Sophianotloren

(Warning: Hugo neepery, possibly the last of the season. Avoid if you don’t care.)

It’s late, and I’m experiencing a bit of insomnia, so, hello, now that I’m home, here are some disjointed thoughts about the Hugo results and the post-award freakout about them that the Puppies appear to be having at the moment.

1. What did the 2015 Hugos teach us? Well, basically that slates are the fucking kiss of death, Hugo-wise. If you create them, it kills your credibility with the voters; if you’re on them, it kills your chances of winning — indeed, it kills your chances of winding up above “No Award,” unless you happen to be a movie that grossed $775 million worldwide. The moral of the story really is: Slates! Not even once!

Have the various Puppies learned this very simple and obvious lesson? Apparently not, since the response from those quarters appears to be “We just didn’t slate hard enough! We’ll be back next year and we’ll slate even harder!” Which, well, you know. Bless their hearts.

The Puppies’ problem is that, inasmuch as everyone now knows being on a slate is a hard and fast ride south of the “No Award” line, it will be very difficult for them to find anyone who is genuinely award-caliber who would want to be on their future slates. My understanding is the Sad Puppies, at least, plan to solve this problem by not actually alerting their future sub-No Award victims that they’re going to be on the slate before the slate is announced. Given what we know of the results of slating at this point, if they go ahead and follow through on this plan, it’ll be a monumental asshole move on their part.

2. The Puppies continue to appear genuinely flummoxed that the Hugo voters rejected everything and everyone they slated (except Guardians of the Galaxy, which as previously noted they can hardly take credit for), arguing on one memorable occasion that if The Three Body Problem, the eventual best novel Hugo winner, had been on the slates, it would have finished below “No Award,” thus proving the bankruptcy of voting for “No Award” in the first place.

This is a bit like saying that if the person who didn’t get on the bus you then proceeded to drive off a cliff were on the bus, they would probably be dead now — it’s trivially true, but misses the point that you drove the bus off the cliff. The Puppies knew that slating was anathema to the large mass of Hugo voters — they had a dry run the year before, proffering a limited slate with Sad Puppies 2, and saw their nominees largely finish in fifth place or below “No Award” — but they did it anyway and now want to be shocked, shocked that their antics predictably resulted in their nominees doing very poorly indeed.

The going line in those quarters at the moment is that the blanket “No Award” just proves the Hugo Awards are corrupt. Well, no, that’s stupid. What the blanket “No Award” judgment shows is that the large mass of Hugo voters don’t like people trying to game the system for their own reasons that are largely independent of actual quality of work. In the Sad Puppy case the reasons were to vent anger and frustration at having not been given awards before, and for Brad Torgersen to try to boost his own profile as a tastemaker by nominating his pals (with a few human shields thrown in). In the Rabid Puppy case it was because Vox Day is an asshole who likes being an asshole to other people. And in both cases there was a thin candy shell of “Fuck the SJWs” surrounding the whole affair.

The shorter version of the above: You can’t game the system and then complain that people counteracting your gaming of the system goes to show the system is gamed. Or you can, but no one is obliged to take you seriously when you do.

3. And did the Puppy nominees deserve better than to be consistently slated below “No Award”? Surely some of them did, in my opinion. I myself put several slated nominees above “No Award” because, consistent with my stated philosophy on these things, I thought they were deserving nominees and I didn’t want to penalize them simply because they were (largely) being used as unwilling pawns by jerks. But as I’ve also said elsewhere, voting against all the slated nominees was a perfectly valid action, if you believe slating is in itself inherently inimical to the Hugo awarding process. It turns out a lot of people decided that was a thing they needed to do.

And yes, that sucked for a number of nominees who got put on the slates either unawares or not fully briefed on the heavily-politicized aspects of the slate (not to mention the fact that they would also in many cases be unwittingly associated with the bigoted shitheel who used the Sad Puppy slate like a parasitic wasp uses the hollowed-out husk of a tarantula). They deserved better than to be used, and I hope many of them realize that their ranking below “No Award” was not a reflection on them personally, but was instead a referendum on the mechanism of slating for the award. Many of them deserved to be Hugo nominees for their work, and I suspect they will be again, although hopefully not on a slate.

(But then there were the ones who didn’t deserve to be Hugo nominees, in my opinion, and/or the ones who were just assholes regarding the awards, the people voting for them and the entire process. With regard to these folks, fuck ’em. I didn’t have a problem in the slightest ranking them below “No Award,” and I won’t have a problem doing it again, should they ever slime their way back onto the ballot.)

4. With the exception of Vox Day and a few of his pals, who were just straight-up assholes, I feel a small bit of pity for the Puppies. I don’t think they actually knew what they wanted out of this whole mess, and I still don’t think they know. Yes, they can vomit up astounding amounts of wounded verbiage about SJWs and conspiracies and blue collar cracking good tales with their nuggety nugget-ness or whatever. But their love-hate act with the Hugos and everyone one else voting on them was just incoherent. It didn’t help that pretty much every argument they offered for their slating action was shoddily-constructed and easily disprovable, based largely on conspiracy thinking or assertions that could have their feet kicked out from under them by a trip to Wikipedia. Which didn’t keep them from offering them over and over. Epistemic closure was not the Puppies’ friend.

In the end, the meat of the Sad Puppy argument was “Brad wants to nominate his friends so let’s fix that and we do mean fix,” and the meat of the Rabid Puppy argument was “Ha ha ha fuck you and also buy Castalia House product oh God I’m still a failure in life aren’t I.” These arguments were painfully obvious, and not easily swept aside by the interrelated Puppy camps’ poor arguments or resentment-laden rhetoric. This is why, aside from the fundamental problems with slating, which were considerable, very few people outside the Puppy camps were persuaded by them.

5. And also, you know. The Puppies acted like jerks the whole way through, which is another, uh, questionable tactic. Look: even if the Puppies weren’t largely slating friends and/or work from their own publishing houses, and then trying to justify those choices by creating a conspiracy of liberals arrayed against them, the fact that largely every bit of rhetoric coming out of their quarters could best be described as “high screech attack” was not going to make them friends with the general Hugo voting electorate, and isn’t making them friends in the aftermath, either.

What’s the deal? Vox Day is a grasping sociopath, in my opinion, so that’s that. But the rest of them? It’s been suggested that in the case of Brad Torgersen, at least, this is an intentional career move, being unpleasant to “liberals” (which in this case seems to mean anyone outside the Puppy camp) to help lock in a conservative audience. And, I guess, maybe? But I know a lot of conservatives — no, really — and as a class they have no higher percentage of jerk among them than does any other political stripe. Catering to the conservative jerk audience seems like aiming fairly low. And in any event, I don’t see the Puppy phenomenon as really being about conservatism so much as being about other things, with conservatism (or reactionary nonsense) thrown on top to mask and/or justify the actions.

But other people were jerks to the Puppies! you might say. Well yes, many people were. But those people were not attempting to argue for the validity of slating or of specific nominees to a vast number of voters. Leaving aside the schoolyard logic of “they were mean too,” it’s not actually smart, when you are trying to convince people to take your slate and nominees seriously, to shit all over them and the awards they care about, for months on end. They should try not doing that. That’s, like, basic marketing.

6. That said, I think it’s too late to change the Puppy brand. This was the third year of the campaign and the second year that it incorporated Vox Day, bigot — and the year that Vox Day actually ended up controlling the Puppy brand and using it for his own goals, much to the unconvincing, backtracking “he’s not with us” surprise of the Sads. Now when the general population thinks of “Puppies” in the context of the Hugos, sad or rabid, they’re thinking of bigoted self-promoters pushing questionable work. Is that fair? It’s totally fair to some of the Puppies, not to others, and far less fair to the people who might be put on the slates in future years without their knowledge or against their will.

