Laurie
Anderson & Feminist-Postmodernist Representations:
Can
oppositional avant-garde performance make a difference in mass culture?
A.S. Van Dorston
May 1991
In 1987, E. Ann Kaplan said MTV is a postmodernist phenomenon that's here to
stay. After ten years, MTV is still indeed going strong. From Kaplan's
perspective, however, this might not be a good thing. MTV was born in Reagan's America,
amidst materialism, racism and sexism, with women as the target of
objectification and commodification. In its celebration of "the look, the
surfaces, the self-as-commodity," MTV has reduced the female body to an
objectified image right from the start (Kaplan, 151). Because videos themselves
were nothing but commercials for albums and artists, MTV seemed to be about
nothing but consumption.
I will examine how scholars like E. Ann Kaplan conceptualize MTV
as a postmodernist phenomenon, and the "dangers" it brings upon
society in terms of sexist oppression and the suppression of oppositional
artistic expression. I will give some examples of MTV videos which attempt to
reappropriate the postmodern video for feminist expression, and how they rarely
go beyond issue of sexuality. I offer Laurie Anderson as an artist who attempts
to bridge more radical, avant-garde forms of expression to popular music. In
examining her postmodernist performance art, I find both liberatory and
deabilitating aspects in reaching toward a mass audience while attempting to
remain oppositional. While future of such a bridge is uncertain, it holds some
promise if the trend towards including increasing numbers of marginalized
artists in the mainstream continues. THE "SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE"
If MTV is about nothing but consumption, it has
accomplished more for consumerism in four years than commercials have done in
forty years. Instead of advertising products as a way to enhance one's life,
MTV made videos themselves a way of life. Videos became an experience to be
shared, part of what Pat Aufderheide calls "a wondrous leisure
world." Videos gave products "a new location on the consumer's
landscape, not as messengers of a potential purchase or experience, but as an
experience in themselves, a part of living" (Aufderheide, 117).
Many agree with Kaplan that the process people, or
spectators go through in entering an MTV way of life, can be dangerous. It
evokes an insatiable desire of plenitude that is coaxed with MTV's
coming-up-next mechanism. A literally endless (24 hour a day) flow of short
segments keeps us in an excited state of expectation, promising that the next
segment will fulfill our desires. The infinite flow is separated only by
different kinds of advertisements and images. Recent scholarship on MTV is
concerned with the social and psychological effects these images have on a
consumer/spectator enveloped in an "MTV way of life."
The "MTV way of life" implies a hopeless
condition of spiraling into what Fredric Jameson calls the "schizophrenic
state." People will change the way they think and use language in a way
that the flow of words and images in texts like MTV are such that the
reader/spectator cannot associate any meaning or recognize boundaries and
differences, past and present. The schizophrenic state is to be fixated on a
detached signifier like MTV, isolated in a present from which there is no
escape. Videos on MTV create a grab-bag out of western cultural history to dip
into at will, obliterating historical specificity. Kids will grow up with the
"televisual apparatus" with a consciousness that no longer thinks in
terms of a historical frame, or a cultural context. This tendency disturbs
people like Lucy Lippard, who believes, in borrowing from other cultures,
"a certain humility, an awareness of other cultures' boundaries and
contexts, wouldn't hurt" (Lippard, 9).
MTV kids will instead only have desire as their frame
of reference - desire for a kind of plenitude that will never be reached. In
their unfulfilled, schizophrenic state, they will be vulnerable to MTV's
dominant codes and messages that tap into their need with their complicit
ideologies. In addition, the conceived differences between reality and
representations would collapse in a way that would render concepts like parody
obsolete. The postmodernist practice of the random borrowing or simulation of
motifs from other artists and texts is a form of pastiche that could signify a
lack of orienting boundaries. MTV videos could be seen as parodies without a
sense of humor.
When the past becomes
pastiche, no critical distance is possible. As a result, music video's
occasional attempts at satire prove feeble.
(Aufderheide, 129)
Videos
like Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" and David Bowie's
"Let's Dance," try to raise social issues only to lose any message in
the disjunctive images of pastiche and fantasy.
