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An Artist’s Struggle for Integrity

I personally struggle for integrity in that I want self sacrifice, but I first want to make sure that my sacrifice will work for what I want it to work for. Baldwin described the purpose of an artist being a lot like sand. In some indirect way it does serve a purpose, and in this way it is impersonal. You have to leave yourself when you give, focus on a goal, and give all of yourself to it. Don’t cheat, don’t lie. Like Teching Hsieh really lived to give, we must accept our role in society as exploited for our creativity, empowered to give what others can’t. Ready to sacrifice everything, feeling for the world.

Integrity to me surmounts in making sure that your art doesn’t strive to be great, but strives to be authentic. It’s important that you’re making exactly like you should be making, because, at the end of the day, there’s only one you and only you can tall your story, and that’s the only value you have. When you make space for yourself, you make your space for others.

https://youtu.be/w-IyamaAbxM

Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh, New York Apartment

UTOPIAN IMAGINATION = RADICAL LOVE

Zak Ové, Nubian Return, 2017. Courtesy of Zak Ové Studio and Vigo Gallery, London. Image courtesy Ford Foundation.

#jaishriabichandani afrofuturism

Teching Hsieh “Time Clock Piece”

At of all the artists that we’ve visited this semester, I think this one shattered my view of art the most. I really admired the way he separated himself from the label of artist, letting his practice really become more about life, fully incorporated into everything from his pain to his persistence through his pieces.

Chitra Ganesh

Architects of the Future - Away from the Watcher, 2014

Woodblock and Screenprint

WEEK 11

#feministart

Muxe’s- Precolonial gender structures

October 19, 2020

#coloniamism #non-binary #indigena

Photography: Ka-man Tse and Sasha Phyars-Burgess

"Studying art often feels like a mystery." "Art serves no purpose", but humans must create. "People had to be somewhere doing something, so I went to look for it." "I am never more inside of the world than through photography."

These are some quotes that stuck in my mind after listening to Sasha Phyars-Burgess speak about her work. I fell in love with the way she looked for people like her "just to make sure they were living". The way she portrayed joy was vastly beautiful to me, and I am very inspired by it. The way she would live in the moment, and how she described her photography as being her excuse to be and her way of living in that moment. It's a deeply honest approach to art that is affective in the way she personally sees the world.

The way she sought out with an instinct where people were “doing things,” and finding these unchoreographed moments of joy and authenticity in-situ. Her constant visual search also worked to humanize the black experience, which is often exploded by the media through coverage of tragedy and targeted exploitation of black creativity.

Ka-man Tse’s work also focused on humanizing her subjects through photography by displaying the quotidian. Queer love is rarely represented in a mundane way, always attached to the tragedy and extravagance and sexuality that accompanies our media representation. In portraying how marginalized communities take up space, both Sasha and Ka-man often stray away from the sensationalized moments, giving their work that humanizing quality. Neither of them would choreograph the people they photographed, wanting to capture honest moments and just making sure to be present.

November 9. 2020

#blackjoy sasha phyars-burgess

My Favorite Basquiat Poem

#jean michel basquiat

Native Land

The map that was posted of native land led me to do some interesting research into my ancestry. The Eperara, Eperara Siapidara, and Inkal Awa are indigenous to the area my abuela grew up in: Babacoas, Narino, Colombia.

My Grandpa is from South Texas, and he gave me the name of a town called “Ciudad Mier,” a town in Mexico where our ancestors are from. The Coahuiltecan are indigenous to this area. They are not federally recognized and are currently fighting for the right to their burial grounds on the Alamo.

While I don’t claim to be Native American, it’s still interesting to see where my ancestry may lie.

On further exploration, I realized that the town where I live exists on occupied Taino, Seminole, and Tequesta land. There is a neighborhood in my area that uses the Tequesta’s name...

October 19, 2020

Astronauts

I remember being in Florida after the Pulse shooting. I had just gotten my boyfriend at the time to feel comfortable holding hands in public, only for him to begin fearing again. I recently came out publicly at that time and I was learning a lot about my identity. I struggled with how people discussed and received the news. It seemed like the news portrayed us to be insubstantial, despite the death toll, and there was a very odd tendency to emphasize the heterosexual victims that happened to be there that night.

Being socialized in an environment that emphasizes the heterosexual narrative, I felt a sense of weightlessness in my queer narrative at that time. There was an argument going on that should’ve been without saying, that we were people too, which had to be asserted against our senseless massacre. It made me realize that society does not care about us.

I see a similar pain in David Antonio Cruz’s paintings addressing the erasure of black queer life, but also something very beautiful shining juxtaposed to this melancholic note. The way Cruz portrays our nascent role in society, as mediators for individuality and divergence, as astronauts venturing out into the unknown. His work reminds me of how much imagining and pioneering I have to do as a queer person, so that I can transcend the role I was casted for and write my own narrative. I learn so much every time I see a queer person is casted in a powerful role that highlights our complexity and mystique like this.

