Author: Gabby Park

“Yeah, it’s Halloween, which means girls can dress slutty without seeming too slutty”, a girl once said.
–“Well, then you’re making it seem like all girls want to dress slutty and on Halloween, they seize that opportunity”.
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Hmm….What happened to the days where Halloween was about dressing up as your favorite Disney character and getting lots of candy from your friendly neighborhood parents?  For us college students, is this what the time-honored tradition of disguises and spooky treats have become– an occasion for debauchery, drinking, and gluttony?  Is this what everything becomes in college?

I would have to say that the statement about women and slutty clothing does seem to apply for a fair number of females in the university setting.  It, of course, does not help that most adult female costumes tend to be on the sexier side, with high-slit witches gowns, low-cut bar maid tops, extremely short and skimpy French maid outfits, and slinky Cruelle de Vil dresses.  What about our culture today generates this desire for women to become sexy whores on an occasion when they can be anything but?  When they can step outside the bounds of our heavily sexualized and sex-dependent mass culture to become an entity entirely removed from mediated societal norms?  Is this continuation of the push for sexy women ever going to stop?  Is it right?

The answer is that the sexualized women is not always right.  Of course, women have come such a long way in political as well as personal liberation, allowing for the open discussion and acceptance of sex and the sexualized female.  However, once that liberation becomes a means of exploitation, then that is where the line must be drawn.  And, I believe, on Halloween, this exploitation is more evident than ever.  It is true that as women, the choice always exists– we can be that fairy tale princess or we can be that half-naked Minnie Mouse.

For this Halloween, my friends and I decided to forgo the sluttiness this year and become Disney princesses.  With a party themed as the classic Disney Romances, we had friends who dressed as raggedy Cinderella, shy Christopher Robins, Giselle from Enchanted, Alice in Wonderland, bookworm Belle from Beauty & the Beast.  It was a nice change to see people fully clothed and having fun without the desire to seem as sexy or seductive, but merely cute and enchantinng.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing to be sexy or seductive.  I fully agree that women should always feel comfortable being sexy and seductive, that we have every right to be open about sex and sexuality.  But, perhaps, on Halloween, we can get away from the normal societal claims of the overly sexualized woman to return back to our childhood dreams of being Disney princesses*.

*It is acknowledged that Disney princesses are not always the ideal; this is another topic for another time.

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Gabby Park likes to eat and make short videos with her friends.

Andy Warhol was always considered to be a distant person. When people approached him, he flinched and backed away. When someone talked to him face-to-face, he hardly looked straight on into the person’s eyes. Whereas, during a conversation, one would gently touch the shoulder of his companion to emphasize a point, Warhol would whip out a camera and take that person’s picture. It was his way of showing affection. Yet, always being the recorder of an event creates distance between that person and the event itself. The photographer cannot ever be fully present at a party when they are constantly roaming around looking for people to photograph. But Andy was just that kind of guy.

Even in his art, there is always a sense of removal and distance, almost a sense of clinical observation. The subjects are subjects themselves, with no embellishments or extravagance. The images of Andy Warhol in the Warhol Snapshots exhibition in UMMA are not the typical, iconic images of his career. There are no silk screens of Campbell’s soup cans or Marilyn Monroe. There are no Brillo boxes. Instead, there are Polaroids and silver gelatin prints of the everyday experience of being Andy Warhol.

After being nearly fatally shot in 1968, Andy retreated into his silvery shell of The Factory, his studio where countless subjects of his art marched into for their closeups. It was widely said that it was in this foil covered studio that people felt the most like themselves and the least judged by others. Andy’s studio became a refuge for people not widely accepted by societal norms: homosexuals, transsexuals, artists, addicts. Even those who were rich and famous or came from influential families found their safe haven in the studio. Though he was a gay man who lived with his mother, it wasn’t always in his initial intentions to transform his studio into such a refuge. It just became like that. Numerous people flocked to him for their own 15 minutes of silk screen printed fame.

But in the snapshots of his life presented in this exhibition, one can easily see the things that caught Andy’s eye. He was interested in the interactions between people, various people, both in the midst of their crowded surroundings and in their own solitude. And in these pictures of other people, we can begin to tell about Andy himself. Judging from the many pictures taken at parties and social events, we realize that Andy was very much a part of the social scene– apparently, he never missed a party. And he never missed a party without his camera, either. He was captivated by small things– a truck parked in front of an instant win lottery sign, three gorgeous men laughing over a glasses of alcoholic drinks, three ladies’ colorful high heels. While examining one photograph featuring Liza Minelli, we instantly become aware that it is not Liza Minelli herself, whose back is turned to the camera, that Andy wanted to shoot– it was actually the cute Asian man sitting down behind her, staring directly at the photographer. And as we look from one picture to another and another and another, none of which shows Warhol himself, it becomes evident that Andy was always the person who always took the photographs, not the one photographed.

