One of the most troubling outcomes of the commodification of diversity, as Leong outlines, is that it pressures individuals into performing their otherness in a way that meets with the approval of the dominant culture. As an example, in my research on British Asian theatre practitioners, my respondents would describe how they have to present their ‘diversity’ in a somewhat exaggerated, or at least assertive way in order to qualify for the money the Arts Council have ring-fenced specifically for ‘culturally diverse’ theatre companies. This is how diversity initiatives make race. It is despite, or indeed, because of diversity initiatives that representations of racialised minorities continue to be reduced to a handful of recognisable tropes, with little variation. As Gray puts it, ‘diversity is a technology of power, a means of managing the very difference it expresses’.
A fascinating album by a slightly subpar singer. Celia was one of the
“festival” singers of the early 1970s who made her debut on television
shows and in live, competitive festival performances. Her debut album
features a wealth of talent as well as a very strong, very contemporary
repertoire. Songs by up-and-coming composers such as Nelson Angelo, Ivan
Lins, Joyce and Lo Borges are framed by the unmistakable kaleidoscopic
pop of arranger Rogerio Duprat.
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Anna-Nicole Ziesche, States of Mind and Dress, 2002.
The fashion film States of Mind and Dress (2002) by Anna-Nicole Ziesche (b. 1972, Hamburg, Germany) opens with a shot of a naked man and woman standing with their backs to each other and with their arms in the air. A blue, hand-knitted sweater gradually grows on the body of the man and a green pair of jeans on the body of the woman. As soon as both garments are finished they glide back and forth from the one body to the other via the raised arms and over the heads of the man and woman. An exchange of garments between two bodies is thus created.
Ziesche’s aim with this film is to show that you can have just as intimate and complex a relationship with someone else’s clothes as with the other person him- or herself. States of Mind and Dress is an example of Ziesche’s later work, which focuses on the ambivalent relationship an individual has with his or her body and clothing. The film addresses how an individual’s personality can be expressed by means of the clothes one uses to dress one’s body.
Ziesche trained as a fashion designer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. In her final year, however, she decided that she did not want to design actual clothing but devote herself to fashion photography and to making fashion films, installations and performances in order to express her ideas about contemporary fashion. The clothing that Ziesche designs only functions, then, within her performances and films. This conceptual approach, which she herself calls ‘fashion practice’, is a new way of creating a visual context for fashion. Ziesche’s work thus occupies a place between fashion and visual art.
Underlying all her work is the concept of endless repetition. Ziesche is fascinated by the countless repetitive movements and routines of everyday life. In her early work she investigated repeating patterns, forms, colours and details in the production process of clothing; her later work concentrates on repetition in the rituals that represent the relationship between body and clothing, such as the daily act of getting dressed and undressed.
The supertalls are usually described in terms that underscore their upward thrust. They’re towers, turrets, blades, glaives, “calligraphic” in their majesty and slenderness. But after a while I began to see them as structures whose energy is directed down, not up: as needles to sterilize the unruly city. Eventually New York will be like the apartment interiors sketched in the supertall mock-ups, with their fruitless kitchens and pristine ottomans, their warm cream sofa blankets thrown just so: a place uncluttered.
…Gentrification is not quite the right word for what’s happening here. Midtown is no derelict precinct primed for an influx of the affluent. What’s emerging instead is a vision of where development is headed next: toward a culture of the secessionist city. The techno-libertarians, machine fanatics, and psychopaths of Silicon Valley have long dreamed of an exit from regular society, through colonization of the seas and the stars. In the form of the supertall, they may have found, for themselves and others like them, an elegant solution: one that gives them a society apart, a realm of perfect exclusion and perfect control, but nevertheless leeches off the encircling polity while entrenching the political influence of the rich.
True, this isn’t the total exit of Peter Thiel’s seasteading reveries, but it’s close enough, and obtainable at a fraction of the effort of other secessionist schemes. The thinness of these buildings, often cast as a great wonder of engineering, needs to be understood in these terms. The ectomorphic state of the supertalls is not dynamic; it does not represent some great urban energy, a loose-limbed frontier spirit standing tall. Rather, it is a symbol of emaciation. The old city is gone, and in its place we will get what? Whatever the rich want.
