On Monsters

Gothic Literature reading 1

     Due to my research project is highly engaging with Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein, so I have decided to look at some of the genres it belongs to, and try to think about an appropriate account for my narrator of the story.  Frankenstein is my structure of the novella that I am about to write concerning the situation and dynamic within the art world, at the beginning I am trying to find out who is doctor Frankenstein in the art world, and who is the monster being create until I found out more analytic view regards to the Gothic genre. 

      From the book “Skin Show” that I am currently engaging with, I read about that there are actually more symbolic meaning within the monster, also people’s fascination towards monsters.  Monsters who are being create in the novel are usually symbolise a certain degree of foreignness, people portrait the unknown, uncanny, and unfamiliar to a monster, in 19th century, monster was seen as a form of various sexual and racial threat to the nation, the bourgeoise, the capitalism.  Also, the portrait of monster is also become a mean to realize racism such as Dracula, his/her figure is being portraits according to people s stereotype of Jews. 

     The power of literary horror, indeed, lies in its ability to transform political struggles into psychological conditions and then to blur the distinction between the two .... use language of race hatred to characterise monstrosity as a representation of psychological disorder. 

       Another interesting point is that the monster is a creature that lingers between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside, dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself.  From my personal point of view, a narrator is usually a canonical account when they tell the story, they usually stands as a moral role to make readers to acknowledge their morality through their narration.  Somehow with the special feature of the monster challenged the position and authority in the novel.  

     So far it is very interesting for me how people to create an image in which they put in a story by using negative description can make then actually start to resent whoever fits into the description. Here I m trying to reason how does it work. I found out this blurring boundaries maybe an issue of why people can easily connect this negative image together.  The monster can not be create without Mankind, it is a in-between creature, this inbetweeness makes them easily being justified as anything, good/evil, homo/ straight, right/wrong, because there is no rules for this creature, at least not mankind can think of.  

     Here, I found monster is a symbol of something being create or exist before but have difficulty to fit in the norms.  one kind that has no rules to follow, hard to create an system to justify them, has different skin color in which I argued in the contemporary world, skin color has become less effective than it would before, language uses, behaviour. 

Art show = Big Party?

I have just read about Frieze Art fair on Wikipedia, and several links on Wiki guide me to this report from The Guardian: Frieze shows put the 'art' into party, In this article, apart from mentioning briefly about how often you can spot celebrities in the fair, also trying to cannon this idea that when america as a huge country with 38 galleries being selected, Great Britain as a rather island country but has 35 galleries being selected into this art fair is a sign for showing that the remarkable quality and state of the art market in Great Britain.  Well, let s see if that is true.

But I couldn't help to notice that there are a group of artists really caught up my eyes when I read about their works.

The Chapman Brothers

Taxidermia

Interview of Judith Butler

Just finished this short interview of Judith Butler, a feminist, philosopher talking about the trouble of gender.
I really enjoyed about when she quoted from Simone de Beauvoir that we aren't born as a women, we become a women. During her book launch in France, she talked about that in her view, gender is always a failure and everybody fails, but it is a good thing that we fails because the stereotypes of gender can be said as an accumulated affect of social relationship that has been naturalised over time.
She also questioned this set value of marriage suppose to be performed by two people, and why two? Why couldn't there be more people to raise a family, who does they have to be two?

And how does the word "Lesbian" make her feel condemned when the word occurred to her.  Will this condemn me to social exclusion?

These questions about how we perform our gender in order to meet the expectation of the society has kept coming back to her study, just at the moment when I was trying to figure if there will be any answer appears in the future, she said:" I don't have a system, I don't try to reconcile my various works to each other, that doesn't interest me.  I don't think they are contradictory, I think they are process.... It's not a system, it's a process that it's on its way.