Danzy Senna

Growing up in public schools it was often difficult to find literary characters that I could happily relate to on matters surrounding race and sexuality. Even when, making my way through High School, popular authors like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison appeared in the curriculum, their characters felt foreign to me in their very public experiences of oppression.

Though her debut novel, "Caucasia," was a tab bit explicit for my taste, in her more recent work, Danzy Senna' writes about race and gender without weighing her characters down with all of the commonly understood markings of racial and gender oppression. Her characters are, in a sense, free to be as racially invisible as their counterparts in White-American fiction. Perhaps this resonates with me because I grew up in communities where racism and sexism operated fiercly through subtexts and micro-aggressions, but almost never blatantly.

I am impressed by Senna's writing because it is elegant, subtle, and nuanced in just the right places, but also because I feel that she's done something very necessary by creating a book that I believe can count itself in the genre of "resistance literature," without ever calling attention to itself as such.

From Whom and what are we Contemporaries

I am interested in the concept of "untimeliness" or "urgency" and "need" that "presses, and transforms" time in the fissure of our present (46-47). As I understand it the shadow that the present casts on the past is what we have unconsciously retrieved from the past, regurgirated and transformed into our present. It can never fully be the same as it was in the past, because we can not live the past. Thus, what we retrieve gets mingeled with our present light to become something new. The urgency and need to find this "what" from the past, often because it is missing in our present, is what I interpret as a "craving." And to satisfy a craving is part of the creative act. But what I crave comes from my unconscious which also belong to the collective unconcsious.

Having said this much there is not one artist, image or thing in my unconscious that affect my craving --but many. I do not know before hand who or what it is. Only after the  painting is done may I see it.

In the wood-cut below, I craved for something, perhaps, what we call romantic. It was not untill several weeks later that I  realized that a paper I had written on Yoko Ono that included a photo of John Lennon kissing Yoko was the object that had influenced my craving. It came forth from my unconscious redigested into something new.  But, if I was to choose an artist that has influenced my work I would not choose Yoko or John consciously.

I

In this work my cravings were atmosphere and nature. I had found my angle, spot and light in Riverside Park. As with the previous picture I did not know that someting additional to the here and now had made its way into the  picture. Much later did I recognize something from Rousseau le Douanier and Rodchenko's angled photos.

Thus, in my opinion it is in the redigestion of something unconsciously craved from some where else, from any time, added to the here and now that makes it contemporary. For the process, I am still in an intuitive stage that should not be analysed too much by words since it must remain intuitive to take part in the constant flow of creating.

what is the contemporary

Growing up, one of the most ornery and pessimistic human beings that I had to be subjected to on an unfortunately regular basis was our blacksmith, Buddy. He would come by every twenty days or so to reshoe the horses at the barn. I would stay as far away as possible while he worked, trying to stay clear of his generally scathing comments about anything and everything. But one day he made a remark that stopped me in my tracks and that I've thought about a lot since then.   He quipped :    "There's nothing worse than has beens and gonna be 's.

When I read Giorgio Agamben's article, Buddy's comment, like some spirit, came racing into my consciousness. And I realized that a Contemporary for me means someone who Is. By this I mean someone who creates their and our reality. Agnès Varda symbolizes this ideal in that her films are of this time but also before it. Many are instant classics so they will perpetuate being  for the now. She also is not afraid to step into her own films and look at her self objectively. And thematically she takes on relevant subjects making an active contribution by addressing the problems  of  the now.

Emily Wardill, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 2007, 16mm film 

 and ....Looking to the future, another artist that I hope can step into this role is Emily Wardill. 

Who is Your Contemporary?

Rosemarie Trockel, Ich kann über meine film nur lachen (“My Films Just Make Me Laugh”), 1993

 

 

 

 

This week we read Giorgio Agamben's essay, What Is the Contemporary and ask his questions of ourselves and our practices: "Of whom and of what are we contemporaries?" and "What does it mean to be contemporary?" We will consider these questions while visiting three exhibits at MoMA: Meiro Koizumi in the Project Room, 1980s to Now, and Inventing Abstraction: 1910 to 1925.

