Famous Costumes, Famous Birds.

So, I admit it. I watch movies for the costumes. But I've actually never seen "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues," just read the Tom Robbins book of the same title. And when you google "Uma Thurman, Crane Costume" this is the ONLY image you get that actually fits the description. You'd think this movie never got made. And how could this not be a famous costume?

However, we do have a sandhill crane event happening around here. They generally fly over in the spring and fall- high black birds you hear more than see, and only if you are lucky enough to be out. But instead, because of the odd spring weather (?), they have been hanging out. You can hear their garbles almost anytime you're outside, which is amazingly comforting, as well as watch their incredibly awkward landings in fallow fields right next to the road.

The pelicans have also recently arrived, the magpies are looking resplendent and the goldfinches are mostly done with the moult. Must be, Must be, Must be spring at last! There are swallows, dammit! Finally!

Anyway, back to the readings, and hence why these musings are relevant.

I read "Even Cowgirls" as well as a lot of hippie fiction (back when I used to have time to read fiction) in high school. As such, I got a very jovial introduction to a lot of fairly serious and also some very not serious topics, (specifically race, gender, body image, animal's rights, sexuality, the environmental movement, mental health, reproductive rights, pharma fun, etc.) basically through 4 white male writers - Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. And, honestly, I don't think they did a bad job of exposing me to the adult world I was about to enter. All their characters are complex, sympathetic, passionate and, more than anything, they are diverse. Especially with Tom Robbins and John Irving, it almost seems like they try to take as many outsiders as possible and throw them into an unpredictable situation. Very infrequently is there a true "evil" component to any character, everyone is believably motivated.

I also read Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and August Wilson, but they just weren't as much fun. They were kinda preachy, and I just don't like preachy. Also, their characters weren't as, well, diverse as I was interested in at the time. They told a cultural tale, but without the same joyous pizazz, and thus didn't hold my interest.

So, I take some issue when people tell me that the reason I'm not as interested in the African American Experience as I should be (Talking Back, Bell Hooks, Race and Representation, Maurice Berger, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Audre Lorde), or that I should appreciate the rants and raves of people because they have a different cultural background than I do. It's not the background I have a problem with, it's the approach.

I glimpsed Bill Cosby talking about Trayvon Martin yesterday on CNN. I'm far more interested in studying Bill Cosby than any of the readings we had to do. His records were brilliant at talking about the horrors of growing up Black in the 40s and 50s. Maybe he can't talk about being a lesbian writer, but he certainly talked about talking back. He certainly could poke fun at the ridiculousness of the white ideal body, not to mention the bizarre idea of male superiority.

Anyway, yadda yadda! there's the tropes du jour!

minimalism, means, minh-ha

thought some Benglis vs. Morris was in order! Just in case you haven't seen these in awhile!

So, apparently I have all the readings out of order, and now am basically just going at them at random...

Minimalism and Biography- Anna C. Chave, Art Bulletin, March 2000. (we made it to this century!)

Critical Reflections- Trinh T. Minh-ha, Art forum, Summer 1990.

The means of Correct Training, from Discipline and Punish, the birth of the prison by Michel Foucault, 1975.

Minimalism and biography- which could have been titled "Who slept with Morris? And their general effects on minimalism as a result, with tangential discussions of Eva Hesse and Carl Andre." I'm not making this up! You get to the end of the article, and the description of the author is as follows "Chave has authored studies...and numerous articles concerned with how modern and abstract art...may be sexually and ideologically inscribed." Actually, the insight that minimalist sculptures are really just set pieces for performance art is worth the whole article.

I had the great experience a couple of years ago of going to the Judd retrospective at the Tate Modern late night. The guards encouraged us (there were very few of us there) to view each other in relation to the minimalist pieces at hand. To look through the metal tubes and around the wall projections. As a result I always want to get right up to minimalist works, which are now protected by lasers in just about every gallery. Boo hiss!

Side Note- on our recent road trip my mom and I created a new game "Public Art? or Building Debris?" It's great, you should try it some time.

Ok, onto Minh-ha- Really enjoyed this piece, possibly because it's only 2 pages (?). It's another article about just how far we've come- yeah, I know white men still rule the world, but I don't know anyone who can get away with not engaging with the African-American woman experience now. Do we have a great big thank you to say to Oprah? It's tough for me to imagine anyone being overt enough to say that any experience isn't valid. Ain't life grand?

And then there's Foucault. What an odd reading- Why are we reading about the history of prisons, exactly? Are galleries prisons? I now have a crush on the word "reduplicate." Anyway, this one is dense and, well, not my cup of tea. But thanks to having a friend in the car willing to joke about penile colonies, I've now muddled through. And may you all!

ok, off to enjoy the Seattle nightlife. Believe I'm now attending a benefit for a bike shop...

