Diaspora Daze

"Diaspora" : from the Greek dia-, apart or through, + speirein, to scatter. LA/FR/MX/CH

[cmonstah]

This is not a Frank Stella. It's a block print made by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape a couple of years before Stella started work on his Black Paintings.

"Tecelar (Weaving)," 1956 is on view in a terrific presentation of Pape's '50s-era prints at the Art Institute of Chicago.

I get into the ecology of ideas and what it means to be first in this week's newsletter.

"Lygia Pape: Tecelares" is on view through June 5, 2023. Find all the deets on the Art Institute's website.

[diasporadaze]

twirling, floating, still

leaf caught in a spiderweb

leaf caught in my mind

[diasporadaze]

Counterplans

“I’ve never cooked...I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife.” —Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky

The modern kitchen is a relatively recent development; having been dreamed up by the Viennese architect Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky in 1926* it was meant to upgrade and provide ease of use for worn-out factory workers in their homes. The laboratory-style fittings, with built-to-measure appliances, cupboards and countertops were considered revolutionary due to their reduced size, they allowed for a smaller kitchen overall, and reduced the user’s step-count, and thus, fatigue.

The resounding success of the Frankfurt kitchen was quickly made evident as it became the predominant kitchen style in social housing developments all over Germany and soon, worldwide. Promises of freedom for the housewife through the “rationalization of housework” showed the influence of Taylorism and the notion that household labor was a true profession.  

Some 50 years later, the intended emancipatory features of the Frankfurt kitchen began to fissure with age, their cracks showing how from the factory floor to the office, not enough had changed for women who were expected to keep up with full time employment and the upkeep of a household. In the light of feminist thinkers like Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and many others, notions like the division of labor and Wages for Housework, it became evident that while design may have had the best of intentions, it had not managed to free women from bearing the majority of the weight of unpaid labor. As Silvia Federici points out in her essay “Counterplanning From the Kitchen” (Cox and Federici 1975), “Getting a second job has never released us from the first. Two jobs have only meant for women even less time and energy to struggle against both.”

But what of the division of labor if only one single person is meant to fit into a cramped, reduced-scale space dedicated to workflows and meticulous organization? The Frankfurt kitchen over the years has given way to a new trend—the open plan kitchen.

The stool stands in front of a window. It is an emblem of a solitary soul making plans; shopping lists, lunch menus, dinner plans. The stuff of life. In Spanish, the expression for a housewife is ama de casa, the soul of the home. While facing the window, this soul turns her back to the housework and continues making counterplans.      

*the year Schutte-Lihotzky began working in Frankfurt with architect Ernst May

[anatolknotek]

»the solution« by anatol knotek

homepage | tumblr | instagram | twitter

[diasporadaze]

Note to self, why I don’t write in languages other than English...in my case the word ‘English’ would be replaced by French and English is my Italian if that makes sense =S

And when it comes to suffocating standards French is a prime example...which of course never stopped Beckett, or Kristof, or...

[diasporadaze]

Delphine Coindet: An architecture of transparency Here are an accumulation of breathy beings, whispery worlds unto themselves stacked into pyramids of near-precarity. They are dangerous and sublime; a hopefulness and a trustfulness are also implicitly present, evoking the artist as Warholian producer. Like looking into a mirror, Delphine Coindet’s prisms reflect our heterogeneity and fragility back at us. We are there, somewhere lost amongst the hierarchy, stacked above or below or behind or out front. Amongst others of our ilk, we are each standing guard, different, yet the same.

[nobrashfestivity]

Helena Almeida, Pintura Habitada, 1977

© The Artist; Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

[diasporadaze]

"ON A TROUVE !!!" ...shouted out with upraised arms, these three celebratory words resonated across the water's surface, skipping up the walls of the Chateau like a chucked stone gone offroading. Meaning they had un-shrouded the mystery of the fountain/art installation we'd just ridden hours to encounter. The view from my upper-floor window was the ideal vantage point to witness the spectacle of delight and discovery radiating from across the emerald carpet separating our room from the installation. They played for hours at the edge of the lozenge-shaped pool, setting off the spray of water and letting it peter out, over and over again, with gusto.

Later I thought about how fountains have always been about man's triumph over nature (and more specifically over an element most commonly associated with the feminine) and how this may be why I've always found them to be a bit vulgar, with their cocktail of chemicals sending wafts of eau de swimming pool my way...

