The other day, Other Cousin sent me this link to one of the wedding blogs she frequents (yes, both cousins are engaged and taking part in the Wedding Industrial Complex. Yes, I will be a bridesmaid (2x), If I didn’t love these 2 women with my whole heart there is no way I’d put on a fancy dress and help them pee while they are wearing their own fancy dresses)

And Vasconcelos does the same thing with her crotchet pieces. It’s a big fuck you to the dominant paradigm. In addition to this gorgeous skull, she’s crocheted a crab shell, an entire piano, a laptop, a mannequin and a dog and a whole list of stuff I can’t even fit here.

Shoe made from pots and lids

And oh she is prolific. Which is awesome because I could look at her stuff all day.

Further reading and ogling

joanavasconcelos.com

and just do a google image search for her name if you want to browse some artsy eye candy

I’ve been chewing on something for a good long week now, trying to figure out if a bit of time would make me change my mind about it.

So I stumbled (not stumbled- the blog is in my reader) across this blogpost .The work is by Kimiko Yoshida and is a series of ongoing self portraits.

(Because the blog where I found this and the artist’s own site don’t allow posting of pics, I am not going to post them here- please do follow the links to follow along)

Most of Yoshida’s work (ok all) is stunning and thoughtful and twists your brain around the ideas of cultural traditions and women (Yoshida herself) becoming so entrenched in those traditions that you can barely make the person out whose self portrait it is.

But then there is the whole blackface issue. Now since I’m not black, I’m just trying to go with some empathy here. Forgive me if I struggle a bit, but here’s what’s bugging me.

1) Blackface- never right. I understand the point, reducing classic images of the female gaze perpetrated by male artists into monochromatic self portraits. It’s clever. But my internal squick measure is still freaking the fuck out.

2) But Yoshida is Japanese and lives in France, different cultural baggage that she’s carrying around there. Does blackface have the same connotations when done by someone with no cultural narrative for it? And am I missing a huge point in that this is a Japanese woman, representing (at least in the Gauguin type painting) a brown Tahitian woman, in blackface.

3)That said, I can’t “give” the artist a pass on the blackface being that I’m white and all.

4) But what really bugs me is that with all Yoshida’s work and with the specific work/show (see here also for more of the same show) that this blogger is writing about, the blogger/designer, Brad Ford at Design Therapy, chose to ONLY focus on the black face portraits in his blog post. (To the best of my knowledge, meaning what I read into his blog and I could be totes wrong- he is white and American and therefore has at least a passing knowledge that blackface is a no no).

So am I bothered by the art itself (a little) or by the manner of presentation of it by a blogger (a lot)? While intent does not a an anti-racist make, I think the artist might be trying to intentionally make us question, while the blogger seems to be following a lazy path of social conditioning+oh look at the pretty shiny thing.

Speak up peeps. You don’t have to be an art geek, really. (Talking or writing about art is a bit like being a wine snob most of the time- you can make up all sorts of pretentious sounding shit and get away with it, depending on the audience. You can also just keep it simple with a confident like/dislike. People will assume your opinion is patently the obvious one with the simple answer and that they are dumb for going on about it like an actual critic).

I almost, but not, always write about women artists in these little posts. After trolling through online art galleries for ages, I am excessively bored by the standard art fare normally offered: naked reclining woman, naked woman’s back, naked reclining woman, and so on.

It’s not even so much that I choose to write only about women as a feminist who wants to promote the artwork of other women, though that is part of it. But before I can even get to the analysis of a piece,or even to scrolling down to see if the name of the artist if familiar, it has to interest me. And the art of most (but not all) men is trite to me, before I even know the gender of the artist. It’s been done, it’s not a new or unique point of view.

So when I stumbled onto these pieces by Amedeo Palazzi, I was gape-mouthed. I don’t know anything about the artist. He could be a raging dickhead. But with just a few paintings he turns the male gaze backwards on itself.

