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Fia Backström

Socially Organized Appearance, 2009

Description

Maker

Title

Socially Organized Appearance

Year

2009

Medium

Photograph mounted to aluminum, 30 adhesive decals

Dimensions

61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 inches)

Type

Credit

Gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez

Object Number

2017.19.5

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

The Phantom of Liberty

May 4 - December 30, 2018

This work includes a stock image of these incredibly white people, in skin tone, clothes, and setting. The title is from Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. Michael Taussig’s What Color is the Sacred? (2009) is also related, how everything colorful has been deemed exotic and “other.”

This work considers the difference between the U.S. [the United States] and “US,” whether as US the consumers or U.S. the nation. With this current regime, we are back to an understanding that seems to eerily correlate to this image in its total fetishism of the exclusivity of whiteness. The stickers attach to the wall so that the piece has no autonomy, but the whiteness of the wall and the people is bound to a larger structure.

–Fia Backström

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Socially Organized Appearance with the accession number of 2017.19.5. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.