CROS - 2002 - 001 : Mind Map @minnowspeaker - Tumblr Blog

ON - Carrie Mae Weems

http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/kitchen-table.html

I have been, throughout the course of my mind map, been rather interested/held in and by the idea of transience…briefness…shortness…fleetingness. And how it’s a string of those ephemeral moments that build together to create our life (as it looks when we’ve passed on). This is what I like most of all about Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990): looking from still photo to still photo, I can sense movement. And not only movement, but the emotion that compels the movement. Like a babbly river, or a time-lapse video of a city neon at night. The shifting positions, the shifting subjects — Weems always physically present, as one is in their own life — the shifting moods, at that same kitchen table surge together to transfix me with a sense of life as it happens. It makes me think. The same room you get proposed to may be the same room in which you both decide to divorce. Or, for example, I pass my grade school on occasion and find it weird that I was six there, in the field I look at now when twenty-five. I could’ve have imagined what I’d be like, just like today I can’t imagine what I’ll be like. But I also can’t imagine what I’ve been like! It’s loony!

And to bring up again the fact that Weems is present in each photograph of this series. I love that! It reminds me — I am my eyes for life, and my heart for life, and my body for life. I will always be a host at my table, and a guest to life. Some days it’s true I want to serve myself something rancid, but I think (hope!) aging is delivering grace. Graciousness towards myself. So I want to think with love when I set my days. Small extract from a poem I wrote: “Now I’ll never be behind me / I am always the eye; I remain.” I’m definitely tempted to take a photo of myself in my room everyday now. I forgot these ‘dull’ moments are so precious.

I’m particularly attached to this photograph I’ve included with Weems and her head bent down, maybe sad, the bottle of wine on the table and the phone sat lonely in the foreground. Are we waiting on a specific call!? It’s so human. It looks like a scene out of a birthday I’ve had. And I don’t say that in a sad way, but in a relieved way. We are humans just like any other.

#wk5

On - Nan Goldin

What I love about this photograph is the friendship apparent. The bonds. Relationships. I’m known in my family as the one who can’t keep a friend. Much of this I believe is down to my inability to keep myself — know myself and accept myself as is known then. However! This image uplifts me. And I hope it’s not offensive to say I’m sure the subjects of the photographs were misfits, somewhat, at the time it was taken (and if it is, I can be taught). They have a cool, other-ish appeal to them. But rather than all that shlock I’m just shocked constantly by the appearance of friendship. I’ve never felt natural at it! And it looks beautiful on this hill by the water. I’m attracted to everything; the bag, the plum umbrella, the cake half-eaten, the bare arms, the drying grass, the makeup on the person centre, the smiles on the faces showing, the back of the head on the face not.

Well, when I think about friendship more critically, I wonder: how can I make it work? What’s that special tick? Trick? And at first I’d like to say it’s believing in yourself, in your ability to be similar to others, not a stranger to humanity at all. But actually I’d say now that it focuses outwards, not inwards. That friendship must in a way hold belief in the other — in a (at first) stranger’s ability to be real and similar to you, rather than viewing yourself as the way in. It’s almost always your focus on the other that builds a bridge, not your focus on yourself. Maybe this is already known to everyone, but I learn somewhat slowly. And maybe after this class I will wonder more and more — what’s everybody fighting for? I don’t only want to befriend people in my same fight, as I’ve realized there’s so much I’ve been missing. Fight of a lifetime. I’d like to know as much as I can.

And honestly, how nice would a picnic be…Cake and laughter by some sea.

#wk5

On - Tanya Fazlalizadeh

“Stop telling woman to smile.” “Harassing women does not prove your masculinity.” “My worth extends far beyond my body.” “I am not here for you.” “Women are not seeking your validation.”

