speaking of

"Nonprofit culture fosters an array of mind-killing practices. Brainstorming on butcher paper and the..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:00:33 -0400

“Nonprofit culture fosters an array of mind-killing practices. Brainstorming on butcher paper and the use of break out groups are effective methods for generating and collecting ideas and or organizing pieces of a larger action. However when used to organize political discussions these nonprofit tools can be disastrous. More often than not, everybody says some thing, break out groups report back to the whole group, lists are complied - and nothing really happens.”

- From “Action Will Be Taken”: Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents by Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti

Philippe Parreno Speech Bubbles 1997 Mylar ballons, helium

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:00:29 -0400

Philippe Parreno
Speech Bubbles
1997
Mylar ballons, helium

"Freedom is understood in these accounts beyond the liberal model of an individual possession,..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:00:23 -0400

“Freedom is understood in these accounts beyond the liberal model of an individual possession, something that emanates from the sovereign will and guards its independence such that, to quote a familiar formulation, ‘‘over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’’ (Mill 1986, 16). Instead, freedom is seen as a practice, not a possession, a process rather than a goal. Whether it is drawn from the simultaneously creative and destructive qualities of the will to power in Brown’s Nietzschean analysis, or from the inaugural and disordering capacities of human action in Zerilli’s Arendtian account, freedom emerges in these texts as a double-sided phenomenon. It is depicted, on the one hand, as an antidisciplinary practice—that is, to use Brown’s formulation, as ‘‘a permanent struggle against what will other- wise be done to and for us’’ (1995, 25). But there is more to it: freedom is also a creative practice, what Zerilli describes as a collective practice of world building and Brown characterizes in terms of a desire ‘‘to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life,’’ a longing ‘‘to generate futures together rather than navigate or survive them’’ (1995, 4). Freedom thus depends on collective action rather than individual will, and this is what makes it political. Though freedom is, by this account, a relational practice, it is not a zero-sum game in which the more one has, the less another can enjoy. Freedom considered as a matter of individual self-determination or self-sovereignty is reduced to a solipsistic phenomenon. Rather, as a world-building practice, freedom is a social—and hence necessarily political—endeavor.”

- From the introduction to The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

soulhospital: Contingent - Eva Hesse,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:00:21 -0400

soulhospital:

Contingent - Eva Hesse, 1969.

Minimalism/Installation - Cheesecloth, latex and fibreglass, 350 x 630 x 109 cm.

Permanent Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Carel Willink, Girl in Renaissance costume.

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:21 -0400

Carel Willink, Girl in Renaissance costume.

Crying in Art, Part 85 Workshop of Dieric Bouts Netherlandish,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:04:57 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 85

Workshop of Dieric Bouts
Netherlandish, c. 1410–1475

Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowing Virgin), 1480/1500

Oil on panel
38.7 x 30.3 cm (15 1/4 x 11 7/8 in.); painted surface: 37.2 x 29 cm (14 7/8 x 11 3/8 in.)

Crying in Art, Part 84 Tracey Emin It’s Not Me That’s Crying...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:04:48 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 84

Tracey Emin
It’s Not Me That’s Crying It’s My Soul

Crying in Art, Part 83 Tom Otterness Crying Giant,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:04:24 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 83

Tom Otterness
Crying Giant, 2002
bronze
132 (H) x 78 (L) x 173 (W) inches
335.28 x 198.12 x 439.42 cm
photo by Mark Luttrell

Crying in Art, Part 82 RICHARD WENTWORTH (B. 1947) DRY CRYING

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:04:21 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 82

RICHARD WENTWORTH (B. 1947)
DRY CRYING

is it okay if i screenshot your ask about the crying in art series and put it on my tumblr? needless to say: i love the series.

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:26:09 -0400

Sure!

Crying in Art, Part 81 The Crying Space – a permanent...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:10 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 81

The Crying Space – a permanent installation by Eric Andersen

Tears and crying are the pivotal points and the theme of the installation to be found in the green room. According to the artist, tears are the only human means of communication which cannot be decoded right away. Tears indicate that something important is happening but not what or how. Tears can thus be shed because of anger, pain, sorrow, surprise, confusion, remembrance, love, joy, consensus, the wind or for no reason at all. In The Crying Space the guests are invited inside to shed their tears together and in public. And, according to the artist, there is plenty to cry over in a culture where crying has long since become taboo.

The Crying Space contains various objects and effects which can stimulate the visitors’ need to cry. Apart from the nine crying stones, made especially out of Verona marble shaped as elliptical stones, each with two indentations for tears, there are a pair of scissors, some needles, feathers – and a chilli waiting to be chopped. Furthermore, there is an accompanying sound picture made of recordings of professional mourners. Crying always contains a substance and leaves traces. The minerals of the tears will influence the crystals of the marble when they fall on the stones. The elliptically shaped crying stones may therefore change their structures because of the visitors’ tears. This may be seen as an extension of Eric Andersen’s whole experimental artistic practice in which the inclusion of an active audience plays an important part.

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

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:32:00 -0400

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 BakkerUntitled Project: Gift Card [Des...

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:44:00 -0400

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...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:00:33 -0400

Torture

Afro Boy

The Rapture

Nucular (sic)

Crying in Art, Part 80

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

Spent 15 minutes today gossiping with my therapist about Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book and all...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:05:44 -0400

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...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:00:15 -0400

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...

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:02:45 -0400

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,...

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:15:18 -0400

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...

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:04:38 -0400

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 +...

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:30:16 -0400

Crying in Art, Part 77

RUSSELL YOUNG
MARILYN CRYING (CREAM + SUICIDE PINK)