Arts Dissertation - Situationist Theory - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 30 Words: 9038 Downloads: 6 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Statistics Essay Did you like this example? When Situationism evolved from the Letterist movement, in the middle of the last century, it set itself up in opposition to two other two other politically motivated groups: Dadism and Surreallism. Situationism, however, was only incidentally political, and rather than subverting the art world, aimed only to redesign its context, including the attitudes of the public, so that art could become something anyone could do or enjoy- something integrated into everyday life. Historically, arts efforts to bring down capitalist structures from within have been very ill-fated, with artists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or perhaps worse- accessories to political agendas. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Arts Dissertation Situationist Theory" essay for you Create order Artists and writers must work harder than ever to devise means of opposing or exposing capitalisms deceptions, but many commentators appear to have reached the conclusion that the battle is barely worth fighting. As we shall see, Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible through art or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to commit suicide, Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the malediction consumed. Thus the avant-garde movements in Europe put the artist under pressure to exhibit a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- being a producer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible, There is a lot of talk, not about reform or forcing the Enlightenment project to live up to its own ideals, but about wholesale negation, revolution, another new sensibility, now self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalist or rational self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened role for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization. In a sense, the avant-garde has been socially commissioned to forecast the future, to scouting out new intellectual terrain, Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured Early attempts to overthrow Capitalism In many ways, Dada and Surrealism represent the most successful artistic rebellions against capitalist norms, as they have attacked the conventional assumption of meaning itself, and in doing so drew attention to the ridiculous fact that such an assumption existed at all, Dada has often been called nihilistic and its declared purpose was indeed to make clear to the public at large that all established values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great War Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeance It is as though the Artist jumped before she was pushed. With its effort to close the gap between producer and produced by making everything equally alien, Surrealism also sought to negate its creator, using, pure psychic automatism intended to express the true process of thought free from the exercise of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose . Habermas, too, asserts that Surrealism poses a threat to arts existential rights, but still fails in two ways, First, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow. Habermas draws attention to the levelling affect of contemporary communication networks: networks which challenge the hierarchical assumptions of classical Marxism, and which have, in scale, surpassed what any postmodern commentator even in the 1980s- could have imagined. More so than ever, our media are democratic and interrelated, A rationalized everyday life, therefore, could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere art and so providing access to just one of the specialized knowledge complexes. Any active dissent can be transformed into a commodity, a product to assist the perpetuation of capitalism. Catchy slogans devised by revolutionaries are used to sell mortgages, paintings that challenge conventional assumptions about beauty and form are written about in books to be sold, and bought by galleries where their beauty and form can be admired and valued- bought and sold. As the Anti-Naturals recently wrote, on the subject, It is the nature of the Spectacle to transform all experience into a consumer commodity. It is no surprise, then, that so much of modern capitalist production should be focused on the authenticity swindle. It is not merely that we are told that our authentic self is only a credit card order away. We must be told what and how to purchase. Since, in the midst of the Spectacle, all experience is real only when it can be consumed, it is natural to follow the guidance offered by the array of products engineered to address each particular need. In reality, it is quite easy to mass market to hundreds of millions of individuals, since each quest is identical in its basic features. Any words spoken against can be turned into rallying support. Art, like any powerful weapon, can always be turned against those who use it. Whatever doesnt kill power is killed by it. In this way the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being systematically categorised as works of art, and were forced to focus their whole project completely on the evasion of this recuperation. Five years of agitation against capital, war and morality, brought them to an impasse of suicide or silence. Everything the Dadaists made, said, wrote or performed seemed to be turned against its critical purpose and used against them- and they abandoned the project. Effectively, they went on strike. The Dadaists left a legacy in the form of recuperated, commodified art works, and in multiple imitations of their style and attitude. Their advocation of collage and photomontage is now everywhere in advertisements, their paradoxically anti-art art surely at the very heart of current post-modernist critical theory. They were correct in their belief that this capitalist appropriation was inevitable while they were merely producing, and not controlling the means of production, but in some ways, they did in fact constitute a challenge to bourgeois morality. Dadaism questioned the philosophical assumptions which justified smug bourgeois attitudes, and uncovered the hypocracy of World War 1s brutality legitimising propaganda. In the end they felt that their subversions of established values were merely contributing too much to the culture they had been trying to undermine. The Situationist Asger Jorn was emphatic about the failure of Marxist theory, to liberate of art from commodification , Instead of abolishing the private character of property, socialism does nothing but augment them as much as possible, rending humans themselves useless and socially non-existent. The goal of the development of artistic liberation is the liberation of human values by the transformation of human qualities into real values. Here begins the artistic revolution against socialist development, the artistic revolution that is tied to the communist project . . . Debord and the Situationist reaction to Capitalism Debords 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, represented an attempt to articulate as fully as possible the Situationist philosophy. The term spectacle refers to the colonization of everyday life by commodity in late capitalism, an extension of alienation experienced between production and consumption. The spectacles subjective, one-directional effect requires a kind of non-participation, eventually resulting in a breakdown of communication between people. Situationism distinguishes between classical and modern forms of capitalism. Where classical capitalism demanded that wasted time describes any time not spent at work, modern capitalism actually reverses that, using advertising and other spectacular means to declare that it is the time spent at work that is wasted, and work is justifiable only because it provides the monetary ability to consume. Marx wrote that, the worker feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home The Situationists describe the spectacular society as a place where, the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere . As Debord himself explains, So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is guardian of that sleep . However, the spectacle was not unique to capitalist society; the Situationists worked on a theory of the concentrated spectacle that would incorporate individual influences on capitalist regimes. This was principally contrived as a rhetorical framework to include the cult of personality in the dictatorships of places such as Cuba, the Soviet Union and China. The Situationists argued that the same tricks that society used to sell fast cars and kitchen appliances were used to promote and deify figures such as Chairman Mao. In anarchic efforts to subvert the spiritual and fiscal poverty of urban life under the tyranny of the spectacle, the Situationists developed a revolutionary art, departed from artistic convention. In their article Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program, Debord and the Marxist theorist Pierre Canjuers, assert, At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (which makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere reserved for free creative activity is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed practically and in all their fullness. Here, in art, lies the basis of the antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separations give rise to the general crisis of traditional artistic means a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention; and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt or destroy it. Initially, the work the Situationist International produced was aimed at ridiculing formalist conceptions of the art object: Asger Jorn bought amateur paintings at flea markets and painted over them, subverting notions of authority and value. Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio invented a style of industrial painting where the canvas was over a hundred metres long, then cut strips off for potential buyers, thereby subverting traditional preconceptions of arts autonomy. In reality these processes were eventually absorbed by a capitalist art market bought, sold, exhibited, written about, and for the most part, politically neutered. In his 1974 book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger points out that the avant-garde artists main goal is to shock the viewer, typically accustomed to organic or formalist works of art, in the hope that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the readers attention to the fact that the conduct of ones life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it He goes on to state that, Paradoxically, the avant-gardist intention to destroy art as an institution is thus realized in the work of art itself. The intention to revolutionize life by returning art to its praxis turns into a revolutionizing of art. This is the kind of logic that prompted the Situationists to agree to stop producing art in 1961, when they decided to cease considering themselves artists. Any remaining members unwilling to abandon traditional forms of art, including Jorn, Pinot-Gallizio, and Constant found themselves either being forced into ideological resignation or expulsion. It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic and authentic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. Once and for all. . . . Our position is that of combatants between two worlds one that we dont acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist. In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler write that, in abandoning early Situationism, the Situationist International abandoned its imagining of utopia a devastating decision, surely unprecedented in the history of the avant-garde, and yet at the same time surely the situationists greatest contribution to that history: the recognition that in changing the world, avant-garde art cannot be a substitute for popular redistribution of power It seemed that the SI recognized that for any avant-garde to succeed, it would do best striving to produce artists, and not art. The Dadaists, too, were aware that both art and artist are part of the capitalist system, and consequently as guilty in their participation as any other commodity or worker. Marcuse and Adorno, in contrast, argued that the Dadaist project was misguided for its attacks on conventional art. They saw art as an autonomous entity, separate from capitalist interests, and something intrinsically apolitical that must be preserved rather than aggressively undermined. For Adorno, art bears an essential negativity derived from its peculiar Form; its rearrangements of reality are conducted according to a system quite alien to those of capitalism. This Form grants art a: refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the reality established through domination. While Adorno and Marcuse criticised the anti-artists for attacking artistic Form, they agreed with the avant-gardists in their slightly utopic aspiration of abolishing the distinction that existed between art and the rest of reality. In fact, Marcuse wished to see a society organised around the aesthetic principles he believed resided only within art. Both argued that this integration could not be achieved if artists were allowed to participate. Art should be kept apolitical and protected, in a realm conducive to calm reflection that might remind us of the truth an authentic life can afford us after the revolution. So, although they expressed their rejection of this view in different ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists all aspired to a collapse of the distinction between art and the rest of life in present: everyday life. Instead of waiting for the revolution, all three argued that the integration of art and life was in fact necessary for the achievement of revolution, a revolution made possible only by a combined cultural, ideological and economic assault on capitalism. Asger Jorn, again, on the failure of the socialist revolution, The capitalist revolution was essentially a socialization of consumption. Capitalist industrialization brought humanity a socialization as profound as the socialization proposed by the socialists that of the means of production. The socialist revolution is the fulfillment of the capitalist revolution. The one element removed from the capitalist system is saving, because consumptions richness has already been eliminated by the capitalists themselves Real communism will be the leap into the domain of freedom and of value, of communication. Contrary to utilitarian value (normally known as material value), artistic value is the progressive value because, by a process of provocation, it is the valorization of humanity itself. Since Marx, economic politics has shown its impotence and its cowardice. A hyperpolitics will need to strive for the direct realization of humanity. Walter Benjamins authentic opposition: the Crisis of Reproduction Walter Benjamin is probably Adornos most established opponent, particularly since The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a work that concentrated upon defining the aura of traditional art preceding 1900, and assessed the decay of this aura under the impact of new media and cultural technologies. Benjamin argues that art has lost its authenticity because of mechanical mass reproduction in our capitalist-orientated culture industry. He is concerned about shifting attitudes to art, which came about as a consequence of the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction. Formerly unique objects, located in a particular space, lost their singularity as they became accessible to many people in diverse places. Lost too was the aura that was attached to a work of Art which was now open to many different readings and interpretations Unlike his Frankfurt School colleagues, however, and especially unlike Adorno, Benjamin argues, this loss of authenticity is actually a positive thing, because it democratizes and politicizes art. Benjamins claim that arts loss of authenticity might actually help free people, not enslave them in a capitalist culture industry starkly opposes Adornos ideas. In addition, each stage of reproduction of an original work of art also contributes to its loss of aura. According to Benjamin, then: culture has been transformed into an industry; thus art has become commodified; contemporary culture is the machinery by which oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated; new media technologies such as phonographs, film and photography, serve to destroy arts aura and effectively demystify the process of creating art, making available radical new access and roles for art in mass culture; the spectator has become a collaborator and participant, who joins the author in determining the meaning of the production of the work of art. Art is successful only when it enables the critical contemplation of a viewer. Benjamin happily equates authenticity with authority- the authority of oppressive institutions such as the church or the state- and history. As Benjamin explains, the work of arts authenticity is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced Until the 20th century, artworks retained their aura, their authenticity precisely because of their inability to be mass-reproduced, whether religious artifacts or one-off paintings commissioned by individual wealthy patrons. This conception clearly presents aura and authenticity as profoundly undemocratic, as the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful, then able use such art to maintain control over the masses. The introduction of mechanical means of reproduction of art, particularly photography and film, caused the very foundations of this setup to be radically altered. For the first time it was possible for anyone to acquire the means to take photographs of a work of art, or at purchase an image of the work. However hard cultural elites in the late 19th century had tried to protect the aura of art works, the social advance of the masses and the invention of media such as film, which depends upon distribution to the masses, had led to the inevitable decay of the aura in the 20th century. Benjamin marks the distinction between manual and machine reproduction of art, The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical, and, of course, not only technical reproducibility, he states, Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction Benjamin states two reasons this occurs. Firstly, machine reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction; secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. So