buried things

1800s Week!

Gottfried Lindauer

Portrait: Unknown Maori Sitter

Bohemia/New Zealand (1874)

Auckland Art Gallery

This is Megumi Igarashi

She’s a Japanese artist

Japan, the country with some of the most fucked up pornography and the penis festival

Where the vagina is basically illegal to talk about 

So she did a bunch of art featuring 3D sculptures of her vagina, including this kayak, and was put in jail for it

She was indicted again in December on obscenity charges for selling vagina art to crowdfund for the kayak and could spend two years in prison

In Japan, women’s vaginas are treated as though they are men’s property. The trains here usually display pornographic advertisements. As a woman, I find that blatant objectification to be humiliating. I’m disgusted by it. My body belongs to me. So, with this project I wanted to release the vagina from the standard Japanese paradigm. Japan is lenient towards expressions of male sexuality and arousal, but not so for women. When a woman uses her body in artistic expression, her work gets ignored, and people treat her as if she’s some sex-crazed idiot. It all comes back to misogyny. And the vagina is at the heart of it. The vagina is ridiculed. It’s lusted after. Men don’t see women as equals—to them, women are just vaginas. Then they call my vagina-themed work “obscene,” and judge me according to laws written by and for men. [x]

She plans to turn her trial in to a manga comic. She seems pretty sure she’s not going to do any jail time but if you’d like to help her pay for her inevitable fine and court fees, you can check out her online store. There are little glow in the dark vagina characters.

There is a way that violence shapes the body: Being conditioned to anticipate harm, being sensitive to signs that may be nothing, having the senses trained to news of a blow. In going to the pier every day to listen for a name, the days come to cycle around an absence. Maybe we can talk about this chemically, like a traumatic stress response, but pathology and PTSD is a discursive way of locating that violence in the body itself, as an anomaly that can be treated through greater care in the form of greater control. The settler desire to fix, improve, save, is the second half of the settler desire to kill, displace, conquer. In this way, signs of violence in the Indigenous body, as in the sick body, invite care as further incursion, and the body – inside and out – is brought more closely into the colonial order. Violence-and-care is a strategy of settler incursion; a transit of empire. 

Moccasins with a message: Art project honours lost aboriginal women

Annie Pootoogook

Achille Mbembe | Necropolitics

Love these questions…

[read here]

Jonathan Labillois. Still Dancing. 2014.