feministartspractices-blog

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“Speak your (white) shame”

When I think about shame, I think about Brené Brown, a vulnerability researcher that I see quoted a lot in instagram captions. I was only peripherally seeing her work, but something that stuck with me was her invitation to, “speak your shame”. This summer, I met a white woman that told me she was doing some work on de-internalizing whiteness. She told me about an instagram challenge where you post about some instance or belief that you had that was upholding white supremacy. The idea was that you were to hold yourself accountable for what you did. I was concerned about content being triggering, but generally thought “Yep, being accountable, speaking your shame, airing out/working through your white guilt so that you can actually do social justice work.”

In Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival, Nguyen shifted the way I see shame. She draws from Sarah Ahmed’s definition of shame as “feeling bad about oneself before others,” (181) and moves on to state that, “the expression of shame is less about the thing one is ashamed for [...] than a hope for recognition that others might witness one’s shame as proof of good faith” (182) Later in the piece, she quotes Nia King in comparing calling someone out for being racist as feeding an “unconquerable monster,” where the person gains of anti-racist points for not breaking down. (184) When reflecting back on the instagram challenge to “speak your shame,” I recognized the performativity of it.  I wondered how many responses were received that were along the lines of “Wow, you are so brave for sharing this,” or “don’t worry, I totally used to think the same thing. Look where we are now.” In doing more research on Brené Brown, I learned her maxim that “empathy is the antidote to shame”. When people confess something on social media, I feel this cultured reaction of people affirming or expressing empathy for that person (especially if the person posting is a white woman). To “speak your shame” in this case, is less about being accountable to your actions or thoughts, and more about being affirmed that you are still a good person. Saying “I used to feel [insert racist thing here] but now I don’t” still upholds the speaker’s whiteness and perpetuates what Nguyen calls the “liberalist fantasy of self-actualization and enlightenment.” (183) The speaker is not actually de-internalizing whiteness, but presenting a narrative of “woke-ing up”, where she doesn’t need to question her whiteness. 

bell hooks’ quote that, “guilt is the continuing manufacture, not the collapse of, whiteness,” (184) is not only talking about emotional flailing, and the defensiveness that many white people express when called out on their racism, but is also about how guilt serves as a function for white people to affirm a sense of goodness in their whiteness. 

-Kennedy :)

P.S. Watch Brené Brown’s Ted Talk and tell me what you think:

https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame/transcript#t-1208070

(she mentions white privilege and shame at one point, but doesn’t seem to go anywhere with it)

-What does it mean for a researcher to de-politicize shame as it seems she is doing? (I’ve been thinking about this a lot)

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Blog Post #2

The readings of yesterday discussed performance art and its relationship to feminism in a variety of ways, while going through a variety of concrete examples of feminist performance arts pieces.

There seem to be a couple reasons for performance art being a fitting medium for feminist work. Performance art was a fairly new medium, thus it was able to be shaped and created by women from the very beginning, as opposed to other art forms which had a historically male background (Wark, 29). While other forms of art had to be created on a foundation set by men, performance art was built from the ground up by women, allowing the “language” (Boal) of performance art to be able to communicate realities and “rehearse” for the liberation of women. The creation of a medium for women has been not just a way to foster a voice and a language for women within an existing scene, but it has been a necessary step, because women were denied from so many stages (both literal and metaphorical). They had to create their own or risk never setting foot on one (Wark, 48). In addition, the body was of central importance in the feminist movement, and performance art centered the body (Wark, 32). Although there are a variety of possible reasons outlined in the text for why performance work was such a critical vessel for feminist arts practices, there is no singular answer to this question.

Offered in Lacy’s speech is the phrase “feminist art is always concerned with communication with its audience” (Lacy, 70). This is also an important function of performance feminist arts; performance necessitates interaction as it necessitates an audience. It requires the spectator to give space and attention to the work.

Performance art was an opportunity for agency, subversion, and visibility by feminist artists, a cross between political and personal.

The example of Lacy’s performance Three Weeks in May gives a very visceral example of how ingrained art is with politics, and the “real world” (Lacy, 2). Lacy’s work was not just an artistic exploration, it also included elements as concrete and grim as self-defence demonstrations at the reception of the art piece. It is also deeply a piece about women, highlighting that gender creates catastrophic gaps. But Lacy’s artwork is not metaphorical in any way; it is performance art, but it is a shockingly accurate and frightening work of truth.

