camp, kitsch and nostalgia
I remember in undergrad writing a scathing essay about the uses of queerless Camp aesthetics in Kill Bill when it came out. I was the bitchy queer dissing Tarantino for a movie that I totally enjoyed but couldn’t handle the queerlessness of the campy narrative, action and carnage. Or probably i was just having a fit that the remotely homo/queer femme/dom character gets her head sliced open and dies in the snow. These days, when fears of nostalgia in art and the debated aesthetics of craft come up I am reminded of two things: literary theory’s association with nostalgia to camp, kitsch and ultimately the feminine or effeminate and my scorn over this abjection. And 2 my scorn whenever Camp Aesthetics, Kitsch and exxagerated nostalgia are used without homos in the scene. When this happens I’m likely to call that use, Appropriation, with a capital A. You just can’t win with me apparently. If anything is ready-made it’s my scorn for misappropriated aesthetics. Who get’s to have em, who doesn’t. Mostly, most of the time, I’m just jealous of the production values that go into a work of visual art that deploy camp to great ends. I think the contradictions abound with regard to craft, nostalgia and kitschified aesthetics. I don’t think however, that the fear of being a sissy has run out and it comes out in art and the talking about visual production. Here’s some texts about that by Gilad Padva:
- Padva, Gilad and Talmon, Miri (2008). Gotta Have An Effeminate Heart: The Politics of Effeminacy and Sissyness in a Nostalgic Israeli TV Musical. Feminist Media Studies 8(1), 69-84.
- Padva, Gilad (2005). Radical Sissies and Stereotyped Fairies in Laurie Lynd’s The Fairy Who Didn’t Want To Be A Fairy Anymore. Cinema Journal 45(1), 66-78.
- Padva, Gilad (2000). Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture. Journal of Communication Inquiry 24(2), 216-243.
Oops here’s the liink: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329660?cookieSet=1
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329660?cookieSet=1
Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovich and Buddhism
I wanted to leave this link to an interview with one of my undergrad teachers and Marina Abramovich — She comments super briefly on Joseph Beuys use of buddhist principles in his art philosophy. Chris Thompson wrote about Beuys meeting with the Dalai Lama in Bonn in 1982 but I can’t seem to find the published essay. I know Thompson wrote his dissertation about Beuys. He talks alot about Beuys felt making before I think Beuys was having the felt made. I’m interested in the way this conversation ends up talking about art education and what’s up in the academy.
make up post #1
This post has to do with considering sites like etsy on a more micro level. My mother lives in a small town in rural Washington. And though the most cosmopolitan place that she’s lived is Seattle, she feels a contradictory pull with regard to culture. She feels like an outsider in her town because she has a desire to participate in a more sophisticated cultural landscape than can be found where she lives. But she also feels provincial, like she’s missing out on a broader, more diverse cultural landscape. Anyway, I think this is where sites like etsy come in. My mother has a degree in home economics and has taken on various crafts throughout her life, but never with the seriousness that she has since joining a site called ravelry.com It allows her to feel like she’s participating in a broader dialogue on craft and knitting etc. While she’s not a particularly gifted knitter, she posts her various projects and discusses them through message boards. She’s never sold anything, so the economics for her I think is tangential. But it’s the dialogue she finds in online craft circles I think, that keeps her motivated and inspires her to push her craft foward.
-mdr
Conceptual Art
“Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical…The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept” -Sol Lewitt 1969
I really like this statement by Lewitt because I began to think of the artists that I converse with as we not only talk about our ideas, but also eachothers experiences. In our conversations there are so many different ideas that surface that allow our minds to go beyond the cube and venture outside of ourselves. At times these conversations have influenced our choices as artist to experiment even further with our work, stepping outside of our comfort zone and producing an idea or project not imagined. It’s incredible what we discover and continue to find. -Monique
catch up time
Rethinking the Readymade
In my practice, I am interested in the idea that making something up actually punctuates the artifice that surrounds our relationship with things in the world. I am interested in mimicking the look of things and the way in which things function already in the world. But I wonder if the hand is clear in the objects I am making, or am i just subconsciously trying to mimic a factory made thing. I think the criticality gets lost when something looks soo well crafted it might as well have been bought and repurposed. Is there something empowering and perhaps even radical about a poorly made thing. I am not more interested in making absurd objects that help punctuate their hand-made-ness.
Relationship Objects
I am not sure how, but I think i am going to graduate from art school without really understanding relational aesthetics. I can’t explain why but everytime it is time to ready Nicky Bourriaud I get sick, or I leave town for conferences, or I break out into hives on my eyeballs so I cannot read. Something beyond my control happens and I just cannot bring myself to read or discuss the topic. I think it has to do with the value of an object (and this can be an abstract idea of an object ex. an event?) being in the inter person relationship that it creates instead of a more passive art on wall and viewer one directional communication? Please, anybody else want to give me a cliff notes chat about relationship aesthetics. Can we do it over coffee or infront of the school and call it a piece of art?
Tactical Vernaculars: localized hybriditis and resistance
I am pretty sure “La perruque” is the only thing they should teach in college. It should be a job survival skills. Actually it should be a life survival skill. I love love this idea. It is all about finding the little moments to exercise your subjectivity. And if you can manage to do something crafty on government/job time or with their supplies, than you are the best ever. I think that is a big part of my practice when making downloadable craft projects.
DIY: Extreme Craft and the “C” Word
So i have a great etsy story. the moral of the story being: It is so great when money does not have to come between the joy of making things and the joy of receiving things.
It is not that I do not like cash money. I love cash money. One of the main reasons why any of us like money is because it gets us stuff. Stuff we want and stuff we need. But i think there is something off about the time it takes to make money and the time it takes to make stuff and the relationship between the stuff we want and how much money it costs.
