Tough Stuff

[jdandchi]

NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT A GOD DAMN RELATIONSHIP AND LOSING WEIGHT AND BEING BEAUTIFUL FOR GODS SAKE GO OUTSIDE AND ROB A STORE AND FEEL ALIVE AS YOU RUN AWAY FROM SECURITY

[calamitys-child]

Me reading academic papers: incoherent nonsense. Bullshit. I could write better than this in my sleep

Me writing academic papers: this sentence is 206 words long and contains 19 commas & a semicolon, fuck you

[xthehatchick]

You either die with a bachelors degree or you stay in college long enough to watch yourself become the villain.

[difficultart-difficultwords]

Collection of Thoughts on Land that have crept up during the semester 1. Friends of mine recently asked me if I wanted to join them doing a work-share at the Black Creek Community Farm so that we could “queer up the place”. This was after reading Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations, by Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin and Jones. The Black Creek Community Farm was created as an urban garden space created by and for the people living in Jane & Finch, or the neighbourhoods surrounding York University.  I wonder if the desire to queer up the place comes from “lack of descriptive work about how Black people defined their own relationships to land” (55), where the narrative about this work being by and for a community of primarily BIPOC folks can so easily be forgotten or taken for granted. 2. This article also roused connections to a walk lead by Camille Turner entitled BlackGrange. Thinking through how “colonial geographies required Black displacement and placelessness” (65) that render black geographies “unintelligible”. Camille Turner’s walk as a part of Indelible Refusal marks the “unexpected” urban places of historical black life and community in downtown Toronto. The piece did the work to contextualize, historicize, emplace, and flesh out the stories of the black community in Toronto, those of us who walked were given the opportunity to challenge the narratives of home, place, photography, history, and futurity laid out in the colonial Canadian narrative of itself.  3.  I can't stop thinking about the fact that the messiness of land, nature, and vital living things are only allowed into museum spaces through technologies of capture (painting, photography). Projects exist that try to bring the museum out to nature, but the physical/structural limitations of the museum, as mentioned in my other post, also do this work to disconnect art, celebrated art, high society, etcetera away from the land. Away from the possibilities of smell or the “lesser senses” (as we briefly discussed in class). Would a disability futurism (or dis-topic  or a decolonial/indigenous futurity or a queer utopian or a black (flexible) afrofuturist lens offer a shattering of the museum that would open up the possibilities for more work with more materials and more humidity or more bugs?  4. The Sexomuseum in Amsterdam didn’t find its place in any of these blog posts and it is a space that I had found disruptive and dangerous about its treatment of non-normative sex acts, bodies, and gender identities. Which I hated as a queer sex educator person But I also know that one of the reasons I found in so annoying was because of its display of these pathologies on a middle-school presentation worthy cork board. Similarly, i was irritated that the AGO had so many work-in-progress construction spaces happening during its regular operational hours - which I attributed automatically to the museum shirking the value of visitors excited by Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrors. So maybe I have to challenge my ideas of an acceptable museum in and of itself too. 

[we-are-rogue]

If the door’s locked, try the wall

[by Geoff Manaugh]

a drywall knife

In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could  simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to  architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City

[tiqqun-deactivated20250830]

SMOOTH SPACE Y'ALL

[itsskunt]

make ur pwn doors u heard it here

[difficultart-difficultwords]

this tumbler post also really really shifted my ideas of space and use of space, which I cannot help but like again to Amanda Chachia’s piece, Talking Blind: Disability, Access, and the Discursive Turn.

“We need to rethink some of the key assumptions behind notions of access and accessibility. Instead of merely extending access, institutions need to question how such gestures can in fact perpetuate repressive norms” (Chachia)

In putting this tumblr post in conversation with Chahia’s work - we can dismantle not only the institutional norms perpetuated in the ways that museums are framed and access is used as a discourse within them - we can also consider how the societal norms of walls or windows or doors -things that physically ‘limit’ access or entry are also a part of an extremely unstable category.

By thinking out of doors, windows, walls, or other taken for granted structures that exist that are easily folded into discussions about ‘access’ as unstable in themselves, there is really no limit to how we can reconfigure the physical structure of the museum, the binary of what is indoor or outdoor, how we ask for permissions or are being asked to ask for permission, the demand for payment or the structure’s relationship to capital or funds, the limits of what is indoor and outdoor, what is art or not art, and what is or isn’t civil or public domain. When we thing out of doors, windows, and walls, the structure perhaps no longer holds the power to say who is and who isn’t allowed inside.

