theerrand asked: hey I really like your "crying in art" series. is it something you're doing just for the blog or an outside project?

The project started when I came across Hayley Newman’s Crying Glasses (An Aid to Melancholia). I’d seen that piece before, but something about it really affected me this time. I think it’s because I’ve really run the gamut emotionally over this past year. Though I’ve mostly retreated from (and deleted) this, people who have checked out my tumblr for a while will probably remember that in the past I was doing far fewer art posts and more crazy bitch self-destructive blogging (and I truly don’t intend for that characterization to be misconstrued as criticism).

I was dealing with the aftershocks of trauma and finding that I didn’t know how to express my emotions ‘properly’ or ‘appropriately.’ I refused to believe that what I was going through was private or even possible to extricate from ‘the public.’ Crying felt too personal and isolated, and my anger was such that I wanted everyone to understand how they were implicated in what I was experiencing. Not that everyone had done bad things to me, but that my life, and my feelings, felt far more social than I had quite figured out how to express.

Newman’s piece reminded me of the public and performative components of crying. Crying can be a confrontation, intervention, or a demand. As a social psychology nerd, I started thinking through the interpersonal and symbolic interactional elements of crying.

For a while I’ve been interested in thinking about and working through the possibilities and limitations of performing affective politics through tumblr and other forms of widely available social media. That is, what does it mean to perform and communicate emotions? What is the relationship between blogger/writer/creator and an anonymous audience, or a semi-anonymous audience, or with the internet as a sort of endless mirror and self-making tool? How can we conceptualize ourselves as constitutive of and implicated in larger systems of oppression and/or relations of power?
Basically, see: feminist narcissism as first developed by karaj.tumblr.com, feminist thought on silence and voice, l’écriture féminine, the ‘confessional’ impulse, Sarah Ahmed, call out culture and claims to privacy, etc.

While this was my starting point, I quickly discovered that I was also interested in the variety of forms crying can take both visually and emotionally. This, combined with my love of obsessive research, led to the unofficial project I’ve been playing with here. I think I’ll leave it at that for now, because I don’t feel capable of communicating much more. I’m still forming my own thoughts (which are weighed down by my complete ignorance of art history/theory/scholarship and my rather unshakeable gut feeling that I don’t have a ‘right’ to have thoughts about art). Also, I just wrote way too much because I don’t know how to express myself outside of a ramble.

untitledprojects:

Conrad Bakker
Untitled Project: Gift Card [Des Moines Art Center][$100]
oil on carved wood, 2007

Crying in Art, Part 80

Torture, Afro Boy, The Rapture and Nucular (sic) from Jill Greenberg’s series End Times.

(Source: kopeikingallery.com)

Spent 15 minutes today gossiping with my therapist about Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book and all of the neighbors, businesses, and locations it references by name. It’s amazingly hyper-specific, down to the local landscaping business and street by street directions to her old house (where Shirley Jackson also used to live).

I don’t know anything about the details of her actual personal life, but I do know enough to recognize that the non-emotional and psychological specifics are exact mirrors of her own life, with no attempt at changing names or details, which is why it’s pretty fantastic that she expresses frustration in interviews that people interpret See Now Then as a thinly disguised autobiography.

I’m totally fine with accepting her word that the emotional and psychological components are complete works of fiction. But it seems silly to not incorporate some analysis of the role of her own life in thinking through the book, even as just providing a setting and starting point for her fiction. Plus, even if everything was strictly non-fiction it wouldn’t detract from any stylistic merit or power of the writing. I don’t know, I still can’t decide if I generally like the book yet anyway.

Crying in Art, Part 79

Kiki Smith (American, born Germany 1954)

Pool of Tears 2 (after Lewis Carroll)

Date:2000Medium:Etching, aquatint, and drypoint with watercolor additionsDimensions:plate: 47 1/2 x 71 3/4” (120.7 x 182.3 cm), sheet: 50 13/16 x 74 1/2” (129 x 189.2 cm)Publisher:Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip and Bay Shore, New YorkPrinter:Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip and Bay Shore, New YorkEdition:29

Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions
January 17–May 21, 2007

In her recent work Smith has often turned to fairy tales in search of dramatic female personae and alter egos. The poignant vulnerability of childhood is an underlying theme in many of her images, like this one, based on Lewis Carroll’s manuscript drawings for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1886). The tension between young girls and animals pervades this scene as Alice struggles in a pool of her own tears with the duck, the dodo, and others. In order to represent the animals close to life-size Smith drew on the largest copperplate ULAE’s etching press could accommodate.

SYLVIE FLEURY
Eternal Wow on Shelves (silver), 2007
Polished stainless steel, fiberglass, car paint, 110 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 25 5/8 inches

So clever!

Crying in Art, Part 78

Dana Schutz
Swimming, Smoking, Crying
2009
Oil on canvas; 45 x 48 in.
Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, Gift of Marti and Tony Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation. © Dana Schutz. Image courtesy of the artist and Zach Feuer, New York.

Braided Hate: So in light of the DGR debacle I’ve been thinking a lot about... →

braidedhate:

So in light of the DGR debacle I’ve been thinking a lot about political inconsistencies. And I was wondering what is your favorite personal political inconsistency?

Mine is that though I really crave the idea of not having any kind of personal holding or investment in identity (wish for the destruction of any kind of gender system) or subculture I really love being a girl and insist on punk signifiers and both of those trains of thought are REALLY important to how I interact with the world every day. Which makes me really confused all the time but also informs like every newer thought I take in which in the long run is potentially damaging, I guess. I don’t know. I also don’t care (that’s another part of the inconsistencies).

(This is in no way of course making light of DGR’s bullshit or trying to rationalize any of it. Cause that shit is just redic and MEAN. I just wanna be real that everyone has these major political/personal/cultural chasms)

So yeah, what’s yours?

Crying in Art, Part 77

RUSSELL YOUNG
MARILYN CRYING (CREAM + SUICIDE PINK)

Crying in Art, Part 75

MICHAEL MILLER
#1 Super Cry Baby
2007 
Acrylic on canvas
87 1/8 x 77 1/4 inches

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of Bettie Cartwright and Colin Kennedy, Martin B. McNamara, John Wilcox, Scott D. Guffey, and George Morton and Karol Howard

Arts of North America

ABOUT
Always alive to the play of text and image, Michael Miller borrows his imagery from clip-art sources on the Internet; he also embraces logos, advertising slogans, and tabloid headlines. He then renders this material freehand. Using devices borrowed from graphic design, Miller gives his compositions an additional commercial gloss and punch. #1 Super Cry Baby is a masterly display of these strategies and techniques.

Painted over an earlier canvas titled Go, from 2001, #1 Super Cry Baby is one of Miller’s most personal paintings. Surviving from the first stage of the composition are the stripes on the left margin, as well as the floral pattern of the original canvas. The painting is transformed, however, by new layers of text and images, as well as by the addition of a higher-keyed palette. The smiling face (based on a suntan-lotion logo) at upper left, the words of the title, the long-stemmed mushrooms (noxiously hued and cloyingly cute), the subscript “idol,” and the hauntingly silhouetted mangrove tree that casts an ominous presence over the patriotic red-white-and-blue ground, come together in a manic celebration of received ideas.