Avant Garde Canon Part 2

In order to start the class with a "bang" I selected a variety of different visual art pieces, theater pieces, dances, films, and animation that I considered "avant garde" and juxtaposed the pieces in a slide show. The earliest pieces were from the very late 19th century and the latest pieces were very current. I specifically avoided musical examples, although music came along for the ride in a few examples. I asked the students to just watch the presentation and take note of interesting or striking aspects of the works.

I chose a very funky Betty Boop example that featured Cab Calloway and "The St. James Infirmary Blues." Music also accompanied the Merce Cunningham dance example, and there were a couple of genre-bending pieces. (Is this Living Theater piece song? Is it musical theater?)

The one striking piece that I included was Nicki Minaj's latest video, "Stupid Hoe." (It is NOT kid-friendly.)



The video is directed by Hype Williams who has a long dossier of hip hop videos, but has also started writing and filming major motion pictures, many of which have failed in the production process.

Williams' most successful videos use fish-eye lenses which distort the performer and he manipulates the speed of the film to make dance sequences jumpy, or simply distorted in time. (See his videos for Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott, for example.) But he also did the video for Coldplay's Viva la Vida which is a forgettable video for an unforgettable song.

What happens in the Nicki Minaj video is almost completely unprecedented in his earlier work. Yes, there are some similarities in color palette--an attribute that one commentator attributed to Williams' early interest in graffiti. But all of the other typical hip-hop signage is used with such an acute sense of self consciousness that the whole thing comes off as, well... avant garde.

It was especially interesting viewing the video in the immediate context of Andy Warhol's Marilyn, which has almost exactly the same color palette.



The video also includes references to Grace Jones, especially her album cover "Island Music" by the photographer Jean-Paul Goude.  Goude's work was avant garde in that he retouched and manipulated the photo before the digital ability to do so in order to create her impossible pose.



I also included Carolyn Schneemann's evocative photography which addresses gender identity and the roles of women in society. This photo is called "Up To and Including Her Limits."



Gertrude Stein was also featured in the presentation reading "If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso."

I have never been a fan of hip hop and I readily admit that I don't "get" a lot of the hip hop references and images in the video. I understand enough to get that it's a typical "diss" song against some unnamed rival (Lil Kim?) but beyond that I didn't get references to other videos. (I saw Madonna in "Express Yourself" instead of Amber Rose caged and eating bling. But that is my age, my gender, and my ethnicity speaking.) But I do get the references here to the avant garde, and I think they are intentional. There's the obvious Warhol colors, but there is also the huge furniture, reminiscent of the work of Robert Thierren:



The distorted female forms (like the faux yoga pose a la Grace Jones) felt provocative instead of erotic. The weakest image was the caged animal image. Yes, perhaps Minaj and Williams are poking fun at the stereotypical hip hop hunny, but it either isn't pumped up enough to really come off as satire, or it's just too tired altogether. (Grace Jones was also famously photographed in a cage.) MTV's Sam Lansky wrote in a letter to Nicki:

"When a parody of something is virtually indistinguishable from the thing being parodied, the whole point has a way of getting lost, and everything ends up just self-cannibalizing."

(Read his harsh critique of the video here.)


The different personae in the video were striking, especially the Japanese character that Minaj calls "Harajuku Barbie." This character references a very particular Japanese fashion sensibility which involves Japanese girls dressing in stereotypical western costumes such as "Gothic Lolita,"



or "Cute Lolita."



More on the "cuteness" of the avant garde later.

Popular and avant garde signifiers are packed into this short video cheek by jowl and there's much more to "unpack." After a first viewing in class (and before I said a word) a student commented that the video made him think that perhaps there really was indeed an avant garde canon--a set of shared pieces that are widely known, and in the Nicki Minaj/Hype Williams video, widely referenced.