And again: Who on Earth at this point would choose to be on a Hugo slate? Either people who crave a nomination by any means necessary, which is tantamount to admitting one cannot get on the ballot any other way, or people who want to get on the slate only to block other people from being on the slate. In other words: The talentless and the assholes. Anyone who wants an actual shot at the award will do their damnedest to stay off a slate — any slate, but especially a Puppy slate, which now has a certain whiff of anger, resentment and most of all failure about it.

7. Will the primary Puppies suffer for their participation in slating? In terms of selling books, I suspect not. The vast majority of book readers neither know nor care about the inside pool of the Hugo Awards and apparently contrary to some beliefs, no author has sole claim over their readers. The overlap in readership between me and Larry Correia, for example, is probably not trivial, and it would be silly for either of us to claim those readers as “ours” exclusively, or to expect them to know or care about any of this. Likewise the very silly attempt to paint Baen and Tor as opposing camps, which again most readers don’t know about and wouldn’t care about even if they did (also, the recent attempt by the Puppies to claim Dragon*Con as their home turf seems, well, ambitious). Will Brad and Larry lose readers who might otherwise have given them a shot? Sure. And so will I, and as will a few other writers too. We’ll also gain some readers. Overall it’ll be wash.

Reputations among fandom? Well, it’s pretty clear that the fandom that votes for Hugos, at least, is not pleased with the Puppies. But in this matter the Puppies are correct: The Worldcon-attending fans are only a small slice of fandom in general. There is lots of fandom, and audience, to go around. Contrary to some heightened rhetoric out there, it seems very unlikely that anyone’s being run out of town on a rail, no matter how much being run out of town might fulfill their persecution complex.

8. So what happens next year with the Hugos? Well, the Puppies have already declared that they will be back, so there’s that. The difference between next year and this last one, however, is the nearly 6,000 people who voted for the Hugos, only a small minority of which are Puppy-affiliated. If next year’s Worldcon folks are doing their job, they’ll attempt to make sure a sizable portion of this year’s voters will nominate next year as well, in all categories. The more people who nominate, the less successful slating by anyone will be, including the Puppies. And I expect people are motivated to nominate next year in any event.

So, while I expect slating, I don’t expect slates to dominate categories like they did this year. I suspect we’ll see a couple of nominations in each category being slate nominations, with the rest hitting the ballot by normal means. I likewise expect that slated nominees will continue to be punished, although possibly not to the extent of this year. I imagine at least one of the “anti-slating” proposals will be enacted for 2017, which should cut down on this specific nonsense, but don’t kid yourself that it will reduce gaming the system entirely. I expect the Puppies will continue to grump about how awful everyone else is to them, because they like feeling, evidence to the contrary, that they are being persecuted for something (aside from being jerks, that is).

Which is not to say people should relax about this. Hell, no. If you have a the ability, then nominate, damn you. In every category.

9. On a personal note, it’s been observed that if the Puppy slate nominees had not been around, my novel Lock In would have made the Hugo ballot this year. People have been curious if I feel like I was cheated out of a rightful spot in the limelight.

In a word: No. For one thing, I’m not sure you can say that if there was no Puppy campaign that all the categories would have sussed out exactly as they would if you simply eliminate the Puppy nominees. Also, I think it’s possible that some Puppy nominees could have gotten onto the ballot on their own steam — in the novel category Chuck Gannon has been nominated for a Nebula two times running, so I think he could have had a decent chance at the Hugo. Likewise Annie Bellet and Kary English I think might have made splashes under their own power (as examples). So I don’t see it as a given I would have been on the final ballot, regardless.

For another thing, dudes, I already have a Best Novel Hugo. One of the nice things about having one of those is that it takes the pressure off, you know? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t mind getting some more Hugo nominations, and it’s always nice to take home the hardware. But if I never win another Hugo in my life I am fine. I have three, including the one (fairly or unfairly) considered “the big one.” I’m good.

Note my sanguine feelings about not making the ballot are not necessarily shared by others who finished under the cutoff, who might feel that otherwise they’d have been nominees. But for myself, meh.

10. As a final note, while I am opposed to slating, and I think the whining and self-justification and more than occasional spite that foamed out of the Puppy camp was and is childish and silly, I am 100% behind the idea that people who believe that the type of science fiction or fantasy they love is not represented at the Hugos, should participate in and vote for the awards. They should do it like everyone else does, which is to say, by voting their own choices, not the choices of someone else who has constructed a slate of nominees for reasons.

If every Puppy did that rather than voted a slate, you’d not hear a peep out of me. Their ballots would reflect their own individual tastes, which might not be mine (although you never know!), but you know what? That’s fine. Honestly, it is.

Ditch the slate, vote your taste. Really, it’s just that simple.

It has often been said that writing about art is like dancing about architecture. Nearly as often, it has also then been said: But I’m going to do it anyway. Whether or not the dance analogy captures all the futilities and elations of the endeavor, writing about art, experience proves, is an activity unlikely to abate. Indeed, as art’s institutional and popular reach has grown ever more expansive in the early 21st century, the proliferation of adjunct written discourses has perhaps never been greater. When everyone is an artist, everyone is also eventually pressed into service as an art writer.

Of course, just as not every artist is a good artist, not every art writer is a good or even serviceable art writer. Both enterprises require more than simply the latent human capacity for creativity or critical thought; they require training, experience, and great quantities of effort and consideration. But the quippish dance analogy misleads by suggesting that the futility of art writing derives from a fundamental incommensurability between language and image, rather than from lack of chops on the part of the writer. Plenty of art writing may seek to clarify and exhilarate, but the problem remains that expertise in art doesn’t guarantee facility in writing.

Gilda Williams’s admirably practical and instructive 2014 primer, How to Write About Contemporary Art, addresses this and other art writing disparities. “As the readership swells and the need for communicative art-writing skyrockets,” she laments in her introduction, “much contemporary art-writing remains barely comprehensible.” Good art writing, she emphasizes repeatedly, begins with good art-knowledge; however, because “art writing is among this industry’s poorest paid jobs, […] fairly advanced art-writing tasks are [often] assigned to its least experienced and recognized members.” Williams argues, compellingly, that this structural incongruity accounts for much of the “indecipherable art-speak” that rankles readers of art writing rather than, as is commonly supposed, a bent for pretentious mystification on the part of art world insiders.

Accessible, well-organized, and example-rich, How to Write provides a welcome refresher course for writers who might not have known they need one. Most how-to books about art writing are pitched toward students, but Williams tilts hers more toward early career arts professionals, who occupy the sweet spot of knowing just enough about art and about writing — but not so much — that they’re liable to get themselves into trouble. She relies on the catch-all convenience of the term “art writer” over more specific terms like critic, blogger, historian, gallerist, or journalist, and the book’s ambit reflects the term’s capaciousness. Structured into three sections — “Why Write about Contemporary Art,” “How to Write about Contemporary Art,” and “How to Write Contemporary Art Formats” — the book contains material that will be relevant to newer art writers whatever their particular concerns.

More experienced writers will also pick up pointers, or at least reminders, about craft, such as Williams’s injunction against what she calls “yeti’s”: “Janus-faced” descriptive waffles such as “bold yet subtle” and “comforting yet disquieting.” Craft-focused points such as this are illustrated through an abundance of excerpted examples, sixty-four in total, including the penultimate chapter’s brilliant conceit to compare the workings of multiple short texts, each in a different genre, about Sarah Morris. And the book’s opening sections, which consider the wherefores and whys of art writing, in particular a lively overview of “where art criticism came from,” serve as sanguine reminders of why we look at and write about art in the first place. All told, the book can act as a smelling salt for the already-initiated: what had been routinized becomes conscious and newly compelling. Like good art, the book, however basic, inspires you to want to write your own criticism.

