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For my makeover, I told Sarada Conaway that I wanted her to make me look like I could get laid in a DC gay bar, something I have had trouble with in the past. She was excited about the opportunity to play with DC and Baltimore stereotypes and perpetuate the rivalry between these two cities. I’d never been photographed like that before, beneath huge lights, standing on the pristine white backdrop; it felt strange. I felt awkward being myself, in my street clothes, and then after the makeover, while there were moments when I successfully let go (Sarada put on some Lady Gaga to go with the hair gel) I kept fumbling my sexy-powerful pose (our idea of the DC essence). I could barely hold it long enough for the photo.
Although Conaway’s employment of the familiar before-after format leads one to expect something like we love watching on reality TV– the ugly duckling becomes the beautiful swan– you will not be able to read a clear before-after contrast in Sarada’s makeover photos. Conaway might have the skills to mimic television makeovers, but what kind of art would that be, to pander to our appetite for dazzling contrivance? Her work is not about dramatic chrysalis but an occasion for discussing the way our identities are bound up in surface presentation. Conaway initiates a conversation with willing participants about who they are versus what appearance they’d like to play for the shoot. Drawing from the palate of the thrift store, that holding tank of cast-off identities, and her beautician skills, Conaway and her sitter collaborate to achieve the new look.
In the finished photographs the sitters appear outside of any context, alone against a blank page, and at least on her website, there is no attendant text to explain who the sitter is and what look she chose for herself. These aspects of the presentation, the absence of setting and plot, leave it to our ability to stereotype in order to interpret the photographs. But stereotype is our default action; that’s how we categorize others and ourselves. In speaking about her work, Conaway appealed to that everyday scenario, when we walk past someone on the street and place them according the sum of available visual information. We draft a story in our head about who they are. Meanwhile, to a certain extent, we’ve crafted our own appearance to correspond to the story we’ve drafted about ourselves. These two stories, passing each other on the street– it’s Merleau-Pontean phenomenology, two subjects that function as mirrors, showing each other each other, and thereby determining (and limiting) each others’ identity.
I’m starting to sound like I want to use Conaway’s work to drive home a lesson about judging other people, but Conaway’s work isn’t so didactic. The majority of the makeover photographs don’t lend themselves to a quick read and a moral about say, equality or intrinsic human worth. Perhaps “Roxanne” does. The two sitters appear like toughs from Pigtown, rough white women in hip-hop clothes. In the accompanying image, the same two women appear as friendly professionals, dressed business casual, with the addition of Hello My Name Is tags, a detail which reiterates the idea that in many ways identity is a matter of superficial application.
But a lot of her makeover photos don’t read like this. Maybe the looks are based on a whim of the sitter’s, or maybe they couldn’t quite achieve the intended identity with the materials Conaway had on hand. We are merely presented with two possible people, two feasible manners in which a particular human might present herself to the world.
These less determinate works are of particular interest to Baltimore artists who aim to make socially conscious work. Jaimes Mayhew put it into words for me a week ago, and I’ll try to put forth my understanding of his distinction here: it’s a difference between work that can be called social activism and work that is social practice. The former is work that identifies a social problem and prescribes a solution. Social practice on the other hand engages people but without an agenda to guide the work’s development.
Social activism operates like a statement; the work is predicated from the beginning, its thesis dictates its form. Social practice, on the other hand, while it may still grow out of sincere concern for the social, allows its form to be guided by the perimeters of the project. Social practice is an exploration of the factors the artist chooses to deal with, and the work’s result is formed through the subsequent interplay of those factors. Besides being a more honest engagement with the audience, it allows for the possibility of work whose content cannot be didactically reduced, work that we as viewers examine and discuss repeatedly to get our heads around its form and its implications.
While not clearly advocating for specific social changes, Conaway’s art does seem to grow out of a desire to subvert the conventional representations of social status or at least to initiate a more careful discussion about the ways in which the experience of the individual– what is inside and what is in the past– manifests itself on the exterior, through style. The work isn’t asking us to abandon our individual identities and start dressing the same (though in another earlier work, Conaway photographed various men and women all dressed in the same K-mart track suit). That would be a prescriptive and facile reading of her work. Besides, our identities aren’t so easily diffused. There is a lot at stake in our appearance, the visible comes along with more intractable, invisible appendages, roots and tendrils that extending beyond us, into space and out through time.
Sarada offered to let me keep the clothes she picked out for my makeover. I thought about it for a minute but finally said no. They wouldn’t feel at home in room. They’d kick around like displaced people, collecting dust, a continual reminder of what I am not, and eventually I’d ball them up and shove them into the trash can. Sarada said she’d return them to the thrift store.
Thank you Peter! You and Jaimes did a perfect job of articulating these different social ways of working.
February 9, 2011 3:17 pm