numérocinq

"Because something is happening

But you don't know what it is

Do you, Mister Jones?"

     -McLuhan, 105


Allan Kaprow - How To Make a Happening

i feel like there are multiple applications of this quote to Rasheed's talk. one way of looking at it is, there's literally this insane crazy ass subculture of voguing and pageant drag queen balls, something i was never exposed to until the Paris Is Burning viewing. so in this sense, yes, clearly something is happening and i am not aware of it, or at least i wasn't until a few days ago.

there's this world that exists, that has existed for so long, and i may never actually experience it, being a part of the crowd that hollers and pounds the runway when voguers drop to the beat, or one of the voguers themselves.

there's another way of drawing parallels between this quote and the talk - i was talking with one of the art history professors later about rasheed, and she told me how she'd never been into video art, she'd always been pretty turned off by the pervasive incomprehensiveness. 

to that i told her, the more incomprehensiveness, the more meaning there is.

or at least that's what i think.

in response to rasheed's 'incomprehensible' work, yeah it was weird, but there's so much more to be said. about how his work is a reaction to the perpetuating oppression blacks experience in america, how the founding idea of collage trickles down into all of his pieces to express the fragmentations and collisions of his identity

"Everyone is in the best seat. Everything we do is music. Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case."

-McLuhan, 119

he first talks about how he's like bell hooks, how both believe the "pedagogy lies in popular culture"

there's a lot to learn from what's being thrown at us again and again and again and again

yay warhol for showing us that there's no such thing as high and low art

i've always been a proponent for the idea that art is inherently democratic

audio, visual, whatever form

multimedia artists like rasheed set me alight

 (sorry if these few sentences are a bit banal, considering we're all in a new media class)

i've grown to the conclusion that rasheed-like artists are the most anti-social beings (according to McLuhan), if i could choose.

for the reason that they see how fluid art is, how ubiquitous it is, and they act as the laisons between these profound messages lessons meanings etc. that exist in our day to day, and they make stuff out of as much media as possible to convey to social beings just how much beauty (whatever that is) rests, jumps from, rolls about in our environment(s)

go rasheed

Some interdisciplinary artists and their work
10 Contemporary performance artists to know
Marina Abramovic: Advice to the Young