research

[readerwa1]

cloth will safeguard you to a very limited extent and while i think there’s an absolute ritualistic and spiritual power to the act of dressing oneself, i think we have to understand that there’s little energy this can transmit outside of a given experience inside a body. is there a strength that you feel when you feel beautiful? undeniably. but you have to take that strength somewhere into action for any type of radicalism to actually manifest

dressing a body is not an act of freedom, dressing a body is not a form of armor, and dressing a body has very little to do with radical practice and i think it’s one of the most ridiculous myths perpetuated by fashion enthusiasts that absolutely needs to be taken down!! individualism doesn’t mean anything and there’s very little power to draw from identity politics imo. it’s distressing to see thoughts like this continuing to circulate and be regurgitated

miu miu and marc on a beautiful body aren’t gonna stop any body counts from rolling up. capitalism makes us thoroughly enjoy the “build it yourself” individual universe and saying your cute outfit is gonna save us is like saying you picked the perfect toppings on your chipotle bowl so now donald trump is gonna be sent to prison!

[deadclownscantclown]

Keynote: Failures of Care, with Bergis Jules, University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside; Simone Browne, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin; Doreen St. Felix, writer at MTV News; and artist, educator, and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed.

[gonegonegonebabygone]

‘The system of systems’ is a military term that embraces the doctrine of ‘total interoperability’ and ‘full spectrum dominance’, whereby warfare becomes ‘a permanent boundless exercise … against a wide range of non-state adversaries’. Not the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War, but the for ever and everywhere war – war itself as a kind of super-world. When I look at images of the militarised European border at, say, Melilla or Ceuta – places I hope never to find myself in – I see the technologies of a medieval siege repurposed for the Technicum. This medieval modernism is born of a fatal resolve to keep the outsider out, to separate the verified from the unverified. But because it requires the systematic enactment of suspicion, it’s also a demonstration of the weakness of the strong.

Frances Stonor Saunders, “Where on Earth are You?” (via etimaetteumoh)

[formschon]

…Here we perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous. It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect. Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomed to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with the individual wearing it. We do not separate them in imagination. The idea no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the covering with the living suppleness of the object covered: consequently, the comic here remains in a latent condition. It will only succeed in emerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between the covering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails to cement this union: a case in point is our head and top hat. Suppose, however, some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion of former times: our attention is immediately drawn to the clothes themselves, we absolutely distinguish them from the individual, we say that the latter IS DISGUISING HIMSELF,—as though every article of clothing were not a disguise!—and the laughable aspect of fashion comes out of the shadow into the light.

Henri Bergson, “On Laughter” (1900)

also titled Philosophers Are Very Ambivalent Towards Fashion, Vol. 15

(via formschon)

[formschon]

Over 200 free art books released online by the Guggenheim

Delve deep into art history with Holzer, Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rothko and many more

[gonegonegonebabygone]

“Enough art books to rival any expensive school have been archived online by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. And best of all, it’s all available to download for free.”

[formschon]

The Shape of Time, George Kubler (1965).

[desdeotromar-deactivated2021110]

…the end of the chattel technologies of slavery is often transposed as the end of slavery itself; which, in turn, permits the facile drawing of political analogies between Blacks and workers, and between Blacks and postcolonial subjects. Hartman goes on to highlight the theoretical pitfalls which result from this ruse of analogy.

Legal liberalism as well as critical race theory, has examined issues of race, racism, and equality by focusing on the exclusion and marginalization of those subjects and bodies marked as different and/or inferior. The disadvantage of this approach is that the proposed remedies and correctives to the problem—inclusion, protection, and greater access to opportunity—do not ultimately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth claims or interrogate the  exclusion  constitutive  of  the  norm  but  instead  seek  to  gain  equality, liberation, and redress within its confi nes. (Hartman 234)

This explains why the Slave’s political communiqué raises a specter of something far more portentous than the call to arms of a revolutionary Marxist or postcolonial political communiqué. In this essay, I argue that Marxist and postcolonial armed struggle, though radically destabilizing of the status quo, are also endeavors which, through their narrative capacity to assimilate “universal” frameworks of liberation and redress, unwittingly work to reconstitute the paradigms they seek to destroy. They  interrogate  and  attack  the  violence  which  constitutes  bourgeois  modes  of authorization in the hopes of instantiating analytic modes of authorization. A Black Liberation Army political communiqué becomes symptomatic of an undertaking that threatens authorization itself.

Frank B. Wilderson, III “The Black Liberation Army & The Paradox of Political Engagement” (pdf)

[bittter0cean]

Sarah Nicole Prickett

[gonegonegonebabygone]

Also SNP: “Objects are fateful…we have not evolved past the urge to preserve things of beauty.”

