Utilitarian Review 10/5/13

Last week I wrote about an old Hulk comic in which our green protagonist crushed a female artist who wanted to appropriate him for her gallery, proving that comics are virile and manly and can kick Lichtenstein’s effeminate posterior.

So Hulk wins the battle against high art there…but in comments, Ng Suat Tong pointed me to another tussle where the victory is not so assured.

That’s “Hulk (Wheelbarrow)” a sculpture by Jeff Koons.

When I suggest that Koons has here defeated the Hulk, I mean that literally — at least in terms of the narrative of the comic I discussed last week. Again, in that issue, Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema presented us with an evil temptress/Circe/high artist who turned her male victims into glass. She intends to do the same to the Hulk, and keep him forever in her gallery as a glass sculpture. Hulk is too big and green and pulpy to succumb to her blandishments, whether they involve sex, magic, or the granting of high art validation. So he destroys her and her house and escaped. And then, 20 odd years later, Jeff Koons gets him and puts him in a gallery anyway.

The trasformation is a little different though. Hulk isn’t turned into graceful, fragile, feminized glass. He’s a plastic inflatable — a giant toy. The act of transformation, then, is not actually transformation — it’s simply relocation. Putting the infantile, virile Hulk in a gallery turns him, instantly, into refined prettified high art, with flowers. Koons’ assault on Hulk is even more cruel and insidious than the villainnesses. The glass Circe, at least, felt that Hulk had something she wanted; she acknowledged the value of his virility by wanting to touch it with her glass creating hands and make it her own. But Koons doesn’t even have to make Hulk his; he just has to pick him up and put him in his place. If there’s any value in Hulk, it’s not in his strength, but in his ridiculousness and incongruence. He’s cheap, plastic ephemera. His incongruous worthless is his worth. He’s not a totemic real to be stolen; he’s just a ridiculous prop to be mocked.

Or so you might think. In fact, though, the Hulk is not a plastic inflatable. He’s bronze. Koons made the metal statue, then painted it to look like an inflatable. The Hulk is not a piece of plastic crap; he’s a virtuosic sculpture made to look like a piece of plastic crap.

In terms of the comic, its as if the villain had turned Hulk not into glass, but into an exact replica of the Hulk indistinguishable from the original. Except secretly made of glass. Or, for another comic-book analogy, you might remember the Harvey Kurtzman Plastic-Man, in which the imposter Plastic-Man is accepted as the real Plastic-Man since anything made out of plastic is fake. By that logic, Koons’ imitation plastic Hulk is more real than the real thing, since a kid’s fake plastic Hulks (in comics or outside them) are the real ersatz thing. Or, to put it another way, the Hulk in the gallery, by virtue of recognizing the fakeness of the Hulk in the comic, is more real than the original.

In Harold Bloom’s terms, Koons’ is a “strong” reading of the Hulk. Geoff Klock in How To Read Superhero Comics and Why points to writers like Frank Miller as “strong” rewriters, troping against the accretion of supehero continuity, so that the Dark Knight becomes, in some sense, the only Batman, “‘the powerful reading that insists on its own uniqueness and its own accuracy….[Miller] compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision as our origin.'” Where Miller makes Batman more real and powerful and cool and coherent, though, Koons’ strong, bronze reading of Hulk is parodic. The metal Hulk insists on the actual Hulk’s transient blow-up crappiness. The amazing virtuosic reproduction of pop detritus emphasizes that it is detritus. The amount of genius and talent that Koons has put into his Hulk deliberately underlines the hackish ineptitude of Mantlo and Buscema. They ineffectually try to reproduce high art; Koons methodically and perfectly reproduces low art. There couldn’t be a much more devastating demonstration of the justness of that high-low hierarchy.