mass-produced copies are able to engage with the wider world in a manner not possible for the original or one-off copies. Benjamin summarises his ideas concerning reproduction by asserting the technique detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. Many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. So to allow the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, is to reactivate the object reproduced, It is these processes that lead to the tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind In Benjamins conception, then, state and religious authorities have steadily lost the ability to control general access to such works of art, particularly since the 20th century began. This is most apparent in relation to the cinema, which destroyed the traces of aura with which art had been traditionally imbued; Benjamin cites arts historical value as a fundamental part of magical and religious rituals. In the process, capitalism strips art of its the idealistic, theological halo- to some extent a happy consequence and restorative, as it returns the art object to its non-utilitarian presence, its everyday reality. For Benjamin, an artworks aura refers to its uniqueness and the phenomena of distance, however close [an object] may be. He uses gives the example of distant mountains and a trees bough over head, both contain aura because they are images have not been effectively reproduced mechanically . Beyond the concepts of aura and authenticity, Benjamins concepts of reproduction and reversibility represent the core of his concerns about way in which arts role in society has been fundamentally altered in the 20th century. Benjamin proposes that the artworks aura of authenticity has withered away because of its reproduceability, and the process of reproduction brings art into closer proximity with a mass audience. However, paradoxically, as the authenticity erodes, the works essence becomes forefronted in the process, as it starts to become designed for reproducibility. As Benjamin describes it, for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice politics. Benjamins commentaries on the effects of reproduction inspired other writers, such as Lechte, it is the process of reproduction as such which is revolutionary: the fact, for instance, that the photographic negative enables a veritable multiplication of originals. With the photograph, therefore, the spectre of the simulacrum emerges, although Benjamin never names it as such. The photograph as simulacrum by-passes the simple difference between original and copy Barbara Krugers Situationism and the Irresistible Collage of Society Barbara Kruger addresses the negative aspects of capitalist society as an artist, writer, curator, lecturer and graphic designer. Her art is displayed both inside and outside museums and in a range of different forms. Occasionally her prints are framed and hung on the walls of museums and galleries in the traditional fashion, but Kruger is endlessly inventive, and often writes text to be printed or projected directly on the walls or floors of a museum. In Picturing Greatness, a photography exhibition curated by Kruger in 1987 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, text was printed in large black type across a central partition. Kruger selected photographs for this exhibit from the museums collection, and according to the words on the partition, the photographs were mostly of mostly famous artists who happened to be predominantly white and male. The text on the partition claimed the works can show us how vocation is ambushed by clich and snapped into stereotype by the camera, and how photography freezes moments, creates prominence and makes history. Krugers work continually questions the definition of art, artists and the ways in which great art should be exhibited. In this work, Kruger challenges the overwhelming dominance of male artists and draws attention to the females apparent invisibility in western art history. Just like the Situationists under Guy Debord, she has altered the meaning of art by recontextualising it. Crucia lly, the visitor to Krugers exhibition does not need to be familiar with the original photographs before seeing the show- even the uneducated viewer could read Krugers text, look at the original images and come to their own conclusions about the meaning. Thus the work achieves a kind of unique political democracy. Kruger has a background as a graphic designer, and as such creates effective bold images which are in many ways visually indistinguishable from advertisements, but rather than trying to sell a product, appeal directly to our social conscience. The subject of her text is always I, me, we, or you, as though Kruger engages in conversation with the viewer. Her messages probe the assumptions of the capitalist status quo: You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic, When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook and We have received orders not to move. Similarly, Constant, of the COBRA group, proposed a city as a kind of physical expression of his utopia of free play which, in parts, bears striking resemblance to representations of the Internet, in books such as Mapping Cyberspace (with wild lines pouring out of the metropolis perhaps representing bandwidth and site traffic). Made with perspex and bike parts, Constants models and his diagrams for New Babylon demonstrate his yearning for future as something mobile, organic, animated, and self-celebratory. For Constant the city was a sort of perpetual festival of leisure. With its intricately connected wires suspending clear circular layers, ramps and walkways, Constants New Babylon recalls some kind of tensile organism. As Constant describes it, The unfunctional character of this playground-like construction makes any logical division of the inner spaces senseless. We should rather think of a quite chaotic arrangement of small and bigger spaces that are constantly assembled and dissembles by means of standardized mobile construction elements like walls, floors and staircases. Thus the social space can be adapted to the ever-changing needs of an every changing population as it passes through the sector system. Analogues with the Internet are irresistable. Equally, he could have been referring in a general way to those unique social structures which have grown from the anti-globalisation movement structures which, although provisional, pragmatic and short term, are nevertheless ideologically committed to social change and serve as emblems of the ongoing struggle against capitalism, a battle fuelled entirely from reserves of creativity. Constants is city as collage, similar to that celebrated by the less politically motivated group, Archigram, in the UK (many of whose members now design massive architectural features for megaband stadium concerts). In this time of desperate connectivity and complicated layering of urban cultures, with invisible webs of communication engulfing us, the need to understand the city as a place beyond work and production seems more pressing than ever. The Situationist reaction to capitalism is also excellently expressed through anti capitalist collage: for example that of the General Lighting and Power group, whose slick mock-advertising images of soft focus female forms in leotards and computer graphics of office interiors and car accidents, wryly annotated with entertaining aphorisms such as: Aerobics is necessary: progress implies it (I see you baby, shaking that ass) and God is in the retailing Comparisons to Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are obvious. Charles Rice, too, has observed the oversized billboard signs now proliferating in major cities, arguing convincingly that they serve to perpetuate the distance between the real and the impossible,these spatial fantasies effectively deliver identification with the distant and the unattainable Many writers have noted the similarities between the Situationists idea of the derive (that is, the navigating of a city via means and routes other than those originally intended) and the experience of surfing the internet. Colin Fournier, architect and educator makes some potent observations on this area. It would seem that many of the characteristics of the internet reflect the S.I.s utopic city. The things considered prerequisite for their utopia: an ephemeral, negotiable type of city, where uses were determined by the population, surfing the web is like the idea of drifting or deriving, flaneur-like, through a city. The Situationist city and the web are uniquely flexible, anarchically dynamic: spacial relations secondary on any given route. The internet always seems to somehow recall the old Surrealist idea of using a map of one city to find ones way around another. Art as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Images Increasingly, the media is becoming governed by imagery, and the average consumer is overwhelmed by visual information on a daily basis. Through sheer competition, the commercial sphere has been forced to use stranger, scarier, more extreme imagery to earn the attention of bewildered customers. Magazines such as Vogue have lured artists to their pages, where they are seen as innovative, visionary powers for re-inventing a complacent visual vocabulary. Thus, the traditional hierarchy of photography, in which the commercial and conceptual