Filed under: rants and such | Tags: Anne Frank, education, history, Holocaust, illinois, murder, museum, nazism, selfishness, video games, WWII
i have finished reading the diary of Anne Frank with the girls last night, and there was so much to it that i could not really tackle all on my own. it so happens that there is an exhibit about Anne Frank at the Illinois Holocaust Museum so we went today. i have been to various Holocaust museums in Germany and Italy, and i was very impressed by today’s experience. the museum has a section for kids, and it’s not pedantic or condescending, but it tries to create a bridge between contemporary youth experiences and discrimination or injustice during WWII.
it was very surprising to find a video game in the exhibit also. it is for 5 players. each person stands in a dark room, and a sensor tracks the motions of each player. it is set in a lily pond where a group of frogs is going about their business, eating flies and swimming around. at the beginning of the game each player chooses a frog, and starts eating or swimming. there is very little direction given by the game to the players. gradually other bigger green frogs enter the pond and bump you off your pad, or the smaller red frogs that are also hanging out. you can also bump frogs off their pads.
the first time we played we all tried to get as many flies as possible, bumping each other and the other frogs off the pads. the green frogs that enter later are bigger, and harder to bump off. the red smaller frogs disappear as they are bumped off their pad.
it seems like such a simplistic model to get you to think about selfishness, or solidarity, or human tendencies, but it was very effective. i felt like such an ass for giving in to my first instinct to accumulate at the expense of others. we played again and again, finally coordinating our forces to get the big green frogs from taking everyone else’s resources.
i have not seen in any other settings a model in which you are forced to question your own behavior, and human tendencies in general. the Holocaust is such a giant, huge mass to even begin to comprehend, it left me with a sense of urgency that i am not sure how to employ.
Filed under: rants and such | Tags: 2010, chicago, feminism, history, jane addams, SAIC, school, social justice
i am taking a class that is based upon an historical chicago site, this semester the jane addams house. i have learned about her in bits and pieces in the past few years, but never did i understand her incredible badassness. i am sure she was not perfect, but there is still something really compelling and striking about her story. her essay about her reasoning behind opening Hull House blew my mind. it was written over one hundred years ago, and it is so contemporary. i felt myself reflected in her thoughts, and in her understanding of society. it is depressing in a way that in a century the conditions of people are uncannily similar, and that the solution not more evolved. it also makes me feel strange that my understanding of the world is not new, nor original or revolutionary. i still have to come to grips with the fact that to everything there is a history. ideas are not new but come from a progression of theory from the past recent, and not so recent.
i am hopeful also, because it’s undeniable that there is something essentially altruistic about people and good, even amidst all the pain and selfishness.
it made me fantasize about what is possible to do with one’s life, and the impact it can have.
i am including the speech i read that i found so compelling: Addams,”Subjective Necessity”
Filed under: artsy art | Tags: gender, art, race, racism, chicago, saya woolfalk, lecture, capitalism
tonight i went to see the lecture by saya woolfalk and it got me to thinking about art, and fetishism of otherness, plus white guilt.
saya makes amazing work about utopia, or no place. she works with ideas of fables and stories as a place where people can try different realities and possibilities. her work used to be very much about gender and race in an overt way. she used to include images of genitalia and tropes of blackness in her art
but she found that instead of questioning issues of race or gender they reinforced them.
i am sure her process is much more complicated than this, but she then decided to create no place, a utopia of how the world could be, populated by beings that can fluctuate through gender and color.
saya is herself japanese, caucasian and african american, so the sense of having to think about identity and race seems very personal. i related very much to that, the sense of being other, of not fitting, of being parts of identities that are societally disconnected.
what i started wondering about once i got out of the lecture has not much to do with saya’s work per se, but the bigger questions of people that are identified as “other” somehow being successful within the art world. i would even venture to say that there is a sense of otherness being exotic, and desirable. if a gallery/museum/ art institution is exhibition work from a white anglo dude, than boring boring boring. it’s all about finding the most other, the farthest away from the canon.
and though it seems that there is a positive change in whose voices are heard, i can’t help to also feel ill at ease.
are the others just being fetishised? are others becoming some sort of collective superficial riddance of white guilt? i am always weary of being seen as an exotic other, and i am especially weary of space that seems to be given to me because of it.
i have not talked to other people that are not white, not american, or straight or whatever other deviance from normalcy about feeling fetishised, or used , but i am very interested to know how “successful” artists feel about this, or if it’s something that they think about.
