janehhhh

Adrian Piper in the early 70s did a piece called Catalysis where she doused herself in a lot of things that smelled bad. Vinegar, eggs, milk, cod liver oil for a week, and then go out on the D train during rush hour, or a bookstore. Repulsive, maybe insane seeming woman roving the streets - wouldn't you have to be insane not to smell yourself, not to know that your sheer presence is a dare to everyone else around you to shun you? Smell has a catalytic power she says. It's not even that girls are smelly (though we know, culturally speaking, that women are bearers of all smells as some concatenation of flowers and fish and laundry), but that they carry smells. Women wafting down the street, their scent being a trace to follow. Piper closes down this lead, this path to some (woman) garden and uses it for a site of dead-ended rupture, something an art critic could fantasize about and tool around in for a while because it alludes to social relations, giving us all a moment to identify the oppressive nature of convention as an internally inhering system. The fantasy Adrian Piper invokes is that we remember to bathe, we remember not to douse our clothes in rotten eggs and milk, we walk down the street effortlessly, no sweat. 

Adrian Piper, writing from Washington, D.C. in 1987: "I experimented with my own object-hood, transforming it sculpturally as I had other objects, took it into the street, confronted others with the end products, and watched the effects on my social relations. I traumatized myself, burned out, and began to withdraw..."

1. Saw Etant Donnes at the PMA last week and got kinda mad, like was really hating this rape culture misogyny death spectacle art 

but then 

Balthus, Guitar Lesson, 1934. 

Some notes on mother-daughter representation (and identification) in lesbian relationships from queermap.com :

The Mother and the Maid appear as a dyad over and over in the myths and stories of the West. Sometimes they are one woman, like the Virgin / Mother of Christianity. Sometimes they are a lesbian couple, like the Two Goddesses at the most famous sanctuary in ancient Greece, Eleusis: Demeter and Kore; Earth Mother and Maid.

            The story goes like this: the two inseparable goddesses are split apart when the Virgin Kore is abducted by Hades, Lord of the Dead. Demeter grieves inconsolably. She rages so violently that every seed is prevented from sprouting. The earth is barren, parched and withered. Finally Hades is convinced to release the ravished Kore, so that the Earth can bloom again. At the last moment, Kore eats a pomegranate seed that Hades offers. Contaminated, she must return again every winter to spend part of the year in the land of the Dead. Every winter, Demeter grieves; the earth shrivels and dies. When the Maid returns to the Mother each spring, the whole world rejoices.

"I spend ALL my wages on your damn therapy. "

Does anyone sit this close to their therapist??