In the work we discussed earlier this week (an earlier chapter from the same book), bell hooks discusses the polarizing reputation of theory. In the chapter Feminism, a Movement to End Sexist Oppression, Hooks articulates feminism as a particularly polarizing movement or theory. Hooks articulates a history of feminism that is convoluted and without a unified trajectory, placing privileged white women on the top of a movement that disregarded class or race, and understood the movement to be spearheaded by the goal that women become equal to men (Hooks, 19).

- Josie

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Homeless chic and intimacy with the Other

In my first year at Quest, I encountered a couple of students that chose to live on their balconies. They said this was in solidarity with people facing homelessness. This sat with me strangely. I didn’t exactly know what solidarity was, but I remember wondering “what difference does this do for anyone? Even by sleeping outside, you aren’t going to understand what it is actually like ‘be homeless’- this is a choice for you.” I thought this behaviour was insulting and a waste. They had to walk through their home, that they (or their family) paid rent for, to go to the balcony and pretend to not have what they have.

As I went through first year, I noticed it was cool to have rips in the ass of your pants. Oversized men’s clothing, miss-matched patterns, and worn out clothes were “subversive”. I honestly loved this (I still do). I didn’t feel pressure to dress up as I did back home. It was socially acceptable to wear pajamas to class. I heard the words “gypsy lifestyle” a lot. People were living in treehouses, There was a mindset that we were “cleansing from the capitalist bullshit,” as if by knitting our own hats and cutting our own hair we could remove ourselves from that entire system. The same system that many questies and their families benefited from, so much so that we are able to to climb the immense financial barriers to attending this school.

I want to acknowledge that I am making a generalization. I know quite a few people that attend this school that are struggling with money and piling debt. I can’t pretend to know everyone’s experience at Quest. I am calling attention to a culture I have noticed here.

Now, when I witness financially privileged questies holding the mentality of “cleansing from the capitalist bullshit”, of pretending to not have what we have, it feels like a performance. Nguyen’s description of the desire for intimacy with the Other applies to questies and our fascination with poor people, specifically homeless people. In response to Rey Chow, she states that ““the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures stand in for some more true, more genuine knowledge, the desire for intimacy with this other enacts an unrealized intersubjectivity in which a performance of address can nonetheless take place.” (182) No matter how convincingly we dress like we can’t afford new clothing or claim we are living the “gypsy lifestyle” when make the choice to live in a van, we are pursuing an idea that this is a more genuine way of living. People can do what they wish, but it’s important to recognize that this is a choice. Many of us will re-enter the “bullshit capitalist system” and likely thrive.

This desire for intimacy with poorness and homelessness I see at Quest reminds me of the the punks described by Daniel Traber in Nguyen’s piece. They chose to reside in neighbourhoods typically populated by working poor or people of colour. He describes it as a narrative of self-actualization, a “disavowal of bourgeois norms”, that is a “long, liberalist tradition of fashioning a sovereign individualism” ( 182) He states that: ‘[the residency] is turned into prestige by punks; acquiring rebellious symbolic capital is how the appropriation of Otherness ‘pays,’ and assuming the underclass is there for their emulation becomes the imperial gestures in punk’s self-escape.’” (182) This appropriation of Otherness as social capital is also present at Quest. There’s this idea that if you don’t find the appeal in dragging your mattress onto your balcony, wearing worn-out clothes, etc., you just don’t “get it”. You aren’t radical enough.

-Kennedy :) 

Vivienne Westwood’s 2010 Fashion Week Menswear. “Homeless Chic”.

An image from the women’s section on the Patagonia clothing site. My friend showed this to me and was like, “isn’t this the most Quest thing ever? All of these clothes are so expensive but it looks like this woman is living in a shack.” I can’t tell where the line is between shack and house, and whether this constitutes as a shack, but she does have a point.