How does this relate to art and activism for me? Well, for one, I’m stunned by this authority of voice (via language even more so than the imagery). I grew up in a quite authoritative household, where what dad said went. It was hard for me, as I grew older, to find my own voice, and understand the authority that I myself possessed. Even today as a proper adult, it can be difficult for me to know what I’m thinking or feeling, as I’m used to being told what I should think or what I should feel. I believe many can relate to this, but women have a special sort of bag waiting for them in this regard. For example, in my case, I was taught harassment and men not taking no for an answer is an equivalent to love. That is how my mom and dad behaved, anyhow. To see these words of Fazlalizadeh’s spelled out so cleanly and clearly sort of shocks me, despite how advanced I believe I am. In fact, I’m made aware that I still sort of believe I’m here for someone else — some man I just haven’t met yet. And all this while not even being sure if I like men romantically! This movement kills me. I am so grateful for it, but also so sad for its need to exist. I remember, as a teenager, wondering why I hadn’t been cat-called or groped uninvited at a party yet? This may sound insane, but this is how high the male attention is put! You wonder what’s wrong with you when you don’t get it, even in the worst way. To stand up for myself as a woman outside of the sphere of attractiveness to males felt like I was cowering…only doing it because no man had apparently wanted me anyway. But no. That’s not why. I stand up for my safety, and the safety of my girls, past and present. I stand up for my right to be ugly (honestly). I stand up for my right to be fat, or sad, or vindictive, or selfish. I stand up for my right to be a human! And not a little cookie. Thanks, Fazlalizadeh.

#wk4

Gathering: Project Materials

#proji

Thinking about transience again, and, in particular, the idea that a video is not done until it is dead (finished it’s play). That is much like human life. Maybe my final project might reflect this...be an animation, involving real world material...

#proji

On - Emory Douglas

The work of Emory Douglas reminds me of gig posters. The kind of work which attracts your attention to some future (or, if the work is up, slathered against the concrete belly of a city, an event long past). Such bold visual language is present in each and every one of the works. Reading Douglas’s Wikipedia page (sorry!) I’m drawn to certain words by him in particular: “I was drawn to it [the Black Panther Party] because of its dedication to self defense.” This makes me think — the work Douglas created, especially that adjacent to the Black Panther Party, works as self-defence. It works to defend not only him, but his community also. It works as a visual evidence of championing thought, “portraying the poor […] not as victims.”

#wk4

RE - Listening for Something... Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation

Some words when spoken just kill you. I get so devastated hearing certain things, certain sentiments, though I’m not sure why so I fail to explain it, so go on hearing them till I’m running about my day like a chicken with my head cut off, in deep pain. Then it comes to me. Good news. Here I can explain it.

The words are Dionne Brand’s. I was ruined the second she spoke them:

“I have become myself; a woman who looks at a woman and says, ‘here, I have found you. In this, I am blackening in my way.’”

Just kill me, Brand. What fantastic words spoken, plus I liked her look — the nautical stripes in the open doorway. What captures me about the sentence is the acknowledgement that interest in another woman makes her feel darker, not necessarily brighter. In many ways, and throughout many times, female loving has been misread. Regularly, woman on woman loving (and I’m talking intimate female loving, woman and woman as lovers, no mother or aunties or whatever else in sight) is figured to be stuffed with pink carnations and pastel tenors, that tea and sugar kind of loving. But, no. No. Darker, sometimes — that’s right.

Blackening in my way, I’m in the same boat, blackening all because one time — out of nowhere — I found my co-worker attractive. My female co-worker attractive. She was a woman of every level, except that she reminded me of a man. Curt and sarcastic, Timberland wearing and training to be a police officer, she stunned me. She was not just attractive, but the most attractive, better than anyone else I’d ever met. To my eyes and spirit she was exhilarating, uplifting — similar to Nirvana. And it was not light. And yes it did feel foreign, being a female loving black girl.

I think I was supposed to be picking up talk of activism here. Maybe not. The video description is solid: “Claiming any subject, they talk about events as they see them, analytic, contemplative, honest and open ended.” I don’t know exactly why — it’s late at night — this video fills me with personal knowledge: activism for the self. For my girl-liking, my fatness, my lateness, my prudeness, my afraidness, whatever. I realize again (I often forget) how much I love poets. Man, I love poets! Hearing Dionne and Adrienne speak their own words with such conviction, has moved me in a way I haven’t been moved in a while. I think I respond more to language than visual art. Maybe this will mean nothing for my assignment, but for my own practice it’s worth a lot. (And maybe I shouldn’t separate them…but school and life seem different).

#wk5

Inspiration Dump

Ryuichi Yamashiro, ad for Morisawa Co., early 80s

from “Ukranian Space Invaders”

found on 50watts

Julia Condon

Jack Bush

#proji

RE - Lubaina Himid: TateShots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc1i66JYaJE

TW / talk of trauma!

Something that stood out to me in this video — aside from the gorgeous, serious yet whimsical work! — was that question posed by Himid: “who are the heroes of black peoples lives?”