Or that’s one way of reading it, anyway. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Harold Bloom would really probably hate Jeff Koons, and vice versa. You can see Koons here as parodying the Hulk by employing the virtuosity of high art, but you could just as easily see him as employing the Hulk to parody the virtuosity of high art with its cult of “strong” Bloomian artists. Or, for that matter, you could see him as simultaneously parodying both; the serious metal sculpture disguised as a kid’s blow up doll seems to implicate both the Hulk’s hyper-masculine worship of physical power (via the ridiculous big green muscles) and the traditional art world’s hyper-masculine worship of genius (via the ridiculous virtuosity and heaviness.)

For Koons, then, high art and low art aren’t opposed. Rather, they’re both engaged in the same project of constructing a powerful ersatz masculinity — the dream of inflatable muscles made out of bronze. Koons thinks that’s funny. But he doesn’t just think it’s funny. Surely there’s some affection in those (Blooming?) flowers, picked fresh for the exhibit, and placed in a wooden wheelbarrow that is not an inflatable, nor bronze, but simply a wooden wheelbarrow. The superhero and the superartist — beneath all that roaring and posturing, they just want to give you pretty things. In the gallery or on the comics page, when Hulk smash, it means “I love you.”

Music Sharing Post 9/29/13

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

So maybe I’ll do this weekly again; we’ll see how much interest there is, I guess.

This is Ms. Jade — The Come Up. It’s Timbaland on production of course.

Nicki Minaj feat Cassie — The Boys

Public Enemy — Pollywannacracka. I just heard this song again and remembered how great it is. Most uncharacteristic Chuck D vocals ever.

And what the hell, here’s Aubrey O’Day

So what have you all been listening to?

Utilitarian Review 9/28/13

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

News

I think this week I’m going to experiment and have a featured archive post every day rather than one a week. We’ll see how it goes. You have been warned!

On HU

Featured Archive Post:Linsey Bahr on fashion in the Hunger Games and Gattaca.

Walter Benjamin on the internet as socialist utopia.

Our music sharing post: check out what folks have been listening to.

Michael Arthur on racism and funny animals.

Jacob Canfield provides a useful guide so you can figure out if you’re being a censor.

Chris Gavaler explains Joss Whedon’s next project.

I talk to Julia Serano about call out culture and exclusion in feminist and queer communities.

Vom Marlowe on how GoodReads needs to let its readers talk about it when authors are assholes.

People who make art shouldn’t appropriate Hulk!
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I:

—wrote about the documentary The Muslims Are Coming.

—interviewed Julia Serano about the reality of gender and her new book Excluded.

—wrote about segregation and violence in Chicago.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Tim Wise, Robert Shaw, white allies and failure.

—how Alexander Hamilton was the Dick Cheney of his day.

Other Links

This is a pretty horrible story about the Chicago police.

Helen Rittelmeyer with a lovely piece about Charles Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard.

Hating perfect actress hair.

Brian Cremins on Bill Mauldin’s Back Home.

Whose Chicago?

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
____________

Most of The Interrupters, the new Steve James (Hoop Dreams) documentary about violence in Chicago, is set resolutely at street level, focusing on the efforts of CeaseFire, a group that tries to defuse altercations before they escalate. There are a couple of moments that pull back to give you a national picture, though. One of these is a political press conference following the 2009 beating death of high school student Derrion Albert. Mayor Daley, Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan all got up dutifully and promised that this would never happen again, no, no, no, not on our watch, not to our children. Which prompted one listener to ask …um, haven’t you said that before?

Of course, Duncan has said that before — and to the same audience, probably. The country is, after all, now run by the same people who have, steadily, determinedly, and for years, largely failed the Chicago communities where kids like Derrion Albert grow up. There’s a huge disconnect between CPS’ national reputation for reform and the local reality. In the same way, there’s a huge disconnect, as one community leader and minister points out in the film, between the success of a black President in Washington D.C. and the fact that in that President’s hometown black children keep being placed in the ground.

