#Carolyn Lazard

[luxe-pauvre]

“You are too young to live like this!” became my well­intentioned doctors’ refrain. “What a shame! We can get you back to work! You should be out living your life!” And so, they perpetuated the supposed narrative of health and death: illness is something which comes late in life, right before the end. They acted as if I was experiencing an inconvenience. As if I wasn’t living my life anyway. They didn’t understand that this experience had stripped and shed a light on me, making it simply impossible to carry on as before. There was no return to “normal.”

Carolyn Lazard, How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity

[mentaltimetraveller]

Carolyn Lazard SYNC Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, New York September 10 – October 17, 2020

[modalities-of-care]

"The abject body aside, it is difficult to conceptualize the body in general under the current cult of health. Descartes discusses the body in mechanical terms. Sontag notes the metaphor of the body “as a factory, an image of the body’s functioning under the sign of health.” What happens when our bodies “revolt” and the factories stop functioning so smoothly? Perhaps they are trying to tell us something about their working conditions." – Carolyn Lazard

"Disability ... signifies a particular relationship to one’s environment. Disability is the reflection of barriers that prevent people with impairments from participating in society. ...For example, when I have difficulty walking ... I am disabled not by my physical impairment, but by the fact that many buildings don’t have ramps or elevators."

How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity. 

Carolyn Lazard. [pdf]

[rivetgoth]

One of the most notable recent examples of why I love modern art came from seeing the piece “Privatization” by Carolyn Lazard at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago.

This picture doesn’t capture the haphazardness of the placement. You walk into one of the gallery rooms, and there are 3 air purifiers scattered about the corners of the room, seemingly at random. This strikes you as a little odd and you kind of note it in the back of your head because it’s the only room in the museum to have air purifiers. You kinda think, “Maybe they had a ventilation problem?“ and may very well move on.

Unless you notice that there’s actually a label on the wall with a short blurb, and you see the words “MEDIUM: HEPA filter purified air,” and you realize that these air purifiers ARE an art piece.

The piece was on living with chronic illness, and it was presented in such a way in order to bring awareness to the subtleties of the things that someone who lives with chronic illness or disability has to be aware of that those who do not… do not. I was so fascinated by the way this piece made use of the gallery space to achieve this. It really effectively achieved what it set out to do: Create a piece that so casually fits into the space of the gallery as a utilitarian tool that the majority won’t even notice it, except that it’s just slightly off. The average person will NOTICE it, but they won’t pay it close attention, or question it deeply. A family member I was with didn’t even realize it was an art piece. I loved the way it existed to engage with the physical space of the art museum, the way it required an inquisitive viewer to go through this mental process of noticing, questioning, ignoring, barely even fully comprehending it, the way it demanded an investigation of its existence in order to be understood, and the way this functions as a microcosm of the life experience the artist was trying to articulate through it. It was a really neat, subtle thing to do.

I was also really intrigued by the use of completely plain, basic, unmodified air purifiers. They were frankly pretty ugly, and not in a “cool” or “punk” or “grunge” way. This was the sleek, blank, glossy white of a modern iPhone charger. It felt really sterile and impersonal, one could make an argument that on their own they made the gallery room less “pretty,” really cemented in aspects of modern aesthetics, commercial production, and industry standards that I think most people, but especially those visiting art museums, let alone making art themselves, have grown tired of, to put it lightly, and I can’t help but feel that this was also an intentional decision... Especially within the context of a name like “Privatization.”

What’s interesting is I didn’t really like this piece all that much, in terms of my own personal aesthetic preferences. I mean, in the sense that… it’s not the kind of modern art that grabs me, specifically. I understand the decision to use the industry standard air purifiers but I’m more, and I mean this fully as a personal opinion, a fan of art with a little more of a fantastical element, I suppose? As an example of what I mean—and this is NOT meant to force these two artists into conversation, just my positing a simple aesthetic comparison—is Briccs 2 by Lauren Halsey, one of my favorite pieces of modern art I’ve ever gotten to see at the MOCA, a really striking city street made of mirrors and rainbows and hand drawn graffiti, large enough to walk through like a hallway. Halsey’s works have been described as Afrofuturist urbanism. I think the dreamlike, fantastical element here really grabs me, that’s the kind of modern art that tends to really speak to me the most. I could go on about this piece because I LOVE it, but I’ll save that for another day.

But anyway, that’s not a criticism of “Privatization.” I guess I say all that specifically to emphasize that when it comes to this piece, it wasn’t that I was like, “Wow! I love this!!” It wasn’t about it speaking to the depths of my soul or even just my more shallow aesthetic eye. It was more that I was just SO impressed by how thought provoking it was and how the ideas it was centering were executed. I’ve never seen an art piece make use of its space within a museum like that before, and engage with its viewers with the knowledge of being in the physical space of a museum gallery in such a way. Angel and I probably talked more about this piece than any other during our visit that day, debating its meaning and the artist’s intentions and if it was successful or not. I think that’s really impressive. I think art that demands conversation is the best. The spatiality of the piece and the mental journey it sends its viewers on in order to provoke thought and spark conversation about the subtleties of daily life we can often take for granted was really, really neat. I love modern art.

