Interview: Avram Finkelstein

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversation and it doesn’t lead to other sets of thoughts...”

It is towards the beginning of this interview that Avram Finkelstein, in his therapeutic geniality, elicits a confession from me: the confession of my frustration. The frustration about the political passiveness of the larger part of my generation, born from the relentless grinding of consumerism; the feeling that collective effort is not really something that seduces many of my peers in any way; the vexation of being cut off from the political effort and achievements of our elders. 

It is no helpful attitude, I am aware, and certainly not a great conversation starter. But Avram waves it aside with a confident insistence: “You may feel balkanised, you may feel like you live in a world in which collaboration is more difficult than ever, you may feel you live in a world in which social spaces are harder to activate but as somebody – I’m 63 – who has lived in many worlds, I feel it’s actually easier in a way. We’re just told that it’s harder. The trick is to not listen. To not listen to that.”

We talk via Skype, and while I am sat in my dark, spare South Welsh living room by a cup of tea, it seems to be sunny on the US east coast. Behind Avram, huge bookshelves tower over him in the bright light, their centre adorned by a Chinese communist poster. Once I can hear a foreign police siren, as if straight out of a Hollywood movie, blaring in the background. Avram seems worlds away from me; but as we talk he draws me in. 

We discuss his work in collectives, from the 1980’s AIDS activism flagship Silence=Death to his recent Flash Collective initiative. He considers the necessity and rewards of interacting with public spaces, and visual and performance art produced within the paradigm of political resistance. We argue the role of the individual in a collective, and today’s problematic historiography of HIV/AIDS. And as we speak, Avram never fails to give me a sense of, ‘You and I, we’re in this together.’ He is eager to hear me out, emphasising the value of our exchange. 

“We share an intergenerational responsibility that goes both ways: For young people to listen – you know, everyone’s back goes up because the assumption is, those old-timers who will tell you how it was and you need to listen. That’s not actually true. We need to listen, to all of the questions, all of the holes in the story so we can help a younger generation understanding all of its complexity while we’re both still here.”

“It’s my thing.”

He laughs when I wonder whether he might be fed up talking about collective cultural production, after all those years. “My entire life is dedicated to thinking about collectivity from a political and grassroots organising perspective, and cultural production. No, it’s my thing. I’m not sick of it. I have a lot to say about it.” He has always worked in collectives. The child of two communist parents, he appreciates the unifying and empowering potential of this strategy: “We’re told that there are intersectional tensions that are insurmountable because capitalism depends on our being balkanised. And any collective endeavour is an attempt to pierce through that.” An endeavour, he is quick to add, that is literally open to everyone who dares it, as long as they leave their ego at the door. 

“Individual identity can sometimes be somewhat antithetical, or emphasising individual identity can sometimes be antithetical to collectivity because the collective experience is really surrendering yourself to the other people in the room. Collectives are organisms, each one is different, each day that organism is different. I feel collaborative thinking is giving, learning when to trust enough to give in to the collective and that is something a lot of people find hard to do, but I don’t think it’s generational.”

Learning processes are essential to him, and if anything, his 63 years seem to be encouraging him. Recently it has been the concept of performativity - “everyone I know currently is in performance!” - that has helped him shine a new light on his work, and approach it from a different angle, and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. His pedagogical initiative, the Flash Collective, enables him not only to pass on resistance strategies to new audiences – varying profoundly in age and profession, from activists to academics – but to discover new ideas, learning new strategies himself from his collaborators. 

“I’ve come to realise the performative nature of the work that I used to consider visual cultural production. So I’ve actually spent time thinking about what performance is and the importance of performance in particular, the ways in which public spaces are performative. So I feel like I have learned more from younger artists than I have from my own peers who have settled ideas about cultural production that are somewhat crystallised.”

“The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.”

It is this crystallisation, the stagnation, that clearly bothers him. For years, he has been openly critical of what he calls 'AIDS 2.0', the “re-imagining of this historical moment that shuts out the potential for current and future activism”. It is a complacent, and somewhat lazy gaze back on the events of the 1980s and 1990s, pursued by stories such as told in the Academy Awards contender How To Survive A Plague. We’re witnessing over-simplifying, marginalising, misinterpreting attempts to press diverse, complex histories into one glorified historiography, written to suit the taste of late-stage capitalism. Its tale of heroes, complete with “beginning, middle, and end” has a finality to it, a deceptive conclusiveness to which Avram strongly opposes – not alone because it affects one of his most famous works, the ubiquitous Silence=Death poster.