Humor plays a much smaller role in art when an artist cannot take
a critical position from which to speak. If the youth culture of the future is
in danger because it does not take a critical stance toward on-going events,
then the loss of mechanisms for critical evaluation of social structures and
ideologies is indeed something to worry about (Kaplan, 152). This could mean
the end of oppositional discourses. Attempts at opposition will always be lost
to the glamour of "media events," and to mere
surfaces/textures/images rather than real threats to the status quo. Kaplan
believes that in anything that seems like dissent on MTV, there turns out to be
nothing behind the representations/images (Kaplan, 54). Any chance of artists
representing ideas on videos other than MTV's commercial objectives, appeared
to be doomed.
Yet one cannot rest on the assumption that MTV has
total power over the spectator. Shifting political climates reflect changing
consumer tastes, influencing the material shown on MTV. The relationship
between MTV and consumers is dialectical. It is a discursive exchange between
viewers who demand to see certain things, and MTV whose interests are to
reflect the viewers' interests while at the same time trying to influence and
manipulate the viewers' interests in subscribing to materialist lifestyles and
ideologies. MTV taps into the collective memory of American consumer values
embedded, encoded, and enshrined by the history of advertising.
When this relationship is analyzed with elements of
literary criticism, film studies, post-structuralism, cultural anthropology,
and psychoanalytic theory, it appears to be much more complex than the process
of MTV transforming the viewer's experience into a decentered, schizophrenic,
and ultimately empty experience, as suggested by Kaplan's structuralist
analysis. Because MTV is such a postmodern art form, its seemingly meaningless
fragments are rich with connotations, and viewers are free to play a far more
active role than that described by Kaplan. Viewers can decode meanings in the
fragmented text "according to their own set of values and perceptions, as
opposed to accepting passively the `messages' intended by the industry's
writers, directors, and producers" (Harvey, 40).
For example, one analysis argues that "those who
allow themselves to be seduced by advertising are getting something out of the
exchange as well," no matter how superficial the gains may seem to be
(Harvey, 59). Even though the "real thing" is held just out of reach,
music video provides us "with a momentary rupture in the seamless flow of
everyday life . . . to the overall maintenance of the social order, as do all
good ritual devices." Such ritual devices include the masked ball in
Jacobean drama, the quest searches in Christian mythology, or the predictable
pranks that characterize modern, secular celebrations of Halloween. Videos give
viewers/consumers "a safe place to scream when the frustration of always
falling short of institutionalized illusion becomes too much to handle"
(Harvey, 60).
IS OPPOSITIONAL MTV A PARADOX?
MTV is a controlled environment with well-defined
parameters of time and place in which extreme deviance and indulgence can
occur. MTV can serve as a form of safety valve for society in which viewers
wallow in cultural taboos until they become sick of it. The re-imposition of
taboo in the "real world" becomes not only bearable, but a welcome
relief (Harvey, 45). Instead of warping viewers, sex and violence in videos
could actually be therapeutic, or at least self-reflective. The dreamlike
qualities of MTV allow for the indulgence of otherwise unapproachable impulses
and desires as an escape valve for cultural tensions. With its "frantic,
fragmented messages," MTV can tell us much about our "most deeply
buried fears and our most profoundly felt desires. It is so easy to lie to
ourselves when we use full sentences" (Harvey, 61).
But studies of these fragmented desires seem to spell
out a society slanted toward escapism and sexism. Sexism in videos has been
shown to effectively transmit negative attitudes about women, and cannot be
justified as merely harmless indulgence. There is a need for competition with
the misogynistic, male-addressed discourse that has dominated MTV. A recent
rise in feminist videos is presenting some possibilities for balancing out the
male/female perspectives. Much to the surprise of many MTV scholars, feminist
art has come out of the margins and proved the postmodernist format of MTV to
be susceptible to feminist appropriation.
The objectification and subordination of women is
currently being challenged by creative performers and directors who are using
postmodernist techniques to manipulate, deconstruct, and reconstruct prevailing
constructions of female sexuality. At least within the boundaries of female
sexuality, feminist videos fit into a sort of mainstream counterhegemony. With
more women and blacks watching more music videos than any other group of teenagers,
these formerly marginalized viewpoints can have a powerful influence on the
entertainment industry (Roberts, 5).
Increasing numbers of African-American women doing
rap and dance music are continuing the feminist approach set by the
precedent-setting performers like Pat Benetar, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner,
Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Eurythmics, and Janet Jackson. These artists show an
ability not only to use pastiche to some extent in drawing attention to the
exploitative traditions of videos, but contrary to Kaplan's theories, actually
dismantle the male gaze through humor. By ridiculing the male gaze and male
behavior, women liberate themselves from the male constructions of female as
object.
