People—America's Favorite Program

NCIS is America’s favorite television show—of all time! This alarming “fact” is brought to us by something called The Harris Poll. Those of you who have seen the results of this questionable survey may have noticed that the truly awful Two & A Half Men holds tight at fourth place, sandwiched between M*A*S*H and Seinfeld—seriously. Two & A Half Men is apparently the favorite among Democrats. No, really, I’m serious.

Even if NCIS’s claim to all-time favorite status is dubious, it really does garner consistently high ratings for CBS. The show, which the network describes as “more than just an action drama,” follows “the sometimes complex and always amusing dynamics of a team forced to work together in high-stress situations.”

In NCIS, mundane office politics act as a ground against which all manner of life-and-death scenarios play out. The show’s producers and writers seem to have gotten the message that cutesy characters soften the impact of lazy storytelling. The characters are all talented and brilliant, we are told, so their conclusions—however commonsensical—are presented as evidence not only of their genius, but of that of the writers as well. Plot points, however, are spoon-fed to an audience apparently too stupid to pick up on nuance (what little there is). Most irritating of all, several strokes of a keyboard can bring up precisely the information sought, however obscure, with nifty graphics to boot. This allows the writers to sidestep actual procedure in favor of hi-tech show-and-tell. We know something cool is about to happen when the house music is pumped up and we’re in Abby’s lab. Her coolness is announced by her personal style—she’s goth!

NCIS is hardly the only show to hide terrible writing behind ostensibly lovable characters. In fact, it’s easier to come up with examples of shows that don’t do this—Law and Order, Seinfeld, 30 Rock—than to list the ones that do. Perhaps the most egregious offender was Lost, which seemed for six seasons to be advancing the plot to end all plots. Its (inevitably) disappointing conclusion made it clear that it had been about the characters and their relationships all along.

Some of you out there (mom, dad, anyone?) may be wondering why I bother to complain. After all, it’s just TV, and people enjoy what they enjoy. I, too, have been known to sail the smooth waters of mindless television from time to time (from 9pm to 11pm, actually). My concern, if it can be called that, is this: people and relationships are things that most of us have, or can seek out, in our own lives. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is not. So why, in our television-watching, do we accept flimsy, one-dimensional versions of the former as compensation for the deficiencies of the latter?

The Poetry of Images: A Weinergate Debriefing

It’s been nearly a week since Anthony Weiner announced his resignation from the House of Representatives, and we—twenty-four hour news cycle drones that we are—have almost forgotten what all the fuss was about. And so, stumbling upon these once-ubiquitous, but now nearly lost photographs, I have taken upon myself the difficult task of cataloguing and analyzing them. The full weight of historical distance supports me in this important endeavor.

Work type: Digital photograph 
Title: Composition in Gray and Peach 
Date: 2011 
Dimensions: Variable 
Creator: Weiner, Anthony David 
Creator dates: 1964 – 
Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Jasper Johns, Weeping Women, 1975

The figure-ground relationship in this self-portrait is ambiguous. The image is emphatically flat, underscoring the flatness of the photographic medium itself. At the same time, the conflation of figure and ground together with the diagonal thrust of the composition destabilize the viewer, conjuring the immateriality of the digital realm in which this image circulates. While the overall color palette is muted, contributing to the shallowness of the image, there is some tension between the cool grays that dominate the composition and the warmer peach color that defines the ex-Congressman’s leg. The variety of textures and patterns calls to mind Jasper Johns’s monumental Weeping Women of 1975. It cannot be said with certitude, however, whether this was in the artist’s mind when he created this work.

Work type: Digital photograph

Title: Nude Athlete

Date: 2011

Dimensions: Variable

Creator: Weiner, Anthony David

Creator dates: 1964 –

Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Donatello, David, 1420-60s

Like a Chinese painting bearing the seals of its owners, this photograph proudly proclaims its provenance—TMZ, and date of acquisition—2011. The figure of the nearly nude artist bisects the composition vertically and is echoed in the edges of the mirror in which the image is captured; in the lockers which stand behind its subject; and in the towel which functions both to conceal and to elongate that which it conceals. The ex-Congressman’s pose combines the bravado of Donatello’s David with the false modesty of the “Venus pudica” (modest Venus). Reflection, however, is the central motif of this self-portrait, with the artist performing the role of the doomed Narcissus, so enthralled by his own reflection that he fails to see its destructive potential.

