Credit: Bob Schutz/Associated Press

Apart from the silly play on one of Obama’s book titles, there’s some interesting rhetoric to be read from this slide NYT Slide Show: The Oval Office Through the Decades

I finally got my Date Farmers Obama print framed and I was very happy to see the big Obama poster next door.

But I also thought about this frame boutique as another site within both informal and formal art for Obama networks.

Deb Nicklay -AP/Globe Gazette

Via the BAG, I keep thinking about how the progressive grassroots visual culture during the 2008 Campaign has informed right-wing counter measures.  The anonymous Obama as the Socialist Joker posters come to mind as the most notorious. But also, looking at images like this I’m reminded how the progressive Obama aesthetic is borrowed and remixed into right-wing narratives, as if the aesthetic itself is evidence of Obama’s socialism.

I haven’t paid too much attention to grassroots right-wing visual culture mostly because it didn’t appear very vibrant until after the election, which is outside my research parameters. But I am interested in the ways progressive aesthetics are remade through the lens of Cartwright and Mandiberg’s thesis about Obama and political iconography in the age of the demake.

Do these right-wing demakes ultimately fail when relying too much on the original graphic/font/iconograpy? In other words, does the redeployment of progressive graphic language undermine the right-wing rhetoric? I would not characterize the image above however as a demake, its pretty straight forward, boiler plate right-winger narrative at play. And I think it works for the intended audience of sympathetic tea partiers.  But do notice how the Obama “O” logo is equated as an equally suspect political symbol with the Nazi swastika and Soviet hammer and sickle.

Lisa Cartwright and Stephen Mandiberg, “Obama and Shepard Fairey: The Copy and Political Iconography in the Age of the Demake.” Journal of Visual Culture August 2009 8: 172-176.

See also, Dora Apel, “Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype.” Journal of Visual Culture August 2009 8: 134-142.

More at Green Patriot Posters

an untrained eye, "America Face To Face With Itself," November 2nd, 2008 - Chicago, United States

I came across this photograph today during my daily Flickr research ritual. I’m interested in this image for several reasons but particularly because the photographer has situated an anonymous black man in place of Obama rather than appropriating Obama’s image. This was taken and and uploaded just days before the election. What’s more, he wrote that he didn’t find out until after shooting it that Obama refers to Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic” in his memoirs, Dreams From My Father. Referring to both the painting and the photograph one blogger made an interesting observation about reader subjectivity noting, “What a lesson for me! When I’ve looked at Wood’s painting, I’ve always seen American insularity…and people to whom I attribute all manner of pettiness and prejudice. When Obama looks at them, he sees his family!” Referring to the painting Obama writes that it reminds him of “…a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”

Secondly, there’s the multiple intertextualities to consider that are carried through Flickr and other social media. This seems like an example, though not deliberately so, of Miwon Kwon’s explanation of the spatialization of discourses  through “nomadic narrative” practice. (Kwon, 2004: 29).

Responding to a comment here’s what the photographer had to say about the shot:

I’d vaguely thought I’d like to post some topical image just before polling day, but I had no particular idea in mind. Then when I was in the Art Institute on Sunday morning, I saw a guy dressed from head to toe in black leather, hair dyed jet black, eyeliner – and I thought “I’ll try to catch him in front of the Grant Wood picture – I’ll call it ‘Who you calling gothic?’ or something like that.” I positioned myself on the conveniently placed bench right in front of the picture and waited. But when after fifteen minutes he finally came into the room he walked straight by the Wood, barely giving it a glance. I sat cursing him silently to myself for a moment, and had just decided to get up and head outside to the sunshine when this immaculately dressed black man came in – and miraculously all the other people in the room seemed to back away simultaneously, leaving me a clear shot of him all alone in front of the picture. The happiest of accidents.

Image: An Untrained Eye “America face to face with itself.”