“I think something like Silence=Death is a very funny case study. It’s a cardboard cutout that represents an entire generation of activists, queer activism, AIDS activism. It’s come through the mechanisms of late stage capitalism, it’s come to represent a whole series of ideas.”

The Silence=Death project was founded in 1985 by Avram, Jorge Soccaras, Oliver Johnston, Chris Lione, Brian Howard, and Charles Kreloff, as a consciousness-raising project based on popular feminist models. The six men – three of which previously hadn’t known each other – soon found each other continually debating the politics of HIV/AIDS. Eventually the idea of making a poster was brought forward by Avram, who had gained his political education in the anti-war movement and Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The result, with its eminent pink triangle and stark white letters, predated ACT UP by two weeks. Yet it became its most popular embodiment.

“The poster went up literally just two weeks before ACT UP formed. So in the AIDS historiography the story goes that Silence = Death is the ACT UP logo and it represents an entire generation of activism and a whole series of questions. But in fact it was created by six individuals, three of whom didn’t know each other … it was six people who designed that poster. It activated public spaces and it was ACT UP who was responsible for that.”

Avram is keen on pointing out that the Silence=Death poster couldn’t have existed as a product of any other collective. It is the brainchild of six individuals, not of an entire generation: a circumstance that has been neglected countless times, in the effort to smooth it into the predominant, institutionalised narrative. It is a superficial reading, erasing voices left, right and centre: “Communities are made of individuals and I’ve been writing about this in reference to the question of an AIDS historiography – the intersectionality; this very interesting kind of crosshatching of multiple generations with HIV-positive gay men.”

There are stories to be told, viewpoints to be opened. “The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.” If you ask Avram, he knows where he would start. His voice becomes excited:

“The How To Survive A Plague construction completely obliterates this parallel story that affects over half of the people in the world infected with HIV which has to do with the fact that up until 1991 they weren’t doing any surveillance on women with AIDS. And How To Survive A Plague doesn’t even touch on that. It’s a pretty interesting story: It took hundreds of activists years to get the CDC to redefine, to include manifestations of immunosuppression in women in the definition of AIDS. If I were an activist in 2070, I would want to hear that story, wouldn’t you?”

“I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence = Death poster.”

“The whole idea of the flash collectives is: I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence=Death poster.” 

It sounds crass, the way he bluntly throws this statement into our conversation. It breaks with the veneration we all share for that poster, the firm belief that, yes, this poster deserves its place in the museums. But let the words sink in, and they start to make sense, you can sense where Avram is coming from. Isn’t he proud of what the collective achieved, doesn’t he want it to go on? “I end up spending more time speaking against my own work ... because it’s like a doppelgänger, it’s like it’s trotted out to represent a whole set of things, but it’s a set of things that are so deeply institutional and totally ignore a whole other set of things.”

Avram is ready to move on, and he has found a way to return to the nitty-gritty of the Silence=Death Project, without falling for the glory-laden fantasy that the poster has come to represent. His Flash Collective initiative seeks to engage new audiences and activate public spaces by steering away from canonical cultural production, and by employing non-hierarchical, collective strategies in order to reframe social questions surrounding HIV/AIDS, gender, reproductive justice, and only recently, the refugee crisis.

“I want us to figure out what it means and set up whole new set of conversations so that the critiques that brought that poster into being will always be alive, that’s the point of the poster. The point of the poster is resistance. And those are the skills we need to make sure are always alive. That’s what the Flash Collective experiment is about, it’s trying to learn new strategies to make new work.”

Returning to his grassroots origins, Avram now challenges himself and others by forming collectives for only a couple of hours. In the limited time, Tumblr blogs are created and interventions in the public sphere are staged; each collective approaches a subject differently, and Avram is experimenting with “which arrows to draw out of your quiver that are going to be right for that room full of people at that moment”, because there are “a million strategies for collective cultural production”. Restricting the time window is only one of those strategies, but arguably one of the more effective, as he explains:

“The reason why I have experimented with the idea of condensed time frames is to remove a lot of the obstacles that we place in our own way when it comes to complex messages. We’re sort of led to believe that some things are too hard to talk about or too hard to understand and consequently we don’t ever attempt to, but I feel like saying something about social issues is more important than saying nothing. So the condensed time frame is a way of forcing people to going on the record.”