Williams clearly loves the craft of criticism (which she helpfully groups under the category of “evaluative” art writing, in contradistinction to “explanatory” art writing such as press releases and wall texts). Rather than rag on examples of unfortunate critical prose, a cheap and pessimistic spectator sport, she smartly confines her excerpted examples to writing she admires, even adores. Criticism, it hardly needs be said, is not often adored. It typically gets regarded in the same way as sports officiating: taken for granted when it does its job well, scorned when it makes a mistake. Considerations of criticism as a craft in its own right, and not just a pawn on the chessboard of artistic fame, are therefore most welcome. “Writing that attempts to match art’s own dare,” Williams calls it, inspired.

Of all the art criticism that inspires Williams, she is most excited by writing that takes risks, critico-fiction in particular. A hybrid of criticism and fiction that aspires to the status of art in its own right, critico-fiction is a recently named genre that includes art writing tour de forces such as Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997), Lynne Tillman’s This Is Not It (2002), and Raphael Rubinstein’s The Miraculous (2014), among others. More than any other art writing genre, critico-fiction most resembles a dance about architecture in that the work of art, its ostensible subject, is more a jumping off point for the writer’s own flights of fancy than an object of sustained description and analysis. Indeed, you could say that critico-fiction takes the descriptive difficulties of art writing as its animating condition: if ekphrasis always falls short of the actual experience of the artwork, why bother with description at all, why not dance, ecstatically, instead.

Still, for all its ecstasies, critico-fiction seems a tad too narrow a label for the kind of adventurous art writing Williams has in mind, given that she also admires performative art writing that is non-fictional in nature, such as the lyric rhapsodies of Wayne Koestenbaum or the more fantastical strains of “philosophy [that exists] at the intersection of art and literature.” Calling the genre something like creative criticism would be more usefully inclusive.

Whatever you want to call the genre, the fascinating thing about its role in the book is that, in the midst of object lessons about the ABCs of criticism, Williams alludes, again and again, and beamingly, to this master class of imaginative art writing. “The finest examples [of it],” she raves, “can reflect a level of preparation, imaginative thinking, and rigor in writing technique unmatched in more conventional art-writing.” It is far from uncommon for an introductory primer to gesture toward the more advanced topics in the field while acknowledging that their intricacies lie outside the book’s purview. “A hypothetical chapter ‘How to Write Critico-Fiction’,” Williams believes, “would be the art-writing equivalent of ‘How to Make Art’” and, as such, impossible to write.

But it is uncommon for the primer to pine for the undiscussed advanced topic in the way How to Write does. Behind this book about the fundamentals of criticism stands an as-yet unwritten one about a shadow tradition of creative criticism that, protestations of impossibility aside, you get the sense Williams would very much like to write. This ecstatic longing does not detract from How to Write’s back-to-basics focus, but it does reveal that Williams’ sympathies as a critic are as bold as the best art. For her, the reason to master discursive conventions is not simply to communicate better, but also to transcend milquetoast standards of communication.

In Eric Hayot’s excellent 2014 primer, The Elements of Academic Style, discursive mastery is, despite assertions to the contrary, closer to being an end in itself, a game whose rules you must learn so that you can play it with greater acumen, polish, and flair. Subtitled “Writing For The Humanities” but most directly applicable to graduate students and early career professionals in Hayot’s native academic disciplines of literary and cultural studies (though art historians will find plenty of value here, too), the book is a comprehensive, incisive, and staggeringly overdue guide to writing humanistic scholarship, as well as an urgent institutional critique of how writing gets taught in humanities Ph.D. programs. Written in assured, engaging prose, possessed of personality but not overbearing, The Elements should be required reading for everybody — students, faculty, even administrators — in the orbit of a humanities Ph.D. program.

As a rigorous book-length consideration of a topic that How to Write treats in twenty quick pages, The Elements throws into relief the former’s main shortcoming: in trying to be everything to everybody, it risks not being much of anything to anybody. The Elements, in contrast, can safely assume a shared institutional and discursive context among its readership, which allows for greater focus and depth. Both books, however, are subject to the “paradox” that Williams claims “haunts” her book: they are “introductory primer[s] for an intensely specialized and complex job.” Calling it a haunting paradox overstates the situation but the underlying point is a good one: art writing and humanistic scholarship are complex, challenging endeavors that attract the kind of person who looks down upon 101-level simplicities. Scholars, especially, are the kind of difficulty-positive people apt to jump straight into the deep end of the pool as a way to teach themselves how to swim.

Hayot implies that many scholarly careers drown as a result. “The difference between those who ‘succeed’ and ‘fail’ in the profession,” he contends, “has as much to do with luck and mentoring as it has to do with ability or hard work.” Talent and ambition are not in short supply in humanities Ph.D. programs; the obstacles to success are more often structural in nature. The increasing scarcity of full-time academic teaching positions, perhaps the biggest structural obstacle, has been well-documented. Hayot focuses instead on a subtler stumbling block: how the training that doctoral students receive in writing is haphazard at best and oftentimes detrimental. Absent rigorous formal training, students must figure things out as writers through instinct, emulation, trial and error. The ones who happen to reinvent, gaspingly, the breaststroke are the ones whose careers remain afloat

This institutional critique receives its most pointed articulation in Hayot’s bleak appraisal of the seminar paper, the most commonly assigned and practiced Ph.D. form and the subject of Williams’ chapter on academic writing. Not only do “the patterns and practices of the seminar paper bear no resemblance to the ways professors write,” they can also, Hayot argues, inculcate counterproductive psychological and rhetorical habits. A published academic article undergoes a year-long “complex and iterative series of thinking, writing, and revision” that in no way resembles the three-week scramble to meet the page length requirements of multiple seminar papers. The form and content of the two modes seem similar but are actually quite distinct: the amount of research involved, the amount and type of citations used, and the types of readings performed all differ significantly. “The [academic] article,” Hayot avers, “is simply a different genre [than the seminar paper].”

Hayot is equally sharp in his writing pointers, which comprise the bulk of the book and which encompass both the psychological and the technical aspects of composition. His touchstone technical concept is the “uneven U,” his term for the characteristic shape of the academic paragraph. The uneven U paragraph begins at a relatively high level of conceptual abstraction, delves down into increasing levels of specificity — including, at its most specific, quotation — to substantiate and explore the initial point, then rises back up toward a conclusion that occurs at a slightly higher level of abstraction than where the paragraph began. The concept sounds simple enough — evidence in the middle, ideas on either end — but it has impressive explanatory force in Hayot’s capable hands, becoming a concept not just about paragraph structure but about the fractal elegance of article (and even book) structure.

For all their prescriptive clarity, both books caution that an overly paint-by-numbers approach to writing can quickly become formulaic. “Good art writers,” caveats Williams at the outset, “break conventions, hold a few sacrosanct, innovate their own.” Likewise, Hayot, when he encourages the reader to “follow these lessons” as though they were “rules” but to recognize that “the final rule is… break the rules!”

“This is a book,” he insists, “that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Indeed, Williams’ belief that critico-fiction, sui generis, can’t be taught reinforces the idea that dutiful rule-following can beget competence but not genius. Like the metaphorical ladder at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which Wittgenstein says must be kicked away after it has been climbed up, how-to books require, as a genre, gestures toward the free-floating beyond of expressive expertise.

