While on a visit to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin I came across this interesting juxtaposition. Inhabiting this beautiful, mid-century slightly modernist department store building was a furniture and decorating business, The Wood Sampler. The shop was closed, but my company and I peered inside to the space. I was interested in how the aesthetics of varying types of nostalgia were coming through. This store front was a sign of development and modernization to this historic downtown area at one time. Now, probably about 30 or 40 years later, this wood furniture store moves in, selling relics that simulate (or should I say fabricate) an idyllic, pastoral perspective on family life and domestic spaces.
Foreword: In the following paper I analyze specific components of the Storycorps project. Storycorps is an oral history project sponsored by and broadcast on National Public Radio, NPR. While the project is not specific to families, a large portion of the interviews surround issues pertaining to kinship. To learn more about the project, visit this link.
Moments of constructed family norms in Storycorps interviews: Introduction
In the article titled “Is there a family? New Anthropological views” the authors, Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako ask readers to reexamine the constructs of family life that are possibly hindering their family relationships. They call for an understanding of family “not as a concrete institution designed to fulfill universal human needs, but as an ideological construct associated with the modern state.”[1] This paper will analysis Storycorps, an oral history project which records interviews between two people for broadcast on public radio, and how it relates to social constructs of families and the agency of individuals in American society. I will focus specifically on those moments in the interviews when the constructs of family, what the participants think a “normal” family should be like, emerge from the conversations. How does the participant’s perception of the Storycorp project accompanied by the highly facilitated interview process foster these expectations? These moments in this specific ethnographic project reveal bigger systemic norms pervasive in American culture at large.
I have recently seen too much art and too many vids. Here are the highlights relevant to my research:
Hennesy Youngman: Art Thoughtz new video:
“IM ON THE INTERNET BITCH IM ON THE INTERNET BITCH IM FUCKING FAMOUS”
I am so obsessed. Hennesy is a persona created by Jayson Musson. Visit Jayson’s site here. Visit Hennesy’s youtube here.
MFA Student work: J.R. Uretsky
I recently saw an exhibit of mfa student work. I was especially interested in work by J.R. Uretsky. I checked out the website when I got home. It is a weird, engaging mix of excessive materials, family stuffs, gender, pop culture, etc.. I definitely felt some art kinship to the work. Here is one video I rocked hard to:
Not my most favorite song, kind of cliche, not so much edge, but I like the part in the beginning when she goes in to some of her characters.
Damali Abrams:
This weekend I went to the lecture Sonic Art and Activism: Exploring the ties between feminist art and popular music.The entire panel was great. Particularly relevant to my own research was panelist Damali Abrams . Her work deals with identity, culture, gender, race, more things, etc… She uses self-help videos, vlogging, popular (and un-popular) music, stickers, and more things in the work I have seen of hers. On her youtube, I found this video of her on the MTV show “Say What Karaoke” from the late 90′s and early 2000′s.
In the context of the rest of her work, this video is so poignant and complicated. It is almost hard to believe it is real. The racial undertones, sexualized comments, and over-all reality of the whole situation has left me curious. I used to watch and dance to this show all the time when I was a kid. I am still kind of in awe at how the mere re-contextualization of this clip changed the reading of this situation to one of extreme criticality.