[gracedenton]

KAIYA WAEREA Read Sick Writers - T-Shirt Campaign 2021

Referencing is a love language!

Image Description: The front design is a center alighned reading list, reading:

"Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Heroines by Kate Zambreno When the Sick Rule the World by Dodie Bellamy Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity by Carolyn Lazard Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry The Rejected Body by Susan Wendell Exposure by Olivia Sudjic The Body Multiple by Annemarie Mol The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison I Choose Elena by Lucia Osborne-Crowley The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz Sanatorium by Abi Palmer Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth The Undying by Anne Boyer Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha"

The back design reads "READ SICK WRITERS" across the sholder blades, with a colophon in smaller type on the bottom left of the tee. The typeface is a relaxed blackletter gothic caligraphy based on femenist ephemera. For more info in this check out Nat Pypers webiste.

The Tangerine is a warm red, and the Vintage White is a warm off-white.

Second Edition 2021 Reading list assembled by Kaiya Waerea Typeface Women's Car Repair Collective by Nat Pyper We Are Print Social donate to Black Minds Matter with every purchase Profit goes to Kaiya Waerea, a chronically ill writer & designer from Aotearoa living in London insta @kaiyawaerea | www.kaiyawaerea.com

[eahostudiogallery]

Blank wall, clean slate

Abbas Akhavan

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Anna Grath - Emmme

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Geof Kern

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Curators, Whitechapel gallery, London, 1930

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Liliana Porter

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Engel, 2022

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Carolyn Lazard - SYNC

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Magali Reus Clay - (Fog)

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Felix Gonzalez - Torres Untitled (Orpheus, Twice)

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Mikael Christian Strøbek

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Laurent Penvern

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Remy Charlip

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Richard Tuttle - 26th Line Piece, 1990

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Matias Faldbakken - Untitled

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unknown

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Wednesday: rust never sleeps

[charlesbryan]

Carolyn Lazard at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

http://dlvr.it/SrwQpJ

[irrepat]

World as diagram, work as dance

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Emily Barker, Simon Denny, Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Win McCarthy, Gretchen Lawrence, Carolyn Lazard, Coumba Samba, Diamond Stingily Curated by Tosia Leniarska

03 February – 04 March 2023

Emalin, 1 Holywell Lane, London

[badarchitecturesucks]

Carolyn Lazard, Pain Scale, 2019, vinyl, dimensions variable

[luxe-pauvre]

If we explore the alternative to the medical community’s elusive explanation, we are left with a disease that is the result of unchecked capitalist production and its runoff. Just as autoimmune disorders have the confused body attacking itself, capitalism has humans attacking the natural world. Capitalism delineates a boundary between human society and the natural world; by separating them, it becomes easier to exploit the latter. What we are left with is bodies that are confused: incapable, on molecular level, of maintaining the basic boundaries that are constitutive of self. Mimicking, on a molecular level, the degrees of alienation and commodification that happen to the body on a social and economic level. There are currently no known cures for most autoimmune diseases. They are discussed as chronic conditions that must be in a lifelong process of mitigation through biomedical means. […] My doctors’ assurance was that I would get well. I would be able to get a job with benefits that would allow me to pay for insurance. Biomedical treatment operates on a capitalist understanding of time. Rather than embracing the regenerative powers of the body, the idea is to get back to work as quickly as possible. It is the body’s radical autonomy that resists commodification. To spite our optimal productivity, it gets sick. Sickness can be masked and treated but the body responds nonetheless. It reacts. It may take longer to recover than is convenient to your boss. We do not have time to get you better. We have time to make you functional.

Carolyn Lazard, How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity

[collectionarchive]

by Carolyn Lazard

[In a gallery space, facing the entrance from the back. In the foreground in the center of the space a white ceramic sink sits upright atop a brown stand with wheels. The sink’s bottom side faces forward and its basin faces the gallery. Along the left wall two electric fireplaces sit side by side on the ground. Further center is a greenish-brown La-Z-Boy chair that stands upright and leans forward toward the right wall, revealing the metal armature supporting its uprightness. On the wall on the right is a brown framed drawing. Further on the wall on the right is a white ceramic sink hung vertically with its basin facing the gallery, approximating the overall shape and form of an old television. In the far right corner is a brown pleather La-Z-boy chair in a reclined position angled toward the center of the space. In the center of the far wall is a metal sink hung vertically with its basin facing the gallery, approximating the overall shape and form of an old television.]

source: collectionarchive.tumblr.com

[disease]

CAROLYN LAZARD / “A CONSPIRACY” / 2017 [dohm white noise machines | varying dimensions]

[mentaltimetraveller]

Carolyn Lazard

TV1 (Dead Time), 2020

at ESSEX STREET, New York, 2020

[contemporaryartdaily]

Group Show at Kevin Space