Whereas How to Write envisions critical craft becoming art itself on the far side of mastery’s horizon, The Elements gestures toward a transcendent, rule-breaking beyond but never names it or offers a positive vision of what it would look like. This difference derives from the unique nature of scholarship, a subset of the larger category of criticism which, by virtue of its strict institutional and discursive conventions, can’t easily imagine an unconventional beyond that would meaningfully remain scholarship. Thus when Hayot, under influence of the OuLiPo group, recommends that writers experiment with self-imposed constraints, such as the ingenious idea to prohibit oneself use of the verb “to be,” he is quick to caution that “[he is] not recommending […] lexical novelty for its own sake” but rather “novelty as a practice of self-awareness and self-renewal,” as “sustained engagement with the tools of your craft.” Scholarly experimentation, in other words, is expressly not done for purposes of expressivity. Less rigidly specialized forms of criticism have softer rules and thus more potential creative freedom.

That freedom, however, comes at a cost: the anxiety of not knowing for certain how best to exercise it. In contrast to the clearly defined rules of the academy, the relative absence of professional rules in non-academic art writing means that art writers must in a sense invent the rules, the terms of engagement, for their own writings and, especially, for their larger careers. How to Write can teach you to write better art criticism but cannot, alas, draw you a roadmap to becoming a professional art writer. The Elements, on the other hand, can chart you a path to full professor that looks downright corporate in its comparative surety but cannot teach you any literary dance steps that aren’t at least a little squarish.

Ever the hippest critic on the dance floor, Dave Hickey, a favorite of Williams, has said that “the trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern.” Each quite valuable to its respective field, these two primers together suggest that, in criticism’s very own written practices (and not just its theories about others’ practices), expertise consists in being able to recognize that elusive moment.

How to Write About Contemporary Art (2014) is published by Thames & Hudson and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The Elements of Academic Style (2014) is published by Columbia University Press and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

omgthatdress:

Dress

Jean-Philippe Worth, 1890s

Musée Galliera de la Mode de la Ville de Paris

nellgwyne:

Portrait of Madame de Pompadour

palmandlaser:

From “Designing a Photograph”

Bill Smith (1985)

glitzandgrandeur:

Light reflecting through a stained glass window onto a wall mosaic. 

Photograph taken at St Vitus Cathedral in Prague, Czech Republic, by Susan, of Glitz & Grandeur.

bitterglitterqueer:

arjuna-vallabha:

  Pomegranate made of gold, rubies and emeralds

😍

A baby is on my breast, I am balancing a book on my knee, and the two year-old is watching Frozen for the fifteenth time because she’s enchanted and I am on maternity leave in a polar vortex. It is only January. By March, after I’ve returned to work and we’re no longer dealing with cabin fever, she’ll have watched it in the ballpark of forty times. Now that it is August, the toddler insists on wearing her Frozen ski hat with ensembles of Elsa shirts, multiple tutus, and high tops.

Some of you are swearing to yourself that no daughter of yours will wear that much princess merchandise, nor will she be permitted screen time until the age of three. You think this way because you either have convinced yourself that parenting is tantamount to martyrdom or you don’t have children. I was once in the latter category so I get it. I also thought that the contents of my bookcases would prevent the lure of the Disney princess. As it is, Jane Austen and Judith Butler only frame the icy fantasy that plays again and again in our living room.

Weathering the fourth trimester in the Chicago winter left me feeling trapped. Frozen gave me 102 precious minutes to dive into a book everyday that the newborn, the toddler, and I were holed up in our two-bedroom apartment. My leisure reading practice has been one of literary self-help since I was a girl. A. S. Byatt raised me as a second-wave feminist, David Lodge assuaged Catholic guilt, and Call the Midwife consoled me in a time of grief. Henry Rollins taught me how to travel alone, On the Road instilled the importance of pilgrimage, and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man instructed me how to recognize a formative moment. I thank The Rachel Papers for avoiding narcissists. Canonical novels with female protagonists were always the most terrifying. If there was one thing I learned from Tess Durbeyfield, Lily Bart, and Constance Chatterly, it was not to get trapped. I’ve never put down a book because it confronted me with hard truths. I read Caitlin Moran’s chapters on childbirth and abortion in How To Be A Woman while in labor with my first child. I escaped from shivering contractions and a numb left leg but not from impending motherhood.

The long days of quiet domestic rage were not everyday but they were hard. One of those difficult mornings, I looked up from my comrades in arms—from Anya Ulinich or Sarah Waters or Jenny Offill or Elena Ferrante—and encountered freedom in frosted fjords. Like Brave before it, Frozen passes the Bechdel test by transforming the conflict between women from one of violent sexual jealousy (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty) to one of magical accidents. The film continues the trend of revising the Disney princess, a movement begun with Pocahantas and advanced with films like Mulan and Tangled. With Frozen, though, the achievement is not about creating a heroine of color—it is so not that—or crafting a protagonist who simply does things by herself. This film celebrates the death of the Disney marriage plot.

The feminist potential in the film exists in its depiction of failure. Not Elsa’s failure to keep hidden her frosty magic and become an exemplary queen, but Anna’s failure to enact true love according to the rigid rules of the traditional princess genre. It is an imaginary world where kind hunters gift pigs’ hearts to wicked queens so that love-at-first-sight can be seen as romantic rather than a wrong swipe right.

No one knows this story better than Anna. We can’t be sure how she spent her childhood behind the castle gates, but in all likelihood she immersed herself in VHS tapes from the pre-Mulan Disney vault. While she sings the celebratory, “For the first time in forever!” she muses that she might “meet the one,” and we see her place herself in a number of poses in famous paintings, always as the object of desire. What becomes clear is that Anna is practiced in appealing to the Disney gaze. Like my toddler does, she goes from make-believe to trying it out for real. Only in her case, she’s not holding up her glass saying “cheers!” and delighting in the fact that her table partner clinks her cup. Rather, she attempts to forcefully enact a fictive script.

Anna meets Prince Hans of the Southern Isles by crashing into him at the end of a song-and-dance sequence. This is the princely deus ex machina, the fabricated mechanical god of the princess tale who swoops in to rescue an underage woman from eventual spinsterhood. Hans and Anna become engaged within a matter of hours. No one else thinks this is a good idea, which must mean it’s really bad seeing that the inhabitants of Arendelle still think it’s a good idea to live in an ice oligarchy full of inherited wealth and rule. Elsa forbids the marriage and the mountain man, Christoph, freaks out. “You’re telling me you got engaged to someone you just met?” he exclaims as they ride on his reindeer-drawn sled. He points out to Anna that she knows nothing about her fiancé. Nonetheless, Anna places all her hope in their love, which is put to the ultimate test after Elsa repeats a childhood accident and blasts her sister, this time hitting her heart. According to mystical trolls, who problematically figure as the magical minorities of this Disney film, only an act of true love can counteract a frozen heart or else Anna will turn to ice. Our heroine hurries back to Arendelle to find Hans so that he can kiss her. He refuses. It turns out that the foreign aristocrat has staged a mutiny, raising an army to capture Elsa. His plan was to kill Anna, get close to Elsa, and then take over the kingdom. The women were an expendable entry into kingly power. He leaves an increasingly frigid Anna to die alone—no, really—and goes after Elsa with sword in hand. Instead of re-evaluating her idea of true love, Anna runs in search of another man she has just met, Christoph.