Martino 2006

Here’s a very thin man, making the hunched shoulder broken doll pose that has become so popular in fashion magazines. He’s sleepy eyed, with the slightly opened mouth that is ubiquitous to female models. He’s posed with a 3/4 view of his face, not with a dead on stare. The painting is undeniably sexual because he has been posed in a very traditional pose for women who are meant to be looked. There isn’t really a male equivalent of a sexy pose (which is why playgirl always seems so much like an underwear catalogue that forgot it’s product).

No Title 6, 2008

This is a classic use of female sexy pose. The head is even cut off, in the middle of the over the shoulder pose. If this had been a painting of a girl or woman I would have breezed on by, just another in a hundred thousand views of teh sexxay is teh art. But it’s a guy, and guys aren’t supposed to be the vulnerable ones in our view.

Perhaps none of this is the artist’s intention. But intention, as we well know from feminism 101, doesn’t matter. This is what women are posed like all the time, on billboards and beer ads and all sorts of shit. But because it’s so universal, we don’t even notice it. Switch the genders though, and a semi-clad guy in a painting shows all those little subjugations as bright as neon.

I love love love her paintings. I want to live in them even more than I want to live in a Morris Lewis painting. They are urban and organic and minimally luscious.

And speaking of luscious- I am also all a flutter for Pat Kagan. There is a perfect balance between fluidity and contrast in some of her works. She captures movement in a very pure way, making you feel every swirl and dip of the brush.

Forgive me peeps, this is going to be an untethered ramblefest. But at least the links will take you to pretty pictures.

Somewhere last week someone (might have been Jezebel) was writing about muses. Why are they always young women musing older men? Do women artists have muses? I certainly have a reappearing character in my paintings who looks very much like me. Does that make me my own muse?

I was talking to Ruth this weekend. 13 years ago, when i left the kid’s dad and dropped out of college the first time, I was studying art. I figured I couldn’t be a broke ass artist and a single mom and that I needed to study something more practical. Now I live the life of a starving artist anyways, but without the portfolio to show for it. Irony is kicking me in the ass.

And good lord I am desperate to paint. All of my brushes were lost in the move. My good set of Kolinsky sable brushes will cost nearly $500 to replace. To say nothing of canvas or paints or pallets or palette knives. Even my drop cloth is gone. That ugly old paint stained sheet had lived through numerous cross country moves and 15 years of paint and red wine.

I guess I will have to make due with my $5 colored pencils and grocery store sketch pad. The real problem is the size. My work is usually big, 48″ x 48″. On such a small scale as an 8″ x 11″ sketch pad it looks cartooney and I can’t get proportions right. So instead I’ve been drawing trees and trying to get myself to break the abstract barrier. Mondrian started his abstracts with trees. Then he got to the graphic colored boxes we all know so well. Lemme tell you that there is something incredibly happy making to the eye when you put down a bright primary color next to a hard black line in a negative white space. It’s like jazz music for eyeballs. Klee and Miro and Kandinsky and any of the New York School abstract expressionists for examples.

But at the same time that I am trying to break out of figurative painting into abstraction, there is an idea (well two actually) that have been fermenting in my head for a good long while that are more traditional. Well, tradition tuned on it’s head. I’m back to the muse and thinking of the male gaze and women as objects. I want to take a series of master paintings like Ingres’ Odalisque or Picasso’s Women of Avignon and turn the woman’s body into negative space. What happens when we’re just left with a woman shaped hole in the pieces we’ve been taught to admire? Do we realize that women in art are objects just as much as a piece of fruit in a still life?

Or what if we turned the nude woman idea around. What if it was two well dressed ladies having a serious discussion about philosophy while a nude man posed for the artist, instead of the way Manet saw it? And wouldn’t it be a much more profound commentary if Annie Leibovitz made fun of her own photo of Tom Ford (a man who spends his life clothing people) and two naked actresses by making the clothier the naked and vulnerable one, instead of stuffing 3 grown men into body suits?

That is what I want to create. I want to make art that asks questions like that.

But I am stuck with crayola pencils and a real starving artist budget. Que sera sera.