worlds were segregated, has been broken down into a fluid, integrated world- mutual respect has ensured that crossing the boundary either way no longer carries the taint or disrespect it once did. A new generation of artists have grown up with the rather cynical and postmodern idea that all things are commercially viable. Contemporary art school graduates are less likely to see their ventures into the commercial realm as contamination, and more as a necessary aspect of their endeavor. Commerce is incorporated into art at every level, from the means to the ends to the theme. That the common thread of art and fashion- the human body- has become such a commodity, seems like an obvious extension of this. Fashion spreads frequently borrow art photographers for their pages and mimic, in the case of Diesel and others, with considerable irony- the current art world trend towards narrative ambiguity and deliberately theatrical tableaux that recall theoretical artists like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman. Russel Wong is one such new generation artist, his work strongly informed by todays cultural fascination with celebrity. Wong has become famous through striking portraits of personalities from sports to music and movies, famous for capturing moments of vulnerability, warmth and humor. A number of Wongs photos have been used on the covers of international magazines. My photos are never confrontational, he says, I want to bring something from the inside and not just show the pretty face, but I also want my subjects to look good. One of Wongs recent exhibitions, a series of prints, straddles the line between photography and fine art, and includes a commentary on celebrity that implicitly involves him with the commercial world. He has been painting, crayoning and etching on the photographs he works from, and uses this process to build a social commentary about the cult of celebrity. He explains, I wanted to look at how a stars identity is fabricatedEach image explores the relationship between the person, the entertainment industry and the public the cult of celebrity. Wongs print work is a little increasingly wry, showing a greater sense of self-criticality, possibly mocking phenomena of celebrity. In a work themed on the Chinese star Joan Chen, for example, Wong examines the manner in which publishers seem to critically view, censor or judge what is the right image before the consuming public encounters it as true. In this way, Chens picture is deemed too sexy, too demure and even too perfect, consciously pointing to the mechanics that operate within the celebrity media machine. Wong began taking photos of athletes as a teenager, having been a keen athlete himself and enjoyed taking photos of other athletes on the tracks. At only nineteen, he offered a photo of Sebastian Coe, to Nike, who, in an act of supreme arts/fashion crossover symbolism, paid him with a pair of shoes. The photo was published on the cover of the sports publication Track Field News, and Nike established a regular routine with the young man, regularly taking his work in exchange for shoes. Again, exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between art and capitalism, played out in the fashion world, Wong recounts, Soon I was running a shoe shop out of my dorm, Wong went on to develop a keen interest in portraiture, but has never explicitly acknowledged that even his sports photography was a form of portraiture: albeit a portrait of an archetype- or even a portrait of a brand. The move from portraits to celebrity portraits was a natural one, in Wongs case, a mere side effect of geography, in fact. The models started to bring their boyfriends. In those days it was the brat pack with people like Downey JrFrankly when youre living in L.A. and youre in this kind of business its bound to happen. Fashion as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Gender In Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City, Cristy Turner suggests that the show may be really about four gay men. The show is set in the gay territory of fabulousness and that gay men hold all the cards both on and off screen- many of the shows writers are gay. The women in SATC are, on first glance, hardly a minority group. Yet, as Turner writes, Yet disidentification with mainstream ideals can also occur within the diegesis of a show; the women of Sex and the City could loosely be described as constituting one such minority group, as they consciously disidentify with bourgeois family values in favor of the dazzling, idealized notion of fabulousness embodied in their gay sidekicks. While certainly upholding and perpetuating many strongholds of normative US culturemoney, consumerism, heteronormativity, whitenessthe characters of Sex and the City also stray from certain conventions of femininity and tradition in favor of attaining this fabulous lifestyle and persona. The fabulous high campness that Turner describes hails from a tradition of black gay males that evolved as a defensive measure to create an impenetrable force-field of extravagant confection, both a protection and a distraction, it also served to underline the difference to the mainstream with an autonomic flourish that reclaims homosexual exclusion as a conscious choice of self-marginalisation. Yet the lifestyle and trappings of flamboyance require money, and capitalism will always ask subcultures to forfeit their marginalized chic, if they wish to survive in society. Hence underground culture is rapidly appropriated by dominant society as capitalism turns subculture into style. As Turner says, what began as a survival strategy for poor queer people of color eventually morphs into sly and discreet markers of fabulousness for the rich, white, heteronormative characters on Sex and the CityFabulousness exists merely as a free-floating marker of cultural capital, obscuring its subversive origins and capitalizing on a raced and classed cultural history without acknowledging the fierce politics behind it. Harzweski argues convincingly that sexuality has undergone increasing capitalization right across the board, and this is clearly reflected in the visual arts. She expands on the old discourse of female objectification, explaining how the culture of dating itself is an exacerbatory symptom of an increasingly commodified society. People of both genders have become a currency in a new society which pivots on the trading of love promises, where everything is accountable and where our commercial greed to earn more is mapped directly onto our biological desire to love and be loved. She cites a dating book which offers an up to 60 percent increase in the odds of marital likelihood, Featured guidelines specify that the shift from casual to monogamous dating should occur between the 1st and 4th month and that the 22nd month of dating marks a watershed moment as the statistical trend line for receiving a proposal begins to drop off. In late heterosexuality, capitalism levels heterosexualitys claim to naturalness in that successful heterosexuality is shown to be the product of labor or a resilient entrepreneurial esprit, Late heterosexuality, a term Harzweski coins, describes this particular social moment, where the desire to go get it has been transferred from entrepreneurial ambitions onto dating culture. Women today believe if they work hard enough, aim high enough, put enough effort in, believe in themselves enough, they are entitled to any man they want- or whichever men they want, however they want them. Laura Kipnis has called it labor-intensive intimacy the idea that if we work hard and network enough in our quest for a soul-mate, payoffs will inevitably yield, and the idea is also touted by a self-help lecture program that Charlotte and Carrie are seen to attend in Season 5 . Capitalising on Sexual Imagery: the Limits of Choice There is indeed much evidence that Sex and the City conflates sexual politics with modern business concepts and sales rhetoric. For example, Samantha asserts that the new dating field is all about multitasking and that the group ought to try to avoid falling into a one-man-at-a-time pattern. We are constantly reminded of the significance of Samanthas position as an efficient PR executive. She is clearly an expert at selling, and sells herself better than anything. Carrie, especially, appears stricken with a materialistic malaise, for example where she compares first dates to job interviews with cocktails in episode 69. She makes the point even more explicitly, in episode 75, as she types on her laptop, When it comes to finance and dating I couldnt help wonder why we keep investing. Carries capital is astonishing and apparently entirely expressed through an invented iconography of high-heeled shoes. There are occasional anxieties around the sheer amount of capital invested in clothes and shoes, after weathering all the ups and downs you could one day find yourself with nothing, and the time Carrie discovers that she cannot get a bank loan to buy her apartment and that she has, over the course of a decade, spent $40,000 on shoes. Theres your down payment, Miranda tells her. I will literally become the old woman who lived in her shoes, Carrie laments. Yet despite this Carrie remains constantly upbeat about her material situation: after all it is her job to wear style, to be style, and as long as there is consumerism she will be happy in