2-News
12 — Wednesday, October 21, 2020
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
Paychecks & paintbrushes
School
of
Music,
Theatre
and
Dance
alum
Maya
Ballester
started
her
career
at the University in the vocal
performance program, but soon
realized her heart lay closer to
musical theatre. Through the
Bachelor of Musical Arts track,
she customized her degree to add
acting and dance classes and then
started work as a photographer as
well.
“It’s hard for me to tie down
one thing that I want to do at a
time,” Ballester said recently in
an interview with The Daily over
the phone from her native Kansas.
She graduated last May, at the
height of COVID-19’s first wave.
Now, she joins the ranks of an arts
industry endangered by and dying
from the country’s mishandling
of this pandemic. But those
stressors aside, Ballester faces
even deeper conundrums when it
comes to personal income.
“There’s this kind of switch
that goes off in my head that when
I am doing something for income,
and to survive, it automatically
becomes less fun, and becomes
less expressive,” Ballester said.
Her art comes from a place that
she aches to keep separate from
money — but without a paycheck,
will she have the resources to
make more art?
Stamps and Music, Theatre
& Dance senior Rhett Shepherd
currently navigates a similar
paradoxical
question.
Their
senior
thesis
involves
the
development of a videogame that
uses characters from diverse
working-class
communities,
a group rarely represented by
the white, straight and wealthy
communities of online gaming.
The project aims to fill a gap in
representation, but Shepherd’s
thesis must also reckon with
the fact that videogames remain
luxury products that are out
of reach for many low income
families. How can their art
make the difference it intends to
without access to the group that
it’s made for?
These questions leave both
Shepherd and Ballester running
in circles: Art and money compete
for attention but also never seem
to find a compromise.
Stamps
professor
Rebekah
Modrak is quite familiar with this
paradox. As an artist, she makes
work dedicated to the resistance
of consumer culture — her “Re
Made Co.” installment replaced
Best Made Co.’s $350 artisanal
designer axe with a $350 toilet
plunger. The piece offered cutting
humorous commentary on the
absurd consumption of glorified
tools and Modrak eventually
received a cease and desist
document from the company’s
lawyers.
“Resistance
to
consumer
culture
was
part
of
my
upbringing,” Modrak recently
wrote in an email to The Michigan
Daily. Her parents started by
teaching her to ask “why we pay
companies money to advertise for
them.”
Now, as a professor, Modrak
teaches the Stamps Interventions
in
Commerce
class.
This
evolved from an older class on
Shopdropping, a project in which
students made false products
to leave in a store — a reverse
shoplift. The idea started in 2004,
guided by Modrak’s question:
“How can we take opportunities
to encounter audiences outside
of a gallery system, to introduce
messages
(critical,
poetic,
personal) contrary to the narrow
conceptual
boundaries
of
branding?”
For Shepherd’s videogame, this
separation starts by reimagining
the power of ordinary objects,
an
idea
that
started
while
mopping the floor at a summer
housekeeping job.
“I look at this mop,” Shepherd
said, “and I think to myself,
‘this mop could be a really great
weapon!’” The realization sent
them into a world of imagined
Expo marker jousts and cleaning
pole lances, the result of which
will
become
fully
fledged
working-class
video
game
characters, aptly titled “The
Working Clash.”
Shepherd sees power in a choice
like this, lifting the mundane
into the creative, moving from
mandatory to leisurely. The game
will hopefully make space for
products and professions often
considered boring or less-than
to take on new meaning beyond
their measurable contributions to
the economy.
Finding
space
outside
consumption
is
also
quite
important for Ballester. At home
in
quarantine,
she
watched
the country’s economy melt,
leaving millions to live on small
unemployment checks. As the
weeks turned to months, Ballester
grew resentful of the system at
large, maddened by America’s
workaholic tendencies.
“I’ve grown very irritated with
capitalism in general,” she said,
“and how that has led to people
defining who they are by their
career, defining their worth by
their career.” At the same time,
this conclusion doesn’t solve her
conflict — “I’m still struggling to
form a healthy relationship with
making money and also getting
to do what I want to do,” she said.
Shepherd echoed Ballester’s
sentiment: “You can talk in circles
about it for a long time,” they said,
“I don’t really have a good answer
for it.”
For Modrak, the answer lies
in actively disentangling oneself
from consumer culture. “I used
to exhibit [my work] in gallery
spaces,” she wrote, but now
it’s
“intentionally
net-based,”
meaning it can reach any browser
of a consumer space. The result
gives
Modrak
independence
and control over her own ideas
and, according to her, is far more
liberating.
This
idea
holds
special
importance for Modrak now
that we live in an age of “self-
promotional culture.” The growth
of
influencers
and
freelance
artists pushes individuals to
think of themselves as brands and
thus “define success according to
the narrow rationale of corporate
culture,” she wrote.
Ballester’s
work
in
acting
and
photography
are
both
heavily operated by such models
of
self-promotion
—
“you
are your business,” she said.
There are drawbacks to both,
but
performance
work
feels
especially vulnerable to her.