That long run off sentence being said, I had a refreshing exchange last week that cut out the middle man that is cash money. I stumbled across this necklace on etsy:
Love it. I emailed the delightful maker and asked if she was interested in a trade. She liked the Benjam print and liked the idea behind it even more. We agreed it is a righteous trade. Although her necklace was valued at less than the $100 asking price for the print, I think that the necklaces craftsmanship and idea, doubled with the willingness of the artist to trade and my own desire for the necklace is definitely a fair trade.
So check out her etsy and support her personal economy a little! I received the necklace and it is beautiful.
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=8298
http://benjammin.iminyeh.com/post/100350291/prioritizing-trades
to function or not to function…
Thinking about the Metaphysical Implications… article…
“Because we tend to refer to the various crafts according to their materials…we sometimes forget that it was once common to think of crafts in terms of function, which led to their being known as applied arts.”
What about craft that denies its function? I love it…that’s what!
I thought I would share one of my favorite artist’s work: Myra Mimlitsch-Gray
She acknowledges function in her work, but few pieces could be said to be functional. She honors the long and distinguished history of metalwork, while at the same time looking at tradition with a jaundiced eye. Her work refuses to live comfortably in any single category.
http://www.newpaltz.edu/metal/showcase_faculty.html
Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is Professor of Metal and Chair of the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Anticlastic Raising: Basics
I just thought I would share this, given the topic of hyperbolic crochet shapes that was talked about in last class. I think it’s cool and you should too dammit…
Throughout the centuries, metalsmiths used the synclastic metal raising process to create useful objects such as bowls. Anticlastic raising was used to make details – such as spouts, handles and lipped edges.
Here’s how the two processes work: In the simplest type of synclastic raising (below), hammers are used to stretch the center of a sheet of metal, while compressing the edges so that they fold inward toward the center, creating a bowl-like form.
In anticlastic raising (above), the smith compresses the center of the sheet and stretches its edges, forcing two sides to curl under and two sides to curve upward, resulting in the classic anticlastic form.
Information source: Michael Good and Aurum, The International Review for Manufacturers, Designers and Retailers of Gold Jewellery.
Canvas Kit
Since we read about craft and DIY, I found this video on a canvas kit. There are so many DIY videos on youtube, but this one was on painting. I was always get a laugh on these type of things. Hope you enjoy. -Monique
Just keep doing it
I found the reading “Van Gogh From The Sweatshop” informative to something I had no clue about. To learn of these paintings being copied, in such conditions, was saddening. Yet, the twenty nine year old man, Wu, said it was better to work in a sweatshop like the one he was in, with his own set time, instead of working in a shop that had a set schedule. It made me think of the immigrant farm workers I see when driving home to LA, bent over picking the crops that will soon be part of our consumption. How so many people do not pay any mind to the process of how these goods make it into our homes.
What I also found interesting was was when Wu said if he wasn’t copying paintings and making his own work he would probably run out of ideas. How many times have we as artists struggled to have anew idea and create something we feel is innovative and then you have someone come across our path and say, so and so already did it and poof there goes your bubble. This made me think of Marilyn Minter in a lecture I attended in the fall when said she knows that in school we are constantly pushed to come up with new ideas and she wondered why. Minter explained that if you’re good at something and like what you’re doing, why try to change it or reinvent it, just keep doing it.
-Monique
Nostalgia, cool or uncool? -Anna
I’m tired of talking about consuming, shopping, buying, etc. I feel like the point of purchase is inevitable in a capitalist society, it’s hardly worth talking about. Does a bear shit in the woods? Perhaps its not generative to equalize everything in such a way….to bring everything down to this moment of bought/sold. It’s merely a blip in a larger process. I do think crafting and making is political but not necessarily based on the quality of what you end up with but how you got there. Slowly and highly inefficiently. And, in terms of De Certeau, it’s interesting to think that the internet, something created with the ideals of technological efficiency, and speed….I mean instantaneous results, is being utilized to sell totally inefficient and less than immediate objects. Objects whose makers have been accused of nostalgic romanticism. Which brings me to another topic. How can you blanket DIY and craft with nostalgic inclinations when such an embrace of the new is present. I think of it more as a re-negotiation….a mind-fulness of the past while in the present.
DIY – Alice
This was an interesting statement from Reading about Etsy – “make consumption itself feel like a creative act”. Our identities today are formed on what we purchase, but in a modular way because we all buy the same stuff essentially but it is assembled differently. Buying craft lets you personalize your identity so much more than manufactured items do. But with current phase- your craft purchases instead of contributing to the uniqueness of your individuation actually put you back two steps because from the look, you are automatically subsumed into a far more general ‘crafty’ style.
Sure uniqueness is important- but so is the comfort of a unifying product- to breed a sense of community.
reproduction and style – Alice
The intro to Ten Thousand Things mentioned that Chinese culture does not shun reproduction because it is a similar to nature. I have just finished a great novel by Orhan Pamuk, “My name is red”. He writes about the miniaturists of 16th century Istanbul. A complex time when Western influence was permeating the world of manuscsript illumination- the main influence being a push towards an individual style per painter. The ottoman technique until then being one of copying old masters and working to maintain this ‘eternal’ style. But the style evolved in Turkey over the centuries because of the imperfections of copying and because of the inability to completely eradicate some form of personal interpretation. But the innovation of style were slow and uniformly spread over a group since the the illustration of one era were usually under the control of one master and everyone worked in the same workshop- it is a fascinating book about the qualms of ego/style and dedication to art.
Swap Meet this Saturday!
After Lygia Clark
I found this video of a group of students remaking Clark’s rubber band piece and just wanted to share it with you. I also included a photo the orginal piece.
-Monique
Material Worlds: CCA Spring 2009 
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