Practices of looking
I'm in the middle of studying for my Visual Culture exam on Monday, and while reading the chapter on Nikki S. Lee and Postmodernism in the course textbook, I came across a rather interesting passage that really helped align my scattered thoughts about the subject.
Postmodernism responds to modernism not by going beyond the material form of the image to some newer, more accurate register of truth but by embracing the surface and appearances as important aspects of meaning, not simply as something put on top of the real thing, the structure. The status of [Cindy] Sherman's images as self-portraits that perform identity make clear that the self is not an authentic subject to be accessed through introspection, and the image does not give the viewer access to the artist's deeper self. In Sherman's work, the portrait is all surface and artifice; in Lee's work it gives us access only to the performance of identity. This does not, however, mean that the artists are shallow or that they have no substance. Rather, in postmodernism, the surface is understood to be a crucially meaningful element of social life and not simply the illusion put over the real, like makeup hiding a blemish. We can no longer look below the surface for depth and true meaning, because we will find no hidden truth there but rather just a different way of seeing.
In this context, Lee's work questions notions of identity as innate, calling into question not only the stability and authenticity of identity and social groups but also the question of social integration. One of the things that is striking about her images is that they are quite convincing. In these casual snapshots, no one appears to be posing. They appear "authentic," signaling, perhaps, Lee's "success" at the performance of integration. Yet Lee also clearly stands apart in these images despite her ease within them. This is most obvious in the images that address issues of ethnic and racial identity - although she looks entirely comfortable in the "Hispanic Project" images, her Asian ethnic identity is also evident within them. Yet her performance also points to the performance of others in her images, the codes by which we can easily detect a particular subculture or social group.
The idea of the authenticity of the appearance of the face is pursued by media theorist Lisa Nakamura in her examination of alllooksame.com ["China, Japan, Korea: What's the difference?"], a website designed by Dyske Suematsu that is devoted to the interrogation of the idea that one can "read" racial identity from the face. The person accessing the site is offered eighteen pictures of faces that are identified as either Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. The player is asked to guess the correct national identity of the face based on his or her knowledge about the typical appearance of members of these groups. The site then calculates the sore of the player, which is on average a seven, whether or not the player is an "insider" or "outsider" in one of the cultural groups represented, showing that racial classification is more easily gotten wrong than right. Suematsu began the site as a joke, but with the rise of racial profiling in the 2000s it takes on a cultural role as an instructive lesson in the conceptual and political limits and problems of racial classification. As Nakamura points out, the "truth" about race is not a visual truth. Identity is always complex and diverse, and visual signifiers, as we saw earlier in this book, are always open to different meanings. Eye shape, hair color, and other physical qualities of appearance are no different in this respect. The site makes players interrogate the cultural and political bases on which racial taxonomies are imagined and built. Nakamura, though her examination of player responses to this site, interrogates the racial visual essentialism and reductionism built into racial profiling and extended in what Nakamura describes as the "ethnic absolutist identity politics" of those who uphold authentic and purist or essentialized notions about racial identity.
Postmodernism responds to modernism not by going beyond the material form of the image to some newer, more accurate register of truth but by embracing the surface and appearances as important aspects of meaning, not simply as something put on top of the real thing, the structure. The status of [Cindy] Sherman's images as self-portraits that perform identity make clear that the self is not an authentic subject to be accessed through introspection, and the image does not give the viewer access to the artist's deeper self. In Sherman's work, the portrait is all surface and artifice; in Lee's work it gives us access only to the performance of identity. This does not, however, mean that the artists are shallow or that they have no substance. Rather, in postmodernism, the surface is understood to be a crucially meaningful element of social life and not simply the illusion put over the real, like makeup hiding a blemish. We can no longer look below the surface for depth and true meaning, because we will find no hidden truth there but rather just a different way of seeing.
In this context, Lee's work questions notions of identity as innate, calling into question not only the stability and authenticity of identity and social groups but also the question of social integration. One of the things that is striking about her images is that they are quite convincing. In these casual snapshots, no one appears to be posing. They appear "authentic," signaling, perhaps, Lee's "success" at the performance of integration. Yet Lee also clearly stands apart in these images despite her ease within them. This is most obvious in the images that address issues of ethnic and racial identity - although she looks entirely comfortable in the "Hispanic Project" images, her Asian ethnic identity is also evident within them. Yet her performance also points to the performance of others in her images, the codes by which we can easily detect a particular subculture or social group.
The idea of the authenticity of the appearance of the face is pursued by media theorist Lisa Nakamura in her examination of alllooksame.com ["China, Japan, Korea: What's the difference?"], a website designed by Dyske Suematsu that is devoted to the interrogation of the idea that one can "read" racial identity from the face. The person accessing the site is offered eighteen pictures of faces that are identified as either Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. The player is asked to guess the correct national identity of the face based on his or her knowledge about the typical appearance of members of these groups. The site then calculates the sore of the player, which is on average a seven, whether or not the player is an "insider" or "outsider" in one of the cultural groups represented, showing that racial classification is more easily gotten wrong than right. Suematsu began the site as a joke, but with the rise of racial profiling in the 2000s it takes on a cultural role as an instructive lesson in the conceptual and political limits and problems of racial classification. As Nakamura points out, the "truth" about race is not a visual truth. Identity is always complex and diverse, and visual signifiers, as we saw earlier in this book, are always open to different meanings. Eye shape, hair color, and other physical qualities of appearance are no different in this respect. The site makes players interrogate the cultural and political bases on which racial taxonomies are imagined and built. Nakamura, though her examination of player responses to this site, interrogates the racial visual essentialism and reductionism built into racial profiling and extended in what Nakamura describes as the "ethnic absolutist identity politics" of those who uphold authentic and purist or essentialized notions about racial identity.