MAKE ME A SUPERMAN:

A Second Life for MAKE ME A MAN



MAKE ME A MAN, a webwork that I created in 1997 revealed the striking social similarities of gender antagonism in both the cultures of the New Guinea Highlands and those of the West. These civilizations are founded on the learned nurtured behavior of men at the expense and alienation of women. In this blog entry, I take Barack Obama as my subject, examining the many ways that his upbringing radically diverged from the process of man-making I investigated in MAKE ME A MAN. I propose that Obama's feminine attributes contribute to his success and popularity and make him a Superman.



In the prior work, I employed Herdt's four precepts for Initiation into Manhood:
Enter through the clitoris gate, reserved for males only.
Purge the female stuff absorbed from the mother.
Emulate mothers' reproductive/nurturing powers.
Muscles are an emblematic icon of seminal continence.1

Both cultures acknowledge the physiological superiority of women because of their ability to give birth.

My identity may begin with the fact of my race but it didn't end there.2



It is men who must be molded and configured into ideal masculinity.



Contrary to the concepts of gender explored in MAKE ME A MAN, Barack Obama's whole evolution, the influences of his youth, and his relationship with his Mother are all antithetical to the precepts outlined in MAKE ME A MAN.





A Sambia boy squats in a sweet potato garden. Upon his initiation into manhood at the age of seven he is taken away from his mother. The gardens will become polluting to him and he will be trained to be a warrior.



An older man bleeds an initiate's nose during the first purging of female pollution from maternal contact.



Women's fluids, essences, and powers are dangerous and inimical to men.



Throughout my life I have been blessed to be surrounded by strong compassionate women–from my own mother, sisters and grandmother to my wonderful mother-in-law and beautiful wife. - Barack Obama



What is significant is the denial of the affective relationship of a boy with his mother. - Freud



Boy identification role learning has little to do with the relationship with a father. - Freud



You have me to thank for your eyebrows. Your father had these little wispy eyebrows that don't amount to much. - Barack Obama's Mother





To achieve manhood men must conquer the feminine, their "Jewish anima"- Jung



The male has a wet-nursing responsibility.



..a man can never be too busy to know his own people. - Barack Obama's Granny



I knew as well that traveling down the road to self respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border. - Barack Obama



Without power for the group, a group larger even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. - Barack Obama



Initiates are taken to the birth house to build a sense of maleness, where the first three Sambia initiation stages are collective, a group impact having psychological effect.



Bravery, hatred of any weakness, of flinching before pain or danger has been the selected key to masculine behavior.



The constant, crippling fear that I didn't belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn't I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment. - Barack Obama



If you want to grow into a human being you're going to need some values. - Obama's Mother



No one could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association, the code that would unlock our blessings had been lost long ago, buried with the ancestors beneath a silent earth. - Barack Obama



That great clot of genital fluid in the brain. - Ezra Pound



But your brains, your character, you got from him. - Barack Obama's Mother





The HERO, the man who overcomes the TERRIBLE MOTHER breaks the teeth out of her VAGINA, makes her into a WOMAN.



Pair marriage is a monopolistic masculine achievement of ownership. - W.G. Sumner 1963 Social Darwinism.



The evolutionary capitalist male has a passive, perfectly acculturated wife. -William Graham Sumner War and other Essays 1911.



The resigned passive wife is an indication of successful acculturation.







1. All quotes in this artwork, unless otherwise attributed, are from Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

See Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manhood_Manifesto

SHOE-FIELD: Our Fate is on Our Feet

1

When did you buy your shoes?
Where did you buy your shoes?
Why did you buy your shoes?
What do you use your shoes for?
How happy are you with your shoes?



"The conception, execution and function of the art of any cultural system can be considered to be a subsystem, equally integral to the growth of that culture."
— DorothyWashburn

Here is my reflection on the difference in cultural attitudes about shoes between the American culture and the Iraqi culture. In this entry, I have juxtaposed images from my earlier work, with recent images culled from the headlines in the wake of Muntadhar al-Zeidi's shoe-attack on U.S. President Bush. It is my intention to allow the compared images, and the formal and conceptual connections between them, to speak for themselves.