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Marina Abramović

http://www.artnet.com/artists/marina-abramovic/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic-ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours

 Marina Abramović is a Serbian artist considered in many circles to be the “grandmother of performance art.” She is widely known for her avant-garde and ground-breaking performances that challenge traditional notions of art. “Abramović braved dangerous or grueling acts to investigate sensation and its effects, often with audience participation”. She frequently uses her body as the artistic medium, to make drastic social statements, often pushing physical and mental boundaries. In one of her most famous acts, Abramović used herself as the art piece. The prompt was that Abramović would take full responsibility for anything that was done. She laid various objects in front of a crowd, such as a rose, razor blades, common house hold objects, and a loaded gun. The participants were given the freedom to use the objects however they wished on Abramović. This resulted in humiliation, nudity, groping, and an audience member putting the loaded gun in Abramović’s hand pointed at her head. After six hours she walked away “bloody and in tears”, but still alive. The central themes of in Abramović’s art are emotional and spiritual transfiguration. She puts herself “under extreme physical and mental duress to jolt viewers out of ordinary patterns of thinking”. She evokes feminist art practise by bringing to light the violence against women in our society and the hierarchies of power in place. Through her complete vulnerability and defiance in her art she brings up powerful questions of womanhood. Her art is terrifying, enlightening and thought provoking. Throughout her work, she open space for the often-unseen parts of humanity to be come forth. She evokes awe and sheds light on our current condition.

-Erica  

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Nicotine (the musician) and her Incredibly Viceral Music

https://open.spotify.com/track/1OCKG0gxM4KiLPpbLT5GSS

The artist I would like to submit as an artist that invokes Feminist Arts Practices is Nicotine from the group Nicotine’s Famous Honey. She is a pansexual, afro-latina singer and song-writer. Her song “An Open Letter: an Introduction” is a proud demonstration of empowerment in conditions that hurt her in her position as a woman. The work takes the listener through her almost-spoken-word history and story in a way that incites and holds a lot of power in many of the words and images she conjures up. The song is detailed enough that is it distinctly hers and it is general enough to potentially unite the listeners into solidarity with her. I have found listening to her music cathartic and extremely moving too in its ability to bring up my own experiences.

In her position as an afro-latia artist it is particularly important that she has found voice in a white, men-dominated music industry. Her music style is unique and evocative. I highly recommend taking a listen to their album “An Open Letter”.

- Aliya

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Queer Temporality, Future-Making, and the No-Future

This article is a transcription of a roundtable discussion between many queer studies scholars. It focuses on queer temporalities. I stumbled across it while trying to delve deeper into the “no future” that Dillon describes as a part of queer futurity in race, queer futurity, and the temporality of Born in Flames. While Dillon describes a future that is no future due to its’ dependence on the present, the contributors to this discussion look at queer temporality from many different points in time. These scholars bring many perspectives to the table, with backgrounds in medieval studies, pre-Stonewall queer history, intersections of race and queerness, and more. Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive that Dillon invokes in his essay, brings a more thorough discussion of the “no future” that both authors bring up. Annamarie Jagose also brings up the invisibility of visibility in terms of lesbian representation, and how this invisibility is accumulated through time. I also found that this part of the discussion informed my reading of Robert Bailey’s Unknown Knowns. By discussing how the definitions of queerness are temporally contextual and the concept of queerness as “future-making,” this piece delves further into the “no future” of queer futurity that is demonstrated in Born in Flames.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/215002/pdf?casa_token=n9MhRfdg-H8AAAAA:A8kHH3wqLGzBHU_BjoCv_i82GivfFPBcbQEmojQk9oHKZRXTD02R3gC0J8RDXajeb2IGceSOlA

-Tierney

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Jessie Ngaio

Jessie Ngaio is queer, disabled, sex-positive artist and performer. She describes herself as a both a slut and a monster. I stumbled upon her work on instagram about two years ago and was blown away by the vivid, grotesque, maximalist paintings of bodies having sex. I think I was originally drawn to her work because it challenged a socially conditioned notion that sex needed to be pretty. In particularly, the women having sex needed to be pretty.

“My work tends to deal with notions of kitsch, concepts of ‘otherness’, alienation, gender, sexuality, deviance, pornography, the monstrous feminine, cuteness, lust, fear, the beautiful, grotesque, lowbrow and abject. I like boobs, cunts, glitter, colours that burn your eyeballs and long walks on the beach looking for mermaid corpses.” -Jessie Ngaio

Ngaio is both a creator of and performer in ethical porn. In Jane Wark’s commentary of Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 Meat Joy, Wark states that “For a woman to author a sexualized work, especially one of such libidinous abandon, constituted a disruptive usurping of power.” (43) By both acting as creative agents and objectified female bodies in their works, Ngaio and Schneemann are depicting their embodied sexualities in a way where they remain in control. Especially in the case of porn, I wonder how much the artist should hold responsibility over how someone engages with their work? What does it mean for a piece to be created with a certain intent (under a certain politics) and be engaged with very differently? Can feminist porn exist?