 

Francois Lemoyne, Narcissus, 1728

Security Check

Last spring at the New Museum, I saw a man walk right into Janine Antoni’s Saddle, a sculpture that was created by fitting a cowhide around a mold of the artist’s body. The artist has said that the removal of the mold—the subsequent hollowing out of the cowhide—is an important element of the piece; this hollowness was palpable in the ease with which the piece shifted on the floor. Those of us who witnessed this gaffe—and who among us hasn’t had a near miss at some point?—cringed first, and then looked immediately to the guard who stood not fifteen feet away. I don’t know what we expected—swift action of some sort, I suppose. Would the guard reprimand the museumgoer for his clumsiness? Would she fashion a makeshift barrier to protect the sculpture from further incursions? Would she radio her superiors to alert them to the imminent need for conservation (or at least a good lookover)? The guard in question did none of these things. At first I was surprised, but her inaction actually makes a lot of sense. First, the damage was done; the sculpture could not be un-kicked. Second, why should she be expected to incriminate herself by reporting the accident or drawing further attention to it? 

I remembered this incident after a recent visit to the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea where a group of 1989 Donald Judd sculptures are being shown. The group comprises twelve open boxes, each of which is unique in its interior configuration and color scheme. From a distance, the colors, which reflect off the interior walls of the aluminum boxes, seem to take on a weight of their own, but what you really want to do is get close and look inside. The first time I tried to do this I was warned by a security guard not to get too close. I was hardly about to climb into the box, but I backed off. In the adjacent gallery, I got about as close as I had before—close enough to see the interiors of the boxes but not so close that I came into contact with them. The friendly guard in this gallery offered suggestions for viewing the sculptures—from a distance, of course. He also pointed out one box with black scuff marks made by a woman whose bag had brushed against it. This was going to be an extremely expensive repair, he said, and the guards had caught some flack for allowing it to happen. This explained their extra vigilance, but no amount of vigilance—short of physical barriers—can forestall what happened at the New Museum or at the David Zwirner Gallery. Nonetheless, the security guard, who seems to be a greater presence as contemporary art galleries take on ever-more ambitious shows, is charged with this difficult task.

The museum or art gallery guard’s role is a strange one—fraught, even. In museums in particular the guard is tasked with keeping viewers in line, but also with giving directions and even answering questions about works on view. Some guards—and I have seen this frequently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are eager to volunteer knowledge or observations about a particular work of art. I have seen guards draw closer to tour groups to gather information. I remember being charmed and surprised when I first learned that Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked as guards at the Jewish Museum in the 1960s. In fact, this is perfectly understandable; guards are among the individuals who spend the most time with a given group of artworks. It should hardly be surprising, then, that they have something to offer. It is generally understood that their primary contribution is surveillance, and the self-imposed decorum that comes with it. It’s nice to be reminded, as I was by the friendly and engaged guard at David Zwirner, that guards are uniquely positioned to watch not only the visitors, but the works themselves.

Semiotics of the Housewife

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Bravo’s addictive but infuriating reality franchise, The Real Housewives—and if you’re like me, you’ve watched plenty—you may be wondering: Where are the housewives?

The show’s first installment, The Real Housewives of Orange County, debuted in 2006, piggybacking off the success of the ABC dramedy, Desperate Housewives. But The Real Housewives, with its interchangeable “stars” (when one leaves, or when a cast needs a shake-up, there’s always another “housewife” waiting in the wings), and its seemingly inexhaustible reserve of city-sites (by my count the franchise is up to seven), has taken on a life of its own, continuing to generate buzz while its fictional predecessor has faded into irrelevance. Consequently, the show and its cast members, who are routinely referred to in the media as “housewives,” seem poised to redefine the term.