her identity. The constant celebration of the material in Sex and the City is only hollow and exhausting if it is set against any anticipation of the women as three-dimensional characters. To the extent that show is a commentary, and surely this facet is emphatically underlined by Carries literal, post-modern commentaries of each episode, (including details of her friends lives she couldnt possibly really know)- the show is a commentary on the abstractions of modern living and modern loving. The message is that the privilege of capitalism is choice. We can choose which woman to be, which shoes we want, which words we write, which man we want to spend the night with. Every episode turns on an over-agonised choice around some consumable or other: most memorably in the case of the dress from the pages of Vogue, which The Russian buys for Carrie. Marxist academic Tim Fiskin has contrasted Carries function with that of Girls Aloud, the pop group chosen by the people and successful against the odds. Their appeal, for him, is their apparent stubborn refusal to choose, refusal to participate in the choices which will only fatten capitalist coffers and delay the revolution, Girls Aloud are unimpressed, which carries the pretty strong corollary that anything you do might fail to impress them (which would lead not to ridicule or punishment, of course, but simply more unfeeling boredom)their apathy is not in principle limited to any particular circumstances. In this sense, the Girls are the anti-Carrie Bradshaws. Carrie is obsessed with choosing, carefully organising her life so that no choice is completed. She inhabits the perfect late-capitalist world where the moment of choice is literally endless (that is, lasts forever). And note that this is not simply despite her choice being of no significance whatsoever, but precisely because of that: the more indiscernable the alternatives then the more the choice is a pure exercise of will; that is, the more it is, ideologically, a free choice. Girls Aloud have no truck with any of that. Their aporia is a quite different one, not an endless deferral but a tactical refusal (sometimes to not choose is not a choice , its something much better) According to Tim, the refusal to choose will bring about freedom- and Carries insistence on frolicking delightedly in her capitalist playground only reinforces the fact that she exists in a perpetual state of choice, with infinite options. The human moments in Sex and the City, undoubtedly the best moments, arise when choices are denied the characters. When Miranda has a baby, for example, or Samantha is diagnosed with cancer. In fact it is only Carrie, the lynchpin of the series, who is never denied choices, whose aporia remains infinite, and who must remain a dehumanized logo, a letter or symbol, for the abstract messages of the show. Late heterosexuality is the selected heterosexuality, as opposed to the heterosexuality by default as feminist writers have characterised femininity. It is a desire for men that arises from an initial desire to choose. Harzweski calls it post compulsory sexuality , and, in her terms, it always involves a humiliating displacement of the male romantic lead. In the same way that Alfie calls his girl friends It, the female characters in Sex and the City barely seem to remember their lovers names, replacing them with impersonal classifications, Big, The Russian. It is almost as though the boundaries between man and accessory are no longer relevant. Males and products are interchangeable in Sex and the City: a shoe often appears to be as good as sex, a vibrator often better. For example, when Smith Jerrods genitals are represented by a vodka bottle in a billboard advert he becomes a minor celebrity as the Absolut Hunk. While he struggles with his new identity as commodity, Samantha strives to keep him anonymous for her anxiously anonymous sex games. After learning his name, she swiftly changes it back, as Harzweski writes, merging the girlfriend role she resists with a more familiar and powerful position as public relations manager (Lights, Camera, Relationship, episode 79) Carries relationships with men take second place to her wardrobe, obviously, yet since her desires seem to be an extreme shorthand for female narcissism, she must be presented as traditionally feminine around men. Carries ultimate desire is to be owned by the Russian; she revels in his attentions, his cooking, and most of all the way he can literally make her dreams come true (buying that dress for her, right out of the pages of Vogue). But while she frets to her friends that he is too good to be true, her real complaint is that he is crossing a line of imagined desire. If he is able to make her dreams come true, and in this very literal sense (she is a literal girl, and her dreams illustrate the pages of fashion magazines) then she will run out of dreams as soon as the magazine is finished. It is imperative that her desires remain slightly elusive, or that any man smart enough to recognize them from the pages of the magazines they are written in, must at least pretend he hasnt notic ed and play along for her sake. She is forced to continue deferring her choices indefinitely for her capitalist paradise to be sustained. Carrie loves the Russian, however, because he is tuned into her materialism and represents a very real extension of it. Barishnikov of course- carefully cast as he represents asexual elegance and performance rather than humanity, reality. Carries extraordinarily dandyish image casts her as a female flaneur of some sort. Her lover is Big, clearly an abbreviation for Big Apple, almost- and characterized as a symbol of classic New York. His rival Aiden is a country lover and opposite, but the men are virtually emasculated and obscured by the emphasis on their styles. Capitalisms Postmodern Apologists If Sex and the City is a postmodern production, we are left wondering whether postmodern approaches to art production can ever really challenge the capitalist status quo. As already seen in Baudrillard, postmodern writers have reacted to contemporary arts efforts to disrupt capitalism in different ways. Jurgen Habermas, the Marxist theorist, perceived postmodernism as reactionary because of the way it promoted industrial modernization on one hand, while criticising the art that emerged alongside. Habermas seemed open to the possibility that art might have a positive influence on social change, believing that modernism still has theoretical value. Habermas views modernism as something in a constant state of change, something that enjoyed the avant-garde as a force working continually against tradition, Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative. Lyotard, too, saw the anarchic potential in postmodern paradigms, because they enabled a critique of meta-narratives, i.e. philosophies and ideas that had been taken as truths. He saw these meta-narratives, such as the Enlightenment and even modernism as representations of dominant modes of thinking that, since late capitalism and postmodernism, could be called into question. Lyotard, like all the voices of postmodernism, questioned our assumptions about origination, authority, expression and universalism. Images which appeared to present an illusion of reality were disdained, since they fallaciously aimed to present an incorrect notion, that is, the impression that reality could be presented in art. Although his experience of the student riots of 1968 in Paris gave made him doubtful about whether social change was still possible, he did hope that postmodernism harboured potential to counter the capitalist regime, We can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be the witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. Meanwhile, Barthes viewed representative, deceptive pieces of mimetic art as text, and found liberation in the opportunity for engagement, even discourse, with art objects that had been opened up by postmodern theory. As he writes, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before Historythe Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate. An explosion of experiment expressionist works and collage in the first half of the twentieth century had serious implications for art theory. The absence of an artist as the authorial presence, and as a person with a high level of training in a particular area allowed for a levelling of any perceived hierarchies between viewer and artist. It suddenly became possible for viewers to engage with the work without being intimidated or alienated by it; to contribute, affirm and create it, and to participate in the determination of meaning. Jean Baudrillard, by contrast, remained dubious about the merits of contemporary art, seeing the late capitalist trends towards mass reproduction as a damaging to the integrity of culture. The 1960s, in Baudrillards view, entailed a crisis of representational art due to commodity cultures reliance on reproductive methods. Baudrillards understanding of the post-modern centres on this notion of reproduction and the crisis, deriving from late capitalism, was symptomatic of an increasingly weak connection to reality- authenticity. In the place of Real ideas and objects, substituting originals, was a preference for a certain kind of simulation- a copies which had lost their originals altogether. Baudrillard labelled the new societical dominance of