research

cloth will safeguard you to a very limited extent and while i think there’s an absolute ritualistic and spiritual power to the act of dressing oneself, i think we have to understand that there’s little energy this can transmit outside of a given experience inside a body. is there a strength that you feel when you feel beautiful? undeniably. but you have to take that strength somewhere into action for any type of radicalism to actually manifest

dressing a body is not an act of freedom, dressing a body is not a form of armor, and dressing a body has very little to do with radical practice and i think it’s one of the most ridiculous myths perpetuated by fashion enthusiasts that absolutely needs to be taken down!! individualism doesn’t mean anything and there’s very little power to draw from identity politics imo. it’s distressing to see thoughts like this continuing to circulate and be regurgitated

Henri Bergson, “On Laughter” (1900)

also titled Philosophers Are Very Ambivalent Towards Fashion, Vol. 15

Legal liberalism as well as critical race theory, has examined issues of race, racism, and equality by focusing on the exclusion and marginalization of those subjects and bodies marked as different and/or inferior. The disadvantage of this approach is that the proposed remedies and correctives to the problem—inclusion, protection, and greater access to opportunity—do not ultimately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth claims or interrogate the  exclusion  constitutive  of  the  norm  but  instead  seek  to  gain  equality, liberation, and redress within its confi nes. (Hartman 234)

This explains why the Slave’s political communiqué raises a specter of something far more portentous than the call to arms of a revolutionary Marxist or postcolonial political communiqué. In this essay, I argue that Marxist and postcolonial armed struggle, though radically destabilizing of the status quo, are also endeavors which, through their narrative capacity to assimilate “universal” frameworks of liberation and redress, unwittingly work to reconstitute the paradigms they seek to destroy. They  interrogate  and  attack  the  violence  which  constitutes  bourgeois  modes  of authorization in the hopes of instantiating analytic modes of authorization. A Black Liberation Army political communiqué becomes symptomatic of an undertaking that threatens authorization itself.

“MoMA’s Travel Ban Protest Exposes a Legacy of Closeted Modernism” by Shiva Balaghi

This is such an interesting piece on MoMA swapping out their display collection for work by artists from the seven banned countries recently and who gets to be displayed in museums. 

It’s not surprising that most museums do not have the room to display their massive collections, which often sit in storage. I found out not too long ago that the Guggenheim nabbed Faith Ringgold’s “Tar Beach” quilt in the ‘80s and has never displayed it. Museums make art acquisitions for many reasons (donations, gifts) but usually they are monetary investments for the museum. It’s also very, very controversial and difficult to deaccession a piece of art, no matter if it’s gone out of fashion, because you’re essentially ruining the artwork’s “career” if it were to leave an institution..

So you have to pick and choose. But who gets left out? Women, of course. Artists of color. People who aren’t Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons. “Museums have to not only defend the canon but also delve into and question it,” wrote Jerry Saltz in a feature on why MoMA wasn’t displaying the work of its women artists. “They are guardians of history, but they’re also makers of meaning and metaphors. If a museum doesn’t continually nourish itself, it will die, and part of MoMA is dying.” He also, like many critics, took issue with the museum’s construction plans in 2014 (which have now been shaved down significantly, ditching the huge glassy performance spaces) because they didn’t have enough wall spaces for actually hanging paintings!

In recent years I’ve come to view curating art museums the way I view writing online. Museums, like websites, need traffic to survive. So exhibitions go to the famous names and work with wide-reaching appeal, aka white men. Tom Rachman wrote in The New Yorker last year:

“The success of an expansion, or of any single exhibition, is often judged by visitor numbers, but there are other markers of success: the degree to which an exhibition illuminates and moves and changes its viewers, or the power a collection has to inspire local artists. Such outcomes provide no data. Therefore, attendance figures weigh on museum directors; their jobs may be at stake.”

I took a class once where a curator from the Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas explained to us why they installed an IMAX theater which, yes, plays blockbusters that have nothing to do with the museum’s historical curation. It makes them massive amounts of money and it’s what they need to survive. Exhibitions based around pop musicians, like Bjork or David Bowie, do immensely well, as do fashion collections for buzzy designers at the Met. Multimedia, interactive installations with performance and selfie-ready surfaces aren’t bad either. 

But the MoMA is not the Bullock Museum and we can’t give it passes into click bait art territory. I think it can afford to revamp and redefine its permanent collections frequently. And any time we get a glimpse at what we’re missing it’s pretty damning. “If the decision to show the works in 2017 as a protest against the travel ban was ultimately a political one, so too was the choice to keep the work off MoMA’s walls for half a century,” Balaghi writes. It might not look like it to the average person who doesn’t keep up with art, but the MoMA is like the Buzzfeed of art museums. Or maybe the Thought Catalog. IDK, think of the most viral, brain-numbing content feed. Which is a shame because, like Balaghi writes, the exhibition of art reinforces its place in the canon and has immense power on how it will be perceived in classrooms and textbooks. 

Colorism is worsened and maybe even caused by the broader supremacy of white skin and white people. At its root, I don’t see black people as fundamentally responsible for its existence. Our complicity is rooted in oppression, I believe. Colorism is interesting because it’s both libidinal, erotic and aesthetic (i.e., “I feel that this is beautiful) and structural. For example, the fact that Beyoncé, Rihanna and Nicki are the most visible black woman musicians is partially a result of the fact that institutions run by white people funnel a wealth (but not really a wealth, comparatively…) of resources and praise their way.

It’s about a feeling that lighter skinned black people are more beautiful, but also an inability to see anything else due to the way dominant media shows us their most economically profitable propositions. 

To Watch Over Me

The History of Lovers’ Eyes

From the Oxford American:

It was fashionable at one time (late 1700s/early 1800s) to give your secret lover an eye portrait so that he (or she) could carry you around (on a pin or a ring) without fear of detection. What is remarkable about the droll collection of miniature “lovers’ eyes” on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art is how very little an eye, the so-called window to the soul, reveals. Perhaps this sort of gift was not so much romantic as cautionary: I am watching you, my darling.

It’s been a lot of things. I wouldn’t only call it traumatic. I also would push back on the use of “mainstream,” since black people, non-black people and white people all inhabit the mainstream of beauty. If we’re talking about white/European standards of beauty and the relationships that black people negotiate those standards, then we have a starting point, imo.

I’d say that European ideals of beauty are often parasitic on black bodies and non-white bodies in general. There is no one biological way of looking black, but it is also true that a large chunk of black people tend to have full lips and high cheekbones. At the same time that the black body is reviled, these common characteristics form–like a puzzle–the ideals that make a white person beautiful or appealing. Many current makeup/beauty trends appear odd, with this in mind. Contouring, lip plumping, etc. Even tanning, to a certain extent, fails to escape race as a structuring factor.