It opens the room to dialogue. A dialogue between the people in the collective – which, as Avram admits, can easily be subject to some tension between the participants –, and a dialogue with the space. When a Flash Collective was invited to contribute to Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress by drawing on the walls of a museum, they decided to challenge the brief. What does it mean to be invited into an established, mediated space like Manhattan’s New Museum, and is it really as egalitarian as it sounds? After all, which audience would behold the spectacle? They ended up producing stickers, claiming ‘This is not a safe space to be queer’, for the museum-goers to take and use. The pockets with the stickers were soon removed by the museum, but as Avram writes on his website, “the stickers are still visible on the streets of New York”. 

“It’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

The public becomes the pivotal ground for dialogue, a paradigm that the collectives are maintaining since the Silence=Death days. And the dialogue could not be carried without a language. To Avram, the key that opens the door to the public is the familiar, sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous parlance of advertising.

“I feel like advertising vernaculars pose as declaratives but I feel like public spaces are interrogatives. And the key to understanding how to break through or to pierce through complicated subjects is understanding which questions to ask or reading responses as interrogatives. I feel like even when we’re in a public space and we’re saying something incredibly declarative, like to use a Gran Fury thing, “Kissing doesn’t kill: greed and indifference do”, we’re activating that space in the hope of a response, so in fact, what appears to be declarative is a dialogue. And I think it’s really essential to think any work in the public sphere as a dialogue and paying attention to the responses however they’re gaged.”

It makes a full circle, this strategy, twisting something that could not be more consonant with capitalism and consumerism to your own political ends. “[It is] a dynamic practice that is really about resistance strategies...it’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

Avram cherishes his flash collectives because it is a way to pass this practice, his knowledge and experience of many years, on to the next generation, and make his voice heard without obliterating others. He is aware that time is precious. 

“You have this very limited period of time where people who were actually there in the beginning are still alive and young people who are completely versed in the complexity of historiography, archives, archival practices and intersectionality and are thinking about all that stuff, they are both alive at the exact same moment and that’s not going to be true forever. So I feel like we share an intergenerational responsibility and this goes back to the collectives.” Again, he calls on the duty of his peers. “It’s sacred ground for us. We lost a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. We’re responsible to those people, to help critique the story, right?”

There it is again, this flicker, this ‘we’re in this together’ moment. It feels like he reaches out a hand through the screen. I can only imagine what it must be like to work in a collective with him, to be inspired to come up with something exciting in only a couple of hours, to thrust yourself in the transformative experience of collaboration. It sounds really easy and not scary, not frustrating at all. Let’s sit, and talk, and listen, really listen, and work. 

Avram pauses. In the past hour we sat, I drank a cup of tea, he ran to the bookshelf to find Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto for me, we chatted, we laughed. Now he is serious, almost weary.

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversations … We’re going to be gone and I don’t want someone else after we’re gone to say ‘this is what it meant’.”


All images provided by Avram Finkelstein.

The Photograph: Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev in La Bayadère, Palais Garnier 1974.
Image by André Chino.

The image shows Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer, the lover, the bon viveur: A lone bright figure on a dark Paris stage, his costume as radiant as his face. The performance that night is La Bayadère, Marius Petipa's romantic and exotic classic. 

Having only recently discovered the vast and omnifarious world of ballet for myself - don't worry, I'd rather watch than try the steps myself - I am drawn into the tales behind the perfect little pliés. And, oh my, is the name Rudolf Nureyev rich with stories. Take this image: It's one of those blissful moments in which life imitates (or should I say: is preceded by) art.

Nureyev certainly was the shining figure he presents in the picture. In his androgyny and intensity he quickly became a blazing star once he had escaped the bonds of the Soviet Union. Julie Kavanagh and Joan Acocella describe in detail how he, in his love for tights and self-presentation, set new standards for male ballet dancing.

But there's more to this image than, well, a pretty confident guy in dazzling white tights on a black stage. I was thrilled to learn that the scene depicted is La Bayadère's The Kingdom of the Shades, an opium-driven, hypnotic hallucination of a ballet. Arlene Croce of The New Yorker once outlined its substance beautifully:

"The subject of the Kingdom of the Shades is not really death, although everyone in it except for the hero is dead. It's Elysian bliss, and its subject is eternity ... [it is] a poem about dancing and memory and time."