Filed under: rants and such | Tags: art, artist, chicago, haiti, pregnancy, studio
long time without a post, maybe the flood of things to say was too dense to sort through and edit. i always have the illusion that i want this blog to be about an organized set of ideas, or topics, but i am continually faced with the impossibility of that.
my life is not neat and the boundaries between all the different parts unclear. so i slowly came to the decision that it can all exist in one place, though disjointed and messy.
in these past few months i have been throwing around the big questions about life and what exactly it is that i am doing. no answers yet, i am figuring it’s easier to approach those questions by a process of elimination. after 3 months spent in the studio with the pressure of making stuff for a portfolio review, for example, i am coming to think that making things should be something that can exist collaboratively, away from the romantic loneliness myth of the Artist. i also want the stuff i make to exist outside of the studio, or the gallery, and inhabit the world at large.
two good friends are pregnant and it is very shocking to be faced with adulthood, with the prospect that i am at a time in my life when people actually start having children, and i am not the only one with that experience (not in the world of course, but in my circle of friends).
i am still biting my nails and coping with life’s harshness by eating sugar. that did not change.
being bombarded by the coverage of haiti i have come to realize that there is no or little background information about the history of the country that has caused the present conditions to be possible in the first place ( earthquake aside). i will be looking up info and posting a very brief history of haiti ASAP.
well, the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti), is pretty decent even though there are lots of qualitative language to sort through that is not necessarily objective or even trying to be. but it’s a starter
ok
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2009, art, chicago, fall, graduate school, school
for all the activity that is been going on in my brain it’s surprising i have not sat down for a second to actually put in into words. there are different kinds of busy, the one i am experiencing now is non stop from the moment you wake to the moment you close your eyes at night kind of busy. it seems impossible to always be doing something targeted and deliberate, but it is my present condition. i was thinking about the name of this blog, and how gender justice has been such a undercurrent for my life, i thought my involvement with social justice stuff would never change.
however i have to come to terms with my choices and what it is that i love doing VS who i would like to be in theory in my head.
the thing is i love making visual things. it is the space, besides music where i am the happiest and most satisfied. but i don’t know how to come to terms with what that life choice involves. i am going to one of the most elite schools in the nation for art, without paying for it, granted, but i still have to contend in how to orient myself with that privilege, and with the reality of taking up space and resources for my own happiness and fulfillment.
maybe i just lack imagination, but artistic practice seems so fraught with elitism, and intellectual prejudice.
incomplete thoughts for now, gotta go!
Filed under: Uncategorized
first cold day. suspended by the freeing air.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2009, braces, chicago, community, donations, facebook, florence, friends, internet, parenthood
has been shedded, as i try to settle into my new life. figuring out where all the pieces fit, and also where they don’t at all. but that is not what i set out to write about. instead it’s the overwhelming response to my plead for money that occupies my thoughts.
that is what i did, in the simplest sense. i asked for money to everyone that would come to mind, because i have no means of procuring a needed service myself.
my daughter needs braces, she needs them badly, and i went through various stages of frustration and denial. i am angry at the exorbitant cost of the procedure, i am angry that i am poor, that i have always been poor, and i seem to not be able to get out of it. i am angry that other people have parents with money, they were just born with that privilege, and that is the end of the story.
i am angry at myself for having children with an asshole that has contributed nothing, and still contributes nothing, though he is very good at hurting and complicating. i tell myself i was 17, but i still should have known better.
one late night as all of this flashed in my thoughts i decided to swallow my pride and let people know that i needed their help, that i was not invincible, not perfect, and not an island. i don’t do that often.
it has been nothing like i expected. so many people i hardly know have helped out, and some to an extent that made me almost feel sick to my stomach. with surprise, and bewilderment, and confusion, and happiness of course. the real kind, the one that isn’t inflated but just makes it seem like what you hope about humanity might not be bullshit after all.
