stunning nonsense

Someone told me today of a current graduate student's work that is so cracked I'm just stunned: the student, a wealthy white woman, is planning to photograph a black man (whom she is paying, presumably, to model) lying on her dining room table with fried chicken on his body that she is sitting and eating.

I couldn't make this stuff up, folks. This is reportedly the enactment of a fantasy of hers. The crit is next week and I'm trying to figure out how to infiltrate it and bring along some black male friends. Let her elicit feedback from us.

This brings me back to a post I started to write last month and didn't finish because the text I wanted to quote hadn't been previously published elsewhere and I didn't want to keep picking on this particular photographer whose current work I despise, but this is part and parcel of the same cluelessness, it seems, so I'm going ahead and posting it now:

Recently, in two separate instances, I've noticed white people complaining that they just can't be as exploitative as they'd like or as they used to be. This one from Rolling Stone from an interview with the singer John Mayer:

Here is one of John Mayer's jokes: "Everyone thinks Brad Pitt has it great because he married Angelina Jolie. I think he has it terrible, because when Angelina Jolie is giving you a blow job, what do you tip your head back and think of to help you finish? You have nothing left -- just Jesus on a polar bear in the middle of the snow, saying, 'You greedy motherfucker, I've got nothing for you.'"

And another: "I'm not worried about how small my penis is -- I'm worried about how dark it is. I have a Dominican penis. My penis hit six home runs last year; my penis wears shoes without socks." Performing in June at the Comedy Cellar in New York, Mayer did a David Chappelle-esque routine that imagined white people being allowed to use the n word -- a blogger reported, out of context, that Mayer had used the offending word, and a brief media furor ensued.

So it's not surprising when Mayer says, "Everyone begs me not to do stand-up. Everyone connected to my well-being and on my payroll says stand-up is terrible. When I say, 'I'm doing stand-up tonight,' they hear, 'I'm going to start heroin.'" On some level, Mayer agrees -- but he's also sick of being forced to apologize for his unguarded comments. He leans close to my digital recorder and says, "Everybody right now in the world of entertainment is a pussy. A pussy," he says, drawing out the last word. "They're all so sensitive. What the fuck happened?"

And this one from a photographer whose offending work, now titled "The Panhandler Project," (with an estimated value per print of $1500 - 1,750) I blogged about in April, when I first saw it:

After years of neglect, American academic art culture embraced the less fortunate and sought, in its usual illusory fashion, to protect those who it believes are unable to do so for themselves. It was, and still is, an empty embrace with no real concrete protect, only linguitsic and representational rules intended to feign respect. Rather than making any actual change, there is only a correct way to speak and make pictures of women, non-Caucasians, those of diminished mental capacity, the homeless. Academics, artists included, seem particularly amenable to this rigid social code and capitulate to it without examining what such rules actually perpetuate....It has become routine to denounce images made of the homeless as exploitive, based on a predictable and unexamined political correctness.

This ethical and aesthetic dilemma provides the subtext of my recently completed Panhandler Project, a series of photographs and video documentation of 5 male panhandlers from Chicago, all of whom are homeless and African American, who I asked to model for me nude. My process was to randomly meet the men on the street, and through discussion, determine if they were willing to participate in the project. The compensation for spending the day with me was $100, lunch and dinner, new clothing, and a hotel room for the night. The hotel room was the location of the shoot. After the shoot, the model was interviewed and we discussed his reactions to the experience. The man then signed a model release, and was left to spend the night in the hotel. In the morning, I picked him up, paid him in cash, took him to breakfast, and dropped him off wherever he wanted to go. Video documentation took place through the entire photo shoot and into the evening until I left the hotel.

A sexually charged atmosphere permeates each shoot and The Panhandler Project is intended to engage the viewer in questioning notions of exploitation.

I'll stop there, though there's more. Oh, how condescending she is to her critics, among whom I definitely count myself. Where to even begin--I like how she didn't pay her subjects until after she'd elicited their presumably honest feedback and signatures. Tell me, if you were a black man on the street, and a white woman approached you to photograph you without your clothes on but wasn't going to pay you until the next day, wouldn't you tell her anything you thought she wanted to hear until the money was in hand? Was she kidding herself about why these men agreed to work with her? If she really wanted to open things up, why didn't she take her clothes off and let these men photograph her? I can't even--I don't even know what to say about it all. I know what my girl Adrienne would say, which is why I love her.

photo above by Carrie Mae Weems