On the media patina and ethics and aesthetics of airbrushing

Is it just me or has the whole world become airbrushed? At least in the way we perceive it through the lens of media. The rampant manipulation of pixels and layout is rendering reality more manageable, more slick, and more ... "glossy" is the word that comes to mind. This isn't coincidental, since the glossies, monthly magazines, were progenitors of this now generalized glossifying tendency. This visual sanitizing distorts the manner in which the world is absorbed by many of us.

Consider the front page of The New York Times, whether it is in digital or print format. For sure, a more beautiful and aesthetically assured representation of the world isn't possible. I admit I myself visit the webpage of The New York Times at least once a day on average, maybe some days I skip it, but I can't deny its attractiveness as a narrative and a representation of all the "news that fits to print." A more visually satisfying arrangement representing the state of the world as of yesterday (or a few hours ago, on the Web) is hardly fathomable. Whether it's word choice in the headlines, or the headlines' relative size one to the other, or whether it's in the arrangement of the page elements, or the mere abundance of the words, images and columns cascading on the well-designed page-- the point is the overall impression transmitted is of harmony: chaos contained, reality reined in by master designers and wordsmiths.

I wonder if reading the newspaper these days is less about being informed and educating oneself and more about feeling relief in seeing that someone is taking all the chaos of the world and painting it over with order. Oftentimes the cover photographs on The New York Times front page will correspond to one another like clothing accessories in a Spring fashion show-- they will somehow match, even if depicting utterly different scenarios: an earthquake in China, a U.S. presidential campaign, a societal trend in Japan. Perhaps a spot of color in each of the photos will resonate, or a compositional element will be repeated. There is a master hand at work. The New York Times (and other newspapers, although I would argue that the Times is more guilty of this wannabe omnipotency than other dailies), is like God interpreting the world. It says: look at all this chaos, and see how I make sense out of it, make something palatable and even aesthetically pleasing out of it. Much of this effect is rendered by the beautiful photographs of death and disaster and political stagecraft that are reproduced, but again, the word choice, the play of fonts and column space, sub-headlines, etc.-- all these elements play a role, as does the reassuring retro quality of newspaper mastheads.

In The New York Times, even the most horrific war is made pretty. It's true that individual reporters (I remember Steven Erlanger's visceral reports from the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s) will go out of their way to describe in graphic detail the impacts of war. But often not only is their prose too gorgeous, but so is the work of the designers and the photographers framing their words. It may be useful to recall that the best books about war might be singled out for their tendency toward dissonant, understated or lackluster prose. This is true about The Red and the Black, The Naked and the Dead, War and Peace (which has more than just a dollop of grotesqueness, off kilter description, and jerky movement in every battle scene), The Red Badge of Courage, and Farewell to Arms. These are books that ring true about war not because of over-revved description, but because of a mass of detail that seems right because it is so odd.

In the magazine world, the warm aesthetic bath effect is the rule. Of course, unlike newspapers, magazines have always been more about serving up fantasy than reality. So we shouldn't be surprised to read an extensive profile in The New Yorker (which itself specializes in being a factory of pretty, authoritative, and effective prose, in serving up a certain sterile and safe view of the world, as bien pensant as anything else, even when its journalism is at its most potent and critical) about a pixel specialist who is hired by fashion magazines and other glossies to doctor images in their ads, shoots and photo spreads, in order to render each of them as visually appealing as possible. After the treatment applied by this magician of the 21st Century's benday dots (if Roy Lichtenstein were alive today, he might find a way to show up the layers of hypocrisy and complacency compacted into your average magazine cover image), there is nothing amiss in any of the images in the magazine's pages. Your eyes glide right over them-- satisfied. All is seamless, an imperturbable patina applied over everything, an inevitable varnish of "as it is," except it's not what it is at all.

Likewise, it seems to me, the better written a magazine article is, especially if the subject is something that should get citizens up in arms, then the less likely that it will have any impact at all.

A friend and I would often talk with one another about the "patina" that coats everything in prosperous communities. The patina is a result of comfort, affluence, and a certain self-satisfied assurance that enlightenment is in fact an abundant quality in one's very fortunate community. The patina means: clean environments, attractive facades, new appliances, slick packaging, intelligent signage, smooth transitions, etc. There is nothing jagged, nothing too obviously out of step, nothing jarring. This patina is the environment of The New York Times (perhaps ironically, smaller and less prestigious newspapers don't achieve it to quite the same degree), the shopping mall, the average Hollywood film, TV in general, mass circulation magazines, etc.

