96. The Accidental Femminist - Part 2

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "95. The accidental femminist":

this was published on archinect in response to this article-image:

there is something wrong with the article and the image.

it isn't merely zaha who worked with gadafi's and qatar's regimes. everyone and their uncle worked with them. zaha is equally as "guilty" in that sense. no one bothered to collage their image with their building like penises.

did the person who make this image ask permission from zaha hadid first and get it? i assume not. in which case, i assume that they have taken advantage of her image and manipulated it to their end.

which means that, in the name of a so-called feminism (that is an exaggerated pathological direct outcome of sexism -other side of its coin-and not an actual independent feminism that respects women's/people's individual images and bodies), she's being abused by being collaged into an image that - i strongly believe- would contradict with her wishes.

the author and fabricator of the image fall into the same hole -truly no puns here- that this image is employed to counter.

furthermore, there is a strong suggestion that this is was taken from some terrorist attack/military zone - perhaps in iraq. the inversion of victims into suggested violators now being violated by a vagina is completely tasteless.

everyone in this image is being used for a single minded purpose trampling on quite a few people - inverting them for its own whimsical and perverse end.


Hi Tammuz,

Thanks for the feedback.

Sure there are other starchitects that work for dictatorial regimes, and I have been critical of them before (see note #56 & 57). I am not singling out Zaha because she is a woman. I have targeted quite a few other starchitects for criticism before.

I have criticized Bjarke Ingels for not being rigorous enough, but no one bothered to ask why I didn't criticize any female architects who were not as rigorous too?

I have criticized Peter Zumthor for being disingenuous several times, but no one bothered to ask why I didn’t criticize any disingenuous female architects or any other disingenuous starchitects for that matter.

I have criticized Wim Wenders for making a masturbatory film that basically is Zumthor pornography for Zumthor fans to jerk off to, but no one bothered to accuse me of being sexist because I was referring to his manhood as a tool for criticism.

I have posted pictures of Rem Koolhaas breast-feeding Bjarke Ingels, Joshua Prince (REX), Foreign Office Architects and a bunch of his other prodigies, but no one bothered to say "if it was a female starchitect they wouldn’t have depicted her body in such a perverse way to make a point. It’s just because he is a man!"

 

I am pretty sure that neither Rem, nor Bjarke nor any of the other architects who were featured in that image would approve of it, but again no one asked if Rem was being abused or exploited when his image was used in that way?

Besides giving evidence that I have a very outlandish sense of humor, do you see where I am going with this?

I am not singling her out for this type of criticism because she is a woman. I am singling her out because she is a starchitect with very low moral bearings. Zaha and her allies have a habit of calling every male criticism of her sexist and every female criticism of her jealousy; a quixotic attempt to make herself inscrutable. It has never stopped me before and it’s not going to stop me now.

The intention with the image was to illustrate an alternate universe where Zaha is actually a super action heroine standing up for the repressed women in Qatar. She is depicted as a poised, powerful woman in control. She is smoking a cigar which she has in one had as if to celebrate a victory. In the other had she is holding up the middle finger, like a driver who has successfully cut off an opponent in a traffic dispute and leaving them in the dust. The stadium (looking like a giant steel vagina) is re-imagined not so much as an accidental Freudian hiccup to be ashamed of, but as an intentional powerful act of defiance and symbol of female prowess and strength. It is not accidental that the image chosen for Zaha's face has an expression of conceit and composure that stands in stark contrast to the horror on the faces of the crowd below. In a way, I was channeling Bruce Willis' expression in the Die Hard movie, that moment right after saying "yippie-kye-yae mother fucker!"

 

The little men in the street below her represent the strictly male power class of Qatar led by the Emir; they stand behind the oppressive system of de-facto slavery and mass female imprisonment. Behind them in the background stands "the cock crammed" skyline - tall sky skyscrapers resembling a forest of male phalluses. This is testament to the highly patriarchal society in which women make up only 1/4 of the population and are diminished in power. If they feel it is necessary to incarcerate and suppress women in their society in such a radical way, one can only conclude that they are afraid of them. It is no wonder then that any building that resembles a female vagina would be a frightening proposition - Super action heroine Zaha has just delivered  them their worst nightmare. So yes you are right, I wanted to invoke an image of what would be terror for such a society: A powerful woman that can stand up to or at least outwit them. That was the main point!

