September 25, 2004 Barking Pink General
Snapped this fresh piece of street art pasted on a vertical I-beam on
Spring Street near the southwest corner of Lafayette St., right where
SoHo begins to morph into NoLIta. So, let's deconstruct a bit, shall we?
Here we've got a disembodied head of a middle-aged man wearing an army
helmet. He's a commander barking an order. The man resembles the
infamous General Patton, who was one of the great military architects of
Allied victory in World War II. He was one tough mofo, a serious
alpha-male raised by the a club of ultra alpha-males. What makes this
street graphic much more visually arresting is it's color, pink, which
is often thought of as feminine, sweet, cute, delicate and pretty--in
other words, everything that a four-star general isn't. So, to get back
to semiotic the deconstruction ... the pink color, in effect,
symbolically emasculates a violent, male authority figure, while
simultaneously forcing the viewer to extend the connotations of pink to
include the potent imagery of martial aggression. (Yeah, whateva!)
Typhoon Photo
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