I remember a few years ago there was a controversy about a Reuters photograph of Israeli bombing in Lebanon because it turned out it was retouched beyond acceptable ethical standards: the smoke was made blacker and more voluminous, the sky lightened to bring out the contrast, etc. But I would argue this kind of digital and design tinkering is done everyday, in our media, and in our visual culture generally, in less blatant ways, and the aim is not at all to make reality sensationalist-- but instead to create a cocoon-like, reassuring visual environment. Look around you: especially in areas and media designed for general consumption and mass observance. Doesn't everything seem too cleanly made? And it's not a question of publishing photos with dead bodies and blood, or "shock" strategies of any sort, or punching holes in walls or throwing rocks through chain store windows. The element that is missing isn't blood or a healthy streak of yellow journalism, or overt protest, it's the willingness to indulge in the incongruent message, the dissonant image, the un-resolvable juxtaposition, the friction of images that don't and won't respond to the eye's and brain's addiction to sense-making.

I would argue that most visual art today, especially in the rich nations, in part lacks any real power because it doesn't truly address these facts, and instead of seeking actively to rupture the cocoon of an airbrushed visual culture falls into the trap of also seeking seamlessness, flawless craftsmanship, some brand of slickness.

As a counterexample to the bumpless texture of our visual culture, I submit the political cartoons of Carlos Latuff, a Brazilian cartoonist. Apparently, his website has been repeatedly visited by U.S. government agencies like the Pentagon, State Department and individual military branches, because of his cartoons' popularity in the Arab world. To me, it is irrelevant whether you support the Iraq War or not, what his cartoons do (and I haven't even reproduced some of his more controversial ones) is thrust us directly into the heart of the matter, without making us wade through the overstuffed prose and analysis of newspapers and websites, and without having to distill tragedy from the flawless composition of a newspaper's front page photo, which may be showing a bombing casualty's funeral, whether it is a U.S. victim or an Iraqi, but which for some reason has to strive to emulate the compositional mastery and deft lighting effects of a Caravaggio. In our visual culture, that amounts to a trivialization of the subject (a war death, a civilian death, a soldier's death) and only an aggrandizement of the newspaper's and the photographer's ego.

Probably it's not coincidental that the winning image in the World Press Photo awards recently was of voyeurism amidst the ruins after Israel's bombings of Beirut (one of the photo's subjects holds a handkerchief to her nose, she can't stand the smell; meanwhile another takes a photo of the ruins with her cell phone, and another looks out from behind gold-plated sunglasses; it wasn't the only image of its kind to become famous in the wake of this news event: another widely-reproduced photo was of two comfortable-looking Lebanese on a rooftop taking pictures of surrounding smoke and destruction, also via a cellphone).

It's my theory the World Press Photo award-winning image didn't strike a chord necessarily as a statement on Lebanese society, but because of its depiction of our voyeur culture, and how we've become spectators inclined to see even the most destructive and morbid events as shows.

So it's media's job now not to indulge us. Before, it may have been necessary to pull a reader in with a well-made, narrative-rich image, a beautiful shot with classic composition, well distributed light and color. Now, it may be that visual culture will be that much more effective in terms of forging a vital connection when it breaks the rules, when it jars and becomes jagged, or grainy, sufficiently illegible-- at least slightly abrasive, maybe even a bit heavy-handed (like Latuff's work).

Today, there's nothing more surprising to our eyes than that which purports to represent reality but has some loose ends, some crooked flaps, some dissonant element. The media is educating our eyes, and words and images seem to wash over us, unless there is something in them that might stick into our skin. We need the barbs so that something might poke us and linger, and not merely slip away with the rest of the media bath, down the drain of daily forgetting.





Political cartoons by Carlos Latuff

Termites but no tango in the news

Here are two articles I wrote for The Daily News in New York. One is on an art show, the other a preview of Latin American productions in a theater festival. When I get a chance, I'll write more about Juhasz-Alvarado's work and our phone interview, which got pretty crazy as soon as we started talking about termites.

Puerto Rico artist Charles Juhasz-Alvarado leads termite attack

Photo gallery on Juhasz-Alvarado's exhibit

'Other' Argentina is the focus of 'Harina' at TeatroStageFest

Against Voyeurism: Baby Goat-Cradling in the Andes and Reverse Borat in Papua New Guinea

Voyeurism used to be just for perverts. Now it's for everybody, thanks to tourism. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. And it is driven by two factors: the massification of the global tourism industry, and its increasing focus on the cult of authenticity (instead of highly organized and deliberate spectacles and landscape offered by resorts and classic destinations: Rio's Christ Statue, the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls, Waikiki Beach, etc.). Thanks in part to the Lonely Planet fetish for departing the beaten path, tourists today tend to leave their home patch of soil in order to see the local culture and landscape in "X" place in its natural state. Whether this so-called natural state is manufactured or not, the tourists sometimes cannot tell, but the people who make their living off tourists know exactly what they are after and scramble to provide it.

