Response to Kips Lecture, lecture #2

Today the theme of Kip's lecture was "How do we define who we are?" He gave us a long list of classifications: species, gender/gender identification, age/age group, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion/belief system, physicality, marital/relationship status, national origin, occupation, education, socio economic, physical/mental/ emotional abilities, tastes, activities, personas. He showed us many different, talented artists who in some way or another identify themselves within a piece. Like Tatsumi Orimoto's "art mama" series. Although some perceive his pieces as making fun of his mom, he is really just engaging with her and remaining an active part of her daily life as she remains an active part of his. To me his photographs are saying "hey, this is my mom...and she's fucking awesome". It's sort of like how parents play with their children when they are young. The parents will come up with fun activities to do or places to take their kids or things to "make believe" about, knowing that in the future their grown kid will remember a morsel of all the things they did or that happened when they were growing up, but they know that it will better their lives. With Orimoto's work sure, he knows his mom won't remember anything they do together, but in the end, she is spending the remainder of her life hanging out and being happy with her son.