substantial Kurdish minority who have been subject to state repression for decades. Since the pipeline’s inception over a decade ago, human rights campaigners in Turkey and the UK have highlighted the risk of local people, particularly Kurdish minorities, being intimidated by state security forces. Today’s ruling has found that, despite widespread awareness of this “heightened risk intimidation”, BP failed to put in place mechanisms to investigate allegations of abuse and ignored those brought to its attention.

The Complaint argued that such intimidation deterred local people from participating in BP’s consultations about the pipeline’s route and compensation negotiations for loss of land and livelihoods.

BP has consistently promoted the BTC pipeline as “world class” in its approach to human rights. According to its legally-binding commitment to comply with the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (an international code of conduct for multinationals operating in the energy sector), BP should “consult regularly” with local communities about the impacts of pipeline security arrangements and should record and report credible allegations of abuse by security forces to the authorities.

The UK government has now ruled that BP conspicuously failed to implement these undertakings in the north-east region of Turkey by failing to respond to allegations of intimidation and to put in place flexible enough mechanisms to investigate such allegations in areas where local people consider the local authorities do not protect them.

The ruling sets a major precedent. In future, to comply with these corporate social responsibility guidelines, multinationals will have to take into account the human rights context in which they operate, including the risk of intimidation, when designing and implementing corporate grievance mechanisms. Such mechanisms need to be robust enough that people can report intimidation without fearing further reprisals.

Given BP’s legally-binding commitment to ensure that the BTC project complies with the OECD Guidelines, today’s ruling from the UK government potentially places the company in breach of its contracts with the major international financial institutions (IFIs) that backed the project with taxpayers’ money in 2004. In addition to the UK’s export credit agency, these include the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and other European and US export credit agencies.

The failure of BP to adhere to the OECD Guidelines and the Voluntary Principles, as required under the project agreements, also raises major concerns over the due diligence undertaken by the IFIs before supporting the pipeline.

Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House says:

“Public funders knew about the intimidation, but failed to check whether BP had adequate procedures in place to address and remedy it. They ploughed ahead with the project anyway for political reasons. Western governments appear to have been willing to sacrifice the human rights of those living along its route in order to grab the Caspian’s oil for the West.”

Rachel Bernu of Kurdish Human Rights Project says:

“It has taken eight years for the claims of villagers facing repression in this isolated area of Turkey to be recognised. We hope this ruling marks a turning point for the governments and companies involved so that those affected receive just compensation, and human rights are not only respected, but also promoted through investment in future.”

James Marriott of Platform says:

“This ruling shows that BP’s pipeline allowed and enabled repression of local communities. Yet EU governments and companies continue to push for new pipelines to suck oil and gas westwards from distant places of extraction. BTC stands as a warning that these planned ‘energy corridors’ risk becoming ‘corridors of militarisation and human rights abuse’.”

Friends of the Earth’s Policy and Campaigns Director Craig Bennett said:

“Using taxpayers’ money to fund this pipeline at the expense of people’s human rights and the planet is a stain on this country’s reputation.

“This pipeline would not have been built without public funding – Ministers must come clean about what action it will take against BP for breaching its loan agreement.

“The only real way to stop this cycle of exploitation is to wean us all off our fossil fuel dependency by investing in safe, clean and ethical technologies of the future.”

Commenting on the ruling, Nick Dearden of Jubilee Debt Campaign says:

“This long-awaited ruling underlines the need for urgent changes in the UK’s export credits system. Empowering British companies to violate the national laws of other countries goes against the most basic form of social and environmental responsibility. Without effective safeguards, projects like BP’s one are bound to happen again.”

Peter Frankental of Amnesty International UK added:

“The UK government’s condemnation of BP for breaching internationally recognised human rights standards on the BTC pipeline begs the question of why taxpayers’ money, in the form of export credit guarantees, was used to fund such a project in the first place. If such support had been withheld until BP had addressed the human rights context of their pipeline project, then these violations might never have occurred. It is time the UK’s Export Credits Guarantee Department was reformed to prevent this from ever happening again.”

The ruling gives BP three months to introduce new grievance mechanisms in Turkey.

- See more at: http://platformlondon.org/2011/03/09/bp-violated-human-rights-rules-says-uk-government/#sthash.jBYzflbm.dpuf"

Miranda July

Miranda July creates fascinating work about the every day. She takes narratives which stem from quiet moments in the everyday and makes them incredibly interesting and unsettling. She is a jack of all trades, having made two feature length films, countless independent short films and performances, and has three books published. Noone belongs here more than you is an exciting book of short stories that she has written, she's really good at getting inside the mind of a seemingly banal person and  injecting their lives with an element of fantasy and curiosity. 

Sometimes her stories have a level of dystopian impossibility nestled into a familiar language that makes us relate to them, sometimes they hold both the language and the circumstance but bring together unlikely components. She has a knack for making things seem both fantastical and benign at the same time. In her performance her use of her voice is the most inspiring thing, she manages to embody professional women to little girls to men in a sing-song story telling manner that make her stories come to life.

I like the pace of July's films, in which nothing much happens. There is a feeling in her work which is almost infectious, it seeps into your own life and leaves a resonance of intrigue.

“Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it’s worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”

}ea vqa~}d`g'Dbt`q m`g—} kg`w fgt`ga(nfhh }ea `yasf}`s fg

Drawing parrallels between Lisa Simpson and Sylvia Plath; the pointlessness of it all.

Sylvia Plath - Ennui

"Ennui

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger."

Lisa Simpson - Meditations on turning Eight

"I had a cat named snowball, she died, she died.

Mom said she was sleeping, she lied, she lied.

Why oh why is my cat dead? 

Couldn't that Chrysler have hit me instead?"

http://vimeo.com/3019157