Growing up in a white suburb, on white media, I lacked heroes myself. At least, black heroes. I didn’t possess a single one until after I’d turned nineteen and began reading more work by black writers, my favourite of the many being James Baldwin. I’m in awe of how clear a communicator he is, and how honest he is about struggle, beauty, and pain.

But, going back, the reason I didn’t possess any is because the heroes were so hard to spot: by community standards, my family members are not well celebrated. They are heavy drinkers with short fuses, dusty, calloused hands, and cold demeanors (when you get too close). I don’t blame them for anything now, but I used to. It was that exact question that used to make me so bitter — who are the heroes of my life? I’d look around my bloodline with bothered eyes. Everybody is broke here, I’d think, everybody is angry and sad and drunk, nobody owns a house, nobody is getting ahead, nobody can help me. There is a song by The Smiths, “Barbarism Begins at Home.” Great title. But what else begins at home? Almost everything, I suppose. Initial steps into the world, the ones taken both physically and mentally. And early on, I think before I could speak, I remember my dad lifting me up, up, and up, almost as if his arms could go on like that, outside of science, into the heavenly trees....

It’s not his fault that he couldn’t keep that up forever. I never once heard his parents, before they died, say I love you to him. But I know for sure his mother did.

There’s this quotation from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room:

“’Somebody,’ said Jacques, ‘your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.’”

Lack of heroes as a child sometimes feels like lack of love. And a lack of heroes sometimes, really, is a result of being surrounded by those, especially adults and parental figures, who are deeply fearful of love.

I’m not sure this made a lot of sense. I guess it’s just that when it was asked who the heroes of black people’s lives, I thought to myself, “how do I deal with the shame and pain of having a family struggling with trauma?”

Abandonment — domestic violence — low self-esteem — alcoholism — emotional repression — binge eating — this was the picture of black life shown to me.

But, it’s like there are halos on my aunt’s heads. And even though I don’t really talk to him, I think my dad has one of the best ever laughs.

And I take pride in that.

#wk5

RE - Black Futures: An Ode to Freedom Summer, Produced by M4BL

I appreciated this video for a multitude of reasons, but most of all for its reminder of the certainty of future assessment. By this I mean, the reminder that our actions today mean something; they slowly build the world that those who come after us will be born to live, stand and create in. In this way, our actions will come to meet people who are able to look at them with an active, objective eye and critique. That’s what I like about generations; how they’re like dominoes falling upon each other on the bed of an infinite table; that they build upon each other and, hopefully with heart at the centre of everything, they attempt to improve, do better than those that came before them.

Powerful words live in this video, and these words serve as particularly great reminders. “Know that we loved you in advance. We anticipated your brilliance.” These words make me think of my actions. Do my actions anticipate good, or evil? Do my actions show that I believe in the future, or that I’m made despondent just trying to imagine it? What about my actions show the next century that I loved them in advance? Am I taking climate change seriously enough? Am I taking the power of individual and community impact seriously enough? Am I taking the power of now seriously enough? It may feel heavy to change the world and pave the way for our descendants, but what is a small thing I’m doing now that could help? Not much, really. “26 million strong,” but was I one of them?

Again, I come back to that idea of each second in time being a building block, and each action within the second stacking with the next to build a new reality, whether for the better or worse.

Imagining liberated black futures, and acting from that place — having our actions be what make the dream possible — is a noble and necessary mandate, as it’s said in the video: “You were our mandate.”

Concept - in the year 2450, explorers from another planet roam the space-wrecked aircraft SS Placid Lake. The woman is from ancient times, her birth logged in the year of 1938. Her name is Esther Mkhonza. This ship belonged to a female descendent of her great grandson. (The woman is my grandmother).

#wk4

RE - The connections between public art and activism, Sarah Ratzlaff

What interests me about our built environment is that it is a literal reflection of all actions undertook — man’s — in the lifetimes before mine. And not only does built environment reflect actions; it stands, too, as an extension of ideologies past.

So when, in this article, Syrus Marcus Ware talks about how a “bureaucratic system” that now exists “in terms of how public art works are created,” it got me thinking. Our built environment is an indication of past values, whether that’s civic duty, national identity and progression (like Robarts Library) or simply the city-dweller’s desire for more greenspace. So many things — such as the monuments of Sir John A. MacDonald, Egerton Ryerson, and King Edward VII — could stand for as long as they did solely due to the public’s perception of them, probably. First monuments of public honour, then public shame. Not because the inherent story and circumstance around them changed, but because a mass of ideas did. It’s very literally that ideas shape the world. This transformation of re-seeing our surroundings, re-defining them as we choose what is acceptable for all futures (Queer, Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ and onwards), speaks to the ability of architecture to not only be born from societal need, but to be constantly changed by it. A protest that takes place directly against built environment (like statues, or near the police department) then directly questions past status-quo.

