Art of liminal spaces: spring on the border

STREET SM(ART): On the connotations of clothing: implications of style in crafting identity

My first act of early-teenage rebellion was buying a sewing machine. I found it on Craigslist in early July, and so found myself, 14 years old, exchanging $35 for a stranger’s spring cleaning leftovers—a compact, simple-stitch, late 1960s Singer. I told my Chinese parents—who thought I was going through a phase—that it was on loan from a friend for the summer. The temperamental machine didn’t even last that long, perhaps because it was old, or perhaps because I stayed up until 2 a.m. every day that summer splitting threads and breaking needles.At first, it was fun to make colorful, textural things; then the things made me. I studied clothing the way a shy, book-savvy young girl does: through literature. I hoarded back-issues of Vogue to analyze fashion trends in America. While these were phases, sewing—building clothing for my individual, Asian-American, adolescent body—was not. When I wore what I made, I found that it lent me the most compelling case for uniqueness. The way I dressed validated my personality and my body concurrently. It asserted the reality of my existence.
To align the outer self with an expression of the inner self is a cultural/political act, especially for those who face discrimination and stereotyping. In my experience, being Asian in America has always come with a set of connotations from assumed identities. Making clothes let me in on a secret: I could slip into different perceptions based on the way I dressed. I was not another nameless Asian if I dressed like a Warhol Superstar or a Riot Grrrl. By rooting myself in American sartorial history, I could assert aspects of my identity that I wanted to emphasize, rather than those prescribed to me. This was a revelation: the power of playing dress up. The care I devoted to the way I dressed was an effort to affect the split-second assessment others made of me based on my ethnicity. Dressing with deliberacy and style awarded me just a second more of contemplation.
This valuable extra second has never been a case of life or death for me. Asians are stereotyped, above all, as being docile. For other people of color, stereotypes are different, dangerous. In 2012, a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot in the gated community in which he lived while wearing a hoodie. Martin’s death sparked national protest, with the hoodie becoming a symbol against unjust racial profiling. In this case, the haunting image of the hoodie, which may or may not have affected how Martin’s shooter perceived him, is a garment weighted with cultural implication. In America, clothing is far more than just clothing. Perhaps if Martin had been afforded that extra second, he wouldn’t have been unjustly, lethally judged. Then again, perhaps not: a reality of America is that it is not fair.
These two very different situations emphasize the systematic implications of appearance. Style provides a flexibility in perception that is radical for people of color in America, who often control very little about how they are seen. Fashion is not just for the vacuous: clothing is a tool for validating the marginalized body, for asserting presence and existence and identity, and thus a tool of power and privilege. With this in mind, there is something inherently vicious in using this power to disrespect or reduce others. To perpetuate stereotype by mocking or appropriating is invalidating and thus, inhumane. It engages the same system that creates otherness, that argues that wearing a hoodie as a black American is a good enough reason for death.
“Style,” Maya Angelou wrote, “allows [a] person to appear neither inferior in one location nor superior in the other.” Style elasticizes boundaries as it moves beyond socio-economic classification and fleeting judgements. I learned this by the lamplight of my sewing machine. At Bowdoin, we learn this by way of engaging in our community, which includes many brave and articulate voices of color. In America, style can be a weapon for those who need it. However, it is not ultimately strong enough to save them from the line of gunfire. This is the work that must be done by American institutions. It is difficult to change a system to protect those it has historically excluded. All the same, it is far more difficult to exist in it. Since this is what Bowdoin demands of students of color, it is merited that students of color demand institutional change of Bowdoin. It is just about time for spring cleaning.

STREET SM(ART): Assumptions of whiteness in indie: a personal account of artistic expression

A couple of weeks ago, I overheard a student in the Brunswick Junior High School class I tutor complain about her piano lessons. Although seventh-grade sentimentalism often confronts me in that classroom, nothing had struck me like this remark before. I turned to her. I couldn’t stop myself. Be grateful for those lessons. I had them too. Then I thought of my younger self, who was awkward amidst variations of heights and stages of puberty at a magnet school in Manhattan. I thought of what playing piano brought me then. My school was also predominantly white— although Upper-East-Side-white, not Maine-white— and all of the strange spaces I ended up coursing through at 13 (as a result of the piano) were white too.
At 13 years old, I found myself the keyboardist of an indie pop all-girl band. This band was a lot of things, but at its core it was a DIY art project that argued cuteness and youth in music could be revolutionary and feminist. In two years, I went from performing recitals to dark bars on the Lower East Side to comedy shows to concert venues on a European tour with my favorite singer. It was special. I became young and musical and privy to a world that seemed far away from that of my classmates. I thought indie music gave me a way out of the averageness and awkwardness of adolescence. In some ways, it allowed me to grow up quickly. In other ways, it did not let me grow at all.
I left my project of two years because touring did not agree with public school. But I left indie because I could not fit its world. Even if I was a good musician, I would never be lithe and pale enough, which I felt deeply as a personal fault. Despite the girl-power and riot-grrrl aphorisms I touted, indie provided no guidance to navigating my identity, which was lonesomely darker and different from those of my bandmates and everyone around me. My Asian-ness pushed boundaries and thus I could feel the edges of the indie’s racial structures. Racism is strange this way. It pervades subcultures that are committed to artistic integrity and nurturing the independent spirit outside of commercial media. In all of that good, insidious individualism and prejudice still distort the world like light through a prism.
I did love music, although I did not love what surrounded it. Something that my friends at Bowdoin remind me of—over three-hour dinners at the vertical tables in Thorne—is that artistic remarkability is not unique here. Many of us have dabbled in different worlds—art, acting, modeling, dance—and still end up here. This is not to say that performing arts careers are sacrificed for education. Rather, the worlds of art can be compared to a world like Bowdoin, where issues of racism and shifting demographics often take the center slot on the front page of the newspaper and the implicitness of being white is challenged by students of color. These are the skills an artist of any sort needs to navigate a world as systematically white as indie, not as an anomaly but as an extraordinary.
An exemplar artist of color in indie is Hari Kondabolu ’04, who spoke candidly about his experiences at Bowdoin last weekend. Kondabolu’s rise to comedy stardom can be attributed to a couple things. Firstly, that he is a good comedian. Secondly, he confronts issues of race humorously and head-on, which he learned to do at Bowdoin, and has spoken about in the Orient. This was of interest to me, seeing as Kondabolu and I performed at the same types of comedy clubs in 2010, but nowadays, he is on the stage of Pickard Theater and I am in the balconies first tier. Perhaps that is a measurable value for spending time in a world like Bowdoin.
This means that there is also an argument to be made for the liberation of indie music. Last week, I watched the Japanese-born Asian American musician Mitski’s first video, and was deeply overcome by her clear engagement and discussion of race. It has been a long time coming, but Asian American indie artists are gaining recognition by the nature of identities which is something I wouldn’t have believed could happen years ago. This is particularly moving to me as I think back to my seventh grade self, who toiled at the piano and believed for a while that she would never forsake music for college, let alone a tiny one in Maine. Then again, it is easy to sign a life away before you know what it will hold. I am glad to feel the world shifting and changing beneath my feet.

