FE FY FO FEMME

Hi everyone,my blog just woke up from a 6 month long nap. Now it has a long grey beard and is trying to get used to the postmodern world. “Who the hell is Sarah Palin and how can a conservative/capitalist be so flippin cute”

I also am now in an open relationship with this blog. My other blog is named Sketchy Lady and it is a reflection on the process weekly portrait drawing. The drawing project is for my class called Space/Time Concepts: Contemporary approaches to Sculpture with Jeanine Oleson. But since that blog is specifically for one assignment, I get to mix it up and post my other sculpture projects to this blog. Here it goes!

This project is from  Learning to Love You More, Miranda July’s interactive art assignment website, specifically the assignment to make an encouraging banner.  I thought it would be an interesting spin on the assignment to encourage the viewer to leave. Many of the things I am making for this class play on gender stereotypes, and this one uses domestic materials (an old housedress, frills, and fabric marker) in order to communicatea hostile idea contrary to the traditional use of embroidery (e.g. “Home Sweet Home”).

The next project is called “Double Breasted 1980s Shoulderpad Feminism”. The idea was to take an object and de/constructit based on its use and its structure. I first sought out to construct a blazer with exaggerated shoulders out of office supplies, but in making the armature out of cardboard, the object took on a sort of intentionally crafted yet robotic quality when worn, similar to the act of crafting upward mobility in breaking the class ceiling. I decided to keep going with the office supplies idea and make a second blazer out of legal paper.

I guess you can’t really see it in this photo but there are reinforcements for button holes, office clips for cuff links, and those bronze-colored bendy things for buttons. Both blazers can be worn (by me) but there needs to be someone helping to put it on, just like how female assimilation needed a hoist-up through legal means.

Yes! A new source for my project– If you go to the current issue and then the article on Art Workers Coalition, there is some pretty interesting stuff on what artists in the 1960s did to demand better representation from the museum system for artists of color and other marginalized groups. Ironically, I originally found out about the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest at the New Museum on the Bowery. Unfortunately I haven’t found out a lot yet about more recent attempts for artists to organize around these issues: mostly for this project I’ve found things like Martha Rosler’s If you Lived Here project, and other community-based art projects.

Today I’ve been reading some stuff about the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the ways that it was tokenizing to women artists and artists of color, essentializing artists’ identities into neat little categories– interesting after seeing the 2008 Biennial on Friday. I still have to catch up on criticism of the latter but I’m sure that it appears largely the same: covertly (sometimes not so covertly) racist, considering the structure of capital and arts funding by corporations and corrupt government agencies…

Sometimes I think the art world is in just as bad shape as SDS at its worst: going through the motions of innovation and change but not actually producing any output, nor utilizing our skills and resources. I knew that the Whitney Biennial would only disappoint me but I decided to go with my dad today anyway… and was disappointed. My dad asked me in the car back what some qualities I think that a piece of art needs to be considered “good art” and so I decided on some. Good art should:

1) be innovative, using a technique or material in a new way.

2) be thought provoking in a way that people can relate to,

3) which means it has to be emotive, make people feel things. It has to make people understand life in a new way.
4) it has to be visually beautiful, obvi!
So the pieces at the Whitney Biennial did usually only one (or none) of these things, usually only #4. There was one piece which stood out: “The Casting” by Omer Fast. It was a short film/media installation which seamlessly strung together bits of two stories: one of a soldier in Iraq shooting at a car behind him, and the other of the same man on a bad date with a German woman in Munich. However, these stories were placed in a framing device of a man trying out for a film role. One side of the room showed two screens which showed the actors speaking to the camera, and the other side’s screens acted out the stories they were depicting. “The Casting” was shot with the actors posed in real time, so they seemed still but with blinking and little movements; this film technique gave the film an extra breathing humanity, while giving the viewer a chance to focus on the concept of the action instead of the mere action itself.

Mostly I think “The Casting” was powerful because it placed the protagonist simultaneously in a position of power (the soldier in Iraq, shooting at a car behind him) and in a position of powerlessness in the other (in the passenger seat of a speeding car driven by a mentally unstable woman). This emphasized the notion of the soldier being manipulated by his privilege, traumatized by his own violence as equally as the violence being inflicted on him as a passenger. Ultimately, the man was rejected from the audition, giving it this realistic edge. The plaque next to the installation claimed that the film aimed to comment on the way that memories become recorded and broadcasted– since the monologue’s traumatic experiences were mixed together in a rather stressful and pathological way.