Dieter & Bjorn Roth

I really enoyed seeing how the family  Roth payed homage to their father and grandfather Dieter.  Before seeing the show I was sceptic to how they would be able to create an art show of all this material from his studio, but it worked out quite well. In their installations they captured how Dieter made life itself art in all fiels from painting on table cloths to making candy sculptures. There is a feeling of joy in his work and the fact that two generations are in the process to continue his work makes me think that Dieter must also have been an extremely giving and inspirational person to have as a father and grandfather.    

MARGARET LEE

I work for Margaret Lee at 47 Canal and assisted her over the summer, so I was super excited to see her name first on this list of artists/shows we’re going to see. To be completely honest, I don’t think I “get” her work all that well, which could a good thing? 

Though I feel like being in close contact with it for all these months should have left me with a more enlightened perspective. 

What I find so fascinating about it is that there could be so much meaning packed into the realistic yet plaster fruits and vegetables, yet at the same time it could just be a joke.  I think her sculptures are hilarious. 

Once in 93 degree weather, she sent me out looking for an American eggplant so she could make one for a sculpture, and I spent three hours walking in circles in Chinatown (the gallery is in Chinatown) to no avail. I finally walked all the way to Whole Foods and bought one for five dollars that was “organic imported from Mexico etc etc.” I felt like that experience somehow articulates what the experience of looking at one of her food related sculptures is like--it’s all very surreal and seems to be telling you a lot about your own method and process of looking for meaning in an object and its relationship to other objects in an otherwise empty space, and maybe there is no significant meaning in that weirdly tense relationship, but you could probably find some anyway. 

-----> so much tension!!!!!!

Also, I love that the show space doesn’t have to have a lot of things in it for art to be heard. The aesthetic is minimal kitschy / playful and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but has so much snark and historical/contextual consideration behind it. I really hope she doesn’t read this in case I’m completely off. 

Fun fact: Margaret Lee met Matthew Higgs (whom she’s showing with) on the disco dance floor where they became friends over their mutual love of DJ Harvey. “People think you have to be schmoozy to make it in the art world, you know... but really you just have to like to disco.” - M. Lee. (I may be misremembering this conversation and have gotten all of it wrong). 

note: after going to her show today and actually seeing the objects in relation to each other and the annunciation of the context she's putting her work into, MAKES MORE SENSE

Darren Almond fan club

Darren Almond surprises me because he is at one moment so tied to aesthetics and then making a conceptual structure in the next piece. I think he makes a good move to separate these two aims.

I’m very drawn to his work in landscapes. Looking for a horizon line, where there seems to be none. The water blends into the sky, the grass is never ending. Landscapes are often determined by the above and below, but his seem to have no end, no point to grasp onto, a simple view without a summit. Yet they invite you to keep looking..

I have always loved Kant’s work on the Beautiful and Sublime, and his discussion of landscapes seems to apply here. In his argument, the logical sublime is evoked by the immeasurable and colossal – the infinitie – which shows itself in Almond’s work. The immensity of a mountain or vastness of the sky. In this we see our own mortality and insignificance.

The dynamic sublime corresponds with the superior forces of nature. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, oceans, things that cannot be contained. The power of nature is apparent here, we see both awe and fear. Kant describes a ‘negative lust’ in which attraction and repulsion blend into one grey and androgynous experience.

Perhaps this dynamic sublime is more apparent in other artists works in the galleries that are not dealing with landscape directy – for example Svenja Deininger’s works have a horizon that appears more powerful, weighty, ominous..

There is a great show on landscape imagery up at art on air  – I am excited to see, it’s up now until April 1^st

http://artonair.org/exhibition/dark-paradise