Here, I was able to set aside my prejudices and just bask in the tremendous energies of two kiddos encountering art on their own terms.

[diasporadaze]

Math comes back to haunt me through my hobbies. Math, my 'best' subject in school, my persecutor, my weak point. The finger points to me, I am to go and represent my class at a math decathlon and I'm trembling all over with a sick feeling in my stomach. Me? I have yet to learn all of my times tables by memory...

Today I tried to run the program, was supposed to cast on 12 and ended up with 13, somehow? Error. Error. Error. Error. Like that infinity error message Windows meme.

Math struggles to this day.

It turned out that my actual, true best subject was geometry. Although I struggled at first, later on that year the proofs, squares, triangles, etc. and very precise reasoning for every mark made with my mechanical pencil on graph paper made a very clear sense to me. I could feel Pythagoras looking approvingly over my shoulder that year, with the teacher, a seemingly ancient turtle-like sage reminding my immediate neighbor to let me concentrate. I ended up losing six years of my life to that learning disruptor and so alas, Mr. Bachman, you were right, wherever you are.

A stately woman dressed in head-to-toe pistachio walks into the bar. She is here to see me. I show her the work-in-progress, also pistachio. "It's yours," I say to her, it is fated. She is trying to start a family with her partner, but it's not going according to plan.

Tonight we toast. To normality, or a semblance of it, I suppose. Everyone's masks are off, the kora twangs sensationally in the background, a glass breaks. Someone is piss drunk and falls off the bar stool with a loud "thwak," while her friends snicker as she tries to recover her senses.

Yes, life is like that sometimes. You fall, you get up. You do it all over again.

[kittiesgalore]

[all--whirlwind--goo]

Lizzy Mercier-Descloux

[diasporadaze]

Can distance be measured in tears, I wonder? Or in dreams of home, or in moments spent second-guessing what I am trying to say in my third language, French?

[diasporadaze]

In the period just prior to moving to Paris, I played in a college-era musical project called Houseplants. We convened in a cramped garage somewhere in the bowels of 2nd-gen aspirational Southern California suburbia, recording indulgent (read heavily derivative) yet spare, tranced-out grooves on an 8-track set to deliberately vapid and vastly insecure vocals courtesy of moi. We were channeling something close to sleepwalking, slightly bubbly; an aural glass of kombucha...just bass, guitar, drums and a few cheap vintage synthesizers.

As I contemplate uprooting my family and life for a move back to Paris more than a decade later, this plant has been summoned into my life, germinating an unexpected promise of rootless gravity. Something surprising this morning: a little blue bud unfurling from a pocket within its magnificent shield (tu me fais une fleur?)—a sudden, secret sensation, a fragile gift sprung from minute attentions brought to it by my young son. It appears just as he’s gone away to the snowy mountains and left me to contemplate the effect of all of this from my sunny kitchen window.

[diasporadaze]

[contemporaryartdaily]

Deana Lawson at The Underground Museum

[diasporadaze]

Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Heavy the Sea, 2016 The well-placed Filles du Calvaire booth beckoned to me, with it’s familiar faces (Laura Henno’s acclaimed Outremonde series (Underworld), shown in Arles this summer), and equally familiar names (I’d recently been in touch about a studio visit for another photographer). Contrary to Henno’s dusty paean to off-the-grid, marginal America, UK-based German artist Teichmann’s multilayered installations take the viewer on a voyeuristic trip inside oneself. Something about the hand-painted canvas background, trailing onto the glacial Grand Palais floor, intimated that this was an artist that takes risks, one of which we should take notice...

On closer inspection, it would appear she is a writer as well—

“Esther Teichmann’s photographs, films and writings, picture mothers like caves, sisters like seashells, lovers like moons, tears like waterfalls. Entering the octopus darkness of Teichmann’s caverns we find ingestion and emission, mother and daughter, sister and sister, black and white, lover and lover, surrealism’s erotic jolt: the irritant that makes the pearl. Seashells with apertures like cameras. The womb as oceanic. Lovers as moons. Holding as withholding. Day as night.”

[diasporadaze]

Hard at work for #HardTruths (NYT)

[diasporadaze]

Collector in repose @Arsenal Montreal