round-up: 1/10
news, reading recs, quotations, etc.
Hi & happy Monday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I read over the weekend
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I made some new zines over the weekend. I’ll list them on the website to buy as soon as I take some decent photos of them.
& I went on a lil rant about rejection letters:
What I read over the weekend:
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s interview with Tim Rollins
“The Miseducation of a French Feminist,” Jules Gill Peterson
Quotations:
Why rethink aesthetics now, when catastrophe has become the watchword of the day, and when all but the most restrictive pragmatism could easily be construed as little more than bourgeois frivolity? Is this not, after all, the age of Antonio Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” in which the many heads of fascism are rearing across the globe? Yet the fascism which liberal modernity and civil society have always required has never abided by this order’s mendacious separation of the political from the aesthetic. Genocide, now as before, is an aesthetic project. The question, then, should not be why rethink aesthetics now, but rather how do we survive the aesthetic regime that carves and encloses the very shape of our question? “The quest(ion) of blackness,” to draw my accomplice Denise Ferreira da Silva’s words from my own mouth, can only be enunciated through losing one’s voice, or rather through yielding to the polyvocality that is always already the condition of possibility of speech. Thus, in writing together, Da Silva and I have not so much pursued a theoretical synthesis as a reticulation, a raveling of the threads of our thoughts, which already twisted and frayed in one another’s text(ilic)s. Four theses, another declension from the Hegelian triad. Our open proposition.
-Rizvana Bradley
[Carl Jung] believed that we carry our ancestors’ memories in our DNA and inherit both their gifts and trauma. When the body experiences trauma, sensory information is converted into a neurochemical track called the taxon system. This part of the brain functions to maximize survival by encoding what is learned from an experience. When someone doesn’t survive a trauma, that information is passed on to those who are genetically similar. We assume that our minds exist solely in our physical bodies, but instead, we are linked to a higher order of intelligence all around.
-Sultana Isham, “Noise Is the Nigga of Sound”
Many of these are arguably advancements in theory, but there remain reasons to question how an ever-expanding trans—built upon a logic of dematerializing gender—has made questions about bodies and sexes difficult to ask, even politically precarious to pose. Are there differences between bodies framed by the general term “trans”? For instance, are there material divergences between estrogenic and androgenic hormonal changes to bodies, or for those trans subjects that maintain their endogenous states? If not essential differences, might there be consequential and material differences between, say, white transsexual women (with a pronoun “she”) and brown gender nonconforming femmes (with a pronoun “they”)? Do these differences shape livability, survivability, not only in terms of racial embodiments but sexual ones as well? And most troubling for the maxims of trans studies, does embodiment differently materialize the experience of trans masculinity from femininity? How might the generalizability of trans have enabled transsexual men to mis-conceptualize the lived experiences of transsexual women?
-Eva Hayward, “Painted Camera, ‘Her’”
Needs are often primal wants that are too unbearable to describe as lust.
-Eva Hayward, “Painted Camera, ‘Her’”
What is art but a constant fight with—if also a reliance on—the protocols of aesthetics?
-Eva Hayward, “Painted Camera, ‘Her’”
I’ve come to believe that writing with procedures and writing with words appropriated from others are strategies often used by writers whom language leaves behind: writers who are denied the right to words and grammar of their own. As Kathy Acker put it: “I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.” @everyword is nothing if not running into (and through) the language of others. I think that—in part—I write with procedures not because I’m trying to silence myself, but because, as a trans woman, conventional language wasn’t made with my voice in mind. I had to come up with something different.
-Allison Parrish
As a girl, I was outside the world. I wasn’t. I had no name. For me, language was being. There was no entry for me into language. […] I could be entered, but I could not enter, and so I could neither have nor make meaning in the world.
-Kathy Acker, “Seeing Gender”
Writing with the words of others draws attention to a marginalized writer’s constricted landscape of possible discourse: it’s a way of indicating that someone is there, but that she can’t, has decided against, speaking for herself. More than that, text can be used as a kind of polymorphous prosthesis, the author a nexus point for possible discourses.
-Emily Alison Zhou, “Digging and Sinking and Drifting: Allison Parrish’s Machine Poetics”
A big part of my experience of being trans is sensing not just the changes in my body and how people view it, but the changes in how my body relates to space, movement, travel, geography. Being trans is about space. The world used to feel like an open field; now it feels more like a network of thin paths, connecting sparsely distributed bubbles of welcoming. It’s true that I feel welcome now in places where I didn’t before. But so much of the world is unwelcoming to me, and what welcome I have is wavering and contingent.
-Allison Parrish, “Special Features” (Ninth Letter)
My body is the message, my mind the bottle. Exploding.
-Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie
But, bottom line, this is my own feeling of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person’s response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication—you can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.