simulation hyperreal, a state where the copy is taken to be more real than the original. Conclusions: Arts Impossible Struggle for Authenticity Conceptual Artists have always tried to undermine capitalism. More so than ever before, artists in the late 1960s and early 70s saw their role as social mouthpiece, giving voice to ideas that attacked the limitations imposed by the economic autocracy of late capitalism. It was of course an impossible role to fulfil without contradiction. Artists aimed to overcome one set of limits- the social and political constrictions capitalism suggested, but at the same time their work had limits of its own. Art works had their own restrictions, assumptions, and biases, based on gender, class, and race. The art world was still laden with assumptions and unwritten rules about the kinds of ideas that were valid or appropriate for conceptual art, and most artists still had a vested interest in maintaining a sense of other worldly transcendence, maintaining a distance between the art object and the viewer. This is very clear from the writings of Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth- both of whom were writers as well as conceptual artists. Concept is so important to artists like these that it becomes the only aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. Conceptual artists were interested in studying the growth of simulacra as a means of critique on the growth of commodity culture. Conceptual art favoured ideas to objects, however, adhering to ideas reflected more a modernist attitudes of universalism, the humanist renaissance man ideal, that opposed the post-modern insistence that viewers ought to participate in art making. In actual fact, conceptual art suffered from airs of elitism- generally considered to be too narrow or beyond the intellectual range of the public. Conceptual art echoed modernism in many ways, then: it specified artistic criteria that, while obfuscated and draconian, were in reality extremely subjective. Its assertion that the work should be mentally stimulating recalled modernist ideas of transcendence far more than any real moralistic protest against the pressures presented by the capitalist society. It seems that even the most influential and persuasive movements in art history have struggled in vain to sustain an anti-capitalist position, but this may be less to do with unconviction or insincerity and more to do with the pervasion of capitalism- and the highly appealing idealism of the vision that opposes it. Bibliography Art Strike Handbook, p. 38 as referenced on https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/artstrik.htm Atkin, Douglas, The Culting Of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers London: Portfolio (2004) Barthes, Roland From Work To Text (1971) online here https://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Barthes-FromWorktoText.html Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in ed. Hannah Arendt, Illuminations Glasgow: Fontana (1973). Borden, Iain Sandy McCreery (Eds) New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City (2001) Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde UK: Morgan Morgan (1981) Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle UK: Zone Books (1995) Debord and Canjuers, Preliminaries: Towards Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program online here https://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/prelim.htm Fiskin, T. Shoulda Known, Shoulda Cared,in https://huh.34sp.com/wrong/2005/01/01/the-erotics-of-apathy/#comments Habermas, Jurgen in Holub, Robert. Jrgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, London: Routledge, (1991) p. 134 Harzewski, S. The Limits of Defamiliarization: Sex and the City as Late Heterosexuality from https://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/hbo/harzewski_01.htm Hebdidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style London: Methuen (1979) https://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj84/molyneux.htm https://www.midaddle.com/interstitial.aspx Hussey, Andrew. The Game of War London: Jonathan Cape (2001) Jappe, A. Guy Debord US: University of California Press (1999) Jorn, Asger The End of The Economy and The Realisation of Art -originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste No.4 (June 1960) Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003 Knabb, Ken (ed) Situationist International Anthology Bureau of Public Secrets, US: Berkeley (1981) Kolesnikov-Jessop, A take on the cult of celebrity from the International Herald Tribune, Jan 6th 2005 https://iht.com/articles/2005/01/05/features/wong.html Kristeva, Zoe Artistic Rebellion: The Modern Dynamic in The Philosopher, Volume LXXXIV No. 1 Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity London; New York: Routledge (1998) Sol LeWitt, Sol. Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum (June, 1967) online https://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Stu/kswenson/lewitt.htm Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism Berkeley: University of California Press (1984) Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? In Waugh, Patricia Postmodernism: A Reader UK: Edward Arnold (1992) Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension London: Macmillan (1979) Marshall, D. Celebrity and power; fame in a contemporary culture Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press (1997) McCracken, Grant, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press (1990) MacInnis and Mello, The Concept of Hope and Its Relevance to Consumer Behavior (2001) p.67 Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge (1992) Rice, Charles, New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City US: John Riley Sons (2001) Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City US: Mit Press (1998) Sex and the City. Created by Darren Star. HBO. 19982004. The Origin Of Dadaism https://www.public.iastate.edu/~volkerh/99R/online/DADA1.htm Turner, C. Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City in https://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/hbo/turner_01.htm Vaneigem, Raoul The Revolution of Everyday Life US: Rebel Press (2001) Wells, Liz. Thinking About Photography, in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Liz Wells, London; New York: Routledge (1997)

Literature The Definition Of Literature - 1302 Words

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Clinical nutrition Free Essay Example, 2000 words

In the US, for instance, alcoholism has been largely associated with nutritional deficiencies affecting mental functioning. Diseases have also been found to result in nutritional deficiencies by compromising nutrient absorption into the body, as well as increasing the body requirement for nutrients (Osborn, 2001). On the other hand, ignorance, poverty and fad diets are among other factors that lead to nutritional deficiencies. According to the study by Berk and Jacka (2012), at least three quarters of the psychiatric disorders in human lifetime are seen at adolescence and during early adulthood. The report from the National National Comorbidity Survey Replication produced recently indicate that at least 22 percent of the adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 years had had an experience of clinically significant mental disorder, with the onset ages thought to be 6 years for anxiety disorders, and 13 years for the mood disorders (Petry, Barry, Pietrzak and Wagner, 2008). Depression is understood to be typically based on biochemical activities or having emotional roots. However, nutrition has an important role in depression onset together with the duration and severity of the condition. We will write a custom essay sample on Clinical nutrition or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now Most of the food patterns that are easily noticeable, which precede depression are similar to those seen during depression (Parker, Parker and Brotchie, 2006). Such characteristics include skipping meals, poor appetite, together with a constant desire for sweet foods. Among the most common mental problems with high prevalence in many countries is schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, as well as the obsessive-compulsive disorder. The intake pattern of the diet in American and Asian countries demonstrate that there are high deficiencies in many nutrients, particularly the minerals, essential vitamins, and the omega-3 fatty acids. The notable features of diets among patients with mental disorders are the deficiency severity in the nutrients. Anstey, Lipnicki and Low (2008) indicate that daily vital nutrient supplements are effective in reduction of mental disorder symptoms. Supplements rich in amino acids have been identified as being important in reduction of the symptoms, since they are converted into neurotransmitters that eventually alleviate depression together with other problems of mental health (Scarborough et al, 2011). Recent scientific studies have resulted in the invention and development of the effective therapeutic intervention constituted by nutritional supplements, which are thought to be important in prevention and control of bipolar disorders, depression, eating disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ attention deficit disorder, anxiety, addiction, and autism (Maes, Leunis and Berk, 2012).

