99 Hooker
Graduate Degree candidate, Media Studies, New School. In debt. Founded media performance collective rev.99 (2000), music (Megaphone, PAX, Tzadik), words (“saved a life” – Robert Hunter; “brutal … kill” – Minneapolis Star Tribune; with Klezmer Madness, “visionary poet” – Seattle Times, “demented” – Village Voice), video / film (Martha Colburn, Benton-C Bainbridge, Donald O’Finn). Places: Knickerbockers (Lincoln, NE). Henry Miller Library (Big Sur, CA), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), web (www.ernstgrid.com). Two year old son. Producer trying to structure improvisation and find my Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting in Saturday Morning Cartoon collective.
“Britney Spears” Autopsy and Séance
Stan Brakhage exhumed the Greek sense of “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes” (autopsia) to document Pittsburg; so too can the imagined community that is embodied as Britney, be examined to see (“opsis”) our senses of self (“auto”). The vortex of sights and sounds collected under the sign “Britney Spears” rewards the cultural coroner. An autopsy obviously implies a dead body, but when examining a sign forever being modified within numberless contexts, the critical stop is what materializes the corpus. Analysis not only functions as a post-mortem, but in an age of simultaneity and infinite regress, critical thinking restores some sense of life and death within the simulacra. The sign itself dies only once the icon is forgotten (something almost impossible to measure in a world that archives itself so particularly.)
This media-rich presentation includes archival video, stills and text from media rituals and events embodied as “Britney Spears”. To situate a broader cultural context additional documentation includes Senate Hearings of Child Abductions, Amber Alerts, Estrogen “dominance” (excess), the New Disney, and the Tween Consumer. Certain media theories also gain historical context by the examination of the visual tactility of the mid-drift, imagined communities (M-I-C-K-E-Y) and media mega-events like the Super Bowl half-time show.
Treating “Britney’s” body of work as extensions of the body politic, the autopsy seeks to uncover some of the complex representations and enactments of compliance, resistance and mystery involved with the popularizing of “Britney”.
And with a little luck Britney Spears – refugee from Kentwood, Louisiana and global citizen par excellence – may, like a ghost within the machine, materialize for a moment.