October 19, 2020

Trade (Gifts for Trading Land With White People) Jaune Quick–to–See Smith

October 19, 2020

#landback

James Baldwin and Hope

“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” James Baldwin’s fight for artistic integrity truly inspires me. I think so much of what informs his work comes from integrity and from being a true individual in a world that out-casted him. The way he described the world of commerce and industry as “struggling with him” instead of the other way around highlights a duality that I think is at the core of our capitalist system. Why did the system struggle with him? Because he was different. He was a minority in more than one way. He was a creative because he was forced to see outside the way things are and make space for a world that could accommodate his divergent nature. In a similar way, I think that is one of the reasons why I, as a creative, haven’t given that up: because I can’t; because this world is too unlike me. In his account, he describes one of the most difficult and rewarding things being the act of making a truce with his reality as a black man. I’ve found it incredibly hard to make this same truce with myself as a queer person. There is too much for me too imagine and only heteronormativity for me to go off of. Part of me still hates myself for not being born in the norm, but I’ve come a long way in finding value in that and I am just beginning to imagine what self-actualization can look like for me. I did some more research on his popularity at the time, his sexuality, and his life. I love what Dr. Cornell West said about him in discussing his reception as a contemporary artist at the time, that it’s not so much about “having hope”, what I understood to be more of an individual act, but “being a hope”, and that’s what he was. You don’t have to have hope to be a hope.

October 12, 2020

#Baldwin integrity

I Identify as the Higgs Boson Particle

While watching “Transgenderism explained through Quantum Physics,” I think a lot about how quantum particles act differently when they are observed. I find my own gender changing depending on the social setting I find myself in. I may feel more male or more female depending on if I’m around men or women, although I never feel fully male. If the laws of the natural world are inconsistent and contradictory, I find science to be much more validating to my gender than my own family!

I think there is a lot of beauty to be found in ambiguity and fluidity and it’s taken me some time to transcend that rigid binary we all face

October 12, 2020

#nonbinary genderisascam

Paris Is Burning: Executive Realness

My favorite part about Paris is Burning is the identity play that came naturally out of the intersectionality of many forms of oppression. Creating a space where people could be whatever they wanted to be for a night in a room where people would feed into that identity was a way of imagining beyond the oppressive world they inhabited. Other times, it was a used as a means of refining the act of passing, turning it from a struggle to an art. The ball became a form of training in tools of queer survival

My realness was never becoming of everything a straight man had to be growing up. I could never give “emotionless” or live up to the aggression expected by men. Putting up a facade was very difficult, and I’m still unlearning the damage it has had on my gender identity.

10/12

“Prison No.1″ by Michael Ashkin

“Ashkin explores the logic of urban spatial organization between social ideals, structural necessities, and uncontrollable contingencies.”

#psychogeography #massincarceration #systemsofcontrol

Paul Vanouse’s lecture encouraged me to even further push what I believe to be the boundaries of what art can be. I was very inspired by his piece “Labor”. I’ve never experienced art you can smell, but the idea of making a perspirant and the conceptual value of synthesizing something that is supposed to come from human struggle was very interesting. There were many other pieces he discussed in his lecture that inspired me, but the resounding thought was how much potential science has to inform and enhance art and how much art could influence scientific practice. It’s art that involves the viewer and is authentic to the instance and space that inspires me, art that forms a lasting memory instead of just calling on one. This also takes shape in the work of Shaun Leonardo. I highly admire artists that place themselves in the contemporary moment. His piece “Primitive Survival” stands to be the only work I’ve seen that consists of an actual dialogue, even more so, a dialogue that transcends language. I am disillusioned by the hegemony of the artistic process over the participation in dialogue, as the event is denatured in its permanence, sterilized, and turned into a thing to be objectified or burried. I want my work to involve the viewer and the viewers creativity, to have some autonomy in their experience. There are many ways I feel science could fit into this process as well. But, even Shaun’s art pieces seem to bleed off the canvas, calling on experiences we all shared together: the watching of Eric Garner’s death caught on camera, the very universal feeling of watching a figure be there one second and gone the next. I hope to work towards the level of innovation of these artists as I learn more every day.

10/9

#paul vanouse

Michael Ashkin: Symbols, Fringes, and Infinity

“Between the language and the image is the space of truth.” These deeply poignant set of words by Michael Ashkin struck me at the core of my artistic soul. It addresses the omnipresence of this façade struck up by the modern economy of symbolism that Ashkin discusses. It makes me recall how his work plays at symbols, at reality, almost seeming to disrupt the myopia of first person narration by showing the modular quality of spaces in relationship to each other.

I was deeply inspired by his told experience of the middle lands. This “place without secrets to withhold” truly resonated in his photography as a fringe, weird panorama of landscape that attracts the waste of Manhattan. To me, what was resonant in the oddity of the ambiance was that it was a place where objects and their meanings as symbols go to die. Ashkin disrupted the space by perceiving the waste and giving it new function as art.

These existential themes pair with Ashkin’s implication of vanishing point, which he employs as a confrontational force in his work. Often, the borders of his artwork tend to this effect: to disrupt the line of perception and rhythm he creates. His use of powerlines and railroads as rhythms that stretch out in either direction exist in collision to an aprupt border. The border, which implies the periphery and the pattern which implies infinite continuation, plays at the existential nature of ones horizon as the limit to perception. The modular is used to symbolize the infinite.

These effects work in contrast to each other as Ashkin portrays the modular as a projection of human compartmentalization of thought. My favorite example of this is how Ashkin captures this expression in the architecture of human systems of control. Ashkin’s photography of prisons echo his work with the logic of gardens. Human imposition of control and influence have come along from the monumental Palace of Versailles to the now corporate hegemony and its monuments to oppression. Ashkin was able to see that buildings represent people, and that those octagons and geometric shapes represented groups of confinement. Ashkin is never one to shy away from societal fringes in his work, and he is excellent at identifying and portraying them. His practice really inspires me.

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