The Writer Jo

I'm Dana J. and this is my blog for all things writing; essays, blurbs, or creative fiction! You may also see me referred to as Andy, I respond to both. Enjoy! Header: Painting (1946), Francis Bacon

[the-writer-jo]

Who Am I?

I love to write, it's as simple as that. I'm an Art History major with a passion for visual culture, media studies and the contemporary art world. I want to share whatever I can with the world; good, bad, or straight up average.

[the-writer-jo]

Dana Jorgenson e-portfolio

Header: LSD Alice (Study for Alice Down the Rabbit Hole) 1965, Adrian Piper

Happy December! And unhappy finals week!

Over the course of the Fall semester, I've been working on this "e-portfolio" for my Women in Art course. It's all of the writing and activity compiled into one place, in short.

Frankly, I prefer a research paper. But I've found it at least a useful exercise in tracking the way I've thought about topics over time instead of the concepts being isolated bits of information with little synthesis. Perhaps e-portfolios will grow on me and I can come back to them for my own research projects in the future.

Either way, I hope anyone who finds this can at least have a good skim of my material.

Happy Holidays!

[the-writer-jo]

A Blurb and a Poem

Just a short meditation on cyborgs and a poem dedicated to a painter.

I spent a lot of time earlier this year in the world of Donna Haraway and her Cyborgian Manifesto. As interesting as it was to contemplate the human condition through decidedly inhuman bodies, by the time I finished with the assignment that I had needed those ideas for, I was so entrenched in them that they had lost their meaning a bit.

Now, I find myself going back to the ideas that have come from her post-human writing. In a time of medicinal suspicion and technophobia clashing with the corporate interests in "progress" I've begun to wonder whether it might have been worth it to lose a little bit of our humanity. In the physical sense, that is. We seem apt enough to abandon ethics all on our own without embedding our brains into machines.

Is there a middle ground between the hyper-urban cyberpunk fantasies and the neo-traditional regression we now face?

Anyways, here is a poem dedicated to the Irish-British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

\\\\\\\\\\\

Francis and I have a connection. 1909 and 2004 have a certain ring next to each other. Side by side and a century apart, Francis and I both have an understanding of the body that writhes and slithers to escape itself.

Whose body? I'm not sure. That body we all inhabit, I guess. The one that bleeds and stinks; and sweats and groans: and wiggles and moans.

Francis has a 1946 painting, aptly named Painting, which smiles at me from some fleshless place.

Skin stretched across the horizon line; bones bent into a dainty cage. Marrow seeping; syrup leaking.

Francis and I know what it really means to inhabit.

What it really means to feed.

[the-writer-jo]

Re-reading The Goldfinch mid art history degree is surprisingly... revelatory?

I first read Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch in early high school and have since read it at least three more times. I've also seen the movie just as many times, if not more, because the movie is a more time-friendly endeavor than the almost 1,000 paged novel. Having been so absorbed in the story for so many years, I know I understand it and all it tries to gets across.

But now, more than half way done with my Art History BFA, I feel like there's an entirely new layer of The Goldfinch that's been peeled away. Back in high school or while I was still doing mostly prerequisites for my degree, I abstractly knew the kinds of things Theo or his mother would talk about. They discussed the art world with such offhandedness sometimes that, to me at least, it felt like I should've already known what they were referencing.

Re-reading it now, it's not just that I understand the characters' casual mentions of obscure terms/works/etc. I understand them just as casually; I didn't even realize I was picking up new things from the text until I put it down for the day and went Wait- that's not how I thought of it last time..

It's not something that will change my life or anything. But there's a certain kind of validation in being able to consume art-centric stories like The Goldfinch in new ways. It proves I'm actually absorbing my degree and makes the experience of the book even better, I think. I already loved the story and the characters and even the fairly disliked movie adaptation. This additional comprehension of the motifs, while definitely not necessary to enjoy the novel, enhances the whole read for me.

Anyways. Read Donna Tartt's novels. They're worth it.

[the-writer-jo]

A Couple of Small Creative Works

Just some poems I wrote in the last week.

Sear

There’s lava in my veins.

It runs slow and burning

but sweet,

Like the honey in my tea.

My molten skin has long since hardened,

an impenetrable crust guarding my liquid innards.

