Why You Should Know about The Virgin Dress

"Good" art affects the beholder. The English literature professor who became my thesis adviser once illustrated this relationship with a triangle, wherein the left base angle was the artist, the right base angle was the audience, and the top vertex angle was the art itself. The triangle's sides were the connection networks made between artist and audience. In his definition, art needed to convey something - be it an emotion, a concept or a technique - in order to be effective.

Several weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to catch the "Sad Girls Club" series, an exhibition by The Virgin Dress (aka, Brooklyn-based Nigerian-American illustrator Chioma Ebinama), in the hallway of a Bed-Stuy brownstone apartment. Only a short while after absorbing the first few "girls" in the series, the little typebars I have for cerebral synapses began banging-out a blog entry about why the exhibition qualifies as "good." Take the following Sad Girl:

A well-coiffed white woman with large, defiant eyes tearfully clutches her Louis Vuitton purse. It is ambiguous as to whether the caption addresses the audience or the bag; however, the often satirical focus on privilege and consumerism throughout the Sad Girls Club exhibition makes me believe the latter. We rely on our possessions - and on the act of possessing possessions - for our happiness. The absoluteness of the caption dramatizes this in a hilarious manner.

In the above Sad Girl, Chioma turns her attention from the privileged to the marginalized, confronting racialist stereotypes about black women with a universal expression of intense, human despair. I attribute the illustration's power to its bluntness: the image of a crying black woman paired with knee-jerk judgements black women frequently face should compel one to re-examine their latent prejudices.

According to the artist, this was drawn following a conversation with a friend about the death scene in Sylvia, a biopic about Sylvia Plath. In the film, Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) closes her eyes after turning on her gas oven. In actuality, Ms. Plath was found with her head in the oven. Chioma’s friend argued that there was no way to depict the suicide as it actually happened without it looking absurd. Chioma disagreed and drew the above drawing.

Regardless of the backstory, the illustration remains an effective critique of stifling, sexist, and thoroughly-American mid-century Modernism. The philosophy that kept the public and personal spheres separate was culpable for the marginalization and oppression of women. For some women of Sylvia's time, such circumscription probably did make some ruminate other uses for ovens besides tv dinners and Thanksgiving turkeys. That said, the dark humor in this illustration is boldly apparent, from the funky wallpaper to the large, baffled cat in the window.

Another member of the Sad Girls' Club fleshes-out this dark humor further:

An almost naked Amy Winehouse sits on a scale, head buried in her arms, surrounded by dancing, anthropomorphic food - one of which gleefully advertises the amount of calories it contains. The juxtaposition between a deeply unhappy human life and consumer culture makes the latter look absurd and irrelevant. The food dances around Amy, perhaps imprisoning her, and when complimented by the scale, it is impossible not to consider the rampant body image problems plaguing women in western societies; Amy herself struggled with an eating disorder which likely contributed to her death.

The blithe, dancing food entrapping Amy suggests that she had likewise become part of consumer culture. Unfortunately for her, in this lifetime, there was no escape. Her fame/infamy kept some writers from seeing her as someone who had suffered in the spotlight, and a rash of callous, mean-spirited articles, like this one, filled the tabloids.

"That's exactly what happened," I said to the artist.

For all the Sad Girls: http://thevirgindress.virb.com/sad-girls-club#/id/i6486712
For other works by The Virgin Dress: http://www.thevirgindress.com/

A Sociopolitical Anthropology of Office Behavior

Ah, the office: a place more awkward than a class reunion at Introvert High School. Prior to actually wearing the white collar, all I knew about offices was borrowed from Kids in the Hall, which, I daresay, was a grand introduction:

Because politics is off-limits, I fill my conversation with mock-shocked statements about the weather ("can you believe it's raining again?") or reminding my coworkers of the day ("ugh, Monday!"). If I'm feeling particularly adventurous, I’ll allude to some weekend debauchery, but as far as my coworkers are concerned, my Saturday consists of laundry, laundry, laundry.

During my first week, my coworkers took a marked interest in me: the youngest, newest inhabitant sharing their corridors and copy machines. They would constantly ask:

"What's your background?"

Which translates into a question about whether or not you're qualified for your position. For other tyros to the office habitat, and for those likewise lacking in actual job experience, ranting about academic accomplishments seems to have a neutralizing effect, thank the high holy heavens.

Determining the intonations of everyday office language could be paradise to the paranoid. Is "you're so nice" office lingo for "you're such a naive little boy"? Does "get home safely" suggest an inability to take care of oneself?

In addition to language, there's the whole, dire matter of politics, both the interpersonal and macro-level kind. How can we be honest with one another if we are advised not to speak about politics when "the personal is political"?

Veganism is a case in-point. At first, whenever a staff member offered a pastry, a fruitcake or somethings' leg, I'd turn-down the food without explanation. Human Resources identified that I was refusing every food offer. I was told that this could be taken as offensive - not accepting the gifts of others - and so I confessed to my deviant lifestyle. Admittedly, the whole point of veganism is to make a political or philosophical statement, so my initial reluctance to declare my morality sounds less logical than a spray-tan salon in the middle of Oompa-Loompa-land.

Then again, given my apathy towards isinglass and my wardrobe of more than few wool garments, any attempt to share my “reduce harm” mindset seems superficial. I’m not a particularly good vegan; why, I’m worse at veganism than Hitler was at making Jewish friends.

A greater sense of shame resulted from my not challenging the political discourse of others in my office. One coworker (“A ‘liberal,’ but not a “blame-America-first liberal’”) recently claimed that imperialism was a “mixed bag." I'm genuinely embarrassed for not shutting him down; yet, considering my newbie status, I wouldn't want any argument to explode and leave me scraping coins from the subway again. Thus the binds of capitalism.

Finally, being a man in a mostly-female office leads to its share of awkwardness, especially around the damned water cooler, which, I've discovered, forces us to retreat into medieval gender roles. Once I was asked to replace the water tank by an unsmiling, bird-like woman who communicates using automobile sounds. “Beep Beep,” she says, meaning “hi” or “excuse me” or “I am censoring a series of two swear words.” Intending to parody her stereotype of male strength, I said something along the lines of “let me know if you need help with anything else He-Man related,” which I followed quickly with, “I’M SORRY THAT SOUNDED INCREDIBLY SEXIST.” I shouted it across the hall. She didn’t care either way; she simply beeped along like a fussy Fiat in a jubilee traffic jam.

Another female co-worker “needed a man” for the same job, and when I happened to overhear her, I stepped-up to the proverbial, masculinized plate. She thanked me a little too profusely for “acting like a man,” "being a real gentleman" and emphasizing my general manliness in general. Did I offend her? Or were my chest hairs a little too visible? I approached her later on and asked whether she was insulted by my help. She was not; as it turns out, she was emphasizing manliness to emasculate the other male coworker in the room who did not help.

Thank goodness for this one person with whom I work - the other fellow leftist in my office. Whenever we talk, she launches a shameless rant about the importance of feminism, her hatred for her daughter’s hipster boyfriend (whom she impersonates with a hilarious, lackadaisical Californian accent) or her love of Ian MacKaye. I knew we were cut from the same cloth when she looked at my Doc Martens and said that, in her days on the New York City punk circuit, they used to call them “shitkickers."