So besides this FANTASTIC piece of amazing craft, there was really nothing else worth spending any time trying to wrap yr head around. I mean I didn’t see the Spike Lee film or the Coco Fusco one (which I’m sure is fabulous as she usually is).

I think this problem of the Biennial has more to do with patronage and the agenda of the art museum system than what art is out there. I KNOW there is worthwhile stuff out there, after seeing all the amazing political print collectives at NCOR and Left Forum (e.g. Just Seeds) and that’s even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, they had some political art there, mostly nostalgic stuff on Black Power in the late 160s, but where was the voice of the people today? It seemed like the political art was there to fit a quota (albeit a very small quota). Clearly they didn’t want that quota to be very high quality because I was not moved. I hate to think about the detriment these shows are doing on real on the ground artists.

Maybe the real definition of Postmodernism is that the art world within Late Capitalism is so corrupt that they want to “decentralize” discourse to placate people. They want us to accept nothing from the makers of culture that has to do with the culture of resistance. Right now my conference project for Dean Hubbard is on arts funding and the way that power/capital frames culture, so I’ll report back on that hypothesis come mid-May.

Jeez, Louise!! It is difficult to be a good student and organize the same time. Especially with an attention span and reading speed like mine. Academic mortality?

At least I am taking classes that intersect with my political work: “Workers, Law and Global Justice” and the “Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment” (along with Printmaking which I am making into my own sort of political exploration). Bless Sarah Lawrence for employing such critical-minded and down-ass professors in the social science department.  Unfortunately the former isn’t getting tenure. At least I got a chance to absorb some labor union & immigrant history, organizer theory, and work in a community partnership to synthesize all of this. (i.e. one day a week I work at an after school center in Yonkers called the Elm St. Neighborhood Center. It’s fucking amazing and makes me hate going back to SLC. Helping kids with homework 4 lyyyyfeeeeee.)

Also at Elm St. my friend Emily and I have been going to their Girls’ Group after snacktime, which is basically a girls-only space for the pre-teen girls to talk about what’s going on with them and ask for Shoquelle’s advice. She is a firecracker of a lady around my age who the kids all respect and love like an older sister. She is also sort of a disciplinarian of sorts and Mr. Ray’s right hand Grrrl. Mr. Ray is the Supervisor of the place but also a community leader in a big way since he gets kids off the street and into the Rec, a good role model for how to stay out of trouble. I ‘m totally impressed by how they can simultaneously demand so much respect but also operate the place like a big family. And when I say big I mean HUGE… the doors are basically open to the whole community and is always crowded and boisterous. It’s a challenge to get the kids to concentrate really hard on their homework when all the “young people” (as Mr. Ray calls them) are all over the place, finally out of school. (And we know what that’s like.)

Anyway, I hope to have one of the Girls’ Groups be set up like the teen ladies talk about what it means to grow up as a Grrrl and talk about things we’ve learned to prepare the younger grrrls. When I was talking about the idea with Shoquelle I was kvelling so much that I started to tear up! Finally I have a chance at my dream of talking to these kids about gender and identity (and race? and class? YESSS). I can’t wait to realize this into a  rad teachin career. Let’s see how that goes.

I would really love to write more about Elm St. today but it will have to wait until next time. (Political economy calls.) Maybe I’ll even address the race/class dynamics of SLC students volunteering at Elm St. Aren’t you in suspense?

BS

Haaay I’m Beth.

Introductions are strange. I haven’t blogged since livejournal during my senior year of high school… I used to be really into this enormous LJ community for off topic posts from a community about (you’ll never guess!)– fashion. It was basically 2000+ young women (a handful of men) talking about random things— relationship advice, apartment decor, family, old photos, party games, menstruation, boogers, childhood memories, kitchy housewares… really anything. I was totally glued to this thing. But I lost the need for it when I got to Sarah Lawrence, since I had a new community of similar people who didn’t previously know me.

I hope that through this network of blogs, radical (or potentially radical) students and youth can connect with each other for discourse and support. I also think this blog can be a useful tool for me to gain more confidence in writing about my politics while developing them.

It is so interesting that we are all studying different things, and have very different knowledge bases; we have a lot to learn from each other.
Love, Beth