Out of Context Images

-
I sat down with Mumbo Jumbo, a pen, and notebook on my desk, and the entire internet at my disposal. Every cryptic image would become a specimen for examination, a good Atonist explanation. But what we called “Reed glasses” transformed into “Reed contacts” into “Reed lasik surgery”, and now I can’t unsee much of the thesis Reed presented us with. So let’s just get two birds stoned at once; why go down a time consuming rabbit hole of research when I could simply explain that the point of the images is contained within their awkwardness.

Including citations, a bibliography, newspaper excerpts, and the images, all make Mumbo Jumbo at a surface level appear something more like an academic text. This could be a conversation in and of itself of course, but images especially add to this. Usually you see them in the middle part of a non-fiction book or a history textbook, with added captions explaining what is being shown. However, Mumbo Jumbo lacks any captions and really the connection between the text and the images is pretty hard to pull together. I mean, you’d really have to go digging through the bibliography to piece together anything. 


With the Mu’tafikah plot, Reed makes the point about how art museums are a place for “art detention”, placing meaningful parts of culture in a cold and disconnected context. Non-western art, particularly African and Asian art, has been stolen and appropriated. The notecards simply tell the purpose of the object and a general area of origin, as if it were a plant rather than a piece of a dynamic culture. They become “cryptic” artifacts of a dark continent to be explicated by pseudo-academic, chin-stroking audience. The art has lost its original meaning, placed in a totally out-of-context, nonsensical way.

The image in the novel gives us the same feeling - they are probably meaningful images, but they are out of context, placed randomly and without any proper explanation. Maybe the odd god-like figure before chapter 3 has some meaning, but it’s not like you’ll get to know what it is. “Get what it feels like now?”, Reed might say, flipping the tables once again. Perhaps this makes us question what we really learn from images in history textbooks and museums when learning about Africa - are we getting the full picture? What information are we missing? How would it feel if Western history was presented in this way?




Comments

  1. Elizabeth TFebruary 26, 2020 at 6:33 PM

    Huh. I didn’t think of it that way before, but you’re almost certainly right. Doubtless, if we did go search up each of the images in Mumbo Jumbo, find their source, and do extensive research about the context they were created in, the images would take on a much less “mysterious” tone – and probably would relate more clearly to the story Reed is telling. But the entire point is that we don’t go search up those images. We don’t understand, and we see it as weird. We don’t put in the effort, any more than, in a “world museum,” we don’t actually understand the cultural contexts that created the things we’re seeing. We see those images – and those cultures – as weird, mystical, or strange, because we don’t put in the effort to learn more. Reed just brings that paradigm into the light.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Grace JuhnFebruary 29, 2020 at 1:17 PM

    This is a really interesting take on how people learn about history and other societies. I think learning about someone else's culture is incredibly difficult and so much more than just searching up picture of artifacts and trying to analyze the meaning behind this or that. Artifacts do carry a lot of meaning for the people who have actually been immersed in the history.

    I think that its good history teachers put a lot of energy into teaching us about different cultures throughout history but I've often wondered "what if the lesson Im getting out of the class is drastically different than the actual context". I don't think theres a better way for students to learn about culture than what we do in school, however, I think that there is always more than the superficial analyzation that we conduct in school.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Sex and Death": Evolving Power and Gender Dynamics

-
“Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable,” (4). Other than their status as the two (nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life, sex and death are a jarring combination. What’s being implied as the connotation? Repression? Violence? - I think it’s both, and both ideas get explored more throughout the novel. The novel shows an ugly underside of American life, particularly in the realm of women’s lives, marriage, and sex, as well as the progression of feminism and shifting power dynamics, showing the first of inklings of sexual liberation and setting the stage for a more postmodern idea of sex. I said “(nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life” earlier, but in the setting of the novel it is truly unavoidable, practically a burden for the women. Mother’s relationship with father, Evelyn Nesbit’s sexuality and relationships, the little girl’s existence in the Lower East Side, and Emma Goldman’s spelling out of the economics of marriage are all examples of the inescapabl...
Read more

Final Thoughts: A Post in Four Chapters

-
I. The Intersection of Arts and Cultures With the end of the semester comes reflection, and after spending four months reading a variety of literature, I have a lot to reflect on. Particularly in the last weeks, as we finished The White Boy Shuffle and watched Sorry to Bother You. On top of that, I watched a film called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (which is not black media, but is connected in many ways to The White Boy Shuffle), and read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” in class. And all of these things have been connected, leaving me with similar questions. And the way I’ve consumed all of these things is deeply affected by my own life, but they’ve also affected how I’ve gone about living my life. And they will continue to do so. So in honor of the film Mishima, here’s is a four-part sweeping comparison of these artworks and a contemplation of their impact. As Gunnar increasingly takes suicide more seriously, he reads a lot of Japanese literature, courtesy of Yoshiko. He r...
Read more

Esther and Holden: A story

-
As the composer Igor Stravinsky said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit,”. This is at least how I, and undoubtedly some of you guys, felt about this project. You’re given a pretty limited set of requirements for what you can write, established characters, setting, et cetera. But within those limits, I found it all of a sudden a lot easier to write something. The combinations and possibilities were extremely fascinating. My story is from Esther’s perspective ten years later, in 1963, when she’s a writer and return to New York City. She meets Holden and they get to know each other a bit. It’s a story that looks at both of them ten years on, but now in the context of the 1963 political crises and culture (although part of the story is that things haven’t changed that much yet). My goal was to follow Esther’s thoughts over two days with Holden, and see where it goes. It's titled In Open Air, sort of "the opposite...
Read more