If we don’t need to use this “door” to get through to where we need or want to be, anymore, why do we keep listening to the people shouting in our direction, “THE DOOR IS OVER THERE, HELLO?” “DO YOU WANT INSIDE? EVERYONE USES THE DOOR TO GET INSIDE” “THE DOOR IS ACCESSIBLE, WE REALLY REALLY THOUGHT OF YOU THIS TIME”

?

[difficultart-difficultwords]

user guide to this blog

Any posts to be featured as one of the 6 required posts for the assignment will have a BOLDED title with a star in front of it.  for aesthetic purposes, all posts begin with an image. enjoy. 

[difficultart-difficultwords]

**Infinity Mirrors, Identity, and Self-serving Nods to Representation  I spoke briefly during my pop-up lecture about the media fire and general energy and hype about Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibition . It has the AGO shaken, shifting, and changing the rest of the space up, almost as though they can use the shining glitz and glamour of the long-awaited works as a distraction from other changes taking place within the institution. I feel this is odd, given that I would have thought using this highly-public travelling show would give the AGO the opportunity to reach folks who do not normally access the museum in the same way that say, AGO member do, but equally important to consider is the fact that my critical take on changes made at the AGO uphold it to a standard in which it can't crack, or can’t shift and change.  WHAT I AM MOST CURIOUS ABOUT, HOWEVER: a statement made by a friend and conversation within the communities I find myself living, loving, and working in:  Criticism of the Kusama exhibition based in claims that nowhere in the gallery space does the AGO choose to discuss and/or unpack Kusama’s relationship with mental illness, ‘madness’, or institutionalization.  I am finding the discourses in representation and claims to identity ever-increasingly difficult to come up against within some of the structured institutions that I find myself participating in (gallery/cultural spaces, academic institutions, government funding bodies).  I struggle in particular because conversations lead exclusively in terms of representation and visibility within institutions leave no room for people in positions of marginalization or subject positions within a white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal, colonial, and able-bodied system of order to exist and create or to gain legitimacy for their work without it speaking explicitly about how their identity relates to power.  In the case of Kusama’s exhibit, thinking through Amanda Chachia’s writing on disability and access, where she asks, “What would happen if the museum began to re-think of itself as an institution for sensorial culture rather than purely visual culture?” where access is more than a tack-on but rather a lens through which the museum and artists generate new ideas. I believe there is  a place within Infinity Mirrors to hold all of the complexities of illness, trauma, or loss that can be experienced or felt without the assistance of a placard that so explicitly divulges the artists’ entire life’s story.  And in any case, should it, or was it, Kusama’s narrative to control anyhow?  Right now, in every well-meaning and NECESSARY attempt to speak truth to power and elevate the voices of marginalized folks by offering funding, offering space (some, kinda), institutions demand our disclaimers or qualifiers before our words, our creativity, or our input can be understood as valuable to the institution - they ask us to bleed on paper before our voices are legitimized within the institutions (as it had come about in a conversation with artist Shannon Gerard for The Pedagogical Impulse Project in the Fall of 2017)  Even though we can understand that representation in art and media changes and saves lives, how can we treat it like it isn’t a check-mark but rather one way to grapple with, affirm, and relate to and identify with each other- a way to shift how we think in this world.  In keeping with Ng, Ware and Greenberg’s work, “those who are most affected by marginalization are in the best position to articulate how and what their liberation should look like”, and in understanding that, this can work by “amplifying individual voices rather than positioning an individual as a representative for an entire community (150)”. In such a framework it is vital for those with decision-making power to critically examine whether or not attempts to allow marginalized folks speak to their liberation demand a huge amount of labour in order for them to justify their visions of liberation.  This leads me only to more questions: how do we create measures that level playing fields without requiring folks to constantly use their identities as a justification for their positions or their successes? How do we do this work that take queues from folks who are leading movements and speaking from experiences of marginalization without asking continuously for the labour that comes with qualifying everything that we say through our positionally?  How do we create systems that instead of just saying “SSHRC welcomes applications involving Aboriginal research,” on funding guidelines, that these agencies can also promise that when these scholars arrive, that there is a place for indigenous ontological work and scholarship within academic institutions? How can we justify the fact that the AGO recently acquired a new Andy Warhol piece but have only a handful of lesbian/queer women artists in their entire collection, and a handful, if that, of trans and non-binary artists and their works.  We can’t use identity as a litmus test, a hoop for marginalized folks to have to jump through, or as a requirement for their work to be seen as valuable within arts, academic, or creative communities. When we do, we re-affirm that people living outside of the benefits of cis-white-colonizer-hetero-patriarchy must somehow always prove their/our deserving of a seat at the table where/when others never will.  (footnote: this leads me to thinking more about this wonderful piece on the fall of mediocre (white) men, by Denise Balkissoon) 

