[-empyre-] "a feminist data visualisation is one that begins to first unearth and re-navigate assumed meanings"

Thu Jul 7 06:59:22 AEST 2016

Lee Mackinnon writes, 

" I might contest the idea that what happens in the mind or in semiotic application (whether in mathematics or language) could be distinguished from somatic experience. I think this is erroneous and disingenuous considering the context of this discussion! 

Kay O' Halloran (2009) notes that, 'The semiotic construal of thought in written form permitted the study of ideas and the hierarchical development of knowledge'. It is the hierarchical development of knowledge that has been problematic rather than semiotic forms per se, which are extremely effective, complex, and even beautiful.

For me, a feminist data visualisation is one that begins to first unearth and re-navigate assumed meanings- an exploration of technics that always begins and ends with the bodies whose presence has been overwritten, or written out of these hierarchies of knowledge, or forms of production. “  http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009164.html <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009164.html>   — Lee Mackinnon 

For me this definition directly folds back to Erin Leland’s new project on the iterations of the apparition of Fatima through a cascade of historical and living  bodies, via a reproduction and recasting of furniture as sets http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009144.html <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009144.html> 

It also brings to mind, forcefully, a show I just saw a few months ago by Yuki Kihara  https://shigeyukikihara.com <https://shigeyukikihara.com/>.

Yuki Kihara has recently created a photographic and video installation, A Study of a Samoan Savage— on view at the Orange County Museum of Art earlier this year. Here’s a link the work as shown also at the Auckland Art Gallery, http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/22711/a-study-of-a-samoan-savage-nose-width-with-vernier-caliper <http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/22711/a-study-of-a-samoan-savage-nose-width-with-vernier-caliper>

The work has relevance for the question of the uses of photography as metrics, and the so-called discipline of anthropometry, to say the least.  More, Yuki Kihara relentlessly generates new territories of resistance to these uses as modes of oppression in their very core operations. Thus she does not ‘represent’ or even ‘map’, but brilliantly, manifests the savagery against the purported ‘savage’ body and mind. 

I should note that I asked Yuki to join us as a guest on this July forum, but she had to decline. In her absence I’ll quote from her exhibition catalog, “YUKI KIHARA: A Study of A Samoan Savage”, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, 27 February - 22 May 2016.  Fa’anofo Lisaclair Uperesa  (University of Hawai’i) writes:

“Throughout the exhibition, artist Ioane Ioane is depicted as the mythical demigod, Maui. In one group of photographs, he is shown being measured, using some of the tools that were standardized as part of the quest toward bodily measurement spearheaded by Franz Boas of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the early development of physical anthropology…These practices of scientific bodily measurement were later carried to different parts of the Pacific by Columbia graduate and AMNH physical anthologist Louis Sullivan, whose work ahas also inspired this critical and creative re-reading…Sullivan provided real and would-be anthropologists with a handbook that was meant to help standardise data collection carried out by different parties (1928)….

“In these photographs [by Yuki Kihara]…like the early photographs from Sullivan’s research, also included in the exhibition, Maui is shown nude so that every inch of his body is made averrable for viewing. That he is without clothing serves a double meaning: in context, it marks him as a scientific specimen, but it also calls forth the problematic interpretations of dress and undress in which the lack of clothing for subjects of the Pacific served also as a marker of their native and subordinate status to European onlookers. Yet Maui is no passive specimen: he looks directly at the camera…

“In the Samoan context…native men (were )a threat to be managed; as leaders they were often brought into the governing state apparatus…or in extreme cases, became subjects of state violence.  Set opposite the supposedly compliant ‘dusky maiden’, men remained a problem for colonial interests… in the present moment they are exalted as ruby and gridiron players…(as) acceptable and preferred post-colonial masculine expressions for Pacific Island men..around a warrior identity.

“This is the violence of (mis)recognitions that Kihara’s exhibition also addresses: who has the power to interpret or imagine these portrayals?…Is it possible to mediate these visions in new ways, on our own terms.. ? 

Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net

insta: naxqqsmash

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