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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Advertisements for SUVs are a good example of what she's talking about, Hogin says. "When SUVs first started to become popular," she recalls, "the seductive code was about transcending an apocalyptic, chaotic landscape" that evoked images of "The Road Warrior." It's a trend still apparent in ads for some SUVs, such as the mammoth Hummer, which originated as a military vehicle. What we, the potential buyers, are supposed to come away with when viewing such an ad is that "transcendence in the context of an apocalyptic or dystopian environment becomes fun."
That advertising approach, Hogin says, "also positions the consumer as heroic, so the fantasy of having a fully coordinated, heroic, perpetually young, perpetually active body, in addition to this almost armored vehicle suggests that the two become one."
Not coincidentally, among Hogin's fascinations is the notion of cyborgs; the idea of the body becoming transcendental, mechanical and independent of nature. An associate professor of art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hogin teaches a graduate seminar that includes a three-week section on cyborgs. She talks about an advertisement she saw recently for a company that's working with MIT to develop new military technologies.
"This ad showed soldiers of the future who looked like 'Star Wars' storm troopers. Their humanity was completely erased, they looked like cyborgs. They were all powerful, all integrated, and I couldn't believe how seductive that was." There is something in us, she says, that finds the completely unnatural, the sterile, hypertidy and efficient very appealing.
"Everything that connects us to nature is sloppy," Hogin says, and though she doesn't agree with many of Freud's views, she grants credence to his belief that we overcome our feelings of powerlessness and lack of individuality by severing our connection with the mother's body, symbolizing nature. "Another reason," she continues, "may be the internalization over eons of the threat constituted by nature and by illness -- the development of disgust, for example."
It's a point that directly relates to one of the recurring themes running through Hogin's work: mankind's lack of empathy for, and alienation from, the natural world. As a youngster, she says, "I spent a huge amount of time drawing animals. I don't really know why, but I think it had to do with questions I had about empathy. Here was a creature whose eyes I could look into and see the evidence that it had an emotional life, perception and consciousness.
"But the only way I could empathize with that was to imagine," she continues. "And that idea became very important to me, the idea that imagination is the origin of empathy. If you really imagine what it's like for somebody, or something, you can empathize."
As an adult, Hogin says, "I've gotten my sense of ethics, and my politics -- as a citizen and as a consumer -- from imagining where I am in this network of economy and production at the global level, and imagining how I want to behave according to my effect on other people's lives." Hogin, who's married to a documentary filmmaker and has a 2-year-old son, continues, "I can imagine what it might be like to be in a place where I don't get antibiotics for my kid. Or to have been in the [WTC] towers -- what it was like for the people who had an hour to think about it."
It all comes back to the idea that empathy and imagination are linked, she says. "I suppose the eyes and bodies of animals were a huge part of that for me as a kid. Perhaps because animals are inarticulate: They won't tell you how they feel; they'll act out their feelings, but they can't express it."
Hogin clearly spends a lot of time crafting her animals' eyes, which seem by turns furious, terrified, frenzied or, at the very least, challenging, many of them gazing straight out of the painting, following the viewer just like those of Uncle Sam on the well-known "I Want You" recruiting poster.
"Animal paintings from the Dutch 17th century really grab me," she says, "because they are all about exoticism, colonialism and collecting -- the ownership of bodies. It's also about tourism, not so much literal tourism, but the psychological tourism now provided by advertising. For example, the representation of urban authenticity or drug addiction -- heroin chic -- is often couched as a form of tourism in our culture."