In Bolivian and Peruvian Andean cities, there is always available, for photo purposes, a little girl in Indian costume cradling a baby goat in her arms. Same for the tango dancers, male in brimmed hat, girl in fishnet stockings, in Buenos Aires streets. These are people who have turned themselves into props or extras on a stage set. There are worse ways to make a living, but the point is that these performances are the tip of the iceberg: they're only explicit demonstrations of a larger event taking place.

The locals are on exhibit and it is the poetics and material conditions of their everyday existence that is of interest to the tourists, who are not after landmarks anymore, or souvenirs. They are hunting experiences and images, and whether these are recorded or not, the satisfaction derived is directly proportionate to the feeling of having penetrated to the kernel of a place's identity, to the soul. Of course snapping a picture of the little indigenous girl with the wriggling goat in her arms scores low on the authenticity chart, but it is better than nothing, barring an immersion tour that includes a "home visit" to an indigenous family at their city-edge shantytown settlement (or better yet, a spontaneous friendship with an indigenous family who invites you to their remote village after market day and serves you marvelously indigestible food that you can reference later).

What this means in practice is that inevitably in the receiving countries everyone's everyday life becomes a spectacle. The locals cannot opt out of participating in the performance put on for the tourists, and this as true of Paris as it is of Bali. I say receiving countries and I mean receiving countries just as people who study migration say receiving countries, except they mean countries that receive poor people and I mean countries that receive rich people: tourists. Tourists are rich people on the move. I don't mean this as a put down, it's the simple truth. When a rich person arrives in a new country, whether he's on business or pleasure or an extended stay, he's a tourist. When a poor person arrives in a new country, he's an immigrant. Poor people do not tour, they go on pilgrimages, or they emigrate, or migrate, or march to exile or refugee camps. The United States and Europe receive the huddled masses (or deport them), and they export hordes of tourists.

Tourism, we all know, could be a magnificent deal for all involved; it's a clean industry, supposedly (except that because of its increasing tendency to overexploit locales of natural beauty in rugged areas it tends to create waste and infrastructure problems much quicker than host countries can resolve them). By some measures it's the largest industry in the world, ahead of the weapon and drug trades even, although it's difficult to quantify those. Tourism could be equitable and help reduce poverty. Except it hardly ever does. One part of the raw deal is created by the fact that the economic benefits of tourism go largely to property owners and the harms eventually accrue mostly to whomever stands in the way of development (whether it's done through the gentrification of high-traffick tourist neighborhoods in cities or the buyouts of fishermen in coastal areas).

Tourism creates jobs but in poor areas too often these are low-tier service jobs, which transform locals into the help assisting in the pampering of outsiders. There are exceptions, sure, but a day or two anywhere in the Caribbean or in Northeast Brazil or the Yucatan in Mexico or parts of Thailand, and the pattern is confirmed. More important perhaps is the cultural distortion that results as tourists demand certain images, landscapes and experiences; the question always becomes, how far is the host society willing to go in order to please the tourists and their thirst for the supposedly authentic? I wonder if anyone has ever written comprehensively about how cultural production and the land itself is affected in areas and cities highly determined by tourist traffic. And also, how is this hankering after the authentic doing violence upon the experience of the tourist himself, subjected sometimes as a result to a pantomime of local traditions and forms?

I thought about all this after watching nearly all of Olaf Breuning's video "Home 2" at the Whitney Biennal in New York, which ends in May. The video features a hysterically comic and neurotic actor named Brian Kerstetter bumbling his way through a tour of Papua New Guinea, including a foray to an urban beach, a trash dump, a crowded market, and an organized cruise along the Sepik River Basin, an area that like most of Papua New Guinea is divvied up among different tribes that still practice much of their traditional culture, including tattooing, wearing penis gourds, dancing, mask-making, etc. In other words, anyone that has a serious fetish for the tribal could hardly do better than spend a few weeks in PNG visiting remote tribal areas and snapping pictures of men in mud masks and headdresses. Which, essentially, is what the tall, gangly, pale, red-headed actor does in "Home 2."

He's kind of a reverse Borat. Through his manic efforts to engage with locals, via his shameless exhibitions of near total ignorance and oblivious good nature, the actor somehow ends up pulling the curtain up on how absurd it is that wealthy people travel thousands of miles in order to pose with tribal men and have their picture taken next to dwellings made of natural material (as we see one of the couples on the river tour doing).

