Racial Bending

Created for mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com, part of the Xth Biennale de Lyon

"...Sarah Weis casts herself into YouTube as an Afro-American, indirectly applying circuit bending philosophy to gender and race." -curator Tolga Taluy

permanent exhibition link: http://mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com/sarah-weis.html

For a moment it felt very pure and innocent, like a little gay boy pretending to be a woman in the mirror for the first time...

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• bend
• white
• black
• race bending
• post-race
• obama
• diana ross
• sarah weis
• racial
• racist
• video art

[NetTuber]

It's light Jim, but not as we know it. ^_^

[boringstoreez]

Jay Smooth has a good video about Asher Roth and racism, in which he questions the motives of white people who want to fight racism through race-baiting and shock, pointing outthat the main thing they use their hastily assembled avant-race position for is to tell generalized jokes about people who have been the subject of generalized jokes for centuries.

What I'm saying is that there's a power dynamic at play in a straight white woman mimicking a gay black boy. That shouldn't go unacknowledged.

[boringstoreez]

Rephrasing a lost comment: I imagine Momus would argue in favor of this piece, but Momus's race politics are a joke. They begin and end at wanting racism to end so that his lazy privileged race-baiting artist friends don't have to come up with new ideas. I know this isn't a scientific measure, but really, show me any photos of Momus with a Black artist he admires. I'm not saying he's racist; I'm saying he doesn't question his privilege to ignore race.

[boringstoreez]

Blackface was used, and still is used, to trivialize and objectify an already-objectified group of people. And my first thought is that you look more like a lawn jockey than a (gay) black person here.

At the same time, you're not doing this to evoke emotion on the cheap at the expense of someone else's agency, which is the method by which blackface objectifies, and you're not doing a borad caricature, you're doing a person, a character. And you're doing it as a meditation on race.

[Gunny11795]

this is shit

[Kibblesmith]

"I don't think video is real," - Sarah Weis