B(r)easts of Nochlin

Way back before we had to have a blog for grad, I had my personal blog where I wrote about the readings for Stuart Steck's class(I think I used to care more). Anyway, if anyone is interested in checking those out- http://sequinnerdecanard.blogspot.com/

Musee d'Orsay, A Symposium- Linda Nochlin, Art in America, January 1988
sub- The Beauties and the Beasts: Outdoor Sculpture at the Orsay

Actually enjoyed the historical (by default) and hopeful analysis by Nochlin (not too trope, pretty general discourse). But what I really found interesting was the side bar we weren't assigned about the outdoor sculptures. If you want to see more of the detail shots of the 6 continents dressed as women, try wikimedia commons (( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Valued_image_candidates/The_statues_of_the_six_continents,_Mus%C3%A9e_d%27Orsay. ))

I wonder if anyone has ever done a census of how many sculptures of women in Paris have their breasts bared. I'm sure it's more common than not. What is sort of impressive to me is how similar all the breasts are- very conical and set fairly low on the chest, perhaps with the exception of Africa's, which really just has extremely pronounced nipples and an odd substructure garment. In the era before implants, it's impressive to me that there was still such a homogeneous nature to idealized boobs.

Speaking of im-plants- That rhinoceros is traipsing through the botanical gardens! Those 2 plants do not grow in the same place. I also like that a monkey has caught the baby elephant. And what is that harrow doing under that horse?

Hope we can keep the sidebars coming!

Going Native, etc

Yup, I'm taking notes on the semester readings-

Going Native- Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Art in America, July, 1989
Matisse in Morocco: A Colonizing Esthetic? Roger Benjamin, Art in America, 1990
Critical Reflections- Johnathon Crary, Art forum International, Feb. 1994
Resonance and Wonder- Stephen Greenblatt, 1990


So, these are the articles (plus a little bit of one other) that my mother managed to read aloud on the 10 hour road trip we just took together. Now, some of that was because of snow (where I, as the driver, had to not be rolling my eyes), but a lot of it was because of moaning (on both our parts.) Now, my mother is one of the smartest people I know, and she has seen most of the works in question. She has visited the Musee D'Orsay approximately twice as many times as I have. She reads the New York Times Arts section nearly weekly, gets the New Yorker even though we live on the other side of the country, and, above all, she cares. She likes Matisse, she just visited Turkey,and she has an avid interest in artifacts. And the readings, even the ones that sound "fun" were mostly a bit of an outdated drag. (Oh, and ironically she had to read to me on approximately the same stretch of road 6 years ago for undergrad, in a class on, apparently, exactly the same topic). Did I mention she's a Literature and French Language teacher? She knows big words in 2 different languages.

Anyway, these are listed in descending order thus far.

Going Native: I have no idea why it's supposed to be relevant for me to be reading about an exhibit, let alone an exhibition catalog, I wouldn't have been able to see 23 years ago, of an artist I have never been able to relate to, who was active over 100 years ago. Is anyone else nostalgic for world's fairs it could be assumed we were all influenced by because we lived in the same proximity? In an era where we were informed in Stuart Steck's class that prostitutes and mixed-age sexual relations were commonplace, are we really supposed to be shocked by Gauguin's behavior? Yes, people were lewd. People are always lewd. What I think is considered especially interesting about this piece was that anyone ever took Gauguin's writings about anything seriously. He was a washed up painter speculating on a quickly atrophying island culture, and anyone paying attention in anthropological circles at the time would have known that. Shame on the people who bought his paintings, but I find it hard to shame him for having flooded the market with piffle. (Actually- there's an exhibit of his works up in Seattle, which I have been wanting to see. I have no problem enjoying sexy native chicks in muumuus. And that it's showing to great fan fair in Seattle, a city which has a significant Pacific Islander population, (Washington being in the top 5 states for Pacific Islander populations) is particularly interesting)

Matisse in Morocco- So, leaving aside my general annoyance (from 1990? Painter active in 19tweens?), I think the author's desire to have Matisse be the exploiter is a little harsh. If I go to Greece in search of Greek subjects how is that different from me going to my back yard and painting back yard subjects? Clearly Matisse had reasons to be interested in Morocco, and who could blame him? Morocco is and was interesting. Exploring is fun. Showing people new ideas from foreign lands has always been a way to make money, and continues to be today. Call it "cultural awareness," if ya like. Getting Islamic women to take of their Moorish attire is something we almost consider heroic today (think of how we were "liberating" women from their burkas in Afghanistan at the beginning of our most recent conflict). How is he being exploitative here, and not later when he makes his chapel? Hogwash!

Ok, I liked the Resonance and Wonder chapters. If you were going to skip stuff in the readings this semester, this would not be one to skip, because it is truly lovely writing. Very few tropes eschewing discoursive blahdeblah- real words, well placed. But then I found it more fascinating to see Bukowski's typewriter, wine glass and eyeglasses and to remember the impact of his poems on me, than to actually stand and reread the hand-printed impressions that lined the walls of the Huntington. Anyway, especially liked the anecdotes about the Coke stand and also the Marcel Proust vase. See, now you have to read the article, with those tantalizing leaders...

And lastly, Critical Reflections, a lovely speculative work about the internet. It's good to be reminded that we really couldn't have predicted Facebook or the Arab Spring. I really do think cell-phones have made the world a better place, even if i still have my doubts about virtual reality being virtuous reality. Thank goodness Steve Jobs had a lot more impact on reality than this guy.

What a productive vacation I had!