The Importance Of A Comfort Zone As A Resident Assistant...

Introduction A comfort zone is a relaxing â€Å"safe space† in which people are familiar with because it causes no anxiety or stress. In life, each of us will be in uncomfortable situations that are outside of our comfort zone. However, we have to be become accustomed in environments that are normally perceived as uncomfortable to experience what others may have to deal with on a daily basis. Additionally, this applies to social workers. We may deal with clients or different situations that are out of our comfort zone. However, we must overcome it to be more aware, as well as completing the job to the best of our abilities. For instance, a strongly devoted Baptist African-American male may be uncomfortable attending a LGBT Pride parade due to his beliefs. Nonetheless, this experience may change his perspective on individuals from the LGBT community and cause him to not be as biased or judgmental. 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Political Attitudes Advocated in 1984 Free Essays

Political Attitudes Advocated in 1984 (AP PROMPT) 1987-Some novels and plays seem to advocate changes in social or political attitudes or in traditions. Choose such a novel or play and note briefly the particular attitudes or traditions that the author apparently wishes to modify. Then analyze the techniques the author uses to influence the reader’s or audience’s views. We will write a custom essay sample on Political Attitudes Advocated in 1984 or any similar topic only for you Order Now Avoid plot summary. Do not write about a film or television program. The world sixty years ago as seen by George Orwell was a different place than the one we live in and experience today. Technology was quickly developing and become a part of daily life. Atomic warfare was still a new threat, and the aftershock of its use in World War II was still raw in everyone’s minds. Totalitarianism was seen as a social experiment of sorts, and not having yet experienced the Cold War, some of America’s great minds were still looking at these governments with an open mind. Orwell thought that society needed to be forewarned about both the possible and real dangers of these issues, so his manifesto, 1984, was his call for social change, his call to respect the dangers that technology, war, and totalitarianism introduced. In 1984, George Orwell goes along the same lines as many other influential contemporary authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood to create a perfect negative utopia. In this fictional society, Oceania, the government hands out cruelty, oppression, and propaganda as is they were food stamps, and every single aspect of the society, down to diary entries, private conversations, and even personal thoughts, is monitored by the Party through intrusive devices called telescreens. The Party uses everything at its disposal to enforce complete and utter control, from an editing of language to constant surveillance, from historical factual manipulation to physical and psychological torture. As a result of the government’s inadequate ruling and constant manipulation, the members of the Party live in an urban, industrial hell. Orwell vividly and continuously demonstrates the effects of this broken society, and the picture he paints isn’t a pleasant one: Oceania is constantly at war, Party members must completely succumb to mindlessness and conformity to survive, the society is living in a state of decay and poverty, inequality is wide-spread and all consuming, and even the structure and loyalty of families is almost entirely dissolved. The fact that Orwell’s Oceania is modeled after the totalitarian governments of the mid twentieth century is a thinly veiled one, and the critique of these societies is more than obvious. His message, though, isn’t reserved only for these communistic cultures; it’s also directed at us. The moral of the story isn’t just that totalitarian governments, psychological manipulation, and misuse of technology are bad, it’s also that we can’t obliviously sit back and allow such crimes against humanity to continue or even gain power in the first place. Orwell’s warning is effective, too, because he wasn’t just creating a dystopia, he was literally suggesting that this fictional hell could become our reality in thirty-five years if we didn’t change the way we looked at things. We did make it past 1984 without devolving into this reality, but the social commentary presented is still relevant and will always continue to be, because the message really is to keep questioning the world around us and not accept any form of oppression, and that’s one that is important enough to keep in mind for the entire foreseeable future. How to cite Political Attitudes Advocated in 1984, Papers

Analyse The Weakness And Strengths Of The Team Members - Samples

Question: Discuss about the Analyse The Weakness And Strengths Of The Team Members. Answer: Reports: Earlier performance report of every team member to analyse the weakness and strengths of the team members Discussion: The meeting was initiated by General Manager of the company who have introduced the new project to the team members (Schaufelberger Holm, 2017). He analysed the overall performance reports of the team members and mutually took decision over the roles of each and every member of the team. The meeting has ended up with the conclusion that every team member has to develop some of the skills that are required in the project to be successful. Roles and responsibilities: General Manager: team management, conflict resolution, development of objectives, monitoring the performance Sales manager: dealing with the clients, designing the documents Finance manager: financial management, maintaining records Automotive engineer: resolving issues of the clients, risk management Workshop manager: WHS, designing and maintaining the records, maintaining the cars After sales manager: serving the customers (Kerzner, 2013). Skills required: General Manager: communication skills, conflict resolution skills, team management skills, time management skills After sales manager: communication skills, product knowledge, influencing skills Workshop manager: product knowledge, technical skills Sales manager: communication skills, process and product knowledge, market research skills Finance manager: market knowledge, technical skills, budgeting knowledge, time management skills (Wallensteen, 2015). Announcements: Everyone has to develop their own personal development plan and requirements of training. Performance development plan: Skills required to be developed Skills gap percentage Set KPIs Training type required General manager Conflict resolution skills 50% Review of team conflicts Role play Sales manager Communication skills 40% Customer satisfaction score Session Automotive manager Designing skills 60% Review of documents Session workshop manager Documentation skills 70% Review of documents Classroom training After sales manager Influencing skills 60% Customer satisfaction score Mentoring Issues resolution: As far as the issues are concerned, it has been analysed that the common issue of communication gap and improper trainings has been found (Autesserre, 2014). Solution: This issue can be resolved by taking feedbacks from the team members itself to explain about their own requirements of trainings. This will help in taking mutual decisions (Edgar Rahim, 2015). Communication policy and procedure: When a bid proposal is made, it needs to be communicated to the clients so that they can participate in the bid. This requires a process to be followed. Step 1: as initial level, a bid needs to be prepared including all the specifications of the car along with all the condition that needs to be followed by the