Identity and Creative Practices
Thesis statement:
Identity is a broad term comprising many sub-types. There is identity as to gender, identity as to race, social identity, identity as to stereotype and many others. This paper will elaborate on all these forms of identity while giving tangible examples and borrowing from the works of scholars like Stuart Hall who wrote a lot on social identity. Three images have been chosen to elaborate further on the same.
There is no exact meaning of identity. The meaning of identity depends on what a person thinks it is, or the context that they are discussing it. Stuart Hall discusses identity in three senses. To start with, there is personal identity (Williams, 2000). This refers to the uniqueness of a person because there is hardly any two or more people who look alike, behave in the same way, think in the same way and do all other things in the same way. Each person has their own identity, and this makes them unique and, therefore, different from other people (Elliott, 2013). They are, therefore, not said to be identical to other persons. Identical is derived from the word identity. Personal identity, therefore, concerns itself with the person in question. Each person has got their own talents, their own way of thinking and approaching issues and their own way of interacting with other people (Gay, 2009).
Social identity
The other sense of the word according to Stuart Hall is social identity. Social identity refers to the fact that people belonging to a certain social group are distinct from other people belonging to another social group hence the aspect of social identity (Hall, 1996). Each social group has certain characteristics that define its existence.
Egoistic/felt identity
The last sense of the word that Stuart Hall deals with is ego/felt identity. This is what individual people feel they are i.e. what they think they are as human beings; individual people have their unique ego and, therefore, they feel differently about themselves as compared with what other people feel about themselves (Wetherall, 2009). This egoistic feeling is what makes them unique. There are those who feel that they are mighty and others who feel that they are weak (Woodward, 2004).
Mutually exclusive and mutually constitutive identities
According to Steph Lawler, some aspects of identity are not capable of existing in isolation. Such identities are mutually constitutive, as opposed to mutually exclusive (Lawler, 2014). They include race, class and gender. Other aspects of identity are mutually exclusive which means that they can exist on their own and still make sense. They include the binary classifications of man/woman, homosexual/heterosexual or eve black/white (Rutherford, 2007).
Social, gender and stereotypic identity: evidence from images
This paper will adopt a unique format in discussing the aspects of identity as conventionally understood. Three images will be picked and discussed one after another. Each will be discussed depending on its uniqueness on the real thing that it represents, the creator of the image, the sociological and cultural perspectives that it represents and all the attributes that it possesses. The idea will be to discuss identity in an imagery perspective unlike a theoretical form whereby the aspects will not be as clear as they would be when represented as images. One image will be different to the other because it was either produced by a different artist or it represents a different reality in life.
Image 1: Marilyn by Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol lived between 1928 and 1987. He was a popular artist in the 1950s. American artists were very popular due to their ability to come up with very creative works of art. Such works of art included paintings, drawings, design and other forms of artwork. This artistic work represents the image of Marilyn Monroe, who committed suicide in August 1962.
Borrowing from the works of Stuart Hall, Steph Lawler, Woodward and Elliott among others, Andy Warhol was able to come up with these creative designs, and this shows how it’s possible for artists to perpetuate social identity of their particular social group . Whereas this work was probably made up for entertainment or commercial purposes, the artist was able to preserve his culture and by looking at his work, his society can appreciate the talent that he had.
The culture of the people, which forms part of their identity, can, therefore, be preserved through artistic work like Andy Warhol did in this work. In the 2004 edition of The Guardian, this work was voted the third most popular piece of art among all the other works of artists in the United Kingdom at the time. This image discusses cultural identity.
Image 2: Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
This work of art represents a urinal which was the result of the work of Marcel Duchamp, an American artist who lived between the years 1887 to 1968. He associated this work with utilitarianism that he hated with a passion. He did not belong to the American school of thought of utilitarianism. He is remembered as having pioneered the formation of famous American Society of Independent Artists whose main vision and mission was to fight and advocate for the recognition of new creative works of art. He was among the artists who were fond of American culture and were ready to preserve it through works of art. This portrait represents this endeavour
His rejection of the popular belief that art was all about craft and sculpture won him a lot of fame for him. He enlightened people by coming up with a new notion and view of art. This is the aspect of identity that this paper endeavours to perpetuate. The whole subject of identity is, therefore, not all about belonging to a certain group of people or doing a recognized piece of work . It has more than this. Identity, as posited earlier in this paper, lies in the mind of the person thinker. Many scholars have termed it as an oxymoron, an abstract form of a thing that cannot be seen, hence the difficulty of definition . The image therefore discusses social identity.