However there is another layer of meaning and intension to this image of terror. If you remember the days leading up to the fall of the Quadafi regime that Zaha worked for, you might recall the violent images of civilians and militia in the streets being attacked by her former employer's solders. As I mentioned Zaha was hired as part of the regime's propaganda wing in an elaborate plan to give the regime an air of sophistication that would help mask the atrocities that he was committing.
 

THE REALITY: The images in the video above shows the reality of Quadafi's Lybia and the terror he inflicted on the people there.



THE MASK: People's Conference Hall  (above) in Tripoli designed by starchitect, Zaha Hadid, but was 'put on hold' causing her firm to lay off many of its employees. The project was clearly an attempt by Gaddafi to rebrand his image and fumigate the stench of Lockerbie and other adventures of his dictatorship

With my image I also wanted to place the mask (Zaha Hadid and her work) and the reality behind the mask (the image of violence and terror) together on the same image as a way for my audience to see both the mask and the reality in one image.  This was the secondary point.

The third point was to create an image that was outrageous, humorous and offensive as possible to draw attention and spark debate. I wanted to shake my audience from their complacency of looking at starchitects who willingly participate in embellishing violent regimes as a trivial matter. By getting my audience emotionally engaged by either laughing or being disturbed by it, my hopes are that they will remember it and help to create a culture where this kind of behavior is no longer acceptable.  

Some say it is tasteless. Sure, I expected that response. What is tasteless? That varies along cultural, religious, and personal value lines. In some societies complete nudity is normal and acceptable; for them no part of the human body is taboo or can be seen as tasteless and that includes both the male and female genitalia. For some religions any flesh visible above the knee of a woman is indecent, others find it tasteless for a woman to show her ankles or require that the woman is covered so that only the eyes are visible.  So no matter what I do, someone will consider it tasteless by some standards. Therefore, you may have noticed that trying not to offend anyone isn't anywhere on my list of intentions above.  

To answer some of your specific concerns though; Why choose the vagina and not some other body part, or something else as a mode of criticism? Well you my have to ask Jon Stewart, or whoever started the Internet meme. By the time I saw that stadium it was already branded as a vagina. All that was left for me to do was to contextualize it, which i did - both visually with the image and politically with the accompanying article.

As for the alleged victims, No! The collage is not taken from images of actual terror victims; they are from a street protest - demonstrators running from tear gas thrown by police, another is of Arabic men running away at the start of a camel race in Rash al Khaimah, and the third (not sure) probably an Arab comedy skit featuring men screaming.  I commend you though for at least thinking about them. Most of the complaints I get condemns the tasteless victimization/exploitation of Zaha without any mention of the thousands of women or slaves who are victims of the system she works for.

In short, I belive you (as well as others) have misinterpreted my intention and inflated it with some incorrect assumptions. As you mentioned, the image comes with other messages. You interpreted it as a tasteless exploitation of Zaha and victims of terrorism that tramples on people for my own whimsical and perverse end. To this I say, that this is part of what makes art/comedy so interesting and wonderful: Because it can be interpreted in so many different ways. Like a Rorschach test, a psychoanalyst may put an ink splash in front of you and you will see one thing and I will see another. In these scenarios, the meanings we find in the images are more a measure of us and our world view than the actual image itself. 

It draws to mind the case when former NY mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn museum because it showed the artist Chris Ofili’s painting of the Holy Virgin Mary that he didn’t like. Ofili's painting depicted the Virgin Mary with dark skin, African features, and was collaged with close-ups of female genitalia cut out from pornographic magazines and real elephant dung.  Ofili's intention was to use the dung and the vagina images as symbols of fertility. Giuliani saw it differently. He thought it was offensive to Catholics and famously exclaimed, "There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!” Ironically though, it was Hillary Clinton who came to Ofili's defense arguing the freedom of expression and cultural tolerance. This is the nature of symbols in art. It can provoke a conversation about the meanings we extract from things between two strangers who know nothing about each other than the values we bring to an image.

All the best,

Conrad Newel
NOTES ON BECOMING A FAMOUS ARCHITECT
Liberating Minds Since August 2007