[saint-of-the-pit]

A witch is, actually, a successful (in the sense of surviving) deviant. You have a cultural, ideological, social, what-not pattern which is, for that society in question, normal (and, importantly, this is understood as a synonym for natural). Most people survive because they conform to these patterns, because they behave normally. […] But then suddenly you get a deviant which survives, and since it does not draw its support from the normal pattern, […] that deviant is understood as drawing its support from “unknown,” “supernatural” sources. […] If we cannot survive without our order, how can she [the witch] survive in solitude? Hers must be indeed a very powerful order to exist so independently, without all the inter cooperation and individual compromise which we have to go through to survive. And if it is so powerful, then it could destroy us. We must try to destroy it first.

Maya Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren”, c.October 1947, vol. 14: pages 21–45 (via la-femme-terrible)

[hazelcills]

Exhibiting art often stimulates an entire ecology of knowledge production. The museum produces scholarly publications with related essays and documentation. Art critics write about the art and the artists in newspapers and magazines. Scholars are triggered to extend their research into new directions. Art history professors integrate the art into their courses. The implications of shuttering this art for decades, then, are far reaching. MoMA’s poignant protest has reframed the boundaries of modern art and of American art. There is much work to be done.

“MoMA’s Travel Ban Protest Exposes a Legacy of Closeted Modernism” by Shiva Balaghi

This is such an interesting piece on MoMA swapping out their display collection for work by artists from the seven banned countries recently and who gets to be displayed in museums. 

It’s not surprising that most museums do not have the room to display their massive collections, which often sit in storage. I found out not too long ago that the Guggenheim nabbed Faith Ringgold’s “Tar Beach” quilt in the ‘80s and has never displayed it. Museums make art acquisitions for many reasons (donations, gifts) but usually they are monetary investments for the museum. It’s also very, very controversial and difficult to deaccession a piece of art, no matter if it’s gone out of fashion, because you’re essentially ruining the artwork’s “career” if it were to leave an institution..

So you have to pick and choose. But who gets left out? Women, of course. Artists of color. People who aren’t Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons. “Museums have to not only defend the canon but also delve into and question it,” wrote Jerry Saltz in a feature on why MoMA wasn’t displaying the work of its women artists. “They are guardians of history, but they’re also makers of meaning and metaphors. If a museum doesn’t continually nourish itself, it will die, and part of MoMA is dying.” He also, like many critics, took issue with the museum’s construction plans in 2014 (which have now been shaved down significantly, ditching the huge glassy performance spaces) because they didn’t have enough wall spaces for actually hanging paintings!

In recent years I’ve come to view curating art museums the way I view writing online. Museums, like websites, need traffic to survive. So exhibitions go to the famous names and work with wide-reaching appeal, aka white men. Tom Rachman wrote in The New Yorker last year:

“The success of an expansion, or of any single exhibition, is often judged by visitor numbers, but there are other markers of success: the degree to which an exhibition illuminates and moves and changes its viewers, or the power a collection has to inspire local artists. Such outcomes provide no data. Therefore, attendance figures weigh on museum directors; their jobs may be at stake.”

I took a class once where a curator from the Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas explained to us why they installed an IMAX theater which, yes, plays blockbusters that have nothing to do with the museum’s historical curation. It makes them massive amounts of money and it’s what they need to survive. Exhibitions based around pop musicians, like Bjork or David Bowie, do immensely well, as do fashion collections for buzzy designers at the Met. Multimedia, interactive installations with performance and selfie-ready surfaces aren’t bad either. 

But the MoMA is not the Bullock Museum and we can’t give it passes into click bait art territory. I think it can afford to revamp and redefine its permanent collections frequently. And any time we get a glimpse at what we’re missing it’s pretty damning. “If the decision to show the works in 2017 as a protest against the travel ban was ultimately a political one, so too was the choice to keep the work off MoMA’s walls for half a century,” Balaghi writes. It might not look like it to the average person who doesn’t keep up with art, but the MoMA is like the Buzzfeed of art museums. Or maybe the Thought Catalog. IDK, think of the most viral, brain-numbing content feed. Which is a shame because, like Balaghi writes, the exhibition of art reinforces its place in the canon and has immense power on how it will be perceived in classrooms and textbooks. 