A lot of Ngaio’s more recent work consists of self-portraits, all of which she is covered in paint and glitter, most of which she is drooling and/or pulling open her mouth. The “deliberate grotesqueness” of her work parallels another of Schneemann’s works: a 1975 performance Interior Scroll. Wark describes the grotesqueness in Interior Scroll as “defiantly asserted the corporeal reality of her body as a challenge to the objectifying gaze of the ‘happy man’”(45) The happy man, in this case, was a filmmaker that discounted her work as a filmmaker, and said that he thought of her as a dancer. Something that I really love about Ngaio’s instagram, is how she openly talking about mental and physical illness, sexual assault, self-esteem, and body image, and pairs this with images of her body. Followers cannot untangle these sexual charged depictions of her body from the experience of living in her body.

Check out her insta: https://www.instagram.com/jngaio/

-Kennedy :) 

Some unanswered questions/thoughts:

What does it mean for me to be comparing works created 50 years apart? As contexts (esp. feminist politics) are so different, is this even relevant?

***I also wanted to note the importance of disability to Ngaio’s work. This is a short piece, and I wasn’t able to give it enough space. As people with disabilities have been socially inscribed as asexual, and historically exploited and objectified (ex. “freakshows”), her depictions of self (hyper-sexual, grotesque) is much more complicated (and I think radical) than described in this blog post. Disability also largely affects her arts practice, as art is physically painful for her to create.

[feministartspractices-blog]

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT:Rene Matić

21 year-old Rene Matić is a London based visual artist whose work predominantly explores her own experience as a queer, working-class, womxn of colour. Working through the mediums of paint, sculpture, film, photography and textile, Rene aims to expose, question, and combat, power relations within the art world and society as a whole. Rene’s focus on dismantling societal power structures is in line with Hooks’s definition of feminism as a movement to eradicate domination in all human relationships.

In a recent work, Matić posted street art throughout London with the message “BLACK CHILD THIS ALL BELONGS TO YOU”. In many places, her message was ripped down or vandalized, but Matić responded to these actions with positivity, stating that the vandalism only furthered her intended message. White supremacist society may try to claim “god-given”or natural domination, but white ownership and control over all is a construction that has to be maintained, not a natural and inevitable reality. The vandalism of Matić’s piece explicitly showcases this maintenance of white supremacy, and erasure of voices outside the societal hegemony.

Teaguen

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LesbiaNews

This article discusses the lesbian newsletter-turned-magazine from Victoria, BC that lasted from 1989 to 1998. In 1989, the newsletter was founded by Debby Gregory and titled LesbiaNews. It was intended to both provide a safe and public platform for written works that focused on the lesbian experience and to establish a stronger sense of the lesbian community in the area. Gregory defined it as “by, for, and about lesbian feminists and allies.” This publication was the longest running lesbian periodical in the Victoria area. Anything was printed as long as it was not considered by the editors to be racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, classist, able-bodyist, anti-semitic, or a personal attack. However, the views expressed within the piece were not homogenous. This paper situates LNews in a place with a population of white settlers on First Nations land. The editors and contributors to this paper discussed this, especially as many other lesbian feminists ignored race, as discussed in Cohambee River Collective. This article describes how a newsletter that later became a magazine also served as a means for creating community and as a platform for activism. All contributors were equals within the publication, which is a disruption of the dominant idea of hierarchical organization.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/14283212/009ewpcc_vol8issue3_barbaraart7.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1542820156&Signature=Zvgy0c4YZ76i7qVG4dKH9pgKHmA%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DA_PUBLIC_SENSE_OF_OURSELVES_COMMUNICATIO.pdf

-Tierney

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Solidarity Poster

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SYRC VIDEO

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The Elastic Collective to me is a really powerful and successful SEA project. The three main founders of the program all lived in Vancouver and respond to youth their age that there was not a creative scene in Vancouver where non-old straight men could feel comfortable in. They throw awesome events and play their music at clubs. Not only this but they host workshops in which they educate the youth on political matters and teach them skills to launch their creative careers, such as dj-ing workshops, how to create a portfolio, how to make a website etc.  They also provide youth platforms to showcase their work in galleries and online. By hiring youth to work in their organizational team they are giving access to professional experience that isn’t always available for youth. I believe that Helgura would appreciate the vitality that the Elastic Collective is helping construct with the Vancouver youth scene. Although the events and workshops normally only take place in a single day, their effect on the community is long lasting and is helping these youth develop their own voice in Vancouver.