During my collaboration (1977-79) with archeologist Dorothy Washburn on the study of Native American pottery designs circa 1000 CE, I came upon an image of a ceramic foot effigy. It was wearing a sandal style of Mexican origin, unique in its southwestern burial.



This foot find triggered the artwork, SHOE FIELD, ongoing for 16 years and still going strong. I produced five interactive installations and four artist's books about people and their shoes and about people and other peoples' shoes. The first interactive installation took place in 1982 at Berkeley Computer Systems.

Hanging on display in the storefront window were continuous computer forms of Dr. Washburn's research data about Native American pottery designs. I had graphically transcribed their research codes and had also transferred images of ancient Native American sandals directly onto the computer forms.







Hanging nearby in the store window was a computer analysis of 44 pairs of my shoes, with hand drawn illustrations. This artwork appeared on similar continuous computer forms as the above-discussed sandal images. The 44 pairs of shoes themselves were displayed on shoe racks.





The participants each received a number according to the order of their entry into the computer store.



The participants then put their best foot forward ready to engage in an unusual art event. Taking turns, each participant sat on a camel-like chair and selected either a velvet pillow, a cobbler's shoe form, or a plywood board upon which to pose their shoed foot for a Polaroid snapshot. Then each person went to the computer to answer the shoe questions.



I compiled into book format the participants' photos and their verbal statements (reasons why they were wearing those shoes that evening).



By quantifying the foot position, the chosen footrest and the shoe answers, I calculated the person's shoe “charge” value. This "charge" represented the degree of difference between that individual's “shoe-psyche” and the average “shoe-psyche” of the whole group.



I used each participant's "charge number" and the number corresponding to their entry into the computer store, to execute the Electric Field Theory program that generated the Shoe-Field Plot.



Shoe participant #44 was calculated as having charge "–1". The minus number is indicated on the diagram by the empty center of his non-interactive shoe-psyche plot. Shoe wearer
#44 had not answered any shoe questions. This negative response was counter-balanced by other popular characteristics, i.e. closed-laced shoes and extension of both feet on the plywood board.



a) INTERACTIVE SHOE-FIELD PLOT
b) PARTICIPATING SHOES
c) SHOE CHARGES



In another incarnation of my shoe works (1988), Shoe-Field, was programmed to be viewed on a personal computer. Participants selected a shoe they would like to interact with from the previously documented shoes.





[The text above says, "YOUR SHOE PSYCHE READING IS: Denotes ambivalence between uncritical companionship and disdain for lack of understanding. Keep a watchful control on emotional relationships."]

I documented the personal computer program into an interactive electronic book format. I titled it "YOUR FATE IS ON YOUR FEET". The participants answered questions on the computer about their own shoes and then selected a pair of shoes with which they would like to interact. The printer scrolled out a plot of the interaction that changed the configuration and a personalized "shoe-psyche" reading.

1. "With 16 severances: Bush and the shoes 2." The pun is that the Arabic word for severances shares a root with a synonym for shoes. (Adam)

The Once Animated Soul of Bernard Madoff

Who is his Ancient Double?

What are his Words of Power?

Visitors participating in my computer assisted interactive installation "The Animated Soul: Gateway to your Ka"(1991), would have found their own answers to these questions.

Your Ka is your double. Everyone has a double. The double has a designated purpose in life. It is assigned "words of power" that can expedite this purpose and yield power in the present. In ancient Egypt the "words of power" had the magical formula for carrying out wishes and needs for a safe journey into the next world.

Following rituals laid out in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I mapped the rites for attaining everlasting life into a Hypercard computer program.

Participants' selections of western icons, depicted on the computer screen, determined their personal pathway to eternal existence. The participant, before making the transformation into a living soul, must confess a declaration of innocence (a "negative confession") before the god Osiris in a court of judges.