Anna cannot imagine a future other than so-called true love because she lives and nearly dies by the plot points of previous Disney films. Her perspective is so colored by the tropes and norms of the apple-pumpkin-spindle script that she doesn’t understand that her major problem is not finding the one, but of rooting out foreign usurpers. Yes, she is a princess, and, yes, she exists in a magical kingdom, but the rules have changed. They haven’t reverted to the Old World justice of Brothers Grimm, but they do reflect a revision oriented towards realism and this is what our heroine completely misses. It’s like going into Deadwood and acting according to the rules of Annie Get Your Gun. And for that reason, Anna is sorta fucked.

Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc: she is desired, she falls into a perilous situation, she suffers, she has faith, and she is saved by God, a prince, or a gentleman vampire. She often exists in the passive voice. Sometimes she is prayerful or mops up or goes to prom. This narrative instructs us that it is better for a young woman to allow miracles and suffering to determine the course of her life rather than her own intellect and will. I’ve always found this story more silly than offensive in genre fiction but its equivalent in the here and now gives me pause. Throughout my life I have witnessed women measure their relationships by what they are willing to give up in order to maintain blind faith in a future that could be but often isn’t. That is the tragedy of this script, which comes uncomfortably close to crossing over from the fictive and to the social. Cinderella’s patient waiting is no different than St. Agnes’s torture or Bella Swan’s pining, all of which reap rewards. There is no warning in these stories not to get trapped.

At the climax of Frozen, a frosty Anna is running towards Christoph for a restorative kiss and Hans is raising his sword over Elsa to execute her. Anna reverses course and blocks the blow between the sword and her sister. She turns into a statue of ice, breaking the sword into two. Moments later, she turns back to flesh. It is her own act of true love that saves herself, her sister, and her city-kingdom. Anna’s act is selfless, but she breaks free of the martyr syndrome in her turn from princess to hero.

The story of Anna’s failure is rare. The inability to trigger romance through magical thinking usually points to a lack of faith, a lack of purity, or a lack of the correct space-time continuum, as in Disney’s Enchanted. But Anna has done everything right. She has studied the princess genre for years, adhered to its implicit instruction manual wholeheartedly, and still does not succeed. This failure does not reveal deficiency in the heroine. Instead we’re met with the collapse of a central cultural conceit. Anna’s act of will not only displaces the prince but also it dispenses with the need for the prince ex machina and all of the trappings of the genre that go with him.

The space between play-acting and attempting actual action is no so far, something that Anna and my children remind me of everyday. The baby is just beginning to wave and to attempt the “h” sound that will eventually become “hi.” The toddler is at an age of mimicking our speech, our activities, and even our emotional affect, something that she does with movies and bedtime stories as well. What we do, and what stories do, are instructing our little girl how to be. She tells us she is “going shopping,” “going to work,” and “going to the gym,” piling on grocery and tote bags as she looks for keys and heads to the door. And, despite my best efforts not to, I have instructed her on how to be a woman by passing on the terrible habit of using “sorry” instead of “excuse me” or “oops” or “watch where you’re going!” Cultural norms, anticipated actions, and social scripts are going to impact both of my daughters. My impulse is not to censor stories, but to encourage their playful improvisation on narrative so that if someday they get stuck in a genre, they can let it go.

The story of Frozen began as a way for me to keep my sanity, but as winter melted, the baby began to sleep more, and the toddler experienced a language explosion, it has become a way to have a lot of fun together. She asks me to turn off All Things Considered and we badly power ballad “Let it Go” on our way home. She tells me that Olaf is smaller than the giant snowman. I consider the type of parliamentary system that might operate in an historic Nordic city-state. Sometimes we discourse on the problem of justice in Arendelle. She says seriously, “Anna pushed Hans in the water!” I respond, “Shouldn’t that be a capital crime?”

One day when she uttered the verboten “Princess Anna and Princess Elsa,” I turned around at a stoplight and hissed, “Really, and what do Anna and Elsa do all day? What sort of work do they do? How do they earn a living?” She attempted an eye roll. “They don’t go to work, Mama,” she replied matter-of-factly. “They go to school. They go to astronaut school in Africa.” Obviously. I laugh at her, as well as at myself. I’m relieved that her imagination isn’t yet constrained, whether by romantic narrative arcs or the work-week. These moments reassure me that I’m not trapped because she’s not.

***

Image credits: featured image, image #2, image #3, image #4, image #5, image #6 provided by author.

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Forty years ago on August 29, 1975, the thirty-six-year-old artist Carolee Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina. The performance, titled “Interior Scroll,” is an essential moment in performance art history, and an important milestone in the artist’s provocative and influential oeuvre. For this important anniversary, I had the opportunity to speak with Schneemann, who lamented the way in which critical reception of “Interior Scroll” downplayed her earlier, yet intrinsically related works, stating: “I think it has to be subtracted from the awareness of all the work I have done since. It’s used against the work; it’s used against the complexity of my processes; it’s used to contain and stabilize a much richer and more complex body of work.”

Schneemann’s first major work, “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions” (1963), posed a question that the artist would continue to explore throughout her career: “Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?” The work was an amalgamation of painting, performance, and photography in which Schneemann’s own body became a material, proving the answer to be yes. Following “Eye Body,” Schneemann presented her film, “Fuses” (1964–67), a visual exploration of sex starring the artist and her partner, James Tenney. For more than half an hour, Schneemann presents an egalitarian erotic experience in which neither lover is subject nor object; rather, unlike pornography, both figures retain agency as their bodies organically blend together in the collaged and painted film.

Schneemann’s need to explore female sexuality came as a direct response to an apparent disconnect between women’s experiences of their bodies and historical and cultural representations. Schneemann writes in 1991’s “The Obscene Body/Politic”: “I didn’t want to pull a scroll out of my vagina and read it in public, but the culture’s terror of my making overt what it wished to suppress fueled the image; it was essential to demonstrate this lived action about ‘vulvic space’ against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning.”

The female form was idealized, fetishized, and contemplated, while the fundamental experiences of the body were considered to be unclean Pandora’s boxes. Such physical displays were inherently vulnerable, and deemed necessary in order to break taboos. By focusing on this site of supposed lack, female artists could expand the discourse about their bodies and confront social stigmas.

The first performance of “Interior Scroll” occurred on August 29, 1975, at an East Hampton, New York, art show titled Women Here and Now, honoring the United Nations’ International Women’s Year. Before an audience of mostly women artists, Schneemann entered the performance space fully clothed before undressing, wrapping herself in a white sheet, and climbing atop a long table. She informed the audience that she would be reading from her book, Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter, then dropped the sheet and, while, wearing an apron, applied dark paint onto her face and body. While reading from her book, she performed a variety of “action model poses” typical of figure drawing classes. Finally, Schneemann removed the apron and began pulling a small (folded) paper scroll from her vagina while reading it aloud. The text (as will be expounded upon soon) was taken from “Kitch’s Last Meal” (1973–76), the artist’s Super-8 film exploring an artist couple’s lives from the viewpoint of their cat.

Two years later, Schneemann was invited to the 1977 Telluride Film Festival by friend and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage to introduce a series of erotic films by women. Upon learning that the program was titled The Erotic Woman, a description that she found limiting and counterproductive, Schneemann decided to once again perform Interior Scroll. In the context of a film festival, the scroll’s words — which recount a conversation between herself and an unnamed “structuralist filmmaker” who refused to watch her films — became all the more cutting. The filmmaker chided Schneemann for her ethereal — and therefore traditionally feminine — use of “the personal clutter / the persistence of feelings / the hand-touch sensibility / the diaristic indulgence / the painterly mess / the dense gestalt / the primitive techniques” instead of the masculine “system the grid / the numerical rational.” While it was assumed that the anonymous “man” was Schneemann’s then-partner Anthony McCall, in 1988 Schneemann revealed to film historian Scott MacDonald that the text was actually a hidden letter to film critic Annette Michelson.

