September 4th Notes

September 4th.
Class notes.
(Sorry for the tardiness)

Ellen: The readings today were preemptive of our discussions that will take place on September 11^th

Amy: Let’s hear some reactions to the blog posts. What themes arose and what was made present? 

Jess: Seems most people stuck close to home, in the sense that they found something that they tended to ignore every day. This is particular interesting in terms of the graffiti. 

Amy: Let’s discuss the graffiti. 

Kelly: This graffiti is slightly different in the sense that it is not directly in public view. It’s on a practice wall and you have to go off the road and through some brush to get there. Is it serving the same purpose as a memorial if it’s not in plain view of the public eye? 

Derek: The fact that it is graffiti makes it not permanent. But it seems that the sentiment is asking for permanency in the memory of the artist.

Jennifer: Could this be linked with the cling on window memorial on cars?

Jess: The vagueness of the messages makes it more personal as well as more private.

Derek: Where you find graffiti speaks to what you’re calling attention to. There is an old factory that once served the purpose of making goods and exporting them. But now, abandoned, its purpose is to house this graffiti.

Amy: The presence of performance. The performance of creating the art is part of the performance. Not just the end result. Requirement of the audience to fill in the story for the vagueness of the messages.

Ellen: The graffiti could be in a gallery of a mock of graffiti. The fact that these are not in a more public space is an interesting notion of what the artist wants from the memorial. Performative quality seems shockingly objective.

Jennifer: Memorials that were being used, recreated. The graffiti is acting like this in that sense, such as Jess’s and Sarah’s finds.

Ellen: It is difficult to find a memorial that isn’t immediately attached to some type of morbidity. Is there a sense of failure with these memorials, in the sense that we admit to overlook most of these?

Derek: There’s a flip side. These memorials have an opportunity. Wanted the Hoagy memorial to be Tom Waits when I saw it from a distance. But since I had my phone I was able to look up and learn about the man this memorial was commemorating. Somebody at sometimes knew this person and knew how they were and if we take in the invitation, we memorialize them.

Andrea: All literature that survives is a type of memorial. Questions arise like who is this person? What is this ballad?

Jess: What do memorials actually mean and how does that interact with my life? It takes a person’s life and elevates them to a person of importance, does that person they created reflect the person they were. Was this person a fan of pizza? What were the weird parts of them that made them a person? What are we trying to accomplish?

Amy: As in Derek’s post it’s not about the person, it’s about the memory. There is an acceptable way to say ‘I’m not interested in people knowing about my gluten allergy.’

Whitney: Is there a danger in memorials that try and by TOO accessible? The digital touch screen verse the book of names of soldiers who’ve died.

Sara: Was it too specific?

Whitney: It seemed artificial and contrived.

Jess: Memorials aren’t for the dead, they are for the living. Death is not like the touch screen.

Sara: The new Korean War memorial is a nod to the Vietnam memorial. Instead of names, though, it has images. The difference was my mother was captured by the realism, but I was horrified. Found it disturbing due to the difference of goals. One was doing work to end war, while one was glorifying it.

Ellen: 9/11 and what is the proper way to engage with a memorial. We are in a different era of how we interact with memorials we can look it up rather than going to the memorial. The holocaust memorial is one that is very demanding of the audience and charged with a lot.

Dorothy: My father runs a black history museum that has neck braces from their family. And whenever a kid is being too loud he will put him in a neck chain.

Amy: University of Maryland performance where they marked out the size of a slave ship and fitted it with people.

Jess: When spaces are not charged with history, it almost does more. When it’s presented in a natural environment, it changes everything.

Amy: The idea of these monuments doing work. These memorials have a job that they either succeed at or fail at. Keep in mind that be it the Hoagy piano man or Simon building, they are all requiring a performance of the audience.

Jennifer: The entrance of crown hill cemetery has a list of rules. On Labor Day, there were people everywhere tending and taking care of the monument. You don’t know you broke the rules, until a rule is broken.

Dorothy: Doing things incorrectly in cemetery reminds me of a cemetery where you trip over mounds.

Jess: There was a big controversy over a big cemetery that opened itself for a fall festival on Halloween.

Jennifer: in the yellow papers, gossip was flourishing in my old town. Specifically for people who walked their dogs in the cemetery. But that’s all anyone did in the cemetery. Can you undermine what the memorial is now used for? Can you demand respect?

Ellen: In theatre, the line is interesting in the sense that we go from Dramatist to actor to audience. Debord’s attempt to define spectacle, there is looseness around agency. Debord focused on the media and was aware of that.

Amy: What is gained by seeing spectacle not as a series of images, but in social relationships? Trying to understand spectacle in a new way.

Dorothy. Spectacle has the opportunity to evolve through time.

Ming. Debord; point 10 = contrast. We get implicated in the social relationship.

Derek. Is there something in that the potential is socially transformative of spectacle? The creation of an imagined community through watching. The performance of Clint Eastwood talking to an invisible Obama, how we construct realty verses constricted reality.

Ellen: This text is iconic in performance studies. It’s worth remembering this is Roach’s second book. How tentative and tenuous is this argument? The problems it would’ve run into pre-tenure.