-David Wojnarowicz, Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell (1989)
Queer people around the world resist the appeal of the “moderate” mainstream LGBTI movement and its pillar issues, like marriage equality—a battle that demonstrates how an incremental approach to change developed on the terms of institutionalized bureaucracy reproduces systemic disparity. Marriage privatizes social safety nets, destabilizes the bonds of the welfare state, and creates a culture of self-reliance that perpetuates economic inequality.1 Marriage is often discussed as being about love and sentimental commitment, and legal and moral rights are extended to subjects who conform to a conventional understanding of what a union between people can be. Only two people, preferably a man and a woman, who (faithfully) commit for eternity can be granted access to innumerable social and legal benefits.
-Carlos Motta, “(Im)practical (Im)possibilities”
Considering the unprecedented visibility that some gay and lesbian issues have gained over the last fifteen years, how can sexual and gender politics themselves be “queered”? Who is being represented, and by whom? Who is excluded in the name of LGBTI equality, and how? What practical goals would move us towards a politics of true liberation?
-Carlos Motta, “(Im)practical (Im)possibilities”
Queer art and artists have used strategies of denormalization and resistance to rupture systems of representation—to self-represent, dissent, experiment, construct fantasy, engage in social commentary, and confront power structures. Art has enabled queers to claim our place, to decolonize our bodies, to reimagine our desires, and to constitute ourselves as a political force.
-Carlos Motta, “(Im)practical (Im)possibilities”
Where is the feeling of queer urgency located today? And what is the role of a queer art of resistance?
-Carlos Motta, “(Im)practical (Im)possibilities”
Language—being regulated by the state, taught in educational institutions, and used to discipline, inform, educate, or structurally violate, among other uses—is frequently subverted by minorities in an attempt to bypass authority.
-Anna T., “The Opacity of Queer Languages”
If gender functions as a veil for the constitutive instability of the subject split by her unconscious, it can be argued that every gender disposition carries a kernel of helplessness, anxiety, and guilt, and therefore it is susceptible to dissociation, splitting, and idealization.
-Oren Gozlan
I love formal issues. Actually they have a very specific meaning. Forms gather meaning from their historical moment. The minimalist exercise of the object being very pure and very clean is only one way to deal with form. Carl Andre said, “My sculptures are masses and their subject is matter.” But after twenty years of feminist discourse and feminist theory we have come to realize that “just looking” is not just looking but that looking is invested with identity: gender, socioeconomic status, race, sexual orientation. Looking is invested with lots of other texts.
I must say that without reading Walter Benjamin, Fanon, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Borges, Mattelart, and others, perhaps I wouldn't have been able to make certain pieces, to arrive at certain positions. Some of their writings and ideas gave me a certain freedom to see. These ideas moved me to a place of pleasure through knowledge and some understanding of the way reality is constructed, of the way the self is formed in culture, of way language sets traps, and of the cracks in the "master narrative"—those cracks where power can be exercised.
You can be destroyed because of love and as a result of fear. Love is very peculiar because it gives a reason to live but it's also a great reason to be afraid, to be extremely afraid, to be terrified of losing that love.
I need the viewer, I need the public interaction. Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.
There is never such a thing as an apolitical or inert artwork. Art always serves a function—it either furthers and helps the master narrative or it tries to disrupt it.
I see the practice of teaching as an integral part of my work. Teaching for me is a form of cultural activism, a form of creative change at a very basic level.
You try to give [my students] the ability, the tools, to see for themselves what is important, what is needed, what is moving, and what is not. I also make very clear to them that they should not trust me—I'm not the voice of authority. I make mistakes, I might be wrong. I do have a very clear agenda and that is a desire to make this place a better place, and I'm an artist, that is the position where I speak from. But I'm an artist who tries to redefine the role of the artist. I see myself as an instigator, someone who questions not only the function of the art object and the practice but also the act of teaching art. Is it valid to teach art in the late twentieth century? I constantly question my voice, my opinions, my suggestions. What do I know? I don't give my students the comfort of expecting me to be the voice of knowledge, the father, the master narrative. Even if I wanted to I couldn't.
In a way I'm trying to negotiate my position within this culture by making this artwork. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel? Who am I supposed to identify with? And finally, above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.
Our intimate desires, fantasies, dreams are ruled and intercepted by the public sphere.
I may make objects without language, but everything in culture happens within language. Nothing happens outside of language. The dominant narrative is not static. It changes very quickly. It requires new modes of contestation.
Yes, everything I say can be used against me. This interview can be used against me. But I like to take stands and say what I believe. It might not be the best idea, but I’m still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this a better place for everyone. That’s really what I’m all about. I trust that agenda. That’s why I’m not afraid of power.
My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.
-Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.
-Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
It’s not unfathomable for a Poet Laureate to be gay (Elizabeth Bishop). What’s unfathomable is for the very lesbian content that I keep problematizing to be present in a Poet Laureate’s work.
-Ariel Goldberg, “Simplicity Craving”
i am bigger than / this pain, a / vortex of every / narrative i’ve / screamed.
-Fariha Róisín
i learn how to / safeguard my joy / in a world that tries / so hard to grab it.
-Fariha Róisín
Tweets:
That’s all I have for you today. Thanks for being here.
-Despy Boutris