I don’t know much about Barbara Kruger. I just know that I love her work. This is normally the part where I give you a little history about the artist, but instead I am going to do something else. I am going to tell you why it is that these pieces hit me in the gut and make think.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things women have to go through to make themselves presentable to the world. It’s not just a matter of looking a certain way, pretty enough to be worthy of attention but not so sexually available as to be prey for a rapist, but that women do things on a regular basis that cause them harm in order to be accepted in the world.

I wrote a while ago about the girl whose vagina was obliterated by pus after she got an infection from waxing- twice! More recently there have been problems with lead in lipstick. What about infections from manicures or toxins in nail polish? Did you know that manicurists suffer from high rates of respiratory diseases and pregnancy complications? What about all the stuff we put on our hair to make it shiny, straight, wavy, curly or another color? A lifetime of putting chemicals on our hair, face, nails and bodies has got to have some effect. Then there’s the shoes. Oh god I love how pretty high heels are but the pain from wearing them. Even our underwear causes us pain- whether it’s the discomfort from wearing a thong or the horrible things that happen when we wear something other than comfy cotton granny panties (yeast infections and the like).

And I haven’t even gotten into the risk of death from plastic surgery. The stuff above are just the little things we do to ourselves everyday. I’m certainly no feminist saint on the issue, I have one closet full of shoes that make me cry and another full of products to make my hair and skin perfect and a drawer full of matching bra and panty sets that make me spend the day uncomfortable.

Why do we have to spend so much time making ourselves into something we are not? Why is our default position when it comes to our looks that there is always room for improvement? Why does it seem that everything we do to “improve” ourselves involves some kind of pain, discomfort or risk?

Your body is a battleground means more to me than just how are reproductive freedom is usurped by old white men in business suits. Everyday we do things to our bodies so that we can get by as best as we can in the world with as minimum hassle as possible. It would be nice if we were actually free to be ourselves (whether that self is a lipsticked, high heeled soccer mom or an all natural makeup free ceo in birkenstocks) instead of having to put on an acceptable image for public consumption.

Several years ago I was looking at a Rothko painting with my then boyfriend. I like Rothko. He’s not my favorite color field artist (that would be Morris Louis) but seeing the evolution of his paintings in order and you see his life in the most basic, wordless sense. See, he committed suicide and you can see the darkness and heaviness evolve from the bright lightness in his later works.

So then boyfriend looks at the piece and says “I hate modern art- it’s so obvious these guys were just doing it for the money!” My fabulous retort was “You’re a fucking graphic artist for christ’s sake- all you do is make art for money!”

Then there was another not-quite boyfriend who was trying to get me to listen to yet another insufferable angsty white boy band. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of angsty white boy bands in my repertoire and I don’t rock the indy-pop queen title for no reason, but this band was a hair’s breadth away from being Creed. I wasn’t into being all worshipful of the tormented band, so I was told my music (at the time I was heavy into the reemergence of disco punk like Franz Ferdinand and Gang of Four) was “trite”. Uhm Hello! They may be tongue in cheek, up beat and danceable but that’s just to make the subversive bits go down easier.

“Trite” is a fabulous way of minimizing the importance of art that bugs you, and though the references I made above were to things made by men, trite is usually used for art made by women. Sonia Delunay and her textile designs were “trite”. Judy Chicago and her dinner plates were “trite”. I am sure someone probably even thought that Frida Kahlo’s iconic paintings were “trite” little pieces next to her husband’s much larger and simpler political murals.*

So then I saw this piece on Pandagon– A woman artist, Amber Hawk Swanson, buys herself a real doll modeled after herself and experiments with the idea of what it’s like to own in every possible way a submissive female. I think the idea is brilliant, the photos I’ve seen are disturbing and awesome and I hope that someday I can see the results in person.

