Dora

"Marshall Mcluhan, among others, sought to theorize about this world as a 'global village,' but theories such as Mcluhan's appear to have overestimated the communitarian implications of the new media order (Mcluhan and Powers 1989). We are now aware that with media, each time we are tempted to speak of the global village, we must be reminded that media create communities with 'no sense of place' (Meyerowitz 1985)." -Appadurai

The Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club was founded in 1974. It is a response to, or a seizing of, the Hudson Valley’s craft legacy. The members are almost all retired men; they carve mostly animals, mostly in independent wood shops in their homes. In a time when communities have "no sense of place," the club defines, formalizes, and promotes an aspect of the imagined local/bygone imagined local.

“The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. A vast array of empirical facts could be brought to bear on the side of the homogenization argument…and some from other perspectives… What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science, terrorism, and constitutions.” -Appadurai

Dora the Explorer:

Dora by Clayton "Clay" Brooks

from the website of the Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club:

All of Clay Brooks' other sculptures documented on the Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club website are in the round. They are heavily shellacked, three dimensional, life-size animals, mostly ducks (in line with the trends of the rest of the carvings on the site). Dora is the only relief sculpture. While staying true to Dora's design (and even television scale?--its hard to tell), he gives her depth, takes her out of her image, but just barely.

"There may be redemptive nostalgia in a distinction between the (active) production of 'country crafts' and their (mere) consumption of their (passive) reproduction as empty styles. But it is certainly not the ideology itself that makes the difference but the social situations to which it attaches. The practice of making 'traditional' country objects through the learned techniques of stenciling, tin-smithin, applique, quilting, refinishing etc. will only enclose the self in a self-conscious image and wrap 'the folk' and 'history' in a primitivist cloak if the interpretive practice is one of reading action and events and products as symbolic examples or manifestations of an already fixed (symbolized) structure or time." –Kathleen Stewart

Brooks's relief sculpture of Dora positions carving as his practice divorced from any certain subject. It is a nostalgic "learned" technique, but his subject is globalized and contemporary (Dora the Explorer the television show is translated into 22 other languages and broadcast around the world). Brooks's Dora is marketing suicide.

For a tourist to the Hudson Valley, Dora is a kind of toxic contamination of the desire for an untouched, pre-industrial rural space.

"As far as the United States is concerned, one might suggest that the issue is no longer one of nostalgia but of a social imaginaire built largely around reruns. Jameson was bold to link the politics of nostalgia to the postmodern commodity sensibility, surely he was right...If your present is their future (as in much modernization theory and in many self-satisfied tourist fantasies), and their future is your past (as in the case of the Filipino virtuosos of American popular music), then your own past can be made to appear as simply a normalized modality of your present." -Appadurai