As it happens, I live half a block away from Obama’s Hyde Park home — close enough that when he visits town my street gets closed off and I have to show an ID to get in my front door. I live within walking distance of some of the communities, like Englewood, featured in the documentary too. And yet, the bulk of The Interrupters might as well have been filmed on the moon for all the connection it had to my own experience of Chicago. For example, there’s one scene where CeaseFire worker Ameena Matthews addresses a roomful of mourners and declares that she’s the daughter of Jeff Fort. Everybody knows who she means…but I wouldn’t know Jeff Fort from Adam if the filmmakers hadn’t thoughtfully informed my white ass that he was a major gang leader in the city through the 60s and 70s, now serving life in prison. Similarly, I’ve lived in Chicago almost 20 years and never seen a gun, much less seen anyone shot with one.

I’m aware, of course, that the Chicago I know isn’t the only Chicago. For one thing, I’ve got a friend who’s a school teacher on the south side…and, inevitably, he’s had kids in his classes who were victims of gun violence. Just as inevitably, we watch a teacher in The Interrupters when she hears that the neighbor of one of her middle-school students was recently shot. She responds with grating perkiness (“You can talk to me about that you know!”) which I would feel much more comfortable sneering at if I thought for a second that I’d handle such a revelation with any more panache. In any case, the kids very kindly ignored her, and turn to talk to Eddie Bocanegra, a former gangbanger and murderer turned CeaseFire worker, whose credibility is clearly exponentially higher within his Hispanic community than that of some random educator.

That credibility is central to CeaseFire’s mission. “We’ve got more than 500 years of prison time in this room!” one interruptor declares in a meeting. “That’s a lot of wisdom!” It’s also a lot of cultural capital when you live in occupied territory. Cops, various people note, are afraid of the neighborhood and are feared and mistrusted in turn. Outside politicians want to solve the problem through bringing in the National Guard, a tactic which, community members very reasonably point out, is likely to end up with more, rather than less bodies. The community is defined in opposition; it’s those who have fought the power who are trusted. You have to have lived the life in order to have the right to speak.

Many of the most poignant moments in the documentary are about this truth, demonstrating the hard-earned knowledge the CeaseFire workers bring to their jobs. Ameena Matthews, for example, grew up fatherless, and was physically and sexually abused at a young age. She sees herself in a young girl named Caprysia. Caprysia’s mother is an addict; she couldn’t stop her younger sisters from being shipped off to DCFS. Caprysia herself is in and out of jail, radiating rage and despair. Ameena takes Caprysia for manicures, tries to get her to go to school, scolds her, worries about her, and cries over her like a mother. One of the most painful moments in a very painful film comes when Ameena asks Caprysia rhetorically, “Are you worthy of love?” and before Ameena can answer her own question in the affirmative, Caprysia interjects a sullen but heartfelt, “no.”

In a subsequent scene, though, Caprysia leaps up and down with joy when Ameena visits her in juvie, and refers to her as “my mother.” She may not be a blood relative, but by virtue of will and love and community, she’s family. Some CeaseFire muckety-mucks talk at length about how violence is a disease and needs to be treated epidemiologically and blah blah blah. But it’s clear from watching Eddie and Ameena and the third interrupter, Cobe Williams, that CeaseFire is really built on people caring for each other. The movie is about a community sorting out its shit.

The question is, how it that community defined, and why? Or, to put it another way, why isn’t this my Chicago? There are various answers, but one of the main ones has to do with a systematic history of segregation — a history that is by no means ended.

In that vein, I understand why the filmmakers wanted to keep themselves out of the picture, but I wish they had put themselves on camera, or at least more explicitly acknowledged their own presence, once or twice in the documentary. Because, after all, they’re not outsiders looking in. The neighborhood they show is their neighborhood too, both because Steve James is a Chicagoan and because — as the film itself demonstrates, albeit indirectly — there they are, in the room and on the streets. If the story is about the community, then they’re part of the story.

