Visual Politics
Iconization of Donald Trump: A year in the Covers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ismael Lopez Medel
During the first year of his presidency, as well as for most of the 2016 electoral campaign, Donald Trump has been the subject of multiple cover stories in renowned magazines such as Rolling Stone, Time, The Economist, Der Stern and many others. Over this time, it can be argued that Trump has suffered an iconization process, by which he has become more than a political figure, and instead is now represented as an icon, a logotype, to represent certain political attitudes. This paper examines Trump's first year in the cover images of popular magazines, to examine his representation as more than a president, but as an icon, something without recent precedents in the United States history.
The Visual Politics of Memetic Participation: A Case of East Asia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Minhyoung Kim
Based on Dawkins’s initial idea of a unit of cultural transmission, an Internet meme can be defined as a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and perspective, which are created, circulated, or transformed via the Internet by a multitude of users. Such memes are much more visual than their predecessors so that the visual nature of Internet memes not only represents their polysemic potential for multiple readings but also utilizes pop culture of people’s everyday lives as a common ground through which individuals can communicate with one another on social, cultural, and political realities in a playful and engaging way. This study aims to obtain a fuller understanding of the visual language of the Internet memes and their "vernacular creativity," and thus to explore how Internet memes serve as pivotal links between the personal and the political, allowing citizens to actively participate in digital "connected action," while maintaining their sense of individuality. This study focuses on a recent East Asian case, from the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong to the Candlelight Revolution of South Korea.
Reclaiming the Tool of Anger: Year of the Angry Women
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
Silence is not golden — anymore. An outpour of female anger propelled the movements Women’s March and #MeToo: visceral impacts of these 2017 social movements are reflected in art exhibitions staged in 2017 and thereafter. Historically, the adjective angry plus the noun woman add up to negative gendered connotations. In the year 2017, women found their voice and began to emphatically enunciate in all caps. An examination of the imagery from several of these art exhibitions, staged in galleries and museums, will reveal homogeneous imagery, metaphorical visuals for the angry woman, and a collective consensus of gendered injustices in society. By delineating the connections between specified social movements and the visual arts, a case will be made for the concept of female anger as a tool for change. This discourse will address historical ties of commonality between art exhibitions stemming from the social movements Women’s March and #MeToo to their predecessors of the late 60s through the 1970s. The discussion of current exhibitions will reveal their advocacy for intersectionality and a commitment to social engagement in the visual arts. 2017 may be remembered as the year women got angry; it was also the year women artists proactively organized exhibitions, fast and furiously, in response to an unrest and urgency bubbling up in our society. The angry woman artist is channeling her rage in a directed manner by promoting awareness of gendered social inequities, raising funds for political and charitable organizations and stimulating impactful change.