ZOE PHILLIPS
Senior Arts Editor
Read more online at
michigandaily.com
DESIGN BY YASSMINE EL-REWINI
THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
Love is a mess of paradoxes in ‘Eternal Sunshine’
“Oh, my darling, Clementine.
You were lost and gone forever.
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.”
So croons Joel’s (Jim Carrey,
“Dumb and Dumber”) mother
as she bathes him in his distant
memory of infancy in “Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
It’s strange to think how you
could know someone’s name
from a song before you ever
meet them.
Of
course,
this
is
not
not
actually
a
coincidence;
screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
(“I’m
Thinking
of
Ending
Things”) chose this lullaby
specifically to fit the narrative
of his movie, but it’s not that
far-fetched.
We
sometimes
make up parallels in our lives
with our loved ones even if they
don’t make sense. Like Phoebe
Bridgers
wrote,
“I
didn’t
know you then / And I’ll never
understand why / It feels like I
did.”
“Eternal Sunshine” begins
with Joel meeting Clementine
(Kate
Winslet,
“Titanic”)
on an impulsive day trip to
Montauk. Joel is enamoured
by Clementine’s boldness —
the way that she invites him, a
stranger, into the intimacy of
her life and apartment. After
spending a night together, the
film abruptly cuts to what we’ll
eventually realize is a flashback
to when Clementine and Joel
broke up, shortly before the
opening of the film. Clementine
went to a special medical clinic
to have her memory of Joel
erased from her brain, and,
upon discovering this, Joel
does the same to his memory
of Clementine. The film follows
Joel as he regrets trying to erase
her, and they both eventually
realize that even with all of
their baggage, they’re willing
to give their relationship one
more shot.
Even
the
mind-bending
science-fiction angle of the film
feels like something grounded
in reality — who hasn’t ever
wished they could, like Joel
and Clementine, be strapped to
an examination table and have
your
heartbreak
surgically
removed?
The most painful moment
for Joel wasn’t just the sight
of Clementine walking out his
door, but the moment when she
acts like she has never (because,
in her current consciousness,
she hasn’t) met him before.
It’s a science-fiction version
of the universal fear that you
can spend so much time in love
with someone only to end up as
strangers. That’s the paradox
that really matters, not the non-
linear storytelling that begins
the day after Joel has already
had his memory erased. With
no
memory
of
Clementine,
he meets his ex-girlfriend as
if they are strangers, leaving
a disconnect between their
bodies and minds. After two
years of love, they erase each
other through a procedure that
takes about as long as it might
take you to finally block your
ex’s number.
If the sentimentality doesn’t
get you, the cinematography
will. There are great visual
paradoxes when Clementine
walks down a street only to
appear to return right where she
began, like an urban Penrose
staircase, or the Eldritchian
version of Patrick (Elijah Wood,
“Wilfred”),
the
man
using
knowledge of Joel’s memories
to seduce Clementine, in a
comatose nightmare sequence
where, no matter how many
times Joel turns him around,
he never sees his face.
But Kaufman’s portrayal of
these inherent contradictions
of the human condition isn’t just
about the body horror of these
faceless
creatures
in
Joel’s
dreams — it’s the way that Joel
and Clementine are cosmically
magnetized
to
each
other.
Though they’ve forgotten about
each other, they remain drawn
to each other. Their bodies
could not forget. Perhaps this
is
because
Mark
Ruffalo’s
(“Spotlight”) character fucked
up the science, or maybe it
means that we can’t ever really
forget people as much as we
want to, no matter how much
we shill out for an experimental
psychological study.
Kaufman has something to
say about the repressed feelings
we hold in our bodies, too. Sex
is probably the most intimate
thing you can do with someone
second only to, I don’t know,
dying in their arms. But, in
Kaufman’s
film,
Clementine
uses it as a conversation starter
— not to express any meaningful
or established feelings. The
implication in Joel’s vitriolic
“I assume you fucked someone
tonight. Isn’t that how you get
people to like you?” is that she
doesn’t have any depth to her
personality, that she uses her
body to get to know people.
Avoiding the possibility of an
argument about sex positivity,
Kaufman uses this sequence
to point out how weird it is
that the bodies we’re in feel
so separate from who we are
inside our heads. Nearly the
whole film is spent in Joel’s out-
of-body experience during the
procedure. Maybe Joel thinks
(while
Clementine
denies
that she’s at all promiscuous)
that Clementine sees physical
nakedness as less incriminating
than emotional vulnerability,
or maybe she sees her body and
her mind connected in a way
that Joel can’t. When her mind
tells her body that she wants to
eat off of Joel’s plate the first
time they meet, she does.
“It was so intimate,” Joel
recalls
about
the
bizarre
moment. “Like we were already
lovers.”
There’s a scene where Joel
and Clementine venture out
onto a frozen lake to lie down
and stargaze. The frozen lake is
revisited multiple times, even if
the characters don’t realize it.
“What if it breaks?” Joel
asks.
“‘What if?’ Do you really care
right now?” Clementine says.