But of course, someone has to get all “I’m the bigger critic than you” and call it “predictable and trite”. But predictable and trite wouldn’t garner the kinds of serious and interesting questions that this piece has raised- would it? I mean trite is usually something that lacks “the freshness that evokes attention or interest” (thank you Merriam Webster- though I prefer the OED, your online dictionary is free). I would think that if this piece were really “trite” then there wouldn’t be all this questioning about what it means to appear to be subjugating your own image or if the brainless, opinionless, impossible to achieve in real life body of a real doll is what men really want. The questions, the thousands of questions that this piece of art evokes should be enough to prove that this is by no means a “trite” piece but a thought-provoking thing of interest.

Things made by women are not automatically “trite”. But they get called that in order to minimize their importance and to silence their creators. Trite things are obvious- hummels are trite, Cathy cartoons are trite, most Hallmark cards are trite. Every fat guy, hot wife sitcom is trite (and those I’m sure were produced by guys). Most romantic comedies, every Adam Sandler movie except Punch Drunk Love, Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kincaid paintings, and every single commercial ever made for a household cleaning product are both trite and predictable. A woman showing images of herself in dominant, sexual positions over a doll of herself is not trite. It’s disturbing, and that is why it is successful as a piece of art. It conveys what the artist wanted it to convey.

*I also once a had potential suitor, a fabulously wealthy art collector, call my own work “primitive” as if it were a good thing. I use a lot of the line styles that made men like Matisse and Leger and Klee famous, though I doubt any collector worth their salt would call works by those with penises “primative” unless they also happened to be brown. Which this guy did- he was comparing my work to some of the paintings he had picked up cheap on his last art buying trip to Cuba.

I just got back from SAM and I am head over heels crushing on Preston Singletary and his glass work. Here’s the hottie :Here’s some of the hottie’s work:

I just took some photos of my paintings to email to a friend and since i can’t actually paint at the moment (paint is expensive and I am out of the important colors- like black and white and red, if I painted in nothing but green and lavender I’d be golden)I figured I’d just put up some of my work for y’all to admire.

Red Mary

Red Mary is from a sketch I did for an art class final. We had one hour to run around SAM and do a drawing of anything in the museum. I chose a 16th century wood Italian wood carving of the Virgin Mary that was hung from the ceiling. The statue had you typical passive renaissance Mary face though, and I wanted my Mary to look more like an avenging angel. So when I turned the sketch into a painting- Mary got a makeover.

Swan Mary

This is another painting done from a statue of the Virgin Mary (I was on a theme at the time). The statue’s neck wasn’t quite this contorted and she was much more peaceful looking. I exaggerated the neck and I wanted her to still look a little like she is struggling to be peaceful behind her closed eyelids. I don’t know if I pulled it off exactly.

Head in pencil

This is actually a portrait of my mother, but she hated it. That alone makes it worth keeping. Ha!

Another head- in chalk and conte crayon

This is my sad clown attempt at Picasso style, but I still like him.

No magic words

I did a couple of pieces after the November elections that look like large comics. This one says “I keep trying to come up with some fab political statement to fill this space but there is no magic word to fix the world’s problems. Fuck it all.”

I did another comic (that I can’t take pics of because it is hung awkwardly in a stairwell) to welcome back all those folks who swung their votes to the left in November. Let’s just say I am not as forgiving of their past misdeeds (Hello Roberts court) as I might be.

Hands of the puppeteer-1929

Tina Modotti has to have one of the most interesting stories in art. She was born in Italy but she lived in Austria, San Francisco, Spain, Russia, France and Mexico. She spoke 5 or 6 languages fluently. She started out as an actress and model and described her profession as “men”. She was a photographer, spy, revolutionary and a romantic. She was absolutely my kind of girl.

Mexico became her adopted home and she was the photographer of choice for murals by people like Diego Rivera. Sadly, she was forced out of Mexico after her boyfriend, a fellow communist, was gunned down in the street while she watched. The police tried to put suspicion on her. She gave up photography for political activism and was dispatched by Moscow on secret missions throughout Europe, including working in Spain against the Fascists.

Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle-1927

She returned to Mexico under an assumed name and died of mysterious heart problems. She is at the beginning of photography as an art instead of just a documenting media. Her images show beauty and grace in mundane objects. Her photograph of telephone wires is one of my favorite examples of minimalism.

Telephone wires-1925