[difficultart-difficultwords]

“Lack of …” Erika Iserhoff, 2016 [photo credit here]  **ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION 

For this post, I want to provide an online annotated list of readings that I have read, liked and favourited over the years about cultural appropriation along with matters including call-out culture and critical self-reflection in activism, and put the links in conversation with a number of our class readings.  the art & politics of cultural appropriation  This piece pulls apart the discourses of whiteness and appropriation in cases of white artists making art about violence enacted on the bodies of black youth. Kenan Malik writes that “cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field, but is shaped by racism and inequality”... while also arguing that “preventing Dana Schutz ‘profiting’ from painting Emmett Till protect the Emmett Tills of today.” - calling for a mass mobilization of public/social campaigns to do this work.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to action  if you feel like you for whatever reason cannot get through the entire TRC report, read about what needs to be done, what is being done, and how indigenous sovereignty must be at the forefront of policy and law in this place that we live.  Guide to illustrating Black/ POC characters risking appropriation doesn’t mean writers and illustrators are off the hook in terms of speaking to, writing about, or creating complex, full, and meaningful POC characters in their work. This guide not only breaks down those ideas but also encourages illustration styles that work best in creating POC characters  Restorative Justice Posters These pieces offer reflection points about survival and solidarity- primarily by offering questions about what happens ‘after’ an instance or event has occurred to build stronger movements. 15 Indigenous Feminists to Know, Read, and Listen to  Listening to the communities that have been exploited through colonialism, helps to complicate understandings of the  networks of state, social, cultural violence that are enacted when indigenous artworks and culture are commodified for and by white settler people.  Fake Love: It's Time To Stop Celebrating Appropriation Masked As Representation Because of this work, I have been able to think through how faulty or disingenuous representation (representation for the same of publicity) (on TOP of the case of the blatant stealing the work of black creatives and artists) can actually be understood as an piece of the conversation about appropriation. 

From radical black feminism to postfeminist hashtags: Re-claiming intersectionality   This piece re-frames a conversation about ‘intersectionality’, a “displacement of the focus from the individual to institutions” and discusses the fault-lines as intersectionality has become a catch-all term and/or adoptable (appropriated) identity marker for white feminists. 

Decolonial Love: A How-To Guide

“I could say so much more about decolonial love. At its heart, decolonial love is actively creating a space for our histories as Indigenous/racialized survivors of colonization (we’re all survivors, babe) ..... Decolonial love steps out of western heterosexuality, homosexuality, and queerness to form unique bonds between two people, regardless of gender or sexuality.... Decolonial love is simply love as we are, broken and figuring it out together” - Gwen Benaway

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Belonging: Alas, A Lack.  (Queer Interventions in Museum Spaces)

This semester I was able to take a 12-day working-vacation after being accepted to present on my thesis research at the INSEP - Institutional Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics 2018 Sexual Revolutions and Sexual Politics conference in Ghent, Belgium. 
I spent most of my time on this first visit to Europe in Portugal, with a layover long enough in Amsterdam to visit the Stedelijk Museum.  From January to the end of this semester, I’ve walked the halls of the AGO, the Stedelijk Museum, the MAAT (museum of art, architecture and technology) Lisbon, the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon, and other smaller galleries in Toronto, constantly seeking out the political, the queer, the difficulties. After visiting the spaces that I did, I was left frustrated with the lack of overtly political and paradigm-smashing work at the AGO (outside of the now-closed Canadian contemporary exhibit, or the hall now dedicated to Annie Pootoogook), leading me to question how and whether queer and/or political artists, artworks, and ontologies have any (permanent) place within the walls of the AGO. 

