"couture Guerrilla": DML's First YouTube Video (Gorgeous--and It's Hot!)
Cat in the Stack
At the amazing Global Youth and Imaginative Labor conference I went to in Tokyo, I ran into an old friend, hip hop and funk dj and activist Dwayne Dixon (aka DJ Sedition), a former documentarian and educator who used to work at the Center for Documentary Studies here at Duke before he decided to go back to school and earn a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology. Dwayne worked with the much acclaimed (and wonderful) photographer Wendy Ewald (who also happens to be our Distinguished Franklin Center artist) on the photographs of Karen refugee teenagers on the Thai-Burma border (an exhibit shown at the Soros Foundation). He's in Japan doing field work for a dissertation on youth cultural, capitalism, and globalization, focusing mostly on kids' understanding of urban spaces. Focus: skateboarders (Dwayne is one himself). We talked and talked, and (surprise, everybody!) I told him about the Digital Media and Learning Competition. There was also another Duke student at the conference, Jessica Figueroa, without question the most Stylin Gal I have encountered in years and years. Wow. Jessica. She's an artist and she embodies art---every detail of clothes, hair, make up changed every time I met her and it was all just phenomenal. I wasn't surprised to learn she was an Art, Art History, and Visual Studies major. She's a fourth year undergrad at Duke, majoring in visual arts, using a multi-media approach including digital photographpy, drawing, fashion/make-up, and graphic design. She has exhibited work in a group show, "When Lamps Attack" and has had a solo exhibition "Nappy Trails," which is currently on view in Duke's Allen Building. She was president of SHARE, an experimental living group on Duke's campus for two years and is in Tokyo on a two-month grant, one of many art awards she's won. These are both really impressive people, with talent to burn. I really don't remember if we talked in Japan about them making a video response to the DML Competition but, when I returned, I couldn't stop thinking about it and asked them if they were still thinking about it to. Well, the rest is history. Even better, the rest is ART. You won't believe what a gorgeous, creative, original, and really beautiful video they made, posted to YouTube, Of Maxicat Rhodendron (Jessica) running, wandering, hustling all over the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, to fabulous music by rattatat, and finding (or is she creating?) the www.dmlcompetition.net logo signs everywhere. Watch it now, leave a comment, enjoy! (I've posted two film stills below, incl the gorgeous logo--this is MTV quality music video, without the cliches.) Dwayne and Jessica are two very, very talented digital artists to keep an eye on.
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Having just looked at the UTube you promote, I'm incredibly sad. It is so terribly far from the pain young people feel, and the urgency of their plight, not just here but worldwide.
It is astounding that they could be so thoroughly and apparently ignorant of things like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c6VN2pOLWU. It's the testament of a kid in a former New England industrial city, beseiged by gentrification, to the pain and death of 16 of his friends from suicide and drug addiction. The guerilla action with which he and his friends began their organization was spray painting "kill the yuppies." What he and his friends saw and felt was the transition of adolescent depression into excruciating personal despair, and tried to act on it without any real act of violence.
They abandoned their media strategy when his brother counseled collaboration with those yuppies via entrepreneurship and organization. Good advice. Yet at a serious cost, since that brother learned those tricks in Iraq, where he still is, and from whence he still advises his brothers in projects a lot tougher, a lot more critical, and a lot more meaningful than the couture you seem to be using the $2 mil from MacArthur to document.
Would that guerilla couture had some teeth to affect how the young can really change their world. Instead, it seems to affirm all the co-optation of the wealthy, all the dizziness of affluence, and all the arrogance of power that we had hoped had ended with Kipling. Playing that game with this tech is as deeply insulting to the real challenges of this tortured and visionary generation as fiddling at the burning of Rome, or taking up that white man's burden.
I think you're making a grave mistake in confusing "couture Guerrilla" with "guerrilla couture." This video is not promoting underground fashion, or anything remotely related. In fact, the "couture" of the title refers only to star within the video; it's a kind of superhero name. The video instead is mysteriously and whimsically promoting a competition which aims to promote innovation within formal and informal education (as you can easily see by visiting the website). A competition which, in fact, could help address the problems listed in the YouTube video you posted.
"Would that guerilla couture had some teeth to affect how the young can really change their world." Well, it doesn't. But no one here is claiming that. Instead "couture Guerrilla," the chosen alias/method of the female star, is advertising a competition, an opportunity, that does have those teeth.
--ADB--