STREET SM(ART)

Art of liminal spaces: spring on the border

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

June Lei

Columnist

April 7, 2016

There is a particular sheen of gold that falls upon the desert at sunset. It is unlike the pale northeastern light that rises and sinks upon the Maine snow over 2,000 miles away. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced prior to visiting Arizona on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip. Despite this, the desert was still somewhat familiar to me. It is the same landscape of Manifest Destiny paintings and made-for-TV movies about the Old West. It is the same desert of the postcard sky that breaks into an untouchable prism of purples, so sunspun that representations appear flat and gaudy. Perhaps this is because the implications of the desert far surpass its visuals.

When participating in and then writing about such a trip, one inherits a set of internal politics. Traveling, gaining, then creating something out of the experience is both reflection and representation. I am not from the borderlands, so I am a tourist and a liberal arts student engaging with a place and its host of issues. Our ASB studied the migrant crisis at the Arizona/Sonora border and the economic, social and legislative systems that influence it. It was often emotional, terrifying and deeply moving at the same time. Although it would take a half semester of seminars and a week in the desert to even begin to describe this, some key thoughts arise as relevant to the liberal arts education, particularly regarding understanding the systematic borderlands through visual thinking.

Within this system, to be a citizen studying casualties of citizenship is a strange, paradoxical role. It is nearly as strange as the action of learning from those with less in order to better oneself or self knowledge. Often humanitarian groups we met that worked directly within the crisis would relay a vague, hopeful sentiment of us students eventually affecting policy or creating awareness of the issue. This was a general bid, but as a student primarily studying art and literature, I found myself challenging my engagement with the border rather distinctly: for being an arts student does not put me in a place of direct influence—I will likely never create policy—but rather in a peripheral location. Although artists have been creating work about and on the border for decades, I am a visitor and my influence exists in a liminal space. This personal conflict preserves, but not without the understanding that the border and the borderlands are too a liminal space, and thus to engage with them as a visual system is possible.
Besides the sun, the chicory air and the variable tones of russet and stucco, a distinctive trait of the desert is its effervescent, unyielding heat. It creeps higher throughout the day until it matches the temperature of the human body. To spend an hour in the sun is difficult; to spend a day trekking the border is deadly. For migrants that cross the desert, it is more than just landscape, it is death. Thousands of people have died crossing within the past two decades.

Despite border relations being a popular political issue, the fact is that the borderlands are far more. They are a home, an economy and a weapon. It is difficult to ruminate upon the beauty of a landscape when it puts human lives at stake. These are some of the paradoxes of the border, factors that make the space liminal, as if in between two worlds. Application of the arts cannot project a simple course of action and change, but then again, this is not a simple situation.
Visual thinking invokes something even more complex. People are dying at the border as a result of a system of deterrence involving a several tactics, but most famously, a wall. When our group took our enterprise van into the desert sand to visit this wall in person, we found it to be better described as a gate, or a fence. The first thing I noticed about the wall was that its rust colored stature soared like a piece of public large-scale artwork, and contained nearly as much symbolic value. There is immense weight in thinking of the border line as a representation. If the 16 million dollar per mile manifestation of the gate is purely symbolic—as it is insecure in places—then what does this mean for the fundamentals of our country and the values that are fiercely and tenaciously guarded in the borderlands?

The relationship between art and the borderlands continues to merge and morph. Liminal spaces are not unfamiliar to the arts nor is most sublime paradox of the beautiful and the terrible coexisting as one. The liberal arts, over 2,000 miles away from Maine, continue to suggest ways of thinking about the 2,000 mile stretch of border.

A body can disintegrate within three days of extreme desert conditions. The landscape, with its variations of cacti and oscillating droughts, carries a particular history that cannot be ignored. The poet Elizabeth Brewster wrote, “people are made of places / They carry with them / hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace / or the cool eyes of sea-gazers”. The converse of this idea is that places are made of their people. All of those bones in the desert are what make America. America, vast and golden and destined, stretches a liminal space between coasts. As tan and tantalizing as the Arizona landscape was, nothing about it was truly foreign to me, not even the sun. We are never visitors of our own country; we are its participants, and its bounty.

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