Private Lives, Public Spaces Response

Walking into the Private Lives, Public Spaces exhibit at the MoMa was so captivating – it was like walking into 100 different worlds at once. Each screen displayed a personal part of people’s lives, lives that we were not aware of before this exhibit. I would be mortified to know that my home videos, private moments in my life meant for family to view only, were displayed for so many too see – to be known can sometimes be a scary idea. Of course, this is only my personal opinion, part of my personal identity. It comes from how I was raised; from how my parents personally brought me up to the society I live in. Judith A. Howard brings this concept up in her article Social Psychology of Identities. In her article, she analyzes social psychology (including sexuality, race, gender, age, etc.). She goes through multiple topics concerning this, including cognitive processes, the social bases of identity, and what I would like to focus on: cognitive schemas.

Cognitive schemas are broken down into two categories: self-schemas and group schemas. Self-schemas are knowledge about oneself, whereas group schemas are more akin to stereotypes; “organized information about social positions and stratification statuses, such as gender, race, age, and class” (368). As she explains, they allow people to “summarize and reduce information to key elements”, meanwhile losing valuable information. When walking into the exhibit, you see a vast array of small screens on the wall to your right. The left wall has one big screen, and a handful of small ones. At first it seems as though nothing is amiss, but upon further inspection you see this concept of group schemas at work. On the right wall, the videos playing are fairly happy; you see a couple getting married, a woman taking care of her child, two little boys playing with their toys. These subjects are all white. With the exception of maybe a couple videos, everyone on display on the right wall is white and presumably straight, being filmed by their white family members and friends, everyone perfectly happy to be filmed. On the left wall, there is a different story. People of color are displayed on this wall, and they are not having as much fun. A majority of these left wall videos include them at work or school, not being filmed by a family member but rather an unknown identity documenting them as they go about their laborious days. Also, concerning women, for a large majority of these films, left wall or right, they are seen being homemakers while the men are allowed to have real, fun lives. These videos fall into group schemas. They allow the audience to compartmentalize their ideas about these groups of people and reinforce stereotypes; people of color are poor and are “othered”, and women are homemakers and mothers. These people are given identities by whoever filmed them; identities that are not necessarily their own.

To construct your identity is to display yourself as you want to be seen to the masses. If you want to be identified as rich despite being poor, you would wear designer clothes. If you want to be identified as a Democrat, you would publicly support Democratic nominees and vice versa for Republicans. Of course, there are parts of your identity you can’t personally construct such as gender and race, and this is the issue with how the exhibit is set up. The white, male subjects are given opportunities to display their constructed identities regardless of their innate identities. The women and people of color, for the most part, are not given this same opportunity.

Of course, no one in these videos ever expected to be put on view in this way. As mentioned earlier, home videos are usually meant to be viewed and displayed privately – in the home, by family members. These people (or at least, those who chose to be filmed) expected to only be viewed by future members of their family and by themselves, perhaps as time capsules; moments of their past in which they can reminisce. And now, their lives are on display for hundreds of people a day to view. Hundreds of people a day get to see these people and make presumptions, assumptions, and judgments. There was one video of a man and his wife throwing around their infant baby girl while she was in the nude. Me and my friends thought it an appalling video – why was she nude? Why are they doing these things to her? But, we will never get those answers because the people in the video knew privately what their goal was and what they were doing. They never expected to have to give an answer to their private activities.

That is why this exhibit is called Private Lives, Public Spaces. The people in these videos have their private, personal, not initially meant to be seen videos and lives on display in a public space. Their identities are on display for the world to determine and judge.