(via hazelcills)

[ukpuru]

Ogba were anklets worn by Igbo women at different times before the mid-20th century. The brass anklets were mostly non-existent in the southern / southeastern Igbo areas by the 20th century, in the north-central Igbo area where the anklets last died off in popular use in the early 20th century, the brass anklets were used as a fashion statement by married women and were made and fitted by Oka (Awka) blacksmiths and usually never removed, they were polished daily and special precautions were taken by the blacksmiths in order to minimise the chaffing of the anklets on the wearers skin by stuffing the openings with cloth.

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

[T]he language of fascism is written in the language of love. Love is made into the primary quality of attachment, what motivates individuals into fascism: ‘we hate foreigners because we love our country.’ […] Love has an enormous political utility: transforming fascist subjects not only into heroic subjects, but also into potential or actual victims of crime as well as those who ‘alone’ are willing to fight crime. Fascist subjects become freedom fighters, willing to stand against the ‘swamp’ or ‘tide’ of the incoming others, who themselves are narrated as hateful: as being not only worthy of our hate, but as full of hate for what we are and have.

Sara Ahmed, “The Bond of Belief” (via coocoolah)

[formschon]

I just need to get your opinion on how will the black "community", ever really tackle colorism? Like wow this is so rampant and I feel like it'll never go away until there is no darker skinned people any more. These documentaries and "discussions", seem to have little to no effective change what so ever. I'm just convinced this will probably be here for years and years.

Colorism is worsened and maybe even caused by the broader supremacy of white skin and white people. At its root, I don’t see black people as fundamentally responsible for its existence. Our complicity is rooted in oppression, I believe. Colorism is interesting because it’s both libidinal, erotic and aesthetic (i.e., “I feel that this is beautiful) and structural. For example, the fact that Beyoncé, Rihanna and Nicki are the most visible black woman musicians is partially a result of the fact that institutions run by white people funnel a wealth (but not really a wealth, comparatively…) of resources and praise their way.

It’s about a feeling that lighter skinned black people are more beautiful, but also an inability to see anything else due to the way dominant media shows us their most economically profitable propositions. 

So, to your question, I don’t think there is one way to end colorism. I see documentaries, representation and discussions in this regard as important, because they help to tackle the libidinal/erotic/aesthetic aspects of the issue. I think it does help to actively propose dark-skinned people of color and black people as not only beautiful but important to engage with, since beauty and value/importance are not inherently the same. When black people and people of color in general take over the means of representation/imagery, this helps to tackle to structural side of the issue. I think that is addressed by things like black beauty brands, black magazines, black production companies, etc. And yet that’s not perfect, since, in this problem, whiteness is already prized within a capitalist visual economy, so simply starting a business doesn’t necessarily free anyone from colorism. I don’t know what a more revolutionary, liberatory or equal economy of visual representation would look like to be honest. 

[guildhall]

To Watch Over Me

The History of Lovers’ Eyes

From the Oxford American:

It was fashionable at one time (late 1700s/early 1800s) to give your secret lover an eye portrait so that he (or she) could carry you around (on a pin or a ring) without fear of detection. What is remarkable about the droll collection of miniature “lovers’ eyes” on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art is how very little an eye, the so-called window to the soul, reveals. Perhaps this sort of gift was not so much romantic as cautionary: I am watching you, my darling.

More on the interesting history of eye miniatures and an interview with the foremost collectors of the form, read the terrific article at Salon.com.

[spatialfeminism]

PDF of excerpt from Architecture After Revolution 

[gonegonegonebabygone]

Order decomposes around us. One does envy the certainty, the personal salvation that is preached in free churches and free markets, that is promised by old religions and new ones, our newest religion being organized around and by identity, but these are bad alternatives to doubt.

Sarah Nicole Prickett (via etimaetteumoh)

[formschon]

your thought's on black people's relationship with mainstream beauty? has it been traumatic?

It’s been a lot of things. I wouldn’t only call it traumatic. I also would push back on the use of “mainstream,” since black people, non-black people and white people all inhabit the mainstream of beauty. If we’re talking about white/European standards of beauty and the relationships that black people negotiate those standards, then we have a starting point, imo.

I’d say that European ideals of beauty are often parasitic on black bodies and non-white bodies in general. There is no one biological way of looking black, but it is also true that a large chunk of black people tend to have full lips and high cheekbones. At the same time that the black body is reviled, these common characteristics form–like a puzzle–the ideals that make a white person beautiful or appealing. Many current makeup/beauty trends appear odd, with this in mind. Contouring, lip plumping, etc. Even tanning, to a certain extent, fails to escape race as a structuring factor. 

The exclusion and disgust towards black bodies–embedded within mainstream beauty–is obviously traumatic. But that doesn’t mean that black people don’t re-tool and inhabit the codes of that mainstream beauty all the time.