As any loyal viewer of The Real Housewives knows, each season follows five or six well-heeled (but never well-mannered!) women as they shop, quarrel among themselves, and, increasingly, hawk their books, jewelry, and—worst of all—pop songs. By my count, about half of these women are married; this is a fluctuating statistic, to the delight of the show’s producers, I imagine. A few, like Vicki of Orange County, have bona-fide careers, while only a handful of the women on the show roughly fit the profile of a housewife, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as “a married woman whose main occupation is caring for her family and running the household.” Even these women are disqualified, however, when one considers that their main occupations are not running their households, but appearing on The Real Housewives (for which they are paid).

The housewife as a meaningful category is a relatively recent phenomenon, a creation of the Industrial Revolution. Most of us associate housewives with the 1950s, the period following World War II when women were sent back to the home to make room in the workforce for returning GIs. This era’s vision of the housewife was immortalized in countless television shows and movies, and even as the period recedes in memory, its imagery remains potent, continuing for many to define the standard against which all other ideas of the family are measured. (Think of the schizophrenic 2004 update of The Stepford Wives, whose creators seem to have been incapable of imagining a Stepford where the women do not appear to have stepped out of the pages of a 1950s magazine.)

During a telephone interview, Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University who has written about women’s changing roles in the family, said that America’s affluence during the 1950s is responsible in part for its subsequent idealization. “It is also part of the backlash against working women to constantly go back to that period as the ideal way for women to live and for children to be reared.”

Despite the era’s perceived devotion to a traditional family model—in fact, it was a subject of some criticism even then—domestic work in the 1950s never enjoyed a status equal to that of “men’s work” (read: paid work) outside the home. “There was always the stigma of being ‘just a housewife’,” says Gerson. With Betty Friedan's diagnosis of “the problem that has no name” and the second wave of feminism, “housewife” became synonymous with monotony, suburban anomie, and of course, desperation. Between 1967—when Herbert Gans identified malaise as a female rather than a suburban problem in The Levittowners— and 2005, the proportion of “traditional” families, defined as those in which the husband, but not the wife, works outside the home, declined by half, from 36 percent to just 18 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Women’s greater (though by no means equal) access to the workplace was accompanied by yet further devaluation of the housewife.

But these days, housewives are back! Or so you might think watching Jill, Tamra, Nene, and Teresa embrace the title as if it were an honorary doctorate. At first blush, all of these warm and fuzzy feelings about housewifery (if in name only) may seem like your run-of-the-mill, “postfeminist” return of the oppressed; yet another attempt to rehabilitate the term, and to restore to the housewife an elevated status that she never really had. But restoring dignity to beleaguered housewives hardly seems to be part of Bravo’s agenda, and the show’s cast-members seem to embrace the title for a very different set of reasons. Nowadays, Gerson observes, “the notion of the housewife conjures up leisure and privilege. It’s only a very wealthy woman who can afford to not have a job. It’s this new form of conspicuous leisure at a time when people are working harder than ever.”

In The Real Housewives, where the title is bestowed willy-nilly on every woman in sight, the word “housewife”—preceded by the word “real,” no less!—has no real referent in the world. Andy Cohen, Bravo’s Senior Vice President of Original Programming and Development (and host of the delicious post-Housewives chat show Watch What Happens: Live), has speculated that viewers are attracted to the camp appeal of the term. Gerson agrees that “people don’t really describe themselves as housewives anymore with a straight face. It comes with kind of a wink and a nod.”

If the women of the series embrace the title, it is presumably because they have determined that it is safe, neutralized by irony or by its distance from their actual life circumstances. But unhinged from any tangible meaning, “housewife” has become a free-floating signifier, available to any number of associations—many of them negative—that the word can be expected to elicit from the educated and affluent viewership that Bravo routinely boasts.

Trailing its cultural baggage behind it, The Real Housewives’ nonsensical title promises to deliver to us women who are “just housewives”— and shows us something much worse. This label, applied indiscriminately to every woman on the show, implicates all of us as well. “What bothers me about it,” Gerson says, “is that it places women in kind of the same old bag, even if they’re single and even if they’re working.” In the end, the show's title is only an anachronistic—if insidious—come-on, a prelude to the show’s real subject: a non-stop spectacle of self-aggrandizement, conspicuous consumption, and above all, bitter catfighting, that can only undermine women's hard-won gains. So why do we love it? And what does that say about us?