 Nam June Paik’s ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY at the MAAT Lisbon opened with a Zach Blas’ work in Queer technologies. 

The above tableau offer’s Blas’ approaches to the ways in which technological interventions in and around the queer body serves to uproot understandings of biological essentialism, identity, scientific advancement, and modes of surveillance.

Most strikingly for me, Blas’ work in Facial Weaponization Suite - aimed at challenging digitization facial recognition softwares. This video in particular works with the Fag Face, a collective work and amalgamation of many queer/gay faces gleaned from biometric facial identification technologies.  the fag face is at once an amalgamation of many faces as it is a representation of using the technologies of securitization and social order to actually subvert them and render them useless (the Fag Face can no longer be recognized through the technology that was used to build it).  

Here, Blas works in “displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident, assemblages allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivity’s, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” (Puar p.128) If we read Blas’ Fag Face as a queer assemblage, the Fag Face  (which he might understand to operate very much like the SoftQueerBody:  Multitude, Swarm, Virus, or Pack, using the words in his also-featured book Gay Bombs). The Fag Face is a collective iteration of abjection which intervenes with the subjectivising power of the technological regulatory systems.

What is produced as abject in the process of bodily materialization- read as what does not belong- serves at once to be the foil in which normative bodies are produced and re-produced against. In writing the abject, Kristeva writes “disturbs identity, system, order” (ibid). As such, the abject serves as a foil while also inevitably fleshing out its own space - one of rupture, collective explosion, the sticky goo of thousands of faces rendered unintelligible to normative society. Renedered impossible to detect or surveil. Rendered a threat.

Gay Bombs were an actual US-made pheromone based theoretical chemical warfare bomb aaimed to make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other…. released in 2005 Berkeley’s Sunshine Project (The Guardian, BBC News). These are the foundation of Blas’ instructional radical queer interventions in tech.  In Queer Assemblages. Puar cautions that “ we must [not] engage in the practice of excavating the queer terrorist or queering the terrorist” understanding instead that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist. The terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance, deformity” (Puar p.127)

As such, a reading of the queer body as one able to destabilize that state and/or regulatory technologies is insufficient. The logics of surveillance and subjectification instead always employ queerness in the regulation of the state. For this reason, I choose instead to mobilize Puar’s understanding of surveillance as “as not only responsive and thus repressive, but also as pre-emptive and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance appear in neo-liberal models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of masculine and feminine gender conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship.” (interview). Facial Weaponization Suite (not the tableau featured at the MAAT, however) also features a conglomerate of biometric facial data gathered from women wearing burqas as a response to the ban on religious wear in France - a cutting into the system that understands burqas as a threat by creating a collective face that would, in turn, have the power to throw their system. Similarly, Blas’ creation of a conglomerate biometric face of black and racialized men signals the ways that racist security technologies often fail to recognize the faces of people of colour all together.  In reading Blas’ work through Puar’s understanding of surveillance technologies - productive surveillance is not undone by queerness alone, however, the mobilization in Blas’ work might be understood as weaponized embodied (or at least faced) assemblage of the abject forces and faces of queerness that then serve to not break, but work around technologies of surveillance.

Parikka points out that “from a societal point of view, you need a face, an address, and a net password to exist. . . . Subjectifcation works through assigning faces to otherwise anonymous preindividual flows.” ( Blas, p.51)  The Fag Face is at once a part of the mobilization of the  SoftQueerBody. A fake face can individualize the multiplicity of theSoftQueerBody to allow for unhindered movements throughout the grids of capital.”

The Fag Face can thus be understood as an abject disavowal to the techonogies of the state.

some of the questions that have come up for me as i put this piece in conversation with the AGO:  Are artistic interventions in technology useful? Do they actually serve to disrupt the realm of either art or technology? What is the role of cisgender/white artists in publicising and politicizing messages about terrorism, racism, gender, identity or marginalization outside of their own experiences? Where is the queer representation at the AGO? In the AGO’s online collection? Where is the black and trans and POC presence at the AGO? Are they just rejecting and usurping us all - rejecting technologies of surveillance? Why is Warhol still a celebrated acquisition, like really?    Why are queer/trans/black/ POC artists only ever featured in temporary exhibits? Why does the AGO’s one exhibition dedicated to tech STILL feature classical art? Why did I have to go to Amsterdam to see work by General Idea? Why did I search over 70 queer woman artists in the online collection to find one?