Their events are super fun and we should all go together!

https://www.facebook.com/elasticcollective/

https://www.instagram.com/elasticcollective/

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Marina Abramović is a prolific performance artist and is sometimes referred to as the “grandmother of performance art”. The piece that I have attached to this post is titled, The Artist is Present. This piece was exhibited from March 14- May 31st 2010 at the MoMA. For this performance piece she sat at a chair facing another chair and visitors of the museum wore invited to sit with her for any length of time. She remained still and would simply gaze at the spectator. I thought of three links on how this piece connected with some of the authors we read this block. First, by having the spectator sit with the artist, it reminded me of the mirror exercise we did by Boal. When our class reflected on the mirror exercise we said things like, we were able to generate empathy for the person in the opposite position, of what it is like to lead and follow. When spectators sat with Marina, a lot of them started crying, they said that this was due to the empathy she provided them. Boal also asserts on page 134 that we must humanize the spectator, which is along the same lines of what Helgura teaches us on page 23, “the audience are never “others” they are always very concrete selves” . For Marina to place her spectators sitting facing her, I believe she is transforming their otherness into concrete selves and at the same time humanizes them as they engage with and become part of the art piece. Lastly, I think Marina connects well with the Jane Wark piece we read, as she attacks the notion that art is neutral straight on, by having “the artist present” she is concealing nothing of her identity and reminding us that there is always an identity the comes with any piece of artwork.

I encourage you to read the MoMA description if you are interested in the piece:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/964

also if you are REALLY interested , heres the link to a documentary about the piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0G8dvrtw5s

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Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi

This painting is a stunning work from the baroque period of painting. In it Judith kills the Assyrian general Holofernes who is threatening to kill her town. What happens in the story is that after her husband died Holofernes wanted to have sex with her, so she went to his tent, got him drunk, and then decapitated him. What I love about this painting and why I am talking about it is how active the women are placed within this picture, in other paintings the women are placed as more passive when in this painting they are active, standing over him thrusting a sword through his neck. This active stance these women are taking is surprising for the times this was made by itself (1618) while the painter Artemisia is incredibly impressive on her own merits. One of the few women to become an artist at this time, and probably the only one to be internationally recognized. I find her story to be incredibly and this painting to be beautiful.

- George Wheeler

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Free the Bid

Free the Bid is a company that aims to create spaces which attempt to diversify directors that are considered for filming a commercial. When a company wishes to make a commercial, out of all the applicants three directors are chosen; this is called the bid. Free the bid was founded by director Alma Har’el who noticed that every time she was up for bid or was in charge of chosen the director for a project, she was only competing with white men or only had a choice of white male directors. Free the Bid calls for at least one of those three candidates to be a women. Since 2016 (when Free the Bid was created) commercial agencies like BBDO and CP+B report that the amount of women directors that were hired for directing positions at these companies went up by 400 percent. Positive change seen in the film industry by women directors can be partially attributed to Free the Bid, however Free the bid leaves behind important issues that still need to be addressed, such as what about directors of color? What women are considered for these jobs?  Are they white? What women and people are still excluded from directing positions? This company could do more in efforts to make the film industry more inclusive

.  https://www.freethebid.com/directors/alma-harel/

Megan 

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Ciel has been a dear friend of mine for many years. She is studying fine arts and international relations at UVIC. I chose to show her photo piece: The People Who Watch Other People Who are Watching the Contents of the Room also including the People Watching Them because I believe it to be a quick and clever way an artist can incorporate ideas from our high maintenance reading and Robert Bailey’s definition of the unknown knowns. As Jackson calls her act of cleaning the Museum door steps “floor paintings”, Ciel depicts a similar idea by including the maintenance of the museum “guards” as part of her work. What Ciel is also demanding of her viewer is to pay attention to the things that go on in museums that we often know about but don’t think much of: the lives and time spent by the museum “guards”. Her work also shows us the unknown known of all the actions that take place by the visitors in the museum, she shows us how we are in relation to the space. I have included a screenshot of her photos but I encourage you to go to her website and see the full series as well as check out her work!

Link to website:

https://thisisperformanceart.weebly.com/blog/previous/3

Link to Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/frenchfor__sky/