The red-haired actor, who's usually wearing an AC/DC shirt, is constantly joking around with the locals, giving away money, putting marsupials on his head, frolicking amidst tribal dancers, wearing a gorilla mask. The humor and the smiles he elicits from the Papuans underscore a common humanity that tourism prefers to ignore in favor of the exotic. The tribal dances put on solely for tourists' benefit ("This performance is just for me," the actor says gleefully), the outsiders' constant wielding of cameras including the very one through which the documentary is filmed, the contrast between the air-conditioned and insecticide-sprayed cruise boat and the rusticity of the villages-- all of it underscores difference, which is what tourism wants to accentuate, difference.

In a world in which all the political rhetoric is about equality of all peoples, our principal manner of coming into contact with one another (other than war), is thru an industry that manufactures and seeks to promote and emphasize difference. Even when the actor tells us gravely of a mosquito bite he received on the eyeball, which forces him to wear gauze over one eye, he does so in the grim voice of a warrior describing his battle scars. This is pure Lonely Planet bravado: "Despite all the dangers and annoyances, I am still here, searching out the heart of this place, the soul, so I can capture it in bits and pieces and say I have seen it."

Before, one had to come back from a trip and say: I saw this pyramid, or this monument. Now, it's, "I saw men in penis gourds and mud masks. I was bit in the eye by a malarial mosquito." Olaf Breuning's exaggeration of the masochism and voyeurism inherent to this authenticity-hunting seems to make fun, simultaneously, of the stunts of "Jackass," the Crocodile Hunter, gross-out reality shows, the Travel Channel, most travel literature and National Geographic programming, as well as centuries of ethnology and documentary filmmaking in exotic locales. He's showing the seamy seams on the underside of the multi-colored dream-coat of tourism. At the end, when the actor says, speaking of fellow passengers on an Air Niugini flight, "Each of them have a home they want to go to, just like I do," he's not so much talking about home as he is about humanity's sameness: everyone's on a journey. It's just that tourists seek to dramatize their trip histrionically and hunt for experiences, when being there should be enough, or too much already. Every expectation distorts a trip a bit further. Every checklist of authenticity is a wall between oneself and the truth of a place.

I like Raymond Roussel's idea of traveling to a place and never leaving your hotel room or closed carriage; or Laurence Sterne's hilarious farce of a travel book, A Sentimental Journey, in which no real tourism actually takes place and instead an impulsive, amorous itinerary is pursued, with no sightseeing involved; real travel literature wouldn't do anything except reveal internal states, the exterior would on its own leave its vague fingerprint on the psyche; and, finally, I like Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine poet, who wrote the following once in her notebook: "I am in St. Tropez, that is to say, 3 km from St. Tropez. Instead of staying locked into my room, I should go visit the town, get to know the old streets, look at people. But for me, returning from a place without having seen it is a reason for pride. To say no instead of yes excites me."

(Girl with llama photo: Thomas Quine)

On false oppositions: Kahlo color or no color

Why is it that there either has to be a whole basket of flowers on a peasant woman's back, or no flowers at all and instead an overdosed blond in a party dress listening to Fleetwood Mac on a vintage couch in a cold and gritty Spanish or Portuguese speaking metropolis (I'm referencing here a Diego Rivera painting and my recollection of the cover photo of a fairly recent Latin American novel published by Alfaguara)? Why does it have to be either all about exoticism and folklore or all about the absence of it? There's a constant vacillation among those of us who make and observe Latin American art and literature that we either have to traffic in exoticism, in color, or in its opposite. Of course it is a false belief, a false dichotomy, and one that withstands no scrutiny once we look at the history of Latin American creation, because all the great artists understood the tension between primitivism and universalism and transcended it, instead of trying to fall on one side or the other of it.

Frida Kahlo. Now, she's the color and the exoticism and the monkeys and the supercilious hormonally hinting eyebrows and mustache; she's sex and nature and violence, which along with music, form the quad bearing up the edifice of Latin American stereotype. Rousseau gave us the noble savage, and Frida gave us his fable and his dream once he's been bound up in the gear and catwalks of the 20th Century. Gabriel García Márquez, he's the sidewalk caricaturist with more wisdom than Methuselah and a rose-tipped paintbrush; he's got more swirls in his canvases than the snake in the Disney version of the Jungle Book. They're primitivists, exoticists, color specialists, supposedly.