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama wear 3-D glasses while watching a TV commercial during Super Bowl 43, Arizona Cardinals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, in the family theater of the White House on February 1, 2009. Guests included family, friends, Cabinet members, staff members and bipartisan members of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

@ BAGnewsNotes

They claim that becoming an OfficePOD user will “bring a positive change to life.” So this is probably my first ever link to a company website. But I can feel the mojo baby. I need one of these! Though I’m sure my wife will say this is exactly the last thing I need, an isolated capsule where I can indulge my endless daydreaming while I slip ever deeper down the rabbit hole.

As an expatriated US citizen, the 4th of July has become ever more problematic every year as I continually rework who I am and how I fit into America. And how America fits into me. Identity, I’ve discovered, is a process, a renegotiation with myself and the people, places, and ever changing contexts around me. I’m not the same man I was a year ago, let alone 10. And so too has the meaning of Independence Day shifted for me over time. Today I feel independent, though I’m not really. I’ll get to that later. But I’m privileged in this here world. I’m White, male, educated, and I live in Denmark.

As most of you know Sean Paul was up here in my little postmodern pastoral neck of the woods before returning back to the land of sprawl. He invited me to write about the garden, “kind of like Don’s Sabbath eve series,” he said. No thanks. Can’t do it. That would require a degree of candor and personal honesty that I simply can’t muster. It’s damn hard work separating the bullshit from the real shit. Americans, and increasingly the rest of us, our chin deep in bull shit.

I’m also terribly busy. No, active. Busyness implies both work and stress. I have neither at the moment. Since finishing my graduate degree I became a father for the second time and began working in (retreating too) our colony garden. I also have several small money earning gigs just under the radar, enough so that we can enjoy small luxuries like ice cream at the harbor or a weekend in Cph. Its enough for now. My wife is happy and so am I.

Today I took the day off from building and gardening. Not to celebrate July 4, but because I finished roofing yesterday and my back is killing me. It’s also damn hot here too. It aint goddamned hot, or the “Africa hot” as Matthew Broderick’s character in the film adaptation of Biloxi Blues would say. “Even Tarzan couldn’t take this heat!” But we’re hanging around the lower 90s which is real warm for these parts. Warm enough for swimming at one of the Storebælt beaches which is where the kids are now. I’m joining them after this. This evening at the garden Camilla will dig up new potatoes and pick arugula for dinner. Sebastian will pluck strawberries for desert. Sean-Paul unfortunately didn’t taste our wonderful strawberries as he left before they had fully ripened.

But questions of identity and patriotism continue to challenge me. Even the word expatriate is loaded with meanings and questions about who, when and how one relates in the world as a citizen. The word seems utterly devoid of the human or the natural. When SP was here he got to experience our roof christening after setting the last roof rafter. In keeping with local tradition I hoisted a Danish flag over the roof, along with a wreath a neighbor gave us, made from hedge branches and flowers. I told Sean Paul that it felt a little weird hoisting that flag. He thought it was “cool.” It was both. But weird certainly not because of any lingering US nationalisms. Its cultural for me. I may be making Danish roots but I’m still Texan and… American. At least that’s what my passport says. That’s what everyone notices in my fat accent when I speak Danish. So even simple symbolic acts like hoisting a Danish flag or not celebrating Independence Day resonate.

Independence Day? From what?  Who participates in “democracy” and who is left out in the cold? I don’t think I’m alone at the Agonist, whatever your birth certificate says, in feeling overall pessimistic about the future of the American experiment and the global ramifications of its neoliberal new world order. It’s difficult celebrating “American Democracy” these days when all we’ve really got left is the movie. Robert Gibbons writes that this is Unique to America. I’m cheered up at least.

But I sure miss my family and friends back home. And I want to echo graham’s sentiment. The world is complex and so are we. And the garden is mostly where I try and work it all out. I’ll also try and share my thoughts from the garden here from time to time. Wishing you all a happy 4th of July as you gather with your family and friends today, wherever you are in the world; pat, expat, repat, or nopat. And try and stay cool!

Physical space as a retreat from cyberspace.