Art 340/540 New Media; Lance Loud

An American Family was a groundbreaking documentary and is considered the first "reality" series on American television. Lance Loud, the eldest son of the family, emerged as the star of the show and was the first openly gay person to appear on television. You can watch episode excerpts here;
https://www.thirteen.org/american-family/
Years later, when Lance Loud was diagnosed with AIDS and Hepatitis C, he asked An American Family filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond to make a follow-up film that would take him through sickness and death. We have  Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family at the library and usually view it in class. It comes highly recommended from me as a pay-to-view. All that is online of it is the absolutely heart-wrenching last scene;

"SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW" sung by Loudon Wainright III for LANCE LOUD

Loudon is accompanied by his mother, Kate McGarrigle. From the PBS documentary "Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family." (2003)

The PowerPoint below further explores this series and its aftermath;

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_mucytReWKDGk7RQ5CbDwHDA8ly6ME0D?usp=sharing

YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK loudfamily.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Email me if you're having technical difficulties with the PowerPoints, getting the videos to play, etc. My newer computer opens these so effortlessly that it's not clear to me what it's doing! 

Art 330/530 Photo; Countess of Castiglione: Artist and Artifice

Pierre Louis-Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863-1866

Arguably the first performance artist and first “goth chick”, the Countess took control of her own image to an obsessive and eventually self-detrimental level.  What if Lady Gaga Gaga-d just a little too much? Her path to fame rose as quickly as it eventually fell.   

Virginia Oldoini: The Countess of Castiglione, commissioned around 400 images of herself over 4 decades by the otherwise bland in style Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson.  It is documented that her role in these photographs was beyond mere model and subject, and that all images were conceptualized and designed in detail by the Countess herself.  Her goal being to use her own image to gain social status and political gain for Italy.  “Yet the countess’s project extended beyond social strategizing for a male-dominated world and even the recognition that photographs had an important role to play in the society as a whole.” (Rexer p. 69).  She desired to be portrayed not just as sitter for a photograph, but as fully-fledged artist in control of the creation of her own image.

 "Both during her lifetime and after, the Countess has been variously labeled as a narcissist, a victim, a courtesan, and Italian patriot, a social climber, a fashionista, a hysteric, an adventuress, a Madonna, a recluse, a sociopath - and to add insult to injury- an unfaithful wife and a neglectful mother." -Robert Flynn Johnson, Countess de Castiglione: The Allure of Creative Self-Absorption. 

The Countess lost her family, wealth, and influence over society and eventually became the equivalent of a scandalized 19^th century tabloid subject.  She lived her last 20 years alone in poverty, going out only at night dressed in black veils, but her influence stretches beyond this short period of fame.  20th and 21st century artists Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Nikki  S. Lee, Gillian Wearing, all have created extensive bodies of photographs dedicated to the performance of identity and it's relationship to the photographic gaze.  

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, 1976 

 

Cindy Sherman, Self-Portrait with Sun Tan, 2003

  Nikki S. Lee, The Ohio Project (8), 1999

Gillian Wearing, Rock n Roll 70, 2015/2016