Visiting Artist Mark Newport and the Identity issue

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“I started to think personally how does that fit into being a man or a woman, being a parent. I started a story in my head of how to take care of my kids. And you need to be a superhero. And a superhero needs a costume.” Mark Newport

In Mark Newport’s talk at the University Center for the Arts at Colorado State University, the artist presented his early and most recent work in terms of the instability of simple binary opposition between male and female stereotypes, and the issues related to it.

Many of his works come about in response to the question: how do I know how to be a man? What makes a man a man? In his work Newport combines textiles and traditionally female-associated art forms with masculine pop iconography to subvert the idea of gender or at least challenge it.

In the mid nineties, he started using imagery connected with sports players on trading cards. “What could be more hyper masculine and represent what a man should be than a sports trading card?” Mark Newport said during his talk. He wanted to dress up the football players in a way that was equal to when a woman dresses up.

Newport keeps dealing with gender issues, as well as the representation of gender in our society. He does it by trying to challenge the idea of a constructed identity in his superheroes costumes series, where he knits full body costumes of famous superheroes (like Batman or Spiderman). He also “created” new superheroes, like Sweaterman, Big S man or Bobbleman. He uses fiber as media: knitted acrylic wool, a feminine and not flattering soft material to represent ripped body muscles and super human physical strength. Moreover, the way he installed his work has nothing to do with the exhibition of power that superheroes always represent. On the contrary, his pieces look hung from the neck, desolated, empty and powerless.

Like the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault were theorizing in the 60s and 70s, different identities are formed mainly through social interaction and shared histories. The concept of identity is constructed by society and follows very specific laws. Mark Newport is trying to break those patterns in offering a different, more intimate representation of identity stereotypes. His superheroes are portrayed as common human beings, with their fear and weakness, like everyone else. Yet, Newport adds further layers of meanings to his work. First, he focuses on how superheroes have usually hidden identities and play the common male in real life, like they perform the powerful hero when needed. Second, with the knitting, Newport seems really intrigued about the way a process that is as time-consuming as knitting contradicts the actions, the intensity, and the physicality of a superhero.

He is deconstructing the differences between women and men identity, offering a different point of view. Like Kehinde Wiley in his work tries to unmask the Euro centrism and class privilege of white male that excluded black people from history, so Mark Newport uses the same concept to reveal what masculinity can be, deconstructing its visual cliché. Female and male are not fixed but fluid concepts; continuously evolving, shifting and mutating ideas.