The scene's theme echoes hauntingly in Nureyevs life. If his life, his world weren't created by hallucinatory drugs, they certainly were shaped by excess, by numerous lovers hidden in the shadows, by a relentless pursuit of fame. And in retrospect one can feel time pressing upon Nureyev - he must have felt it himself, dancing up into his 40s, unwilling to leave the limelight, half-joking about his "old galoshes". The stage, the dancing kept him alive as long as they could, as if to Nureyev death never really mattered - only the eternity in which his name, his work would be remembered. In 1992, shortly before his AIDS death, he, sick and struggling, staged his last ballet on a Paris stage: La Bayadère. 

This is the third installment of 'The Photograph', a series of pictures that I love, find remarkable or important, and which I will present on this blog on a non-regular basis.

Panti's Noble Call

Here are ten minutes of wise words everyone should have a listen to - delivered by the Irish drag queen Panti (Rory O'Neill). Maybe she should be part of the Gorgeous project, since she's got one of the most important stories to share?!

Rob Lebow/Masha Kupets: Gorgeous

What happens if you take popular drag culture and pimp it up with "glamour, glamour, glamour"? Photographer Rob Lebow and Creative Director Masha Kupets have tried and the result is Gorgeous, a 'coffee table photography book' aimed to be released in 2014. Gorgeous will feature several well-known US-American artists from the LGBTQ scene, or as Lebow puts it: "It will include the entire LGBTQ spectrum: androgyny, drag queens, drag kings, gender benders, trans, plus a few surprises for shock and awe", all glammed up for spectacular portrait shots, their personal stories added in text form. According to its makers, the book is an attempt to celebrate the culture, and at the same time to educate about non-binary gender expression and challenge gender norms.
The mainstream fascination with drag culture is nothing new - think of La Cage Aux Folles from the 1970s, Priscilla, The Queen of the Desert from the 1990s, or RuPaul's ever so popular Drag Race. While the gay website Queerty assumes that the topic might be "challenging or unfamiliar to a lot of people", I'd argue that most people have seen and are not too fussed with a drag queen here and there. By nature it is fun and exciting on the surface, and deep at its best and tragic at its worst underneath. It has a history - after all, the Stonewall riots in 1969 were led by transvestites and trans people - and it has its own, brilliant, successful way of answering problems such as gender dysphoria, homophobia or transphobia. But most of all, it is so outspoken, so flamboyant, such a feast for the eye and the mind alike that it deserves to be celebrated.
I believe that Lebow and Kupets do not really need the slightly superficial educational approach which they repeat in empty phrases in their interviews over and over. Gorgeous has all the potential to be, well, gorgeous the way it is. The portraits are stunning, echoing great photographers such as Richard Avedon and playing on old-school Hollywood glamour in their simplistic, straight-forward, studio style. They are celebrating the diversity indeed, by capturing the great personas of the subjects, reverberating the vibes, the pride, the playfulness in simple and always beautiful black and white.

Cake Moss 

The Kickstarter for the project just failed to raise the required funding. The Gorgeous Project is not giving up, though. I'd love to see it succeed, because these pictures are so great to look at, they deserve a bit of good paper and nice printing. Maybe a good book will actually help the matter, and promote progressive gender conceptions, just by being lovely and approachable - a little bit of iconic glamour never hurts, and if there's one thing you can say about drag artists, they never fail to stand their ground.

Ernie Omega

Sara Davidmann: Ken. To be destroyed

Visual artist and photographer Sara Davidmann has been an outspoken ally for the queer and transgendered in the UK for a long time - starting in 1999, and publishing her book Crossing The Line in 2003. Although I know the book pretty well, she disappeared off my radar for a while, until yesterday, when the Guardian published a piece on her latest project, Ken. To be destroyed, in which she carefully tells the life of her transgender uncle Ken. I took the opportunity and checked out her website. I was surprised by the extent to which she had dived into the subject matter, and the variety her work encompassed. She has certainly come a long way since Crossing The Line.
Davidmann has always had the best intentions. "I quickly realised that generally accepted ideas of cross-dressers are drastically inadequate", she writes in Crossing The Line before embarking upon a tour de force through cross-dressing, drag and male-to-female transgender. One of her main assets is definitely her close collaboration, which includes using a smaller, unobtrusive camera and editing the pictures with her subjects (as she recently told Coventry photography students). After the book, she would go on to explore gender, sex and sexuality in all directions, unbiasedly and with a natural curiosity; many of her projects express important thoughts about the ambiguity of gender, or about power relations between photographer and subject, or as in the case of her project view point, the viewer and the subject.
However, I always felt that her good intentions not necessarily do her photography a favour. Many of the pictures in Crossing The Line felt intrusive, slightly voyeuristic, and were in no way aesthetically pleasant - I thought her bystander's POV in the images dominated the book and unfortunately undermined her honest words and sensitively conducted interviews. Her later projects - visible on her website, unlike the images from Crossing The Line - look a lot better, are nicely lit and carefully framed. Yet they feel somewhat overthought, the brilliant texts under the pictures too ambitious for the images. Davidmann is an outstanding thinker, and an important ally, publishing, exhibiting and giving talks a lot; her commitment to make the invisible visible and open the public's eyes to the whole spectrum between 'male' and 'female' can only be applauded. I am just not sure whether her photography is living up to it.
Having said this, I am left to wish her the best for Ken. To be destroyed. The story in the Guardian about the family secret around her transgender uncle is thorough, deep and promising. Handled carefully, it can become beautiful and touching - and without wanting to be mean, I think it is a good thing that Davidmann is working with archive pictures this time.