As Schneemann explained in a recent conversation, the idea behind “Interior Scroll” was to “physicalize the invisible, marginalized, and deeply suppressed history of the vulva, the powerful source of orgasmic pleasure, of birth, of transformation, of menstruation, of maternity, to show that it is not a dead, invisible place.” The performance evolved from a dream in which “a small figure extracted a text from her vagina that simply said ‘the knowledge.’” As such, “Interior Scroll” asserts the vagina not only as a site of physical creation, but as a source of thought and creativity. By pulling a physical object from an otherwise hidden space, the interior becomes visible, and therefore, vocal.

Schneemann’s interest in vulvic space was deeply rooted not only in gender politics, but spirituality. She wrote, “I thought of the vagina in many ways — physically, conceptually, as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model, enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible: a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, with attributes of both female and male sexual powers.”

As mentioned before, while it is essential to discuss “Interior Scroll” in terms of Schneemann’s earlier work, it is also necessary to mention Schneemann’s intensive research of organic “sacred vulvas, carved, painted, and sculpted for hundreds and hundreds of years before christianity suppressed it,” those “marking waterways, sacred mounds, sacred mountains, sacred caves.” Prehistorians Desmond Collins and John Onians assert in 1978’s “The Origins of Art” that images of vulvas were more prevalent in paleolithic caves than images of animals or phalli. While it was originally presumed that these images, along with figures like “Venus of Willendorf,” were created by men as manifestations of their desire, it is now believed that they were actually made by women in their own image. Or, as art historian Leroy McDermott wrote in 1996’s “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines”: “As self-portraits of women at different ages of life, these early figurines embodied obstetrical and gynecological information and probably signified an advance in women’s self-conscious control over the material conditions of their reproductive lives.”

Schneemann had been a proponent of this idea long before McDermott’s paper. Her belief in the complex power of the female body, and her expression of those thoughts in painting, performance, film, and sculpture, helped return women’s bodies back to themselves. “Interior Scroll” may just be one example of Schneemann’s powerful work, but it is a piece worth thorough examination. Hopefully, one action performed 40 years ago will continue to inspire women to claim their bodies and sexualities.

What Kilgore said:

Is that the source of all this hysteria? Conservative media accounts of random college speech code incidents and the occasional dumb move by a school principal? Something that affects maybe a tenth of one percent of the population? That has conservatives backing a deliberately offensive celebrity like Trump and a conspiracy theorist like Carson?

I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. The Trump supporters and proto-Trump supporters I know are upset by things like having to listen to Spanish-language messages on customer service lines, not being able to call women “chicks” without someone frowning at them, and having to stop telling racist jokes at work. That’s what “political correctness” is code for: having to worry about the sensitivities of people who were invisible or submissive not that very long ago.

If Cupp is right and I’m not, then let’s all cooperate in convincing Republican politicians and conservative pundits to stop using the term “political correctness” and come right and and tell us what the beef is about. Is it really “trigger warning” requirements at scattered liberal arts colleges? Or is it this whole new world we’re in where people have to question old habits? When Ben Carson calls inhibitions about torturing terrorism suspects “political correctness,” it’s pretty clear he’s yet another apostle for the Church of the Day Before Yesterday, when America was never wrong and dissenters kept their mouths shut.

For some reason–perhaps laziness or force of habit, or engagingly alarmist (‘new records for traffic misery!’) press releases, media outlets across the country dutifully report as fact the whatever new congestion ‘study’ the Texas A&M Transportation Institute releases. The problems are significant: their approach uses bizarre assumptions, questionable data, and despite being produced under the aegis of an institute at a major research university has never been subjected to peer review.

David Alpert:

The report, from Texas A&M University, looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad.

On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work.

Which city has worse roads? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation.

Joe Cortwright: 

The authors continue to report data for 1982 through 2007, even though TTI’s model for those years doesn’t actually measure congestion: it simply assumes that increased vehicle volumes automatically produce slower speeds, which is not necessarily accurate. The report’s data from 2007 and earlier isn’t comparable the data that comes afterwards, and can’t legitimately be used to make claims about whether traffic is better or worse than in earlier periods.

The presumption of the methodology is that our goal–to avoid “waste”–is to have sufficient road space available that the most popular times to travel see no delay whatsoever during peak times. That sounds nice, as long as we temporarily forget that land and money are scarce resources.* What makes the best (and most congested) cities attractive to access is that a)there’s lots of economic opportunity and activity there, and b) they are interesting and attractive places to visit. Ginormous 12 lane highways and acres of parking competes with those values; it’s a boring, ugly land use that generates little revenue. Walkability and human-scale density and cars travelling 60 MPH don’t go together.

Pretty much any time you decide to X at the most popular time to X, you pay for your timing in some way, whether in money, time, or flexibility. For whatever reason, we’ve elected to have a system where commuting by car at peak costs time instead of money. This choice has some cross-ideological appeal; on the anti-tax right the alternative is treated as tax increase; on the left it offends a kind of egalitarian ethos about access to a public good. I see the force of the latter position, but think it’s ultimately mistaken; transforming the cost of peak congestion from a time penalty to a financial one contributes to a number of progressive goals (environmental, of course, but public transit, as buses get stuck in congestion too). But either way, the notion that we should expect this activity to come at any price at all is both unrealistic and entirely undefended.

*The atmosphere’s capacity to store carbon emissions is a scarce resource too, of course, but the underlying logic here would still be deeply flawed even if global climate change turned out to be nothing more than a figment of Al Gore’s fevered imagination.

 

pdlcomics:

Morning

Well, we continue to go through growing pains.  As mentioned earlier, it made sense given the volume of this site that we use a dedicated server.  This has been done, but with this new level of control and freedom comes more responsibility.

In addition, our internet host has had to pull back from his traditional responsibilities due to long term personal issues that are preventing him from focusing on his work.  That means we need to handle things professionally and hire someone to take care of the ongoing “hardening” (that’s the industry term meaning to protect the site from attack and contamination) of Pigtails in Paint.  I am in that process right now and the recommendations of trusted readers and associates are appreciated and will be taken into account.

As some of you have noticed, one of our readers has inadvertently tracked some malware onto this site.  The result is that when you click on something, you may get an unwanted tab selling you something or warning you that your computer is compromised.  It is still safe to visit the site, but until this is resolved, it would be prudent to keep an eye out whenever you click on something.  If an unwanted tab comes up, close it immediately. This announcement will remain here on the top page until the malware has been purged and we will temporarily refrain from publishing new posts because there is a remote possibility that we may have to restart from a backed-up archive.

After the immediate issues have been addressed, the posts will continue and I will be learning the ropes of what it means to be an owner of an internet server.

Thank you for all your support and hopefully, soon, we can get back to the business of researching and presenting interesting new material.  Best wishes, -Ron, Editor-in-Chief, Pigtails in Paint.

You can continue to contact me with leads, suggestions and questions at ron_at_pigtails@yahoo.com.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans (and the Bush administration) former Bush FEMA Director Michael "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown is still trying to pin the blame for FEMA's ridiculous response to the storm on everyone but himself. I’m often asked, as the person who was running FEMA when Hurricane Katrina hit, why I didn’t evacuate New Orleans. My response is simple—FEMA had no

Rock art is one of the most fragile cultural treasures in the United States. Located out in the open, ancient drawings are continually threatened by acid rain, fungus, and … people shooting paint cans for fun. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, rock art in Utah County is being riddled with bullet holes and slopped with paint by careless visitors who also leave behind torn-up cans and broken bottles.