Image 3: Elephant and the Boa, adapted from the book “The Little Prince”
In the famous book “The little prince”, the writer moans about people’s lack of wisdom and not allowing other people to do what suits them most. In his story, he writes that when he was young, he had a passion for works of art. His first drawing, he explains, was that of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. This was what was in his mind when he was making a drawing (Dunning, 2010). However, when he happily showed the piece of art to the people hoping to be congratulated on the good work.
He was not tired of his work, so he got down again to drawing, this time round hoping to come up with something that the people would applaud (Adamson, 2012). When he showed them the second piece of work that he had done, they advised him to concentrate on studies instead of troubling himself because he did not have the talent to make drawing as pieces of works of art. Though he is young, he is the only person who can understand what he is doing (Saint-Exupery, 1943).
This brings about another aspect of identity. The narrator is identified with a lot of creativity yet other people cannot decipher his creativity. He is the only person who can understand and know that he is creative and possesses a wealth of creativity. It would therefore appear that identity rests on its owner and other people may never realise what the owner possesses. This is personal identity.
Conclusion
This paper has traversed various disciplines in search of instances of identity. As the likes of Stuart Hall and Steph Lawler in their writings would state, identity to some people is just an oxymoron. It manifests itself in various phenomena and not in only one instance. As such, it depends on the perspective that the person is looking at it. On matters nationality, a named country has many forms of nationality.Regarding the society, there is always that aspect of the society that defines it (Bauman, 2004). One society is quite different from the other, and that is what makes it unique from the other societies. However, identity is not static. It changes over time and what a certain category of people regarded as their identity may change over time. This is because identity is dynamic, and it is affected by cultural, social, political and economic changes.
References
Adamson, T. (2012). Little Prince Discovery Offers New Insight . Associated Press.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity. Polity Press.
Dunning, J. (2010). In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupery . The New York Times.
Elliott, A. (2013). Concepts of Self, 3rd Ed. Polity Press.
Gay, P. D. (2009). Identity In Question. Sage.
Hall, S. (1996). Questions of Cultural Identity. Sage.
Lawler, S. (2014). Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge, USA: Polity Press.
Lemert, C. (2009). The New Inividualism. Routledge Publishers.
Rutherford, J. (2007). After Identity. Lawrence and Wshart.
Saint-Exupery, A. d. (1943). The Little Prince . Reynal & Hitchcock (U.S.A.).
Taylor, C. (1997). Sources of Self. Cambridge University Press.
Wetherall, M. (2009). Identity in the 21st Century. Palgrave macmillan.
Williams, R. (2000). Making Identity matter. Sociology Press.
Woodward, K. (2004). Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation. Routledge Publishers.
Illustrations:
Image 1 represents a piece or art by Andy Warhol which he did in 1962 and measure 205.44 cm × 289.56 cm (80.88 in × 114.00 in). Retrieved at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Diptych
Image 2 represents the fountain by Marcel Duchamp and measures 15 in. x 19 1/4 in. x 24 5/8 in. (38.1 cm x 48.9 cm x 62.55 cm). It was acquired in 1998
Retrieved from: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25853
Image 3 represents the elephant andthe boa adapted from the book “The Little Prince” available at http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/chapter1.html
Bibliography
Adamson, T. (2012). Little Prince Discovery Offers New Insight . Associated Press.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity. Polity Press.
Dunning, J. (2010). In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupery . The New York Times.
Elliott, A. (2013). Concepts of Self, 3rd Ed. Polity Press.
Gay, P. D. (2009). Identity In Question. Sage.