Sexism in advertising is scrutinized in Pat Benetar's
"Sex As A Weapon." Benetar criticizes the negative images of women
used from the 1950s to the present in advertising with a pastiche of images and
Benetar dressed in a variety of historical frames. Muscle-bound men are
portrayed as ridiculous and ineffectual, and Benetar even destroys a James Bond
figure by taking away his gun and blowing away his machismo image. Like Turner,
Benetar also ridicules the use of phallus', with lipsticks, guns and hot dogs.
Her direct references to advertising even includes the music industry,
criticizing MTV itself. She even criticizes one of her own album covers for its
sexism. Referring to one's own experience to validate a critique of
exploitation of women's bodies is becoming more popular among feminists. By
employing "the postmodernist techniques of fragmentation,
self-reflexiveness, pastiche, and the combination of popular culture and the
avant- garde," Benetar puts the use of women's bodies to sell products
into a feminist context (Roberts, 9). However, while "Sex As A Weapon"
was one of the few most political videos to survive on MTV, it is not a
guarantee that there are more to come.
Much more common, however, are videos of women
asserting their sexuality any way they please, such as most of Madonna's
videos, Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and "What Have You Done for Me
Lately," and the previously mentioned Tina Turner videos. These videos do
not directly criticize the music industry as overtly "Sex As A
Weapon" does. In fact, they often validate the industry in showing that
involvement in the process of capitalism and production need not equal
passivity (Roberts, 12). In "Nasty," Jackson pays to get into a
theater, but goes on to take over the screen. The openings for sharp feminist
criticism on MTV are very narrow.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF OPPOSITIONAL PERFORMANCE ART
It is nearly impossible to find a mainstream artist
who takes a position as critical as someone like Adrian Piper, a performance
artist whose art is often confrontational but rarely compromised (Lippard,
43-4). Ironically, while marginalized artists are best able to regain the
critical position and sense of humor in music and performance, it is often only
the most privileged audiences who get to see and hear the work. Nevertheless,
such performance best exemplifies the capacity to articulate alternative or
plural identities of groups belonging to the margins of national or dominant
cultures, and to celebrate the principles of parody, pastiche, stylistic
multiplicity and generic mobility (Connor, 186). It is performance with a
counterhegemonic agenda against practices associated with the increased power
of advertising and the electronic media, the advent of universal
standardization, neocolonialism, institutional xenophobia, racism, sexism and
homophobia.
Paradoxically, the artists best known for such
postmodernist styles are the ones relatively close to the mainstream, including
musicians Captain Beefheart, Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, John Zorn,
Negativland, and a plethora of rap/hip-hop groups. Among artists like Spalding
Gray, Eric Bogosian, Wallace Shawn, Joahn Leguizamo, Ann Magnuson, Karen
Finley, John O'Keefe and David Cale, Laurie Anderson is one of the most
prolific, producing multimedia arrangements of text, image, movement and
musical sound. The music, photography, film, poetry, fantasy, dance and
stand-up comedy all have subversive elements of social criticism. As a white
woman artist with an art history degree at Barnard College and a master's
degree in sculpture at Columbia, Anderson is hardly marginalized in the sense
that Lucy Lippard deems significant in Mixed Blessings.
Irony, humor, and
subversion are the most common guises and disguises of those artists leaping
out of the melting pot into the fire. They hold mirrors up to the dominant
culture, slyly infiltrating mainstream art with alternative experiences --
inverse, reverse, perverse.
(Lippard, 199)
Lippard
also, however, mentioned Anderson's series of texts and photographs in 1973, in
which she took photographs of men in her neighborhood as they accosted her or
commented on her appearance (Lippard (1976), 102-3). Instead of a mirror,
Anderson held up a camera-eye to men, giving them a sense of what it means to
be subjected to the male gaze. Such "decentering," which was the
focus of antiracist and antisexist cultural tactics in '70s activist art, was
Anderson's first experience with getting first-hand "reactions" to
her art. Her work became increasingly complex throughout the seventies, as she
began to examine the slipperiness of language. Her invention of the tape bow
violin, an instrument whose strings have been replaced with an audio head from
a tape recorder and whose horsehair on the bow has been replaced with recording
tape, enabled her to create a sound-speech that never existed before. The
sound-speech consisted of a totally reversible music-language: as the bow is
passed across the audio bridge, "no" on the up-bow becomes
"one," on the down-bow, "yes" becomes "say."