It reminds me of the old Russian hang-up, whether Russia was a thing of Europe or a fully wild and burly and soot-covered Slavic thing, its own were-creature. Russian culture was dominated by the Europhilic types but kept honest by its Slavophiles, I think. And how could "The Master and Margarita" exist, with its felicitous feline Satan, without a painful soldering of the two together: East and West.

In Latin America we have Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote the definitive word on this binary fallacy, really, a long long time ago. People would have him be a sort of pioneer of McOndo (the literary movement started in the 1990s as a sort of wannabe black beast to García Márquez's universe), but Borges was deeper about it, honest to himself. He did not advocate a break with the color, with the soil, with the roots that weave so many into the very dirt of this hemisphere. What he said was: the whole world is your Pandora's Box, man, take it, open it, and feed from it, because it is your material. He wrote this in the 1930s, in an essay called "The Argentine Writer and Tradition."

Of course Borges shunned anything that seemed too earthy, to loamy, to mulchy. He had his gauchos, his urban toughs, his 19th Century warlords and soldiers, his detectives. That was enough. It's just that Borges, he was as white as they come, he didn't feel it, the man was not the type to inhabit his body down to every pore, like perhaps others did-- Horacio Quiroga let us say, a man of the generation preceding that of Borges, and a seeker of Rousseau's garden.

Borges was a ghost, and he wrote like a ghost and in part lived like one. Read Paul Theroux's "Patagonia Express" and you will hear Borges defending Jorge Videla, head of the Argentine military junta during much of its genocidal phase, and calling him a "gentleman." He didn't know, no, he didn't know anything, sure. Because Borges lived like a ghost, or a ñandú, with its head in a flour sack. Borges didn't need to know anything except what was in his head and between the covers of his books. He wasn't dry or cold, the man had a deep sense of humor, he independently invented or downright originated every trick in the genre mixer's bag of tricks, but he didn't know. There's really not a drop of blood in his work, just exhilaration for the gray matter. But that's his idiosyncrasy, his position was clear, and generous: the world is yours, all of it, Uqbar too.

I write all of this prompted by an article in The New York Times Magazine about the curator of Latin American art at the museum in Houston. She says Frida Kahlo is not such a great painter, and that her problem with Frida is that her work, with its power, is a kind of many-hued smokescreen through which many can't see the truth about Latin American art. And the truth, of course, is that it is not a backwater filled with people that like to spend a lot of money on color paints and squirt out of them flowers and Aztec massacres, but also a wellspring for things like Brazilian post-concrete art, with its more straight lines and non-figurative shapes, its bichos and parangolés and off-kilter blue polygons. And there's also what came before, the actual concrete stuff-- even more straight lines and these on actual canvases. And there's kinetic art, and so on ... These are more, well, universal things, more identifiably avant-garde, more apt to prove that Latin American art is not some parade of ardent, hairy, tormented color-spewers who either paint on walls or invite pet monkeys into their self portraits or paint figures sitting against oversized cactuses (Tarsila do Amaral) and just can't quit it with the bright colors.

I say, bring it on. The color and the anti-color, the monkeys and the robots, the cities and the amber waves of corn and soybeans, the gauchos and the Indians and the Patagonian Nazi. Who is trying to protect who from whom? Frida Kahlo overexposed? I see a day after reading The New York Times Magazine article that Frida is having her first major U.S. show in 15 years right now at the Philadelphia museum. If she's waited 15 years, then maybe she's on too many posters and T-Shirts, but how can it be said that she's getting too much attention among U.S. collectors or art patrons or museums or whoever the authority is supposed to be? And Helio Oiticica isn't getting enough love, supposedly, but the Tate Modern just did a big thing on him (theming it on color, because despite his total non-figurative tilt Oiticica liked the color and was basically a sensualist). And the very same New York Times Magazine article notes that Oiticica's now what everyone is drooling to have in their catalogs, their art history theses, their prestigious collections.

Either/or? Why?

We need Oiticica and Frida Kahlo, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Luis Guerra and Juana Molina, etc. etc. Not Macondo or McOndo. But Más Hondo, deep, deep enough to contain everything, and more, y siempre, algo más. Admit it, the baroque always was a congenital thing in Latin America, a baroque built around the depth of the culture's carrying sack, which has no breaking point, just eternal inordinate strain. One thing is marketing exoticism, another is indulging in it because it's in your bones; one thing is marketing a universalist's sophistication and dominion of forms being trafficked in Paris-New York-London-Berlin-Rome, another is actually having that sophistication, effortlessly. And being secure enough in your possession of it to not require the upturned nose when in range of a Frida's or a Gabo's flowers.