Is the ice going to crack? Is
the view of the stars worth the
risk of hypothermia? Is the love
worth the heartbreak? It’s the
paradox of loneliness when you
know how much it hurts to be
with someone who hurt you,
but you still want it anyway;
of knowing no one can force
feelings of love but still hurting
when they don’t love you back;
of Valentine’s Day intending to
be all about love, but ending
up being about heartbreak; of
everyone having the shared
experience of childhood but
somehow forgetting how lonely
it is to be a kid when you finally
grow up.
All we’re supposed to want
is survival. We’re supposed to
shave off anyone who might
hold us back. But instead we
go against all our instincts
to protect ourselves when we
choose to love someone, even
with all their weaknesses laid
out on the surgical table. Maybe
love is the ultimate paradox.
Daily
Arts
Writer
Mary
Elizabeth
Johnson
can
be
reached at maryelzz@umich.edu
MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON
Daily Arts Writer
It’s a science-
fiction version
of the universal
fear that you
can spend so
much time
in love with
someone only
to end up as
strangers.
THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
The true tragedy of snob
NINA MOLINA
Daily Arts Writer
In
his
1988
poem
“Introduction
to
Poetry,”
Billy Collins laments the way
his students have been taught
to read poetry. Rather than
“hold it up to the light like a
color slide,” or “press an ear
against its hive,” he writes
that
the
students
torture
a confession — in this case
meaning or significance — out
of the poem. Once they have
found its meaning, analyzed
its metaphors and discussed
its themes, they leave.
Collins
hates
this;
he
wants the experience of art
appreciation to be as ongoing
as the admiration of nature in
everyday life.
I agree with him. As one
learns more about a subject
— in this instance, art — the
less one seems to appreciate it.
This is the paradox of the snob.
Critics and experts’ knowledge
about art ultimately lead to
bitterness and disillusionment
about the direction of that
particular art form. Slowly,
the initial passion for the form
is replaced with unending
criticism.
We are taught to approach
art in this paradoxical manner.
In my creative writing classes,
I’ve learned to employ the
syntax
of
Alice
Munro,
Raymond Carver and Alice
Walker; we read the words
and then tear them apart and
put them back together in
carefully
crafted
academic
prose of analysis. But I don’t
want to tear the story into
shreds
of
clever
sentence
turns, front versus backstory
and particular verb usages.
I wonder when I’ll start
seeing
writing
as
work.
Perhaps
that’s
what
the
best artists do — they have
routine and practice, what
outsiders conflate with divine
inspiration. Walking the line
between creating a writing
routine while also giving in
to the whims of inspiration is
tricky.
Perhaps therein lies my
question:
Why
does
art
criticism exist if it turns us,
the art critics and consumers,
into
cynical
curmudgeons,
ready to attack any artist,
musician or writer?
In
one
of
my
English
classes, we’re learning about
Romantic-era literature. At
the
peak
of
19th-century
Romanticism,
nature
and
emotion became art’s purpose.
And, for the first time in
literary history, art’s purpose
became
oppositional
from
societal, morality and value
systems.
We just finished reading
Johann
Wolfgang
von
Goethe’s “The Sorrows of
Young
Werther,”
the
1774
German novel about a young
man’s infatuation with an
unavailable girl that leads to
his suicide. Werther’s foray
into the reality of unrequited
love is painful to watch, even
with Goethe’s beautiful prose.
And yet, the epistolary novel
is flooded with reasons to
continue loving the world,
despite the trials and pain
that
they
bring.
Though
Werther is no exemplar on
how
to
handle
romantic
rejection,
his
youthful
intensity and sensitivity are
highly admirable. He writes
to his best friend, “I am proud
of my heart alone, it is the
sole source of everything, all
our strength, happiness and
misery. All the knowledge
I possess everyone else can
acquire, but my heart is all
my own.” This vulnerability
to the world is enjoyable and
interesting to watch unfold,
but it’s also a virtue that us art
consumers can — and should
— learn.
As an English major, I live in
constant fear of becoming this
snob. I worry I will approach
every piece of literature I
pick up ready to annotate the
margins and always keeping
the
essay
prompt
at
the
forefront of my mind. But, I
agree with Collins when he
writes that he would rather
“walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light
switch” than beat a meaning
or significance out of a poem.
It
seems
some
art
enthusiasts
find
comfort
in that they are the few
“chosen” followers who are
enlightened enough to have
better taste. I’ve encountered
people who correct the way
you say Van Gogh. They are
the ones who gasp at you
for not knowing that the
drummer of Nirvana was the
lead singer of the Foo Fighters
and book-shame you for not
having
read
“Fahrenheit
451,”
“Slaughterhouse-Five,”
“Frankenstein” or any Oscar
Wilde. But I have yet to find
joy in being the “select” few.
In some ways, this makes
me excited to have space away
from this kind of analysis
after my formal education. I’m
determined to never let go of
that excited, playful state of
being enraptured in a novel.
Like Werther, I’d be sorry to
lose the beauty of nature in
the name of art.
Daily
Arts
Writer
Nina
Molina can be reached at
ninamolina@umich.edu.
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