If you have seen Ken. To be destroyed in Liverpool, let me know what you think!

Jennie Livingston: Paris Is Burning

Pepper Labeija in Paris Is Burning (Screenshot)

Paris Is Burning is a documentary film, directed by Jennie Livingston and published in 1990. It deals with New York's Ball culture in the late 1980s. The balls were, and are to the present day, large events where everyone, but mainly gays, lesbians, transgender, transvestites, and queer people of Afro-American and Latino origin, could have a great time "being fabulous", performing in drag or presenting extravagant dance styles.

The balls are extravagant, something for the eye to feast, giant parties, serving as well-needed upbeat moments in the film. They are so exciting, and the viewer immediately gets why the protagonists spend most of their days stealing clothes, planning outfits and performances, and organising more balls. It makes you want to go back to the wild New York of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And then there are the quieter, pensive moments of the film. The excessive balls serve as a distraction from the often miserable life of the characters: Many of them deal with poverty, violence, homophobia and transphobia on a daily basis, prostitute themselves to make a living, or are ill with AIDS. To Livingston, they open up their dreams of gender reassignment surgery, or becoming a successful model, but also of security, wealth, a home, steady relationships - and it is these moments when you really start to relate to the protagonists.

Paris Is Burning also shows an alternative to the traditional nuclear family - many of the ball participants live in Houses, substitute families founded by and named after Ball legends which function as "mother" or "father". There are the Houses of Labeija, Xtragavanza, Ninja - united in their competition. It is heart-warming to see the love and care shared by the House members, and Livingston approaches this environment very sensitively to document the protagonists in private moments, off their outspoken Ball personas. The making of Paris Is Burning took seven years - and it is palpable. Livingston came really close to her subjects and achieved a honest insight into their lives, by conducting excellent interviews and mixing them with observed moments.

The ball culture exists still, but most of the protagonists of Paris Are Burning are gone. They died of AIDS or were murdered - Venus Xtravanza's death is one of the shock moments in the film. In this context, Paris Is Burning becomes kind of a memorial, mourning times and people long gone. But the way it celebrates life, diversity and self-expression is exemplary and highly enjoyable; a fundamental documentary to watch when you are interested in LGBTQ history.

Scott Schuman: The Sartorialist

It repeatedly occurred that some photography colleagues of mine used my computer, and inevitably, after looking around my internet browser for a while, noticed that I have the Sartorialist blog as a bookmark. Enter the patronising look and the saucy undertone: "The Sartorialist, eh...?" With just a few words, they make clear what they think: Scott Schuman's street fashion photography is unworthy. In their eyes this little cretin of a blog by a rich guy who shoots whoever he wants and still is not more than a puppet of the devouring fashion industry, shouldn't be anywhere near an aspiring young documentary photographer's bookmarks.
But give me, and him, a break, people!
Sure, that blog is a bit of weird place. Schuman seems to be one of the privileged people who has unlimited access to fashion shows, expensive shops, and industry connections. Yes, he is one of those who think that a jacket for $149 is "cheap". Given the popularity of his blog, he is certainly one of the main players in fashion when it comes to dictating taste and trends. He rolls along with the rich, splendid and spoiled - not everybody's cup of tea.