Bernard Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was recently arrested by the F.B.I. He is accused of using funds paid by new investors to pay existing investors for what they thought were reliable returns. He perpetrated a Ponzi scheme; a $50 billion global fraud, that has impacted thousands of investors and financial institutions worldwide.



What selections would Bernie Madoff have made as a participant in "The Animated Soul"? Under the guidance of the soul-bird (a human headed hawk), what choices would lead him to his ancient double?








^ Click on image for clearer view.

It would be difficult for Madoff to protest his innocence since he'd already confessed to his employees (his two sons) and to the F.B.I.

Vagrancy Among the Shadows of Love

The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg


The virtual world of the puppet theater recently became notorious with production of a cold war crime of espionage and execution. Puppeteer Vit Horejs of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater staged "The very sad Story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg…" about the couple who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians during World War II. 1



Horejs' conversion of real life drama into a puppet theater reminded me that I, too, once played the dalang (puppeteer) when I documented participants acting out the ways in which they coped with their intense experience of sexual jealousy in my interactive performance "Coping with Sexual Jealousy "(1984). I adapted their responses into the framework of an Indonesian "wayang" (shadow) play to create a computer-assisted interactive installation entitled "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love"(1993).



In a Hypercard computer program I combined imagery from Jungian mythology and Aubrey Beardsley prints with clips of incidents of sexual jealousy from TV soap operas. The presentation was accompanied by gamelan inspired music composed by Michael McNabb. Participants were able to investigate the sources of their jealousy, and their methods of coping with their feelings by answering a series of questions at the computer in the interactive program. The "shadow" in the title refers to the observation by Psychiatrist Dr. Ayala Pines, consultant for the art project, that jealousy reflects or is the shadow of the initial reason for the chemical attraction between people.



In "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love" I selected shadow puppets of Javanese Majapahit Empire heroes that related to the attraction icons of desire, respect, attention, security and faithfulness. The puppets are juxtaposed with their humorous American counterparts.



Morton Sobell's recent confession prompted me to reconceptualize Vit Horejs' puppet characters as virtual Indonesian shadow puppets reminiscent of those I used in "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love". In this piece I metaphorically use the computer screen as a scrim upon which my characters cast their shadows of ambivalent love.



I have re-appropriated the set of categories from my earlier artwork; "Desire", "Respect", "Attention", "Security", and "Faithful" and their respective shadow puppet figures in order to arrange the players, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; their sons Michael and Robert; Morton Sobell; and Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, according to their ambivalent love attributes:

DESIRE
Julius' desire was to serve Communism and the Soviet Union. His love was reversed against his wife, Ethel, and their two sons when he would not reveal any of his co-conspirator's names.

RESPECT
Morton Sobell's silence about his espionage activities showed his respect for Julius. Then, in his confession, after fifty-seven years, he reversed this love by betraying that he and Julius had indeed been spies.

ATTENTION
Michael and Robert Meeropol, sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were deprived of parental attention when neither parent would cooperate with the prosecution. They were ten and six at the time of their parents' execution. Although betrayed, the sons have consistently supported their parents by repressing their anti-love ambivalence.

SECURITY
David Greenglass, Ethel's brother who at first exonerated his sister from any involvement in the case, later reversed this love with false testimony made by his wife, Ruth, that convicted Ethel. This move secured his own wife's freedom and her love for him.

FAITHFUL
Ethel, faithful to her husband, chose the stoical path in balancing blind loyalty to him with accusations from her brother. She made no compromise that would have allowed her to live and be a mother to her two young sons.



Their last words in betrayal to their sons were: "Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience."