It’s not clear how many rock art sites have been damaged, but the two-mile stretch along the eastern slopes of Lake Mountain contains at least 300 places where 1,800-year-old drawings of snakes, hunters, and sheep from the Fremont culture abound. “If you take paint off, the patina comes off and the rock art is gone,” Matt Sheehan, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), told the newspaper. “It’s pretty irritating.”

While shooting on public land is legal, Utah County law prohibits firing toward natural features. The Archaeological Resource Protection Act of 1976 also protects the petroglyphs and if caught, the perpetrators could face fines and even jail time. It’s unlikely that would happen, though, as up to 50,000 people shoot in the area every year. 

Utah’s Petroglyphs have been having a bad decade. In 2014, vandals spray painted human figures on rocks in the area and shot them to pieces. The same year, a man etched his initials and date into the dark patina of a prehistoric image called Pregnant Buffalo in Nine Mile Canyon. And back in 2006, Herald Extra reported that looters were carting away smaller pieces of rock containing the petroglyphs. 

BLM hopes to preserve what rock art remains by reigning in gun enthusiasts in the area. It’s putting together a plan to manage target shooting and has also proposed giving 160 acres of land to the county to be used specifically for that purpose. BLM’s Bekee Hotze told the newspaper that they have to resort to such methods because people didn’t listen when they asked more nicely. “We tried to educate the public with signs, but the signs are shot up,” she said. 

I always thought I had “a good ear” for music. I guess I was wrong. The Toned Ear site’s ear training practices can test your musical hearing and also help you improve that skill.

Read more...

DETROIT — There is a great tension between the investments an artist makes to produce work and the living she extracts from selling art. It is a classic conundrum that many artists have to fund their own efforts for some length of time by an alternative means of support, and one major expense, especially for beginning or mid-career artists, is swinging travel expenses for residencies, art fairs, and international shows.

Enter Julia Friedman, who founded the Los Angeles–based ExchangeWorks in late 2013, with a mission to create a worldwide trading economy between artists and the public. This enables the free exchange of art and resources — such as materials, professional services, and, most recently, frequent flyer miles (though international trading is possible, currently most of its services and exchanges are within the US). Says Friedman, who studied fine arts in college but quickly moved into the business side: “Throughout my career as a gallery owner and before that, when I ran an arts management service, I saw a wide gap between artists and the public, as well as the continuous need for artists to find resources that enable them to work.” Friedman was director of her own gallery, with locations in Chicago and New York, and produced and managed projects at international venues, such as the Yokohama Triennale, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Exit Art in New York. These experiences inspired her to found ExchangeWorks, with the support of “instrumental” advisors Eric Garduño, Bonn Macy, Rocio Villalobos, and Rob Ray.

ExchangeWorks looks for artists who regularly perform or exhibit, and sell work, and therefore helps artists who are already on their path. Artists select the work they want to offer and set the terms of the exchange, and ExchangeWorks then confirms that value by evaluating the artist’s established record with institutions and galleries, and facilitates the process. Though the site charges no fee to post art or resources, or to contact participants, some artists on EW Art + Public do request to charge a fee. In the case of fee-based events, ExchangeWorks collects a 13% commission from those artists.

When artist Pedro Vélez needed a place to stay near the High Line in New York, to facilitate his preparations for the Whitney Biennial last year, he found an apartment through ExchangeWorks in Chelsea owned by law professor and arts supporter Tony Sebok. Says Vélez:

Not having to worry about lodging expenses in a city as expensive and prohibitive as New York really gave me the stress-free environment I needed at that particular moment of my career. I believe ExchangeWorks is a progressive and groundbreaking new tool that will provide the art class with a new set of opportunities that will enhance its capability to produce art and maneuver social interactions, more in tune with today’s economy.

In exchange for the temporary accommodations, Sebok received a series of photographs that were created during Vélez’s stay. Another artist, Olga Koumoundorous needed 100 gallons of paint to complete a public project in a Los Angeles park. The site-specific structure, “Roundhouse Shines,” reclaimed the abandoned site of a railroad track. Through ExchangeWorks, Koumoundorous accessed local stores that provided the paint from their excess inventory and returns, and, in exchange, the stores received mentions in the media around the project.

 

Now in its second year, ExchangeWorks has begun partnering with museums, galleries, and art organizations to find resources for artists whose work they exhibit, and has also launched a new program, Art for Miles, currently in a two-week trial run. “While speaking with artists and arts organizations, I repeatedly heard them talk about their urgent need for travel support,” says Friedman. “International flights are among the most in-demand resources for artists. This really helps to minimize the cost of traveling while researching or preparing for exhibitions around the world.”

This kind of free transaction between artists and art collectors has previously existed informally, but was lacking an official channel, particularly online. In a sense, ExchangeWorks has found a way to convert travel equity into art value: people with a surplus of travel miles can use them to buy tickets for artists in exchange for artwork. Visitors to the site can browse for artists that interest them and choose their method of support — which holds appeal for a set of buyers interested not just in art objects, but in supporting a specific artist, or the arts in general. “People checking out Art for Miles have ranged from art collectors to people who travel a lot and are curious about art,” says Friedman. Art for Miles partners, who are helping to pair artists with resources providers, include Kandor13, NYC; Center for Contemporary Art, Plovdiv, Bulgaria; and Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens, Greece. That program ends on August 31, and may run again in the future.

The dynamics of a business plan based on a trading economy seem unsustainable, and ExchangeWorks has yet to prove itself by the numbers. In the future, Friedman speculates that ExchangeWorks may offer premium services or sponsorship opportunities in order to generate revenue. For now, it seems Friedman’s greatest metric for success lies in enabling artists to build their careers and create more work.

Art for Miles via ExchangeWorks continues through August 31. 

More examples at The Telegraph's gallery of mistranslated Chinese phrases.

missboston1399:

creativekarma504:

READ HIM FOR BLOOD CHER

Lol she’s vicious! 😂

dovahcaine:

darth mail

This is almost enough to make me forgive at least part of the prequels.

…almost.

yrbff:

Pro-tip.

Last night, a tweet from writer Stassa Edwards led me to a post on Gawker about yesterday’s New York Daily News cover. The cover, which I will not reproduce here, relates to the on-air murder of two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, in Moneta, Virginia, on Wednesday, by a former colleague of theirs, Vester Lee Flanagan II, known professionally as Bryce Williams. In addition to the TV news footage that exists of the shooting, Flanagan recorded his own videos of it and posted them on Twitter, before going on to kill himself. For its Thursday cover, the News took three still images from one of Flanagan’s videos and laid them out in a neat triptych. This means the sequence is shot from Flanagan’s point of view, with his arm and gun in the foreground and Parker just beyond, conducting an interview. The three images literally show the moment of Parker’s murder: the taking aim, the flare of the gunshot, and her shocked face when the bullet hits her. The News took the liberty of adding a word across the top of the images — a title for the triptych, if you will: “EXECUTED.”

It is truly a horrific, exploitative, and shameless cover. It is one of the rare things that I wish I could unsee. It should never have been printed, and it certainly should not be defended.