Anderson uses it to great effect on "Late Show" in the movie Home of
the Brave, a documentary of the same tour in 1985-6. One only hears fragments
of a phrase throughout the piece, as it begins as a strange noise and gradually
develops a human-voice, and finally says "listen to my heartbeat."
Turning around accepted images and meanings is a
reoccurring theme in Anderson's work. In the video "O Superman,"
which was occasionally shown on MTV, along with being performed live on the
United States Live, Parts I-IV tour in 1979-83, Anderson's waving hand
refers to the image of a hand raised in greeting on the Pioneer spacecraft.
Anderson uses this image to signify ambiguity of communication--"in our
country, good-bye looks just like hello," similar to the way the Cheyenne
Contraries--warriors who rode backwards, said "hello" for
"goodbye" (Lippard, 201). In using paradox, collage and
reflexiveness, she explores her obsessive fascination with language and its
failure to communicate our most basic fears, longings, and sensory impressions.
Much of Anderson's work suggests William S. Burrough's cut-up methods. Cut-ups
in literature is a notion in which the work of randomly selected writers can be
cut up, juxtaposed, and "sampled" in a form of collage writing.
Burrough's influence was consummated in collaboration when he provided the
lyric for her song "Language is a Virus," and making a cameo
appearance/tango in Home of the Brave.
Just as she shows how complex and contradictory
language can be, Anderson does the same with gender. Her androgynous stage persona
serves well to confound sexist stereotypes of what should be expected of women
performers. Her standard dress consists of suits, ties, and technology. While
not necessarily condemning sexuality in other women performers, Anderson
chooses to manipulate her body technologically rather than sexually. Her body
becomes a screen in its own right when she places a light in her mouth to
silhouette her face in "O Superman," a reflection on communications
technology and consumer capitalism. When even transforms her body
electronically into a Buddha and then an abstract shape, literally embodying
the electronic technology she is critiquing. In "Drum Dance," she
becomes Andy Warhol's [wo]man-as-machine when she wires herself up for sound
and plays her body as an amplified percussion instrument. Not even her voice
escapes transformation, as she electronically alters it to become a "voice
of authority"--a voice of a man, or rather, a shoe salesman, or "a
guy who's selling you an insurance policy you don't really want," said
Anderson in her "Home Tour" segment of Collected Videos. She
even goes as far as to produce an electronically altered image of herself as a
four-foot tall male clone of herself. "He" is not a mirror image. The
clone is a much less intelligent, "cheesy," inferior copy. While
Anderson's humor may at times seem cooly detached, dry, or even boring, the
subtext of it has a vicious bite. The cute, seemingly benign portrayal of the
clone could very well signify a not-so- benign attitude about men and their
misogynist practices in the entertainment and artworld.
Anderson goes even further to play upon the
traditional "T&A" expectations for women in performance by often
revealing nothing of herself. In the beginning of Home of the Brave, Anderson
appears with a mask and a body suit, with the tape bow violin as the only way
to reveal Anderson's identity. Women walk past Anderson, wearing elegant gowns,
as Anderson's tape bow makes sounds comparable to cat-calls one might hear from
men harassing women. Yet the women are also wearing masks, leaving only their
bodies exposed, with Anderson secure in her anonymity. The mask has played an
important role in gender and racial politics in feminist and bicultural art.
In art, as in society,
there is a subtle and ceaseless donning and doffing of masks. Disguise has been
employed as weapon and as shield, allowing the artist a chance to "make
her/himself up." Ritual masks from traditional cultures often have their
eyes closed, presumably so they can see inside, where it matters.
(Lippard, 231-2)
The
multiplicity of images with which Anderson presents herself speak with a
"polyphonic voice characterized by ambiguity and paradox," similar to
the way Lippard's Tricksters recognize that speaking from within contradiction
is truer to one's local, specific, and personal lived experience than
attempting to resolve the contradictions of life into idealized abstractions
(Lippard, 206). Anderson gains freedom and ambiguity which allows her to be
many things in many places. It is in this sense that she "deconstructs the
border between identity and difference, that she appears as something at once
determinate and indeterminate" (Mitchell, 285).
