Daniel Keyes on Alex Da Corte Alex Da Corte, O K HOL E (BACON TEAR/DREAMWORK DRIP), Hollywood in the gallery Sic Comic Tragic Arc, After Hours, 2013. Photo: Blaine Campbell

Alex Da Corte’s Bacon Brest plays with the Bacon Oracle allows fans to locate connections had not yet fixed cultural capital with distinctions two seasons of the 1960s television series features fragmentation of high, middle, and lowbrow between film narratives perceived to be radically like high and low brow, and as such, minstrel plays the white Julie Newmar as Catwoman, and in its culture within Hollywood’s increasingly diffuse discontinuous. Fans using the Oracle are inclined could parody Shakespeare in racialized, bawdy third and final season cast the black singer Eartha visual culture—‍where all players, themes, and to regard actors and directors as the well-worn performances that were grasped by a wide and Kitt. Cultural theorist Henry Jenkins notes the visual cues are destined to endlessly recombine and entirely replaceable cogs in a machine. popular audience. He declares, “a rich shared adult fans of TV show saw Catwoman as “a way to produce the next slate of new movies, television public culture . . . characterized the United States of exploring issues of feminine empowerment, programs, spinoff toys, video games, product Bacon’s career as an interchangeable yet highly . . .less hierarchically organized, less fragmented or resistance to male constraints and to the placements, etc. Despite Hollywood’s imperative recognizable face points to the industrial quality of into relatively rigid adjectival boxes. ” 3 Da Corte requirement to be a good little girl.” Da Corte to embody fresh, new, innovative modernity, stardom, where film acting, as Benjamin notes, is aims at a less hierarchically organized public calls attention to how Catwoman as a heavily as early 20th century Marxist theorist Walter about “the shriveling of the aura with an artificial culture that is open to interrogation via a do-it- eroticised hybrid human/animal figure is always Benjamin might note, a creaky industrial mode build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. yourself (DIY) aesthetic that troubles mass culture. riddled by questions of racialized representations, informs how art is made in this age of digital The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money This do-it-yourself retrofitting aims to reconfigure suggesting female empowerment is but one piece mass reproduction. Da Corte calls attention to of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura the iconography of cast-off bits of Hollywood’s of Hollywood’s complex and largely unconscious the omnivorous cultural imperative that informs of the person but the ‘spell of the personality’, imaginary; Da Corte complicates Hollywood’s tendency to re-work “old” material in order to Hollywood’s production and its often relentless ’the phony spell of a commodity’.” 2 Bacon, as a limited repertoire while simultaneously celebrating maintain a straight white male phallic order. hegemonic representations. His work can operate something less than bankable star, may not offer its ability to transgress high and low boundaries. Thus Bacon Brest revels in the humanist and at the level of fan culture, suggesting via textual viewers the spell of personality or the phony Marxist conundrum of how to demystify the aura poaching and cultural jamming that Hollywood’s spell of commodity. But in a Brechtian mode his An example of this high/low mash up is O K HOL E of the commodity form to lay bare more humane image gallery can be configured to locate cinematic presence points to the industrial nature (BACON TEAR/DREAMWORK DRIP) (2013), which includes relations. moments of transgression from hegemonic norms, of Hollywood performance, where his familiar face an image of a figure wearing two identical hoodies as it blurs the once staid boundaries of high and and mannerism from role to role offers not the and a mask with bacon leaking out of its eye NOTES low culture. On one level, the title of the exhibition unique aura of the actor’s stellar performance socket. The image recalls both the Ghostface mask refers to two white male Hollywood personalities but something more akin to a vaguely lucrative in the Scream series as well as Edvard Munch’s 1 http://oracleofbacon.org. who are not the defining luminaries of Hollywood endorsement of a script. icon of modernity, The Scream (1895). Rather than celebrity, nor are they figures of radical artistic or being white, the mask is painted black, pointing 2 Benjamin, Walter, “Art in the Age of Mechanical political possibilities. Instead their names invoke a Brest refers to New York-born director and writer to the limited racial imagery of the film series. Reproduction.”(1936), http://design.wishiewashie. more workman-like approach to producing easily Martin Brest, who is perhaps best known for his The use of the hoodie also alludes to the February com/HT5/WalterBenjaminTheWorkofArt.pdf, p. 9. consumed and disposed popular art that flirts with uneven career having directed the financially 2012 Florida slaying of black youth T rayvon Martin high, middle, and low. successful Beverly Hills Cop (1982) and the by his Hispanic neighbour George Zimmerman. 3 Lawrence W. Highbrow-Lowbrow, The Emergence notorious Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck flop Gigli Zimmerman judged Martin’s hoodie to be of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard UP: Bacon refers to the journeyman actor Kevin (2003). His film school short Hot Dogs for Gauguin suspicious, claiming self-defence in killing the Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 9. Bacon and despite not being the brightest star in (1972)—‍broadcast nationally on Saturday Night unarmed Martin with one bullet to the chest. Thus Hollywood, his willingness to star in numerous Live in 1980—‍provides an example of the blurring this “scream” speaks to a specific moment beyond Dr. Daniel Keyes teaches English literature and films and television places him at the centre of between high and low in both its title and its plot, the hermetic world of the Bacon Oracle where Cultural Studies with an emphasis on media the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a trivia game that which describes a photographer wishing to create Hollywood seldom treads. Da Corte mashes up studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, British connects any Hollywood actor or director to him great art by blowing up the Statue of Liberty. Thus Hollywood’s “scary” images to expose Hollywood Columbia. His research reflects an interest in through a series of films. A fascination with the the blending together of Bacon and Brest stands in and by extension America’s possessive investment media and performance and is informed by his interconnectedness of Hollywood has helped place for an industry that is prone to chew through in white privilege. dissertation on the performance of testimonials spawn the website The Oracle of Bacon 1, which and cannibalize idea and images, and also treat on daytime talk shows in the mid-1990s. More connects the actor to contemporary Hollywood anatomy (e.g. Breasts) like processed meats (e.g. in relation, the life size Catwoman cardboard recently his research focuses on the problematic personalities usually through not more than two Bacon). cutout of Anne Hathaway’s body (from The Dark expressions of cultural nationalism in 1950 or three films. The Bacon Oracle demonstrates the Knight Rises, 2012) has an image of Halle Berry’s and 1960s theatre productions throughout BC; insularity of Hollywood film production, despite the In Highbrow-Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural face pinned over it, recalling a procession of white television studies with a focus on reality TV; and notion that it speaks to and for diverse audience’s Hierarchy in America (1988), historian Lawrence and black actresses who played Catwoman, with contemporary articulations of whiteness in the tastes. By focusing on the element of labour, the Levine marvels at how early 19th century America Berry having taken on the role in 2004. The first Okanagan.

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