Should my flesh be pricked,

I fear for the permanent loss of warmth.

What do I have but this searing blood

coursing through my heart and baking my lungs?

Perhaps one day I’ll cool,

and beauty can be found in the remains of my tissue.

Until then, this fever is mine and I am its,

for better or worse and through sickness we go.

---

Lily Stems

I have lilies wrapping up my spine.

They make me see you in every tooth gapped smile,

and have me looking twice at every curly head in a crowd. 

I think of what you’d order in every menu,

and constantly add to the list of things

I keep in my brain that I want to tell you about.

It’s not like a missing limb,

or anything so sentimental as that.

(It’s not your style anyways)

But it’s present and poignant,

this peculiar little plant that has grown into my brain.

When I see you next, perhaps I’ll pluck a bloom 

from a fold of my brain and it’ll be a funny anecdote 

you can tell your friends.

(by the way, tumblr completely killed the original formatting of these so they're a little ugly- but! They're here, so I hope you enjoy.)

[the-writer-jo]

Is Everything "Post-" now?

A short blurb on how we perceive (or don't perceive) time and "eras"

While I'm not finished with my degree quite yet, I've noticed that a good bunch of the terms we use for contemporary theory are "post-" something. Post-modern, post-human, and post-feminist are the usual few to encounter but there's plenty more out there and it makes me wonder; how much of our modern lives do we think of as being After with a capital A? How much of our culture is made up of reminiscent nostalgia for anything and everything from the past? Quite a bit, I'd say.

In pop music, artists like Taylor Swift or Katy Perry go on tours looking back on their "eras" as though it's a time bygone, when in reality their careers have only really spanned the past 15 years or so.

On social media, trends or memes come and go so fast that time becomes near meaningless. Just the other day, I saw people saying that January-March of 2024 was their favorite "time period" of TikTok. And of course, in those three months they're feeling nostalgic for, they were wishing it was 2021.

While I'd love to attribute this warped mindset in its entirety to the pandemic, I don't think that'd be accurate. Stranger Things, for example, has been on since 2016 and is a mish-mash of nostalgia for a culture my generation never even experienced (incidentally, also the year many young people like to joke was the beginning of the end for culture). Yet this nostalgia, in large part, drove the first wave of success for the show and is mostly watched by Gen Z and Millenials.

Most of the people in these environments, including myself, were born into and only know this world of "post-" movements. I think this has created a significant rift in how people my age think of culture and its productions. Everything is post-something else, so what do we have except nostalgia? A lot, probably. But with how familiar we've gotten with sticking our noses in the past, I have a feeling we'll stay there a while longer.

(Info on Stranger Things viewership from Statista and personal experience.)

[the-writer-jo]

Hill to Hatoum: Skinspace in Corps étranger

A short little analysis of Mona Hatoum's video work Corps étranger with Gary Hill's idea of "skinspace".

     Gary Hill’s concept of skinspace is an exploration of what exactly can be considered flesh, especially when in an encounter with actual, human skin. Soundings (1978) goes through the process of using and abusing an audio speaker in what appears to be Hill’s attempt to reconcile his own self with the central object and method of his other video works. He and the speaker are not at odds in the video, despite the violent nature that seems to dominate their interactions; instead it’s an endeavor of greater understanding within Hill as well as between him and his materials.

     Mona Hatoum’s Corps Etranger (1994), on the other hand, is a confrontation rather than a reckoning with the skin like Soundings. Skinspace becomes more literal and consequently more uncomfortable for the viewer. It’s one thing to think of the conceptual skin of a speaker and completely different to have an up-close experience with someone’s head orifices. Corps Etranger poses skin as simultaneously grounding and alienating. It’s more real in a way to know that skin means what it usually means in casual discussion; the epidermis and follicles and whatnot are all there. But, it’s almost vulgar how invasive the camera seems to be, an idea enhanced by its circular shape reminiscent of a medical scope. Even the supposed comfort of familiarity that comes with knowing what you’re looking at is corrupted by the fact that the video mainly focuses on the wet, the hairy, the uneasy sections of the body. 