Anderson exerts full creative control over her videos and films,
giving her an artistic authority which is rare in the world of performance. The
characters presented in pieces like "Stephen Weed," "Hey
Ah," and "Talk Normal" are presented to the spectator in a
fragmented, alienated process of "showing," which enables the
performer to mediate between characterization and narration. The decentered,
postmodern form of presentation bridges performance art to pop, especially in
"O Superman," the most spectacular example yet of crossover from
performance into pop, reaching No. 2 in the British pop charts in 1982 and
subsequently shown on MTV.
Anderson herself has legitimized the judgements on
her work as postmodernist, as acknowledging the postmodern condition as one of
the motivations behind Home of the Brave:
It's not a mistake to
call something postmodern now, because there actually is no present . . . It
becomes very difficult to produce something which doesn't immediately become
grist to the media mill . . . That's one of the reasons I did the movie,
because I work in such a transitory medium, the minute I do something it all
disappears.
(Mitchell, 284)
But unlike the humorless, positionless pastiche of most
postmodernist video, Anderson does relentless political critiques of the American
democratic circus ("The Big Top"), suburban alienation ("Talk
Normal"), the exploitation of Native American folklore ("Hey
Ah"), sexual violence ("The Hollywood Strangler"), property
development ("Big Science"), the FBI ("Stephen Weed"), and
examines issues central to postmodernism; "the slipperiness of language,
the way that our alienation and confusion are produced by Big Science and the
media, how words and images are created in today's world--and how we are
inundated and affected by them" (McCaffery, 27). She also illustrates a
postmodern concern with undoing the problematics of surfaces, of flatness, and
of appearance. Her performances, as Dick Hebdige has said of pop art,
"remind us that which is obvious matters, that surfaces matter, that the
surface is matter" (Mitchell, 286).
Anderson will never be the sole patron-saint of crossover
performance-pop. While her work as recently become less inspired, even at her
best, Anderson is problematic. African-American theologian and political
theorist Cornel West demands more than Anderson could hope to produce:
a new historiography,
a structural analysis beyond the postmodernist base . . . There are still
homogenous representations of our communities, and we must go beyond that to
their diversity and heterogeneity. But we also need to get beyond that--beyond
mainstream and malestream, even beyond the "positive images"--to
undermine binary oppositions of positive and negative: male/female,
Black/white, straight/gay, etc. .
(Lippard, 12)
Yet
Anderson's early style was made up of a "system of pairing," of
placing polar opposites side-by-side or before one another, revolving around a
network of dualities: artist as person/character, language/sound,
private/public activity, memory/fantasy, audio/visual space, male/female,
nineteenth/twentieth century musical instrumentation, history/prophecy,
filmic/live presentation (Gordon, 51). While Anderson's work has gradually
become more complex, it does not consistently keep up with her ambitions or
pretensions. In her attempts to be inclusive, she features African and Asian
performers in Home of the Brave. Yet it is always Anderson who is in
control. She is the star, the master, the focus of the show, leaving her guests
as merely peripheral attractions, without a chance to speak for themselves in
their own chosen context. This sort of appropriation of other cultures should
be done carefully, if at all, because of the danger of "visual
plagiarism" in which borrowed culture has no frame of reference . . .
"Appropriation may be, when all is said and done, voyeurism at its most
blatant" (Lippard, 25).
Anderson finds herself in the precarious position of
not being marginalized enough, but too inaccessible for mass culture. Her bleak
explorations of a "technology-ridden world that ultimately imply the
inability of modern society to control that technology" may simply not be
in demand (Holden, C1). In her last major piece, "Empty Places,"
Anderson used images and sounds to evoke a global, post-industrial landscape so
homogenized and degraded by technology that a feeling of community has been
sacrificed. Anderson explains her fears:
I am terrified of
being dogmatic and didactic, because the ideas I am working with are hot and
heavy social and political and economic issues. I want to leave it loose. I try
to leave the exit signs on, and well lighted too, because it isn't everybody's
idea of a fun night out.
(Wood, 102)
While
many people may choose to take the exit rather than stay, others may see that
boundaries are made to be broken, that women need not restrict themselves to
one-dimensional sexual imagery to make a living in performance and be
relatively successful. Anderson has played an important role in breaking
stereotypes, turning them around, and laughing at them. Her work shows that
"the options for breaking patterns, reversing stigmas, and conceiving a
new and more just world-picture are many and multifaceted" (Lippard, 241).
No matter how many complications and contradictions may develop, turning around
is a valuable goal to achieve.