lessee. Step 2: after preparation, the prospects for the bid needs to be selected to whom the bid proposal is to be sent. Step 3: this is the step that actually requires communication media to be involved. Here the bid proposal sends to be sent to the clients through e mails in this case. Confirmation of the proposal on calls is also required. Step 4: follow up needs to be taken and query should be resolved on calls or in meetings. The interested client show their presence on the day of bid at the venue mentioned. Communication policy: Friendliness along with formal behaviour is necessary for the communication between the company and the client. The proper follow is must for a better communication with the client so that la the queries can be resolved. The communication should be made two way and needs of the clients should also be discussed (Annosi, Magnusson Brunetta, 2016). Project tasks: Development of commercial and legal system that offers projects based on specifications to the clients. Defining the scope of delivery strategically. Calculation of cost and budgeting of the project along with the sales price in cooperation with the sales department. Management of bid proposal timely Supporting the sales person for negotiation at the communication site. Preparation of the supporting document for the clients and for internal reviews of the project. Taking regular feedback of the each and every team members working for the bid proposal project Travel requirements for making the project successful. Minutes of meeting: TEAM meeting for taking the responsibilities: Attendees: General Manager Sales manager Automotive manager Workshop manager After sales manager Agenda of meeting: To delegate the responsibilities to each and every members o the team as per their specifications and requirements. Discussion: This is the meeting that focuses on delegating the roles and responsibilities to the team members as per their specifications. This meeting has ben conducted so that every team members can get the idea that what they have to do to contribute their art in the project success. Delegating the duties helps in clarification of the roles and reduced the chances of team conflicts. Roles and responsibilities: General Manager Managing the overall team Managing the bid proposal Review of the team performances Delegation of duties Travelling where required Automotive manager Supporting in developing the bid proposal Making the specifications of the vehicle in the proposal Resolving the queries regarding the vehicle specifications Sales manager Developing the leads for the bids Negotiating with the clients Workshop manager Supporting the team members in their activities Supporting after sales services After sales manager Dealing with the clients after sales Resolving their issues Finance manager Creating budget in association with the sales team to take decision over the prices and the cost of the overall project Corrective action procedure: This is the procedure that needs to be followed so that any of the corrective actions can be implemented in between the process of the project to make it more successful and efficient. Reviewing the activities: It is the step where all the activities that have been set for the project needs to be reviewed at every level so that any deviation from the set standards can be determined and correction can be made at that time only. Comparison: Comparison from the set standards is required so that the gap can be analysed. Implementation: the contingency plan need to be made so that it can be implemented in order to make the plan Follow up: follow up is also required again at every level so that it can be monitored. (Schippers, Homan Knippenberg, 2013) Corrective action plan: In this case, the corrective action can be implemented only when the team conducts a meeting in which the issues can be discussed. Following is the action plan for the bid proposal: Activity Description Responsibility Meeting All the members of the team needs to show their progress report All the team members Analysis of the reports It is the step where the reports of each of the members is analysed and cross checked General manager Gap findings The issues in the performance is to be found General manager Discussion Discussion amongst the members is done in order to convey the issues All team members Corrective actions Brainstorming is done by all to correct the issues All team members Implementation Implementation of the corrective actions is done All team members Personal contribution plan: This is the plan that describes the role of a general manager and contribution in the overall project management task (Dyer Dyer, 2013). This plan provides the description of all the roles and responsibilities that have been conducted by the general manger in this case. Roles and responsibilities by General Manager: Delegation of duties: It is the first responsibility that has been fulfilled as a general manager. Under this, all the duties and responsibilities are delegated to the specific individuals of the team members as per their requirements and skills (Clegg, Kornberger Pitsis, 2015). Review and monitoring: As a General manger, it is required to review the performance of each of the team members and monitor their activities property so that corrective actions can be taken anytime where the deviation has been observed (Lanaj Hollenbeck, 2015). Supporting the members: It is the basic reasonability of the General manger to support all the team members in performing their duties effectively so that the performance of the overall team can be improved. Proper information flow: This project requires the coordination of the members to perform effectively and thus it is required by the general manger to conduct the meetings timely so that the flow of information can be smooth between the team members (Cottrell, 2015). Conflict resolution It is basic requirement when two or more members work in team. This is because different people have different opinions and thus may lead to conflicts between the team members. The general manager has to show them skills to resolve these issues and to come up with a mutual decision (Wellington, 2015). References: Annosi, M. C., Magnusson, M., Brunetta, F. (2016). Self-organizing coordination and control approaches: the impact of social interaction processes on self-regulated innovation activities in self-managing teams. Autesserre, S. (2014). Introduction to" Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention".Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, 1-19. Clegg, S. R., Kornberger, M., Pitsis, T. (2015).Managing and organizations: An introduction to theory and practice. Sage. Cottrell, S. (2015).Skills for success: Personal development and employability. Palgrave Macmillan. Dyer, W. G., Dyer, J. H. (2013).Team building: Proven strategies for improving team performance. John Wiley Sons. Edgar, P., Rahim, S. A. (Eds.). (2015).Communication policy in developed countries(Vol. 4). Routledge. Kerzner, H. (2013).Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley Sons. Lanaj, K., Hollenbeck, J. R. (2015). Leadership over-emergence in self-managing teams: The role of gender and countervailing biases.Academy of Management Journal,58(5), 1476-1494. Schaufelberger, J. E., Holm, L. (2017).Management of construction projects: a constructor's perspective. Taylor Francis. Schippers, M. C., Homan, A. C., Knippenberg, D. (2013). To reflect or not to reflect: Prior team performance as a boundary condition of the effects of reflexivity on learning and final team performance.Journal of Organizational Behavior,34(1), 6-23. Wallensteen, P. (2015).Understanding conflict resolution. Sage. Wellington, J. (2015).Educational research: Contemporary issues and practical approaches. Bloomsbury Publishing.