As am I. These are my neighbors, after all, even if I don’t know them very well. Communities have to get their own shit together…but part of that is having people recognize they’re in a community. When Chicagoans like me look at the communities in which CeaseFire works and say, “Those are our kids. Those are our schools” maybe fewer children will get shot. That kind of change in attitude isn’t easy, but it’s probably more helpful than calling in the National Guard. The Interrupters, anyway, makes the case that to if you want less killing, you need, not more guns, but more neighbors.

People Who Make Art…Shouldn’t Appropriate Hulk!

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

One of the few Hulk comics I own is a 1981 effort by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema titled “People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Hurt Hulk!” I was never that into the big guy honestly — though I got a year or something of Peter David’s run whenever that was. But I’ve been asked to do a talk on Marvel’s greenest property, so I thought I’d revisit this story (one of two in the issue), which I still remember fairly clearly after three decades.

Why I remember it is not especially obvious, I have to say. The title does have a goofy charm, I guess, and the story has a kind of inevitable progression which is compelling, if not exactly competent.

The narrative starts with Bruce Banner passed out on a Malibu beach; a woman all in white with a white dog finds him and brings him to her house. She cares for him and shows him her sculptures; all glass statues of men. She then seduces him and keeps him for a month, promising to do his sculpture too. Finally, she reveals that she is some sort of witch (the plot rather breaks down here) and tries to turn him to glass with her magical glass hands. But he turns into the Hulk and destroys everything and escapes; she accidentally touches herself with her own magic hands and ends up a glass sculpture at the bottom of the sea. Hulk bounds away. The end.

So this is obviously a basic noire set up, with Glazier (that’s the glass lady) as the femme fatale and Banner as the dupe she bamboozles. The noire paranoid misogyny is firmly in place, which is also the noire terror of/fascination with female sexuality.

At the top of the page you’ve got Glazier’s nefarious boasting about how she collects men juxtaposed with the image of the glass guy frozen underneath the pond — entrapment imagery doesn’t get much less subtle. (Mantlo and Buscema subtly have Banner give us a thought bubble telling us that the statue looks horrified in case we couldn’t tell from looking at it.) Then, at the bottom of the page, Glazier comes on to Banner, who — courtesy of Buscema’s shaky drawing and some preposterous eyebrows — looks deeply uncomfortable. The caption is odd too: “He cannot resist. He can think of no reason why he should want to.” He’s presented as being both overpowered and as ambivalently acquiescing. The implication is that he should be able to think of a reason not to (like the guy in the pond, dumbass!) but he’s too busy thinking with his dick, or his eyebrows, or whatever.

Then we skip ahead a month, with Banner in his ridiculous white suit (connoting elegance? his captive status? the tail end of the 70s) whining about how he’s a kept man and he’s bored. So far, still noire, with Buscema trying lamely to create some sort of interesting light effect with the moon and the white and the interior glass, though mostly it ends up looking like they’re inside some sort of jello mold.

And then the noir coup de gras, where the conniving evil bitch destroys the douchey guy, to the horror/delight of all.

Except that, as you can see, the grace doesn’t coup (or something like that.) The vampiric consummation doesn’t drain the victim; instead it causes him to improbably and greenly tumesce. The mark walks out, the man walks in, and puts the uppity woman in her place. The masochistic sex fantasy of noire is violently rent like Banner’s stupid white suit, to be replaced by the sadistic violent empowerment fantasy. It’s sort of like rape/revenge with the male rapist replaced by a female succbus and the female revenger replaced by a big green steroidal phallic lump.

The gendered reading is fairly obvious, and even unavoidable. But I think there’s a genre reading as well. Again, we start with noire; which is linked to sophistication, sex, and adulthood. And then suddenly we switch up and have Hulk babbling in his infantile dialect and brutishly smashing up all the high art he can see.

