Marlon Brando was an actor for his time, not ours. Ours is one filled with Facebook and quantum physics. There’s no way Stanley Kowalski—Brando’s character in A Streetcar Named Desire—could understand what it means to be human now. Likewise the type of acting used by Brando, now commonly known as the Method, cannot get to the heart of who we are today, or so argues Sheila Heti in Maisonneuve.

The Method—the form of acting started by Constanin Stanislavski in Moscow and popularized in the U.S. by Stella Adler and Lee Strasbourg through their Actors Studio—Heti explains, follows closely the development of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, pleading the actor to look inside himself to find similar emotions from real human experience to project onto characters, who will then appear to us, the watcher, to have a past context that has brought them to this moment.

Actors who studied at the Actors Studio—like Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman and Dennis Hopper—present us with a version of the human as a deeply individual, emotionally rooted being, with psychological depth, continuity of self, and a past that profoundly affects present behaviour and relationships—a human as Sigmund Freud and mainstream psychoanalysis would have us be.

This, however, no matter how good, amounts to little more than mimicry. “How humans currently portray other humans is an invention,” Heti writes, “just as three-point-perspective was an invention.”

Today, we have moved from the Freudian era toward cognitive behavioral therapy, meaning that “we are not determined by our past experiences….We are now in an age in which to be human means, in part, to be able to choose what sort of human one wants to be.” As Heti sees it, our actors have not followed the trend, but rather are still attempting to act the way Brando did. Even the best of this acting, Heti sees as bad, as it is only “high mimicry.”

So what, exactly, would Heti want to see replace the form of acting so commonly used today? She gives one example: the artist Ryan Trecartin’s videos. The characters in these videos have “no personality at the core” and “[t]here is no sense that [they] have what we consider an emotional history, or have lived days and years prior to the moment they are currently living on screen before us.” Other than that, she pretty much offers only a call to duty for screenwriters and actors to discover what the next stage of acting will be:

[C]ontemporary writers have to lead the way, writing scripts…that demand a different style of playing; scripts that reflect what the human is now….Let the actors cut ties with the Method and its psychological understanding of the self, and show us how electric we are.

Maybe I’m too steeped in Freudian thinking, but I’m not sure I buy the whole characters having no history equals a better representation of who we are today argument. And watching a bit of Trecartin’s videos, for me, is not “tremendously exciting,” as it is for Heti. Still, it is interesting to think about the way viewers originally saw Brando’s portrayals (or another example: what the Beatles did for music) and wonder what might come next to bring that same feeling to a modern audience.

Source: Maisonneuve 

Alexis Esquivel, "Smile, you won!" 

The idea of globalism, so emphatically embraced by the , seemed to assume that the breakdown of cultural barriers and national borders—the “flattening” of the world caused by the increasing rapidity of exchange and interchange in the contemporary digitized age—was something wholly new. Of course, curators overstated the novelty of globalism. Humans have simply long been compelled to share and reconsider and mimic and recreate the work of others, and so intellectual and creative conceits and trends have always had a way of flowing across borders and around barriers.

Or such is a message, imparted through overt and covert channels, of an exhibition currently being mounted at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory: "Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art" (October 16, 2010, to February 27, 2011). As per the subtitle, “Queloides” presents the work of twelve artists who deal with issues of race, discrimination, and identity in Cuba. All twelve artists represented in this show—Pedro Álvarez, Manuel Arenas, Belkis Ayón, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Roberto Diago, Alexis Equivel, Armando Mariño (Right: "La anguista de las influencias" (detail)), René Peña, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Douglas Pérez, Elio Rodíguez, and José Toirac/Meira Marrero—were born in Cuba, and many produced their most compelling work during the so-called “Special Period in Time of Peace,” which started around 1991 and lasted through most of the decade (i.e., prior to the age of globalism).

The “Special Period” in Cuba was a time of acute economic struggle that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, on which the Cuban economy depended. During this period, the country’s trade market crashed, and its GDP dropped by 34 percent. Food and medicine imports were severely slowed. Cuban industry and agriculture ground to a halt, and food shortages followed. The average Cuban consumed about one-fifth the amount of food calories as prior to the Soviet collapse and lost twenty pounds in weight. Persistent hunger became a way of life, and many young children exhibited signs of malnutrition.

Starting in 1991, numerous Cuban musicians, writers, painters, performers, and academics began to use art to process the troubling changes taking place in their country. For instance, the emergence of Cuban hip hop dates to the Special Period, with rap artists driven to write about their everyday struggles. Around the same time, Cuban visual artists began to fixate on a particular social issue. In paintings, photographs, installations, sculptures, videos—examples of which are included in “Queloides”—artists focused on finding ways to ridicule and to dismantle the so-called racial differences in Cuba. The largest island country in the Caribbean, Cuba is home to over 11 million people, and the nation's culture is drawn from diverse sources -- aboriginal Taino and Ciboney peoples, the period of Spanish colonialism, the introduction of African slaves, and so on. “Queloides” refers to a “keloid,” or rubbery scar. In Cuba, many people believe the erroneous racial stereotype that black skin is prone to such scaring. The title also refers to the wounds, both physical and internal, that result from racism, discrimination, and centuries of cultural conflict and social struggle.  

