What does it mean to "construct" an identity?
To construct an identity means to build who you are. Empower yourself with what you are, what you stand for, and what you aim for. Although the word construct can mean ‘build’, it doesn’t mean literally build yourself. Your identity comes with time. Sometimes we need time to determine who we are. We grow and we take ideas in, from birth we are assigned a stamp which determines what people will call us. Our last names can stand for nationality, background and how important you are.
How are the issues of looking/gaze, patriarchy, power, race, class, identity and manners presented in the works you see?
Power is shown by authorities, by voice, class and even background. I saw pictures of different classes of people, people in offices and people working cleaning windows. This all demonstrates different types of classes.
1. Larry Silver. Police Officer and Swan, 1990: This piece shows professional identity. Police officers have power, they’re seen to be scary and to be strict but this shows a soft side that isn’t always captured. It’s a police officer with a swan, swans are soft, white and elegant. Very ironic, that the police officer seems to be helping a swan.
2. Sandy Skoglund. A Breeze at Work, 1987: Work is a thing we all do. A lot of people work in offices 9-5, and they’re closed off from nature and the outside in these offices. This is ironic because Sandy brings a sense of nature into the office itself.
3. Dulce Pinzon. Bernabe Mendez (Spiderman), 2007: I personally loved this. Most people doing these hard jobs are undocumented immigrants who have to work hard to make ends meet. He is in a superhero costume because to someone he’s their hero. I loved the concept. The hard work being depicted through this photograph it reminds me of the saying, ‘not all heroes wear capes’.
4. Matthew Jenson. Another world, Passaic River with objects from the Passaic River, 2016: A very contaminated river close to home. Years and years of lack of care and human activities have caused all this debris that shouldn’t even be there to pile up. All these objects are foreign.
5. Tom Nussbaum. Family Totem, 2003/4: Reliance on community. The act of being on each other’s shoulders shows that we rely on one another as a whole. This can represent one community. Or society as a whole.
I have chosen these 5 different pieces because I liked how they looked aesthetically and after reading and analyzing, I knew they related to me in some way. Identity is who you are, what you look like, what food you like best, or how you talk. We focus a lot of self-identity but forget that there’s things outside of us that show you we are and what we believe in. The Larry Silver piece of the police officer and the swan was chosen by me because there’s a lot of problems that have risen up when it comes to police brutality. There are many movements in American such as ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’, and ‘NO MORE GUNS’. Police officers are people in authority, they enforce the law of the nation on its citizens. They watch out for bad guys, and sometimes they are the bad guys. I like this because it showed a soft side, a swan and a cop. It can be interpreted in different ways, a swan is seen as beauty so the beauty but the ugly. We don’t know exactly what the cop is doing too. The officer might be going to harm the swan, or he can also be on his way to help. It depicts a caring site, we like to think that something positive will happen. The swan can be a citizen who is stopped for whatever reason and then is scared as to what the outcome might be. A quote from Finkelstein in the Art of Self Invention is, “ It was his role to distinguish formal truth from the lived narrative, and the institutional fundamentals from the social and functional ones.” (Page 43) Officers have to get truth out when they’re handling different situations. What’s the truth, who’s the bad guy, who started the argument, what can happen if I can’t handle this? They have to put apart all social difference and handle situations in a fundamental lawful way.
The second piece I choose was A Breeze at Work by Sandy Skoglund. I think Americans spend a lot of time time at work. The usual typical work week is 40 years. A lot of people don’t have time to enjoy nature, to go out, to take a stroll, or do anything really. Life is so fast and they’re inside an office for most of it due to the fact we have to work to survive. In this picture she put leafs, signifying nature coming into the office instead of the people going out. There is a breeze, which is cool. It’s a cool breeze that refreshes the workers. In John Berger’s, it says, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” (Page 8) I think we have it embedded in our heads that we’re supposed to go to college, supposed to get a 9-5 in an office, that that’s the American Dream. If we’re stuck in an office for 8 hours of the day, we made it. Which is how we see life as. We see it as working at an office and getting good money. We believe in this, so therefore we see it as life.
The third piece by Dulce Pinzon called Spiderman is a true representation of what is going on a lot in America. Immigration is a big issue and we’re seeing a lot of arguments in the government and politics as to what to do about it. The major argument is that immigrants are criminals, rapist, and take our jobs, and don’t pay taxes. Although, this is a completely different topic this man cleaning windows in a hero to someone. Whether he’s working hard at a dangerous job to provide an education and home, as well as food to his family he is a hero. He sends $500 dollars a month to his family back in Mexico, he’s their hero. He is a hard working man just trying to provide for his family and whatever means necessary.
The 4th piece by Matthew Jensen represents environmental issues. He shows the Passaic river which has been abused for years by humans. We use it to throw our waste and to just get rid of whatever we want. There is so much garbage, it shows a small area of what we are doing to a whole world. These different items all represent a story of the landscape. It can show the history of the place. In John Berger, it says “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.” (Page 10) This shows how something can show a picture, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal representation. Pictures can show memories, the past, so we can compare it and remember how things were.
The 5th piece by Tom Nussbaum represents unity and community. People standing on each other’s shoulder is what a society should be. We have to identify as a whole, which we constantly forget we are all a community.
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