A certain sentiment resonated deeply with me — that one Ware shared, originally penned by Walidah Imarisha in Octavia’s Brood, about “how all activism is speculative fiction, because the process of activism, like speculative fiction, is daring to dream that another world is possible.” Having daring to dream as the connection shared between activism and speculative fiction warms me.

Plus, an aside, I think it’s fair to say many black souls share a profound connection with the work of Octavia E. Butler, no? Mainly, I think, because her work imagines our possible futures explicitly, and in many forms. Reading, we cannot deny we are being included; we’re elevated by this. I grew up in Ajax while Ajax was still a mostly white demographic. These were the kids named Randy, Brett and Connor; Stephanie, Heather, Michelle.

By the time I reached high school, I would meet diversity, but in retrospect that timing was unfortunate and much too late. I didn’t necessarily see myself as white (couldn’t with my kinky hair, hot combed by now into oblivion, my South African cheekbones and wide nose), but I did, in a way, feel white. I read pounds upon pounds of white books; I listened to sparkly white music and followed white trends with the rigidity of an air cadet; I crushed solely on road-skating white boys and best friended a brady bunch of Hilary Duff-esque white girls (still do! that wasn’t the problem); I even began, when imagining my future, to see myself as somebody else completely. When I grew up, my hair would be straight as a sheet of cotton fabric. My face somehow morphed to fit white European proportions — my nose, evidence of my origins, gone.

All this to demonstrate that it is difficult as a child to dream of shaping the world to fit you — rather, and sadly, some tend to gravitate towards shaping themselves to fit the world. That was my bag.

As I grew it luckily became possible for me to be with my blackness, my queerness, my oddness, etcetera, and like it. Would it have been so possible without the voices before me, and alongside me, championing? The sudden visibility (compared to the forever existence) of black creators and black dreamers backing themselves for themselves has transformed how I stand with the world; has changed my own eyes and how they look at me.

Ideas — world.

World — us in it.

Ideas.

Walt Whitman

#wk4

RE - The Art of Protest: Tate Modern Podcast

At the second, it’s hard to think of a single form of protest that doesn’t appear to ring from, or towards, art. Perhaps the reason for this is that art and protest share their birth countries, in a way — born from places of pain, loneliness, fury, wrath, dissonance, despair. Not to make it sound bad. They can also share the origins of hope and faith and optimism. It could be argued ‘art’ is too general word to compare to the act of protest, but I’d disagree; both art and protest are formed, really, by the intent to create (it could also be argued that art involves submission more than intent, but I refer to that initial moment of emotion spurring action, before any making has begun, or any final ‘product’ or ‘state’ travelled to). Much of art making, and much of protest, exists in unsettling transience – meaning what makes it itself is that it all, each gesture like seconds in time, adds up, and often the sum, the destination, we can’t foresee. At least, not exactly. Perhaps the art is made in a night, or two, or three — and then, when ‘completed,’ is upon the wall forever. The peoples of cities die and the city itself remains, though transformed more and again via its next people, and its next, and its next.

Looking first at the evocative, green world of Reflections on the Thames (1880) by John Atkinson Grimshaw and then at a next, much more recent digital photo of the same area left me with an acute sense of possession (photo from Possession, 1981, dir. Andrzej Żuławski). Possessed by uncertainty — and the certainty that uncertainty is sometimes all there is. The newer picture includes a skyline that likely would have seemed impossible to Grimshaw while he lived, but there she sits.

What I’m getting at here — dawdling to grasp it — is that both art and protest call on transience, impermanence. My impermanence. His. Hers. Theirs. But they require, too, immediate presence. Reminded, I say goodbye to everything. Goodbye to the house I live in, despite that I’m here now. Goodbye to the birds outside, even though they choir now. Goodbye to mom, brothers, the Playboy magazine stack in the corner of my room, my twenty-five-year-old body, my daring brown hair (still full of colour), goodbye to the tomatoes cooling in the fridge, the salt, the pepper, goodbye to this device I type on which I’m sure, just three decades from now, will seem as odd and ancient as communicating through clay.