Filed under: Uncategorized
| how much can you help? |
|
helper $5.00 helper ++ $20.00 big ass helper $50.00 |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2009, art, attraction, chicago, drawings, love, missed connections, people, relationships, romance
being in a new city is making me obsess over how people meet and form relationships, because i am around people all the time, but they are perfect strangers, a strong unbreakable wall keeping us divided.
so enter the missed connections, my own attempt at understanding what draws people to each other, as a starter we have women for men, and my rendition of the desired person:
Macedonian Guy At Lincolnwood Produce – w4m – 30 (Lincolnwood)
Date: 2009-08-10, 12:56PM CDT
Reply To This Post
You will probably never read this but I saw you last Thursday at Lincolnwood Produce and waited behind you at the second register since lane one was closed. I told you how nice your Orthodox cross looked and you said thank you. I buckled down to talk more but when I asked you for your number you looked at me kind of funny and said you were in a serious relationship. Maybe you were surprised that I was the one asking you for your number. Then you paid and walked off quickly. You had on a white cut off tee, tan shorts, had facial hair and cute dimples. I thought you were Greek when I started speaking Greek to you but you told me you were Macedonian. It never hurt anyone to go for some thrills but you are committed. I never got your NAME! I will probably run into you again. I will be there this Thursday!
Location: Lincolnwood
We talked about a lizard while your son ran around – w4m – 26 (Shedd Aquarium)
Date: 2009-08-11, 8:02PM CDT
Reply To This Post
You have long hair and were dressed kinda granola. You were with an adorable little boy about 3 or 4 years old and he was running in circles around us. I loved watching you play with him. I assume he was your son, but I didn’t see anyone with you or notice a ring. I wanted to talk to you more but your smile made me a little flustered. On the off chance that you read this and you happen to be an awesome SINGLE dad, I would love to talk again, not necessarily about lizards this time, though it was fun.
Location: Shedd Aquarium
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2009, feminism, gender, media, murder, parenting, pittsburgh, puberty, violence
oona and florence came back from italy today, and they are enormous, overgrown children, smallish adults. talking different, walking different, but also the same.
they are exiting kid and entering the amorphous zone in which a lot of things feel uncomfortable, including me. florence’s body is changing already – bumps sprouting and all, and it is so scary, and also great.
this week a man killed three women in pittsburgh in a premeditated murderous spree that he outlined on his blog, a morbid pathways to his mind, and a source of endless fascination for the sensationalist media in the past couple of days. he opened fire because he hated women. simple as that.
he hated women because they would not sleep with him or have a relationship with him. a relationship he felt entitled to have , an entitlement that brought him to believe that women were at fault from holding back what was righteously his.
this was going through my mind as i sat across the dinner table from my daughter today. not a kid anymore really, not protected by the lack of sexualization of childhood, but a very soon woman to be. a target.
thinking that i moved across an ocean to give them more space, to let them and me become more than just what an overly sexist society was allowing us to be. now i look at them, and i am not so sure that we are safer here, or have more choices, or freedom.
maybe the acceptable roles are different, but american society is not one were equality exists, not for women, not for people of color, or poor people or queer folks. but sexism is what seems to be so pervasive that it becomes invisible. it is ridiculed and trivialized, co-opted by ad companies, ignored by the media, even though a man living in such society felt it was ok to kill women, because he hated them. he is dismissed as a maniac, a deranged individual, no matter the fact that gender violence is happening all the time.
i want to take my daughters and find somewhere safe, somewhere i know no one will cause them harm, but it’s impossible. i know that the only way for them to be safer is to change the conditions that would bring someone to have a sense that women are less then, that they are disposable, and that they exist to fulfill men’s needs or else they deserve to be hurt.
i feel engulfed by it sometimes, i see it all around me, and i have to force myself to remember that so many people are doing so many things to create a less fucked up world. they just don’t make the news
