Feeling feelings

Hi y’all. Writing this letter on a wildfire smoke-y Sunday in Portland. If you are able to donate to relief efforts in Maui and haven’t yet, please do it! Maui Rapid Response has a few options here for community funds as well as direct aid.

Do you have artworks that you think about all the time? One of my touchpoints is Cory Arcangel’s Untitled After Lucier, which is an infinitely compressing video of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964. Something about the deterioration of such a huge collective cultural moment comes back to me often. So many of our collective experiences these days are disasters.

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In late 2019 I led the creative team at Instrument that helped Twitter bring their new brand to life on the web. Irradié was developing the brand alongside a lovely in-house team. The work was influenced by collage, grunge, and the chaos of overlapping conversation. They were leaning into it! When I first saw the brand work I had one of the biggest unprofessional meltdowns of my career. Why? Because to me, the early work felt extremely grim and negative. Something about the use of collage to strip away words, or hashtags, used for activist movements, felt so off. I said something about “a brand language for a brand that profits off of chaos” at the time.

I came to see the beauty and honesty in that creative work and loved Twitter as clients. As one of my first touchpoints with big tech, that work was also an entry into how I think about white women and power. Because: working with Twitter was one of the first times I realized that women like me can and do hold positions of power. And by that I mean white women who are eccentric leftist intellectual types. Here in 2023 we know this well, but in 2019 I was still early enough into my tech-adjacent professional life that I hadn’t quite realized that women like me—former goth, anticapitalist weirdo—could or would ever hold any kind of corporate (creative) power.

From Layla F. Saad’s definition of white exceptionalism:

White exceptionalism is the belief that you, as a person holding white privilege, are exempt from the effects, benefits, and conditioning of white supremacy and therefore that the work of antiracism does not really apply to you.

When I read Saad’s Me and White Supremacy a few years ago I realized that this lack of seeing myself as even having access to a certain kind of power was tied to white exceptionalism. White progressives who grew up in the south know intimately what it’s like to carve a sharp boundary between yourself and the other, bad white people. There’s class stuff in here too, but what I am saying is that I had/have this other additional layer of exceptionalism that separated me from your average white liberal because I studied intersectional feminist theory in college or whatever. And that made me very naive to the ways whiteness works for a long time.

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I bet Greta Gerwig read lots of feminist theory in college, too. If we’ve chatted in the past month I bet I made you talk to me about Barbie… and how crazy it is that Gerwig is the most peer-like director I could ever have! Or just how fun it must have been to have been in charge of the creative details for something like Barbie. (Talk about corporate creative power!) Being a film director (and an auteur at that) is the best job one could possibly ever have! Etc.!

Many reviews mention the self-consciousness of the humor. From Pitchfork:

At its core, Barbie is a piece of marketing that is being aggressively marketed, and it's succeeding wildly while anticipating its own critique.

From Mariam Rahmani in Lux:

I was ready to dismiss the Barbie movie as white supremacist postfeminist schlock. I expected the diversity of the cast to act as a curtain behind which this plastic ableism and overvaluing of whiteness could hide. But alas, the film anticipates just such critiques and, with deadpan sarcasm, deflates them.

I can relate to this kind of humor and approach, and also: I aspire to be the kind of white person and feminist who can show up in public and be present in the complexity of our world, you know? From what I’ve read about Gerwig’s leadership on set… let me just say that I’m taking notes. She sounds like a great leader—one who is directive and clear about what she wants, but who makes room for her collaborators to help shape the work and share in the vision.

I’m in the phase of my work-life where I’m looking for really great models of creative leadership. Particularly visionary creatives who are influential in the work and speak truth to power. (Maybe I’m also thinking about this because I’m seeing Beyoncé in three weeks.) If you have more reading or references on this topic, please do share. I’ll report back too.

Wishing you all some moments of collective joy. Sending love.