1. To briefly summarize the Rosenberg's story, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American Communists who were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, in particular, to pass secrets about the Atomic Bomb to the Soviet Union. They were subsequently executed. Morton Sobell, an American engineer, was also a former spy for the Soviet Union. He was found guilty of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Sobell was released in 1969. He had claimed to be innocent for over 50 years, but on September 11, 2008, in an interview with the New York Times, he admitted to spying for the Soviets, implicating Julius Rosenberg as well. His confession exonerated Ethel Rosenberg's role in the affair.

higgledy-piggledy: The Transgenic Bagel Redux

A BAGEL FLAVORED BEAT ROCKS



1. Art and archeological historians have uncovered definitive proof of the existence of the bagel in Middle Kingdom Egypt, pictured in a hieroglyphic frieze dating to 1837 B.C.E.



2. Scientists have recently discovered that their earlier theories concerning the gene’s ability to impart specific traits to an organism were too simple and specific to account for the many exceptions to the currently conventional gene rules.

These two seemingly disparate developments have led me to reengineer my earlier work, The Transgenic Bagel (1993 -1996).



From 1993 to 1996 I produced, in several phases, The Transgenic Bagel, a parodic interactive artwork in which I hypothesized that a person could acquire new personality traits by eating a recombinant DNA bagel.

In this work I used the bagel as a model through which to explore the recombinant gene-splicing process. I created a “bagel plasmid chimera” – a bagel that carried within it certain ingestible, and thus transferable traits.



I researched animals said to bear traits such as “obedience” or “impetuousness” or "authority" and with a hypodermic needle virtually extracted the trait gene from the animal. The gene was hypothetically processed for preparation of a genetic formula that was injected into a section of a bagel (bagel fragment DNA). The “bagel fragment DNA” was subsequently smeared with a cream cheese “mortar” and inserted (annealed) into the cleavage site of another bagel (the bagel plasmid vector), from which a same-sized section had been removed.

In the early 1990s, scientists believed that a gene trait excised from an animal host was inherent to that single trait gene. Now, fifteen years later, the identity of the gene is challenged. Other molecules clinging to the DNA strand comprising the gene can produce different characteristic traits from the same gene.



From 1994 onwards, in the computer assisted interactive versions of the Transgenic Bagel, participants were situated in a virtual “Bagel Casino” wherein they played the one-armed bandit slot machine hoping to win their preferred “Noahsomal DNA trait gene”. To win the trait gene, the players needed three identical animals in a row from among images of thirteen mythical animals that resided in Noah’s “Virtual Ark”— hypothetically the first gene pool.

Scientists now realize that gene expression operates under the “law” of higgledy-piggledy.1 Current genetic research has determined that the law of higgledy-piggledy has joined in the genetic game.

These new scientific developments have made me realize in my artwork, the idea that when an unmatched combination of animals appears in the slot machine’s windows, each animal representing its own specific trait, that their combination can be read as representing a complex that produces a single genetic trait.



In the fall of 2008, I had the chance to read some essays by undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.2 For the assignment, each student was told to choose an animal and write a story about it. Many students chose animals similar to those I had chosen to be the animal residents for Noah’s “Virtual Ark”.

Little did the students know that they had returned to play the one-armed bandit in my Bagel Casino.

Three students chose to write about dogs, thus creating a similar “window line-up” with my own (Spaniel). Whereas I had attributed the trait “lovable” to the Spaniel, these students identified the traits “tolerant”, “obedient”, and “technically strategic” in their dogs.



In the original Transgenic Bagel the lion carried the “authority” gene trait. But when the student got the lion in the Bagel Casino, she claimed that lion instead carried the trait of the “male chauvinist pig”. Thus, this student pointed me to the recognition that an individual trait gene could code for two distinct traits in the lion.

1. New York Times, December 11, 2008. Dave Itzkoff byline.
2. In a conversation with Tom Bates, he mentioned that Sir John Herschel, the esteemed astronomer, in his desire to have a universe that was eternal and unchanging, used the term “higgledy-piggledy” to describe Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection.
3. I read samples from the diagnostic essay from a Berkeley, Fall 2008 class, “Reading & Writing about the Visual Experience” in which each student selected an animal to write about.