But when it comes down to his pictures, it is a different thing. The pictures on his blog are nice, simple as that. They look good. They have nice colours, good lighting, interesting framing and setting. You cannot deny that Schuman is a talented photographer, and he's got a good eye. Also, most important to me, he is very open in what he photographs. He doesn't go for one type of people, he is interested in many different styles and self expressions. Therefore, you can sometimes find a "gem" on his blog: A character who captures you, who makes you look twice. It is a wonderful resource when I'm on my regular hunt for gender expressions in photography - because there are these androgynous, playful subjects, and Schuman snaps them so well.
So don't judge me on my bookmarks. You never know what you'll find.

All images by Scott Schuman, found on The Sartorialist.

Genderbending: JJ Levine, Hana Pesut, and Ali Mahdavi

JJ Levine: Alone Time 7

Lately I've come across quite a few projects that interestingly play with gender and the performance of it. Performance in connection to gender is, in a way, a pet subject of mine, because I believe that traditional gender roles can be easily challenged by body posture, clothing, make-up. We can be what we want to be, and many people actually choose not to confirm to social expectations but express their gender identity in complex ways - legible from their appearance and their performance.

JJ Levine's Alone Time features one model performing both male and female in the same frame. According to Levine, a queer and trans artist, the work is immensely personal and draws from own experience as much as from the queer community in Montreal. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Levine said: "I want to convince the viewer of the many possibilities that may exist within a single surface perception or presentation. Ultimately, I aim to destabilise the notion of gender as singular and predestined by the sex we are assigned at birth." The project is effectively breaking up the notion of the binary gender, the boxes we are often assigned to  - it acknowledges the fact that there is a wide spectrum between male and female for every individual to explore, and it makes you stop, look closer, and think.

Less political, but nevertheless interesting is the Switcharoo project by Levine's fellow Canadian Hana Pesut. She made couples swap their clothes, and photographed them in each outfit.

Hana Pesut: Switcharoo

It is a easy going, fun project and very successful in its simplicity. In an online interview Pesut stated:"Now it seems that almost anything goes. And in fashion now there are men modeling women's clothes and women modeling men's clothes." It shows that gender is not a dead-serious subject - you're welcome to play, to express yourself.

She's right about the development in fashion. My last example is a picture from Ali Mahdavi's editorial Body Double series in which he worked with the androgynous model Andrej Pejic. It works on the same principles as Levine's pictures, although it is much more stylised. Fashion is arguably one of the biggest influences of our time. So, maybe, if fashion has realised by now how easy it is to be whatever you want, if fashion enables us to perform... why don't we just go for it? 

Ali Mahdavi: Body Double

Hollywood

P. Lorca diCorcia: Marilyn, 28 years old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30

Last night I came across an interesting interview with Philip Lorca diCorcia in which he - whilst casually having a haircut - talks about his long-time photo series Hustlers. One of the moments that got stuck in my head was when he talked about the picture above, Marilyn, 28 years old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30 [their name, age, place of origin and what diCorcia paid them].

The picture is outstanding from the rest series, as diCorcia admits, for being "fully front-up and clearly the imitation of an actress" - the latter struck me in particular. Apparently, diCorcia had no influence on Marilyn's pose, the prostitute chose it. A certain resemblance to Marilyn Monroe is undeniable. This reminded me on an article I had read earlier, an examination of Indonesian trans women living in Europe. They, too, were majorly influenced by Hollywood movies and actresses: in the way they presented themselves, in they way they imaged romances - basically, Hollywood shaped their entire lives and hopes. The Indonesian women, trying to survive in the Netherlands, seemingly share their dreams with diCorcia's Marilyn - is it, in the end, the beginning of the American Dream?

Hollywood is, inarguably, the big thing. We're being flooded with images from Hollywood every day, there's no escape. No other industry has promoted the American Dream more successfully - the idea that you can change your life, your identity, if you only believe and work hard enough; tempting particularly for those struggling with gender dysphoria, or unrequited sexuality. But what diCorcia and the story of the Indonesian women show and Hollywood conceals: Only few can make it, and the rest remains a hopeless imitation, an empty performance.

Phil Bicker sums it up perfectly in his LightBox article about Hustlers: "Masterfully depicting the bleak underside of Hollywood, they also capture the town's unfulfilled dreams and its fake intimacy." 

A. Eisenstaedt: Marilyn Monroe, 1953

Found this on little rant by @Wiscodiz on Twitter just now: "Fuck the American Dream. Its a white cishet capitalist dream. Its a nightmare for poc, trans/queer folks, the poor, and the disabled." I am not sure whether Marilyn Monroe would approve, but for me, it's true.