[difficultart-difficultwords]

**CAMERA TRAP: on looking I caught Mariana Silva’s Camera Trap on the last day it was exhibiting in the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon Modern Collection Project Space on February 26th, 2018. 

Camera trap is, according to the artists’ statement: “a reflection on the mass extinction of the animal species and the practice of taking images in natural habitats….[where] ecological failure appears in the exhibition as fiction and document, narrative and reflection, past and future, past and post-humanity.” 


Mariana Silva uses two circular screens (circular, like a camera lens) to introduce us to a speculative future in which people are no longer able to access the natural and animal world due to ecological devastation and extinction. In this world, people rely on digital image / virtual reality representations of nature, bugs, and animals - all but domestic animals - the two women featured in the video do have a house cat.



 This story stops and starts again, is interrupted by images as they appear on the screen adjacent to it. Bees. Bugs. Birds, sometimes spanning across the entire visual field. They exist in image or digital representation if not exclusively, than heavily protected from the public. 

Speculative fiction can be understood as a medium that allows for a reflection on social crises, but following Munos, among other scholars in queer theory, disability, and diaspora studies,  “Futurity can a problem” (2009, p.49) because futurity invokes ideal that seeks to very explicitly and implicitly eradicate signs of difference, particularly violent iterations of difference that are read as ‘suffering’ to those invested in white supremacist, heteronormative and embodied/neurotypical standards.
 We have to caution that the work of dystopia often re-inscribes structural violences “as white characters toil under the hardships that brown and black people experience acutely in real life” (Angelica Jade Bastien 2017). 


I believe that Silva is doing more here, as she works in a critique of colonizing technologies throughout the piece.  The story is told through conversations between these woman, who I will go ahead and assume are a lesbian couple given that they share a home and bed. 
One character is struggling with insomnia, anxiety and stress, which is resolved when her partner comes in to offer a virtual reality head set through which she can enjoy a virtual nature. Integral to this is a notation that she is a black woman, a figure who is markedly uncomfortable adjusting to the particularities of this unfolding “future”, perhaps because of the colonial and violent implications that have come with the fraught interaction with nature that come with a preservation-based approach to interacting with the natural world. In Rice et. al, they consider Garland-Thompson’s critique, where “the disjuncture of misfitting that exposes the privileges and fragilities of fitting also produces critical consciousness from which a crip politics and praxis of time might emerge”. What does this figure’s unease with this photograph-informed future leave with us with when we walk out of the room? These are technological interventions in nature and digital representation of a future in which human interaction with any world outside of domestic urban life is based only in images and representations: 



The nature of the photograph as a regulating technology is central to this piece, in which we have archival text and videography juxtaposed with the futuristic digital images employed in the story. As a technology of capture (Sontag, 1977), “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”, and Silva’s piece does a lot of work to unpack the ways in which technology, when used as a device of capture and containment - the only version of nature accessible to those existing in this world- creates particular forms of global, ecological, and human violences.

[difficultart-difficultwords]

No Saying Yes / Nao Dizer Sim

Rui Toscana (1970)

Portable radios displayed with pre-recorded audio saying ‘yes’.

[At the Gulbenkian museum of modern art, Lisbon, photo credit: me]

this piece only made me angry Of course some modern art dude would want to infer that a negation could be an invitation. If the doublespeak is intended critically or ironically it certainly doesn’t ring through

I am dealing with a whole slew of difficult conversations with different men while working on public workshops in sexuality and consent and.

Witnessing this, I was just done.

[difficultart-difficultwords]

**CRISIS AND CHANGE: financial crisis and activist re-writings [12 Short Songs (2009) by Jorge Macchi. Photo credit: me]  At the MAAT Lisbon, I had the chance to witness a large video survey featuring different artists’ takes on the 2008 financial crisis to now, called Tension & Conflict. 

Pedro Gadanho, the exhibition curator, notes that “video becomes much more challenging, because people are not used to the fact that, rather than just glimpsing at a work, they have to be there for five, six, seven, 10 minutes” in an interview with Sarah Rose Sharp about the exhibition (2018). The range of difficult subject matter, heavy content, war, and violence were engrossing, at times disturbing, and in other instances, inspiring change - curated in ways that offer “the terrible gift … the task of inheriting the troubling consequences of ‘the otherness of knowledge’(Simon, 2006)(Simon, p.435)”.