Raju Rage mentions using “everyday objects” with their body to “provoke questions.” I think protests share a strong link with questions — the question of, why is this like that? Who am I to you? Who does your living hurt?

To protest is to believe in what appears like an impossible future.

To live until you die is like pressing your thumbs into a soft, fuzzy (babylike) peach and seeing the juice spill down your fingers, wrists, onto the cold floor — material punctured, everything affected, and nothing you can do to take it back. Still, the intact peach was here. And is here, in one of those inaccessible seconds that make this one possible. Permanence and impermanence exist in a dance.

Art as protest is art that lives in the pain of the present, but that is hopeful in its call for and belief in something new. Art and protest work, joined, to create new worlds. As does art.

I’m thinking again of here is now, now is all there is.

And a time-lapse of infinite migration.

#wk4

#wk3

RE - How To Be an Artist By Night (RAQS Media Collective)

This paper put into words some concepts I’ve been struggling with lately — namely, the concept of giving myself time, and allowing myself to be “in the process of” forever. There’s a lot of pressure, maybe due to films and the image-screen of celebrity, to be (or feel) as if you are a complete and finished person. Never mind that it would, in reality, be horrible to be finished growing by the age of twenty-five. Nevertheless, there’s that wish to have it — one’s art, one’s image, one’s relationships, one’s learning, etc. — all sorted out immediately. The pressure to “be somebody,” especially a somebody that others may recognize often and find quite valuable, makes it incredibly hard to experience the uncertainty that’s innate within us and, really, innate within every minute we will ever live.

When it’s written that, “the current reality of schools […] have strayed a great distance from the original sense of what schooling might have meant,” I wondered to myself, what has the current reality of schooling done for me? I mean, I’m not sure I can answer that yet. Maybe in a few years a light bulb will blink on in my head, and I will see this all clearly. I do believe it’s not exactly school but the messaging behind school that’s caused me the most grief; the idea that postsecondary schooling is required in order to form you into a respectable adult (though we know that’s not true; sometimes I feel bitter at the sureness of singers of actors or painters or drifters who left school when they realized it wasn’t for them). In the context of my art, are these grades I get at school all that valuable for me? No. And that’s NOT to say I don’t appreciate all the time put into marking.

But I used to, ridiculously, see grades as the only valuable part of education. That’s just not the case. I think what’s been more valuable is that this time has allowed me to figure out more about my likes and dislikes; what gives me joy, what annoys me, what I consider bullshit, what I consider vital. There’s a lot of both. As I age, twenty-four now, I become more certain that it’s my criteria that matters most to my life — in the sense of my own work, that is. I’ve spent a lot of time away from school, and sometimes feel plagued by the sense that I’m behind, but this paper helped validate that leisure time as necessary. I would like as often as I can to “engage with time in a non-instrumental way,” even when that engagement “can represent a fundamental distraction from production.” This idea even sort of reminds me of Akomfrah and Galanin in that sense of everything mattering, and us being a “product” of all that is, and was.

I’m going to give myself more breaks. Guilt free.

#wk3

RE - Mona Hatoum in Studio: I Never Know What I will End Up Making

I mean, the part of this video that struck me the most is the amount of studio space Hatoum possesses! Three people could probably room in that place. Sometimes I wonder if too much physical space has been given over to career and not enough to living (aka, affordable housing projects/initiatives). I feel the need now to put a disclaimer here and say that I understand art is ‘vital.’ But eh.

“I find this very exciting — that not knowing,” Hatoum says, right at the end of the Tate video. I appreciate that. As a being in my mid-twenties, I’m sort of haunted often about the idea that I have no idea where life or my practice are taking me, so it’s nice to see this obscurity framed in a positive light. Probably a useful approach for my practice, too. Sometimes not knowing what I’m gonna do annoys me. But perhaps I should just let the blank space allow me to fall deeper into the work, whatever it is, and see where it takes me.

I also found myself gravitating towards the material of soap — I love soap! The big, bulky, colourful clear or opaque bars. I like the fact they can hold a fragrance and smell like pomegranate, or olive oil, or goat’s milk, or salt water. They’re so unassumable. And soap can change states. It melts, then it hardens. As Hatoum has done, you can press things into it. The artist Anicka Yi has done this too. I found myself, after this video, gravitating towards all that reminded me of soap. I love how a bar can hold things in suspension forever.