In his Gawker piece — which is titled, “This Is a Good Newspaper Front Page” — writer Sam Biddle attempts to argue that seeing these images of Parker is important because doing so will probably force (his word and emphasis) viewers to do something about the epidemic of gun violence in the US. The substance of it comes in this second paragraph:

Reading about gun violence isn’t enough. A shooting is a visual tragedy. There’s a muzzle flash, bullets, a wound, blood, and bodies. When we see an upsetting image, our brain draws on tens of thousands of years of evolutionary training for a proper response. We are flooded with chemicals that make us feel the badness of what we see, so that we can adjust our behavior accordingly. Maybe that means running away from a tiger, or maybe it means passing gun control legislation. But horror is healthy and normal, and means your brain is working as intended. It’s a useful response, because it might convince you—it might force you—to viscerally react to our nation’s epidemic of gun violence. If people see photos of Alison Parker being effortlessly slaughtered by a disgruntled former co-worker with an easily obtained firearm, maybe they will conclude that guns are devices of horror and easy death. If so, it will be worth the discomfort. It’s a nice fantasy, but you can’t pretend that discomfort is optional; feeling like shit is a necessary part of being alive.

The horrifically twisted irony, of course, is that Alison Parker isn’t alive. She doesn’t have the luxury of “feeling like shit” about the world anymore. Would that matter if we knew for sure, without a doubt, that these images of her murder would force the NRA to relent its endless lobbying and Congress to pass a gun control law? Maybe not. But we don’t know that. We never can. And in the meantime, we are violating her body and her memory by forcing her to die, over and over again, forever, while we watch.

The problem with still images — which, when pulled from their source video in this way, become like photographs — is that they do not have a fixed meaning. Susan Sontag, John Berger, and countless other photographic theorists have written books on this. “All photographs are ambiguous,” Berger says in his essay “Appearances.” “Yet often this ambiguity is not obvious, for as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion.” Sound familiar?

“What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness,” Sontag writes in On Photography. “Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow.” The biggest problem with Biddle’s argument — aside from its failure to tell us how to swiftly move from that flood of chemicals, or “demoralizing emotional blow,” to gun control legislation (something many people have been trying to do for decades!) — is that it assumes a singular politics: one viewing mindset and one meaning for the photos, a “proper response” to the “badness” as the only response. How can this ever be guaranteed? As Jeet Heer put it so well in The New Republic, in a discussion of Flanagan’s videos: “Could showing the Virginia video help de-glamorize guns? Perhaps, but it could just as easily make those enthralled by gun culture put even more faith in weapons.”

The complications of the News images are numerous. For one, their point of view makes them look highly stylized, like they’ve been pulled from a movie or a first-person shooter video game. The paper plays this up by laying them out in a triptych, as if they comprised a religious altar or a Warhol installation, and slapping a sensational word that hints at retribution, or some form of justice, on top. Importantly, the point of view of the stills also sets them apart from the primary category of terrible images we’ve come to know and accept: photojournalism. Biddle completely misses this distinction when he attempts to crudely draw a comparison between Wednesday’s Daily News cover and the covers of newspapers in the wake of 9/11. Photojournalistic images of death abound, and though they’re not without controversy, at the end of the day, most of us believe that photojournalism serves a purpose, whether it be relaying the news, eliciting empathy for the victims, or inciting some kind of political action. Photojournalism, at its heart, is about a kind of connection, even if its immediate subject is the severance of such. Stills from Flanagan’s gruesome killing video are not about connection or empathy; they do not present a newsworthy event from an outsider’s perspective. They are the propaganda of a murderer.

Because of that, a better comparison here would be with the ISIS beheading videos. Yet, even then, one could make the case that the ISIS videos are fair game because their political context is far clearer. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s an argument I can entertain. Flanagan’s videos and images do not offer us a clear political opponent or cause; in fact, I’d argue they do just the opposite: reinforce the idea that we are looking at a lone, crazed killer rather than witnessing the workings of a true epidemic.

The images also play into our culture of misogyny awfully well. It’s no accident, or surprise, that the News chose to put stills of Parker being killed, not Ward, on its cover. Stassa Edwards touched on this when she tweeted last night, bringing in theorist Roland Barthes and his discussion of images:

And indeed, there is something deeply, uncomfortably fetishistic about that image of the pale-skinned, blonde-haired, pleasantly dressed Parker caught in shock at her own death. It’s almost familiar in the way it recalls horror movies and Quentin Tarantino films and procedural dramas, echoing a cultural fixation on “dead girls” that Edwards recently wrote about for The Awl.

The News’ Flanagan images are equally disturbing in the way they affirm racist narratives that have buoyed the US for centuries. When Dylann Roof, the Charleston terrorist who killed nine African Americans in Charleston, told congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that “you rape our women,” he was spouting a longstanding myth in which the bodies of white women become justification for the killing and oppression of black men. Now, on the cover of the Daily News, we have horrific images of a black man killing a white woman. Are they true, in the sense that this event happened? Of course. But by printing the stills, the Daily News has not only detached the meaning of Parker’s body from her person; it has offered up these images as free-floating signifiers, most dangerously for the justification for more violence — from the angry gun owner, the self-proclaimed defender of white women’s purity, the police officer who thinks all black men are dangerous, and anyone else who sees in them, as we all do, whatever he wants.

According to Danila Tkachenko: “The project “Restricted Areas” is about utopian strive of humans for technological progress. Humans are always trying to own ever more than they have – this is the source of technical progress, which was the means to create various commodities, standards, as well as the tools of violence in order to keep the power over others.”

Photo above: The world’s largest diesel submarine.

“Better, higher, stronger – these ideals often express the main ideology of the governments, for these goals they are ready to sacrifice almost everything. While the individual is supposed to become a tool for reaching the set goals, and receive in exchange the higher level of comfort.”

Photo above: Test bench for missiles.

“I travel in search of places which used to have great importance for the technical progress – and which are now deserted. Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete. Secret cities that cannot be found on maps, forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came.”

Photo above: Airplane – amphibia with vertical take-off VVA14. The USSR built only two of them in 1976, one of which has crashed during transportation.

“Any progress comes to its end earlier or later, it can happen due to different reasons – nuclear war, economic crisis or natural disaster.. For me it’s interesting to witness what is left after.”

Photo above: Secret city Chelyabinsk-40, which was not marked on the maps until 1994. The first Soviet nuclear bomb was created there. In 1964 there was the first nuclear catastrophe, one of the largest in history and equal in scale to Chernobyl. It stayed secret thanks to the fact that wind was blowing east. It is still impossible to enter the city unless one has special permission or relatives living there.

Former residential buildings in a deserted polar scientific town specialised on biological research.

Former mining town which has been closed and made a bombing trial field. The building on the photo shows the cultural center, one of the objects for bombing.

Sarcophagus over a closed shaft which is 4 km deep – was one of the deepest scientific shafts in the world at the time.

Scientific storage at far North.

Antenna built for interplanetary connection. The Soviet Union was planning to build bases on other planets, and prepared facilities for connection which were never used and are deserted now.

Tropospheric antenna in the north of Russia – the type of connection which has become obsolete. There were many of them built in far North, all of them deserted at the moment.

City where rocket engines were being produced in Soviet times. Was a closed city until 1992.

Water contamination test at the lake around the previously closed scientific city Chelyabinsk-40. In 1964 there was the first nuclear catastrophe, one of the largest in history and equal in scale to Chernobyl, but it stayed secret. The city is surrounded by the lakes which are until now contaminated with radiation.

Pumpjacks on a spent oil field.

Monument to the Conquerors of Space. The rocket on top was made according to the design of German V-2 missile.

British designer Jez Burrows was looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary and was struck by how literary the example sentences for word definitions were. So he created a new Tumblr called Dictionary Stories, where he posts very short stories made up only of those sentences:

He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery, a study of a man devoured by awareness of his own mediocrity. The place was dreadfully untidy. Tattered notebooks filled with illegible hieroglyphics, the evolution of animal life, the mysteries of analytical psychology, victorian architecture… The street lamps shed a faint light into the room. It was beginning to rain.

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