White Supremacy in the News! Courtesy of the Daily News....

as always here on the galleryblog, click the pictures for the link or to make it bigger...

first, a story that highlights the ever-evolving relationship of aesthetics, medicine, and race-hate...

and, second, a tale of Catholicism, racism, and schools...

Mexican Superheroes, Working Immigrants, XicanOSMOSIS, and Dulce Pinzón

original posting: 3/5/08

It may be the times (and a facebook query from a regular reader), but I think the present anti-immigrant zeitgeist demands that we rethink the way we see these mostly brave, valiant, documented and undocumented sojourners--no one makes us do that better than Dulce Pinzón.

Xicanosmosis is one of the key concepts that emerges in the closing sections of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in American. A mouthful of a word, XicanOSMOSIS is a name loaded with salacious, reproductive overtones; it describes a peculiar process or phenomena where the high-brow and low-brow miasmal excesses of U.S. pop culture and the equally sordid and delicious emanations of Mexican mass arts fuse, co-mingle, spoon, and "splorf" into and onto each other in a veritable orgy of creative synergy and aesthetic synesthasia. You can see xicanosmotic climaxes and much, much, much more at work in the brilliant art of Dulce Pinzón, especially her Superheroes project.


Pinzon's fabulous gallery of ocular delights imagines an urban metropolitan setting where working Mexican immigrants are re-imagined at their labors clothed in the garb of DC and Marvel comics finest--Spiderman, the Flash, the Thing, Batman, and more. The go-to target of fascist racist pundits, the working poor, the swarthy immigrant, is re-visioned as the epitome of American fantasy, the Superhero.


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Eyegiene and Synecdoche, New York: The Eyes of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze

When people ask me "what is eyegiene all about," I seem to always flail about with cinematic/literary/art references: "imagine Borges translated through Buñuel's camera; Pynchon as filmed by the Coen Brothers; Kieslowski painted by Remedios Varo," and so on.

Two artist who get it and live it in their projects are Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze--in films like Being John Malkovich, and soon, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman and Jonze weave cinematic canvases masked as mirrors; or better, filmed mirrors that double as novels. Here's a taste from the new film--below the snippet is some footage from the film's Cannes debut earlier this year:





For those wrestling with the title of the film, it's named after the rhetorical part of speech, synecdoche (si NECK doe kee) that means "part for whole" as in "all 'hands' on deck" where 'hands' shorthands for sailors' hands or labor in general. It is the coolest of metonymies, even cooler than catachresis and the foundation of all poetry and art. Here's the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, on "synecdoche."



More on this after the movie opens here stateside. As a quick aside, I love that Kaufman has named his film using a pun, where Synecdoche, NY proxies for the anticipated Schenectady, NY. At Cornell, back in the day, back in the high renaissance of critical theory, I used to make a joke in seminar, a horrible pun, really, where I would say Chaka Khan in lieu of French psychoanalytic hero Jacques Lacan. Kaufman's done me one better!

Chaka Khan fans will dig this flashback to her days with Rufus--1974 at a Bob Hope hosted [!] event, no less!