In fact, the tragic truth was that Andy believed that he was ugly. Even as he drew and took pictures of these people that he called gorgeous, even as he said, “Everyone is beautiful, it’s just that some are more beautiful than others”, he thought himself to be ugly. Perhaps as these “beautiful” people sought security in Andy’s studio, Andy also sought security in his art featuring these beautiful people. But as someone who became one of the most famous and recognizable artists of all time, what would Andy have to be insecure about?

In a way, this creator of iconic proportions presents the case of those on the margins of society. He may be brilliant, he may be famous, but if he is different, than he can never fully feel safe in a world where he is not understood and in a world where he feels he does not belong. Maybe that is why so many people followed him and nearly worshiped him as an artist. He brought out in them– the rich, the famous, the beautiful– insecurities that they had hidden for so long and had always longed to stifle and hide, yet he did not judge them; he understood. And in that studio, as their photographs were being snapped, at that party, where candid shots were being taken, they understood that he would not exploit their weaknesses to their disadvantage, but that he would take them in all of their good and bad and raise them up to a level on par with the ever enviable Marilyn. That he would transform them from regular people to iconic figures. That they would, in his art, become that which they had always desired to be: Accepted.

— The Warhol Snapshots Exhibition curated by Christina Chang at the University of Michigan Museum of Art lasted from August 29 to October 25 2009 —

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Gabby Park spends hours in museums and restaurants, with a notebook and a fork in hand, respectively.

We get so caught up in our own lives, in the events that pass us by, in the people who surround us.  We become so focused on our work, the latest trends, the current affairs.  We lose sight of so many important things, the ones unseen, the scenery that remains constant even as we move incessantly.  We forget to appreciate the quiet.  We forget to truly look and reflect– about ourselves, about the world, about life, in general.  We forget too easily that it’s not all about the grades or the money or the reputation.  It’s always about something more than that, some unspeakable greatness that is found in the smallest of things.

This video is just another reminder of how greatness surrounds us every day.  How can something so simple, like fish in an aquarium be so astounding?  This is what they mean by the Sublime in History of Art– a scene that reminds us of just how small we are.  And indeed, as onlookers are deeply silhouetted by the blue green of the water tank, we are forced yet again to acknowledge how small we are.  In comparison to the vastness of the sea, the millions and billions of fish and other species in the world, we are but a mere 6 billion humans.

Because we are human, oftentimes, I think we forget that we are just humans.  We have the capacity to think, to feel, to plan, to act, to judge.  So, we think we are so great, so immortal and invincible.  We believe we are the most intelligent beings, we believe we are right, we believe no one else could possibly know better than us.  We feel we have the right to control everything, to hold power over others.  But when it finally hits us that we are nothing more than human, the word than connotes a meaning much less than “powerful”.  It strikes us that yes, we are humans…and nothing more, nothing less.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Under the comment section on Youtube, there was one who criticized this video and those who considered it to be beautiful:

“Horrible. It’s never that crowded in the open sea. Poor animals. And all that only because they want to hear us humans saying things like you are here on youtube.

This is not beautiful, it is brutal.”

This comment does bring up a plethora of questions, one of which asks, “What is beauty?” and the other which asks, “Can something be morally deranged and artistic at the same time?”  This commentator seems to imply that because the entrapment and display of natural beings is a brutal practice, this scene cannot be considered “beautiful”.  That its artistic value is lost because it is tainted by some idea of right or wrong.  Alas, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it not?  Something that is brutal to one person has every capacity to be considered beautiful to another.  Not to sound completely void of morality, but this seems to be fact.  Photographs and paintings depicting the havoc wreaked by war are still considered to be art, to retain its sense of creative expression, even if they are portraying or were created in deplorable circumstances.  Art, I don’t believe, is necessarily bound by a humanistic sense of ethics; in fact, art is precisely that which cannot be defined or contained by human understanding– artists will say that they do not create for the purpose of profit but that they create because they are driven by this innate drive to express something they cannot label or comprehend.

However, I’m really glad that this person showed us the other perspective of a scene many would call breathtaking and magnificent.  There are so many sides to art, so many ways that it influences us daily and we do not even take notice of it.  Art does a lot to move the public, yet we have become so interested in technology, the sciences of movement– faster, stronger, better– we have become blind to the art that surrounds us each day.

This video holds a lot of appeal for viewers because we become immersed in the scene.  We become surrounded by the water that holds the sharks and the fish, we are enveloped by this sense of calm and tranquility, struck by awe and amazement at the beauty that faces us.  We are just another human being in the aquarium, drinking in the magnificence that slows everything down.  It’s like we’re in water– we feel loose and at ease, we feel slowed down but not in a cumbersome way.  And as we watch, mesmerized, it hits us that, wow… there’s so much more out there than we fully appreciate or realize.

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Gabby Park often wishes she could go to aquariums and be immersed in the blue-green water, even if she has trouble swimming.