Within the exhibition, Mario Pfiefer’s #Blacktivist, 2015, [photo credit: me] is a dual-screened video installation, one featuring video interview and cell phone footage of black arms activists engaged in legal battles for releasing private files about firearm production to the public, displayed beside a music video for Flatbush ZOMBIES’s song, ‘blacktivist’.   The juxtaposition between the two highlights the ways in which hip hop and music creation serves as a tool for sharing and highlighting issues of political, structural, or state violence. 
The “The “otherness of knowledge” featured in this work, unlike the historical pieces set out and examined in Simon’s work, offers a reminder that the aforementioned knowledge missing from public discourse and dialogues about race and systemic historical violence is not only affective, but simultaneously a matter of civil / public rights to information exposed by activists working to disrupt national security narratives embedded with systemic racialized violence. The piece can be understood as a creation of culture, an example of flexible black creativity, a display of resistance in the form of a PSA, and a political movement & moment all at once.

(Flex, Conjure, Crack: Flexibility and the Uncertainty of Blackness, Treva C. Ellison, C magazine, 2017) Melanie Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System (2008) haunted me as I went through a 3-day improv-based professional development course at Second City training centre a few weeks after I saw the video installation  (a course priced at $2000! I was invited for free because they needed an even number). The 6-part series satire featured a number of wall-street executives getting together and using improv and scenario-based approaches to solving the mess of the crisis. As I sat through this training where we were offered office-management scenarios of our own, Gilligan’s work served as a reminder that under neoliberal capitalism, it is only the high-paid executives that can shell out $2000 for 3 days that will ever win (and have access to things like arts learning to help them make more money). What I do with this renewed sense of injustice at our urban social-enterprise focused arts-based complacency is yet to be established.

[difficultart-difficultwords]

Visited the Winter Stations at Kew Beach  Was rather disappointed in the giant uncritical pussy hut installation, absolutely loved Kien Pham's Obstacle.  Rotating suspended boards to get lost in, finding my pal again at the top. I also loved this small fairy homestead I found in the park nearby

[difficultart-difficultwords]

user guide to this blog

Any posts to be featured as one of the 6 required posts for the assignment will have a BOLDED title with a star in front of it.  for aesthetic purposes, all posts begin with an image. enjoy. 

[kimmo-lust]

just some random queer pose.

[difficultart-difficultwords]

This piece by kimm-lust is here to be placed in conversation with the Renee Magritte piece posted before it because I think they share a similar aesthetic.  what is a ‘queer pose’? Is it a pose laying down? Is it that this figure is relaxed? with time to think about cats (queer time always moves slower. It has to. It always exists in tension with productivity and success)  Does this picture read as a rejection of western beauty standards (white, thin, european features) or further reify it with certain caveats? 

[academicssay]

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I include this viral tweet because  1) Dylan Marron is incredible 2) I think that choosing to take up less space is a constant and conscious exercise in solidarity 3) Especially the case at OISE, audience members and students who show up to a speaker series or event are often there to learn about very particular systems of structural violence /patriarchy/ class stratification/ white supremacy/ colonialism from the people who have studied these topics at length, who have studied the work of those who lead resistance movements and/or are often the leaders of these resistance movements, coming from the communities of people who are out on the streets or in parliament or in academia fighting for the lives of those subject to violence under those systems 4) so solidarity practices -  as something I am working through-  to bring it back to this again, is to think extra critically before thinking about adding to the conversations that might be coming from different knowledge bases, subject positions, and ontologies than the ones that I am accustomed to.  5) it also means, however, that I have to do better at shutting conversations that begin with entitlement down as they happen... with love and care and calling in... but most importantly, shutting it down and sticking up. Because i can't use ‘trying to take up less space’ as an excuse, either.

[artist-magritte-deactivated2020]

Pebble, 1948, Rene Magritte

[difficultart-difficultwords]

See later post, placing this piece in a brief conversation with the work of queer artist @kimmo-lust 

[eddieolson]

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Photo source: unknown welcome to this blog! I have tried to include thoughts that have been rousing in my head about art, access, identity and the like alongside the required posts for our class and I hope you enjoy!