     And a confrontation with skin is naturally going to lead into a conflict with the body as a larger entity, as the embodied separation of the two would be more obscene than any portrayal of them as one. Hatoum’s French title Corps Etranger translates to Foreign Body. Literally, it could reference how Mona Hatoum’s body is foreign and unfamiliar to the audience or perhaps since no one can see inside themselves, it’s also those things to Hatoum herself. But with the pre-established medical associations in the work, it’s important to think of the title in the context of disease. A foreign body can be used to talk about viruses, bugs, infections, and a bunch of other harmful bodily illnesses. The title could be calling the camera which is searching the body a foreign entity, a physical sickness invading Hatoum. This could further imply that the audience, as the ones watching behind the camera, are the participants or perpetrators of the “illness”. 

     Another distinct difference between Hatoum and Hill is how they use audio to convey the different thought processes of their videos. Corps Etranger is elevated beyond Soundings in terms of provocation because of the body’s more direct involvement in the making of the video. But this is also illustrated in the less direct incorporation of sound, namely voice and language. Gary Hill does speak legibly throughout much of Soundings. It’s distorted, sometimes hard to comprehend but it’s understandable and identifiably human. Hatoum doesn’t have this same sense of intelligibility with her audio. Most of the audible noise that’s not the camera’s movement is heavy breathing. The viewer doesn’t automatically know it’s Hatoum, though that would probably make the most sense. But there's a slight sense of anonymity created because a present voice would be definitive and knowable, while technically that breathing could be anyone, maybe even the operator of the camera. There’s a certain sense of primitivity associated with nonverbal communication as well as a sexuality that comes with heavy breathing in particular. All of this contributes to the amped up uneasiness that comes with Corps Etranger more so than with Soundings.

     Mona Hatoum’s skinspace is no longer something to ponder like in Soundings, but something to recoil from and maybe think about later once it’s not in front of you anymore and the confrontation doesn’t feel as overtly obscene. Soundings and Corps Etranger do both have a sense of provocation in them, because there’s an inherent oddness of a man speaking to and hitting an inanimate object. But the interpersonal physicality of an innard-exploring camera propels Hatoum’s video past provocation and into abjection, crossing the thin line that exists in any medium relating to a skinspace. 

---

Something I think is also important to note, though it's not included in the main essay, is the political aspect of the body's invasion. Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist and with an invading body currently occupying Palestine, I don't think I need to write it out for the parallel to be visible.

--

Link to Corps étranger

Warning: it's not an incredibly pleasant video

[the-writer-jo]

Asymptomatic

For my first ever post, a short creative writing work based on the idea that Edgar Allan Poe was an asymptomatic carrier of TB and inadvertently caused the deaths of many of his loved ones throughout his life.

     Before those first drops of blood even leave your mouth, it’s too late. The first cough, the first fainting spell, your clammy forehead; inconsequential once your hands are spattered and sticky. You’ll quietly wipe your lips with a napkin and try to finish dinner before really absorbing what’s just happened. The clinks and clanks of the silverware will rattle around in your head, enough to distract you until you can make your escape to the bathroom, where you’ll peer into your reflection looking for any hint of rot. 

     Have your eyes sunken since this morning?

     Have your hands always been this shaky?

     Is your breath as loud as it seems?

     Is that reflection even telling the truth, you’ll wonder. It won’t make sense, how your tongue isn’t stained red when you remember how vibrant the color was under the dining room’s lowlights. 

     Blood, you’ll think, is a scary thing. What’s in is out and what’s out wants in. But there won’t be any evidence of your fright, so you’ll smooth out your nice shirt and walk back out like it never happened. 

     When you sit back down though, you’ll look up and see me. You’ll pretend I go unnoticed but the way your eyes move right over me tells me you’re just nervous. That’s okay. I’ll be here either way. I’ll stand by the mantel, admiring your family photos from childhood. I’ll sit next to you on your commute to work, enjoying your little air freshener that lost its scent months ago. The handkerchief you’ll start to bring with you everywhere has my initials embroidered in the corner, unseen and well known. 

     Everyone will wonder where in the world you picked it up, when they eventually find out. They’ll pose the elderly grocer or the strange neighbor as possible culprits of your sickly murder. You’ll wave them off, saying it doesn’t matter now. And you’ll know that it never did. Because I will be there with you, stroking your limp hand as you drift into that inescapable place. I’ll be there as I am now; your carrier, your asymptomatic courier, your ardent companion.