Ultimately, the artists in “Queloides” used the subjects of racism and the societal and ideological changes of the Special Period to make oblique stabs at the government. Officially designated a socialistic republic, Cuba in practice has been ruled by a closed and repressive governmental regime. Citizen’s access to the rest of the globe is severely limited in Cuba. The Human Rights Watch alleges that the Cuban government "represses nearly all forms of political dissent" and that "Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law.” Today, just connecting to the Internet illegally in Cuba can lead to a five-year prison sentence. For Cuban artists, addressing the ills of their society in their art has exacted a higher toll: Real ostracism and repression, even for addressing as simple an idea as racial justice and equality. According to co-curator Alejandro de la Fuente, "This is the first time in post-revolutionary Cuba the word ‘racism’ has appeared in the title of an exhibition. Because of this, I have now been banned from Cuba. It is a high price to pay, but we must do what we can to help break the official silence on racism.”

All these facts, taken in sum, might dictate that Cuban artists in 1991, in a pre-globalist age, would be ignorant of international art trends. But in actuality, as “Queloides” reveals, quite the opposite is true. Early 90s global art trends such as identity art, appropriation, accumulation, media-fixation, mixed media art, installation and performance art all make their appearance in this exhibition. For example, the artist Alexis Esquivel produced works that were not far removed, at least in surface appearance, from the David Salle and Robert Longo-influenced, media-mediated pastiche style popular across the globe in the early 1990s. Roberto Diago’s installation work, meanwhile, reflected the trend of accumulating appropriated objects—trash, discards, consumer goods—that appeared in the work of Tom Friedman, Tara Donovan, Rivane Neuenschwander, and many others through the 1990s and 2000s. And Rene Pena’s work reflected a concern about personal identity and self-image that is not much different in the work of Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and many other artists who emerged in the 1990s.

Of course, understanding all the nuances and subtle contexts of the work in “Queloides” relies on a full understanding of local issues—in particular, what life was like during the “Special Period” in Cuba. But it is clear “Queloides” reveals a hidden secret of globalism. That is, many years before curators noticed, ideas, fashions, and visual trends were already being widely shared, even in nations and among artists that resided outside the world stage. “Queloides” is both an intriguing look at how art ideas pass over closed borders, and how closed communities internalize and reinterpret global intellectual trends while keeping a solid eye on local conditions.

René Peña, "Marat negro" 

All photos courtesy of the Mattress Factory 

Michael Fallon is a writer and arts administrator based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Art in America, American Craft, Public Art Review, Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, the OC Weekly, City Pages, and many other publications. Read his previous post, Artist Faces Darkness at Heart of Amazon Rainforest. 

Michael Fallon is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.

In this continuing series, Utne Reader Art Director Stephanie Glaros explains the process behind an Utne Reader illustration.

For the article “In an Age of Eco-Uncertainty,” I asked illustrator Jon Reinfurt to create something that expressed “the futility of living a ‘green’ life. Or in other words, the environment is too big of a problem to be solved by individual lifestyle choices only.” He provided some great sketches for me to choose from (below), and the final artwork had exactly the look and feel I was hoping for.
 

Since its inception in 1984, Utne Reader has relied on talented artists to create original images for stories that express powerful emotions, brilliant new ideas, and humorous storytelling. Browsing through back issues of Utne Reader is like a tour of “Who’s Who” in the illustration world. Artists like Gary Baseman, Brad Holland, Anita Kunz, Bill Plympton, and Seymour Chwast have graced our pages over the years, to name just a few.  

Most of the pseudo-cartography in graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov’s ongoing "Mapping Stereotypes" project renames the countries of Europe and slightly gerrymanders the borders according to the skewed lens through which one country sees the continent. (The image above is “Europe According to USA.”) The results are funny in the way stereotypes often are—chuckle worthy at first, then dark, mildly offensive, and problematic. For example, on Tsvetkov’s map called “Europe According to France,” Greece has been renamed “Noisy Hairy People” and Turkey “Definitely Not Europeans.”

"Europe According to Russia"

"Europe According to Gay Men"

"Europe According to Britain"

(Thanks, Kottke.)

Images courtesy of alphadesigner . 

News coverage on the influx of immigrants from Mexico seems perpetually concerned with the border crossers who succeed in bypassing that invisible line. But what about those who fail? Working for Mother Jones, photographer Matt Nager visited a small town in Arizona to compile a beautiful but haunting photo essay on the process of identifying the hundreds of nameless, desiccated bodies that turn up in desert border zones every year.

 Source: Mother Jones