ArtSlant
>Like eating brown sugar until you feel better
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Writer Alex Field considers what happens when art gets in the way of our everyday lives @ ArtSlant.
I was going to go to Oxford University to study English Literature, then move into a job with excellent prospects, get married, have babies and live happily ever after in a beautiful house in the country. At no point did those little mundanities of life feature in my plan; there was no laundry, no supermarket queues and certainly no days at the office where the work is dull and the hours drag. Then, at a school presentation on possible A Level subjects, my future Art History teacher stood up and told us that if we chose his class we would spend the next two years studying beautiful things, and that was it for me. From then on, my future was filled with works of art and all the exciting opportunities that they would lead me to.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )As it turns out, it’s not that easy. The art world is a tricky beast, and one that does not necessarily recognise either a person’s passion or their need to pay the rent. At the moment, the art world is dedicatedly not paying mine. Perhaps not surprisingly, although I really didn’t see this coming, rejection by your chosen industry is on an equal level to the love of your life hitting on your prettier, blonder best friend. It hurts in unfair, tragic ways you never imagined when you were at university, determinedly reading every book in the library on Hamish Fulton in the absolute knowledge that understanding that he was deeply influenced by his early travels in South Dakota would get you somewhere.
>Every street in Berlin is ghosted
>Morgan Meis wanders the street of Berlin and considers the tensions between art and the immediacy of the everyday world around us @ The Smart Set.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In a public park where families take their children to play on the swings, in what was, just a few decades ago, East Berlin, is a wall of relief sculptures. The sculptures date from the Communist days. They depict children who are happy and healthy, adults who are industrious and kind. There is work, play. There is life. Monuments like these — the remnants of the dreams and aspirations of a lost civilization — can stimulate that most disconcerting emotion amongst Germans: ostalgie (literally, east-stalgia, nostalgia for the old East Germany). It is not the first thing you expect to encounter in Berlin, ostalgie, until you realize that nothing in Berlin is settled, no aspect of the recent past has yet been laid to rest.
Just up the block from the park is a square, in the center of which is the Zionskirche (Zion Church). The Zionskirche itself is a church in the form of a ruin. This was once the church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Do you know that Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem for a little while? This was in the early 1930s. Then, Bonhoeffer went back to Germany where he set up the Confessing Church. He was going to stop Hitler with that church. In fact, he ended up in a concentration camp and was hanged by the Nazis in 1945.
>The Mental Interior
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Julian Hoeber confronts the performance art of Dawn Kasper’s “Music for Hoarders” @ ArtSlant.
The first time I saw Dawn Kasper perform she sat, covered in fake blood, in an old wrecked light blue Toyota Corolla parked in the lot of the Bergamot Station gallery compound (Los Angeles). Though meant to look as if she‘d died in the accident, her makeup was theatrical and crude. When I saw her later, walking around with blood still caked on her forehead, Kasper was so animated and crackling with anxious energy as to erase any lingering memory of the dead girl in the car.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In intervening years since that performance, I’ve seen Kasper brand herself with hot steel and a blowtorch, crash her truck, run around naked, plant vegetation and try to beat the shit out of me. All in the name of art. If you’ve seen Kasper in public when she’s not performing you’ve noticed she’s full of twitchy vibrations. She walks on the balls of her feet always bouncing and pitched forward like a welterweight fighter. She’s usually wearing one of two looks on her face: either a toothy grin pushed so far as to almost be straining with feeling or wide-eyed almost-surprise. She speaks quickly and with nearly awestruck enthusiasm. There’s more there than is meant to be held inside of a person.
>Culture Animals
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At Spike Magazine, Tim Black reviews Helen Guldberg’s Just Another Ape
At Quarterly Conversation, George Prochnik considers the complicated escapes of Stefan Zweig: “What makes the “good exile”? Is there a calculable equation of inner fortitude, openness of mind and external support networks that determines a refugee’s odds of survival? Why did Thomas Mann, Zuckmeyer and Zweig’s friend the conductor Bruno Walter flourish in the United States, while Zweig, Brecht and the dramatist Ernst Toller recoil from almost every aspect of their New World experience”
Stefan Auer at Eurozine considers the ways that narratives of European unity have been used and abused for political purposes: “The juxtaposition of uplifting narratives produced by the European Commission, with the many, messy histories of participating nations points towards the limits of the usage of history for political aims, however worthy those aims might be. Yet, there are also some positive lessons that can be drawn from the dissonance caused by the EU attempts to appropriate the legacy of 1989.”
Barrie Jean Borich explores the limits of redemptive narratives in women’s memories and fiction at Women in Literary Arts: “Which leads me back to resisting redemption, or resisting a reliance on only redemption, or complicating the meaning of redemption. Book editors so often use the word redemption when describing what they are looking for in women’s literary nonfiction—which even some independent presses want to squeeze into the classic conversion narrative arc dating back to St. Augustine, an admittedly lovely story form replicated in every AA meeting in which the teller is asked to tell what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now, but which assumes that a sexual past is something to recover from.”
At Artslant Joyce Cronin returns to the F-word and rediscovers some feminist artists in two London galleries. “I wonder about the phenomenon of thinking about something or learning a new word and then seeing it everywhere – what is that called? Is there a name for it? If not, there should be.”
Anwyn Crawford at Overland considers the relationships between feminism, anorexia, and capitalism: “Feminism, as I have discovered rather painfully over the years, is not a prophylactic against patriarchy or against capitalism. It is possible to know, intellectually, that starvation is a viciously self-destructive tactic while still actually starving; the self-destruction is in part an inability to inhabit a self – a body – that capitalism has constructed.”
Johanna Gohmann writes about the pleasures and disappointments of shopping at American Apparel at The Morning News. “I craned my neck around the store to look at the other merchandise—at the pastel jumpsuits, the reflective bikinis. I was about to scowl an emphatic “No” when suddenly I spotted it, sitting in the display case right before me. So oddly out of place. And yet so eye-catching. A Hitachi Magic Wand. The mother of all back massagers. The fabled sexual machinery I’d heard about for years, but had never attempted to seek out.”
Also at The Morning News Ester Bloom reflects on her adolescent transformations and the hidden story behind her name: “It was my friend Deb who made me see the light. Deb was a well-dressed, sophisticated pixie who lived in Manhattan, went to Hunter College High School, and knew infinitely more about the world than I did. “You’re a loser,” she explained to me one day on the phone. “In the eyes of society, you’re a loser.” This was a ploy to make me invest in contacts and hair gel, and it worked”
The photos with this week’s collage come from the beautiful photo essay by Serge J-F. Levy at the recent issue of Drunken Boat.
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