Transformation of self
and society is finally the aim of all this mobile work that spins the status
quo around. While irony, with its tinge of bitterness as well as humor, is the
prevalent instrument, another is healing, in which the artist, as neo-shaman,
heals her or himself, as a microcosm of the society.
(Lippard, 241)
Yet
the avant-garde of subcultures will always be subordinant- -maggots trying to
scale the garbage heap of mainstream commercial culture. Jean Baudrillard said
a minority will never be able to take over the form of the mass media and
change the content to any good purpose, since what is oppressive about the
media is precisely the "code" which in their very form they embody.
Mass media like MTV talks to its audience while never allowing the audience to
respond, and confirms it audience's muteness by simulating audience response,
via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewer's polls and other forms of bogus
"interaction." The mass media fabricates non- communication, making it
impossible for any significant populist takeover. And whenever a marginalized
artist scores a "coup," the postmodern music industry quickly
stretches its boundaries to include the eruption of cultural difference,
actually reinforcing its own stability. Counterhegemonic commentary becomes a
quasi- commodity, a "part of a ritualized exchange in an institutional and
commercial economy of ideas and intellectual styles" (Connor, 189). The
ethical awareness of marginal groups in mass culture, in their recognition of
an important diversity of voices and interests [are] in danger of being smashed
into a flat, commodified pancake.
CONCLUSION
If marginalized subcultures can only continue to express
themselves sufficiently outside of the mainstream, what is the mainstream to
do? What are people like Hard Harry in the movie Pump Up the Volume to do after
they've been arrested by the FCC for their underground pirate radio stations?
According to leading theoreticians like Lawrence Grossberg, Stephen Connor and
Kaplan, they must adapt and survive. Or perhaps the answer to the question of
what exactly will happen to oppositional discourses, subcultures, and even
postmodernist culture in a stage of capitalism that is advancing to the point where
nearly all communication will be allowed to happen only to benefit corporate
and institutional profit and nothing else, is anyone's guess.
But if such oppositional culture can never take over
the mainstream, what can be expected from an oppositional avant-garde practice?
According to Susan Suleiman, "quite possibly, not much-- or not more than
for previous avant-gardes . . . But that does not mean that the attempt is not
worth making" (Suleiman, 199). Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock suggest
that "feminism explores the pleasures of resistance, of deconstruction, of
discovery, of defining, of fragmenting, of redefining" (Parker, 54). Many
women besides Laurie Anderson have found some unexpected ways to use
technologies associated with the culture industry. Jenny Holzer's use of
electronic signs in airports and other public places--such as the Spectacolor
Board in Times Square, which flashed her message in huge letters: "PRIVATE
PROPERTY CREATED CRIME" --is one well-known example. Barbara Kruger, who
has used billboards to display (and occasionally to transform into political
posters) some of her photographs, usually shown in galleries and museums, has
also used the Spectacolor Board, to display the message: "I AM NOT TRYING
TO SELL YOU ANYTHING" (Suleiman, 199). Kruger even buys thirty second
spots during television shows, the very site of the stereotype, in order to
change the rules of the game so that subtle reformations can be enacted.
The hope expressed in such statements is that it is
possible to find openings even in the monolithic mechanism of the culture
industry; that it is possible for innovative, critical work to reach a large
audience. The future holds the possibility that many substantial changes could
result from the complex relationship between the avant-garde, television, the
popular culture industry and the consumer/viewers. While chances are that the
changes will not be "radical" and "good" enough for many
feminists, we can only get a sense of what these changes could be through
studying the complex relationship through a variety of disciplines.
. . . we need to
redefine what our texts and subjects should be; we must analyze the complex
interplay of subject and object, pleasure and danger, power and powerlessness
that constitutes gender relations in popular culture.
(Roberts, 15)
Only through combinations of critical theory's deconstructionism
of audience consumption as it occurs within the production process, symbolic
anthropology's use of ritual mechanisms, psychoanalytical theory's examination
of individual internalizations and culturally- generated myths, and critical
techniques of film studies and literary criticism, can one fully get a sense of
MTV's function as a postmodernist phenomenon in contemporary and future
mass-mediated society, and the possibilities of oppositional cultures
appropriating their own spaces in the mainstream
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OTHER SOURCES
Anderson, Laurie. Home of the Brave [videotape]. 1986.
Anderson, Laurie. Collected Videos
[videotape]. 1991.
Anderson, Laurie. United States Live, Vols. I-IV
[album]. 1984.