Glazier even explicitly explains that she was trying to catch Hulk in the moment of transformation for her collection; she wanted to turn the comic-book monster into a gallery piece, as if she’s some sort of acquisitive feminized Lichtenstein. But of course it doesn’t work, and moments after she insults Hulk’s intelligence, his gargantuan bulky authenticity smashes the effete museum to smithereens. Your puny art world institutions cannot contain team comics! “Stupid to build a house out of glass!” as Hulk says.

As I’ve mentioned before, Bart Beaty in Comics vs. Art argues that in discourses around high art and comics, comics are always already feminize; they are the weak thing that high art masters. However (as, again, I’ve noted before) masculine and feminine are a bit more fluid in these discussions than Beaty suggests. Here, in particular, higher art (both as gallery art and as the relatively sophisticated pulp genre of noir) are presented as feminine, and the children’s, and even child-like, art-form of comics is presented as victoriously hyper-masculine. Bruce Banner is trying his darndest to find a different, more highbrow narrative, where he gets to have sex (he doesn’t know why he shouln’t) and has cool lighting and is placed in galleries. But Hulk comes along and stomps all that hoity toity namby pampy crap.

The narrative comes across, then, as an extended effort to excuse, or justify, it’s own helpless comic book crappiness. Sal Buscema’s efforts to convey grace, or even style, are utterly ridiculous, foiled by clumsy drawing, clumsy layout, and banal imagination (is that a gallery or a gym?) But grace and sophistication are, we learn through the story, evil, meretricious and not to be trusted. Thick, awkward, clumsy, stupid — those are big, manly qualities you can count on. Fuck high art…or, you know, don’t fuck it. That’s way too dangerous. Just smash.

Julia Serano on Call Out Culture

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I have an interview with Julia Serano up today at the Atlantic, in which we talk about her wonderful new book Excluded, which you should all go out and buy right now.

The interview got cut a little for space reasons, so with the Atlantic’s kind permission, I decided to post the excised bit over here.

You talk a bit about call out culture and where you see problems with it. So, thinking about the Hugo Schwyzer mess in particular, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you think activist communities can be inclusive and open to difference, while still being able to respond to or deal with folks who actually are undermining their goals or exploiting them.

The chapter in which I talk about call-out culture is the last chapter and it’s called “Balancing Acts.” And I talk about how activism needs to be a balancing act between the fact that we each have our own issues and concerns and agendas, and then there are other activists coming from other perspectives who have their own issues and concerns and agendas. And the best thing for us to do moving forward is to create intentionally intersectional spaces where we both talk and listen to one another, and where we give people the benefit of the doubt.

I think that can happen on a very conscious level, especially in smaller situations.

It becomes a real problem on the Internet. Just because, as you pointed out, there are bad actors, and people who are either going to be selfish and only talk about their own issues, or who are purposefully undermining other people. And you usually can’t police who shows up at your blog post, or who comments or who doesn’t.

As I was writing that chapter, I knew that it was a very complicated issue. But I do think it’s important to try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know for myself, that I grew up in straight mainstream culture that didn’t really have a feminist analysis and that was very anti-queer. And I learned what I’ve learned as an activist slowly but surely, and I went through various stages of probably being messed up in my perspective, just because I was new. And I think that we need a way to give people who are new to activism a chance to learn, and to be given the benefit of the doubt if they say something that other people think is problematic, as long as they’re willing to listen to others and learn moving forward.

The other reason that I bring it up is that a lot of exclusion that happens within feminist and queer movement comes from having some minority member of the group being called out under the assumption that who they are is inherently oppressive. So there’s a long history of trans women in feminist and queer spaces being accused of having transitioned in order to have heterosexual privilege, or being accused of upholding heteronormative ideas of what women are and so on. So that was another concern of mine.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Noah

Utilitarian Review 10/5/13

Hulk Is The Strongest Flower There Is!

Utilitarian Review 9/28/13

Whose Chicago?

People Who Make Art…Shouldn’t Appropriate Hulk!

Julia Serano on Call Out Culture