Oleg Mindiak
Title of paper: Style and Simulacrum: Objects and Subcultural Group Membership in the Performative Photography of Nikki Lee.
Affiliation: Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, USA.
Abstract: In her controversial photo-series “Projects,” Nikki S. Lee, a Korean artist based in the U.S., problematizes Hebdige’s pairing of subculture and style by performatively inserting herself into a variety of millennial American subcultures. Part participatory ethnography, part artistic practice, Lee’s photographs become artifacts of the subcultures they document, while nevertheless remaining objects essentially external to them. Assuming the visual tropes of the groups she infiltrates, Lee demonstrates the style-as-code that Hebdige theorizes as salient to the construction, extension, and preservation of subcultures. This paper will explore Lee’s performances of subcultural style through a reading of three sets of Lee’s “Projects” traversing punk, “yuppie,” and skateboarder cultures in New York and Los Angeles. In “Projects,” imitative infelicities demonstrate the importance of style as a marker of group membership while paradoxically de-valuing the symbolic object as something that can be duplicated from the outside. “Projects” critically queries the very possibility of subcultural style within a broader millennial culture defined by access to historically anti-hegemonic subcultures whose stylistic markings (whether physical objects or forms of self-presentation) are now widely commodified.
Skateboarders accept Lee into their subculture precisely because her visual markers suffice for group membership; conversely, Lee simulates acceptance in part because she studied the subculture to a point of passability. Specific objects delineating subcultural style thus remain, but have become significantly more accessible to imitation, diluting their political force. In this way, Hebdige’s emphasis on style as a constitutive determinant of subcultural identity becomes less relevant to millennial subcultures defined by their social media representation; signs of stylistic accord no longer give evidence of anything but performative participation in a highly objectified simulacrum of identity.
Biography: Oleg Mindiak works in Special Collections (SPARC) at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where he recently completed a thesis on the gendered construction of glamour in Weimar visual culture. His work has previously been accepted for presentations at the Freie Universität Berlin, Weimar 20/20 Interdisciplinary Conference, the Northeast Modern Language Association 51st Annual Convention, and the Poetics of Precarity conference at KU Leuven, Belgium. His other academic interests include representations of the Neue Frau in the paintings of Kate Diehn-bitt, Lotte Laserstein, and Hannah Höch in Weimar Germany; anxious masculinities in the violent depictions of working women by Otto Dix and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen; and the construction and deconstruction of femininity in the work of Cindy Sherman.