#and the bit that extends into white space is the essence of an ongoing conversation happening At Some Points

[thedreadvampy]

The museum near my mum's was hosting a Raymond Briggs retrospective and it wasn't until we went today that I realised the absolutely outsize influence Briggs quietly had on my development and sensibilities as an artist. I've never really thought to flag him as one of my Favourite Illustrators but I realised walking around the room that his comics work - reading stuff like Fungus The Bogeyman and Father Christmas as a kid, and When The Wind Blows as a teenager - really formed like the platonic ideal for me of what comics should be and do.

A short list of things I think I've unconsciously learnt from his work without thinking about it:

the amount of character you can wring out of framing and posing

the idea of stylised faces in a highly rendered world

using repetitive panels to create meaning

breaking the edges of panels and frames

energetic lettering

filling up the world your characters inhabit with lots of little details you find entertaining

trying to create worlds and people that feel like Real Things That Exist by drawing on the world around you even if what you're making is a fantasy

borrowing faces and places that fit

it's allowed to be very silly

Anyway it's honestly left me quite emotional looking at his work like this bc I didn't know! I didn't know how much he'd influenced me! and there's something about looking at the artwork with all his notes to self around the margins and relettered phrases and "change this bit"s. there's a spread from fungus the bogeyman where the margins have been repeatedly filled with carefully drawn bubble letters counting down how many thousands of words and hundreds of hours of lettering he still had left to do and I'm just like i see someone is losing his actual mind lettering. relatable.

There was also. one of the last spreads in Ethel and Ernest, and it shows him and his dad coming to the hospital to see his mother's corpse after she died. and everything else on the page is done in his usual repeatedly-photocopied-and-redrawn style and worked through, but the body of his mother is almost just a pencil sketch over loose watercolour. and it's like. looking at that you can really really feel how unbearably hard it was to draw that. and next to that they had the closing spread where Briggs is showing his wife his parents' house after they died, and so right next to this drawing that evidently hurt too much to work on too long, you can see how in-depth and thoughtfully he's drawn the house he grew up in, he's done it brick by brick and every bit of detail worked in like he doesn't want to stop working on it and be done with the house. and idk it left me insanely choked up.

[dancedancerevolution2020]

how to begin // disorientation

“It matters how we arrive at the places we do.” (2)

“Orientations are about how we begin; how we proceed from ‘here’, which affects how ‘there’ appears, how it presents itself.” (8)

I’m writing this at the beginning of my independent study, curious about how to proceed. The ‘here’ of the internet. 

I am beginning: in a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, creativity.

Orientations are not simply given. When we orient towards some thing or some one, we are also turning away from something. As Ahmed says, what is present or near is not “casual”, but has appeared because of certain lines followed, paths taken or not. 

The writing table: “In this book, I bring the table to ‘the front’ of the writing in part to show how ‘what’ we think ‘from’ is an orientation device. By bringing what is ‘behind’ to the front, we might queer phenomenology by creating a new angle” (4). Ahmed is calling for a politics of location, intersectionality, being situated. To queer phenomenology would be to acknowledge where one is beginning, bringing what is usually in the background to the front and thus creating a different angle, a different dialogue. 

“After all, phenomenology is full of queer moments; as moments of disorientation that Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests involve not only ‘the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us’“ (4). 

“When we are orientated, we might not even notice that we are orientated: we might not even think ‘to think’ about this point.” (5) 

“It is by understanding how we become orientated in moments of disorientation that we might learn what it means to be orientated in the first place.” (6)

I walk in to the studio. Where do I face? What do I do? Do I start on the ground? standing? with music? Lately I have been using this score of “bad dancing” because it makes me question and look at what I think is “good dancing”. One way to look at where I am oriented.

I think that all practices of somatics are in essence practices of disorientation. When I arrive at a somatic practice I am often not aware of how I hold my body and move through the world. Or, I am aware, but it has become so natural and habitual to me that I no longer feel it as new, unique. The experience has faded to the background. By feeling, thinking, and moving differently my sense of self is (at least momentarily) shaken loose. I remember my first Feldenkrais lesson in which we balanced books on our feet for an hour. When I got up, I felt like I’d been given a new pair of feet they were so alien, alive, and richly complex.

How can somatics remain flexible and rooted in community practices as opposed to rigidly codified systems? We are not given a body that we then have to try to discover the user manual for, but instead are a body and are continually investigating ourselves and our way of moving through the world.

Side note: I find it interesting that somatics often relies on others, either people or objects, to disorient. I’m interested in this inherent relationality. We need another in order to see and feel differently. 

Desire / Lines

“The lines we follow might also function as forms of ‘alignment’, or as ways of being in line with others.” (15)

“Following lines also involves forms of social investment. Such investments ‘promise’ return (if we follow this line, then ‘this’ of ‘that’ will follow), which might sustain the very will to keep going. Through such investments in the promise of return, subjects reproduce the lines that they follow” (17). Inheritance, wealth, safety. Codified structures. Pathways. Certain ways of being that we know white supremacy and capitalism will reward.

Can desire function as a kind of guiding principle (note to self: read adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism next). Pleasure guiding scholarship and research. 

What do I choose to practice? How do these practices shape me? 

I am reminded of one of the first pages in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower:

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.“

((I take a brief diversion to look up adrienne maree brown’s definition of “somatics” in her book Pleasure Activism)

(sidebar: listen to new podcast with adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon where they discuss Parable of the Sower: http://adriennemareebrown.net/tag/octavias-parables/)

“Somatics is: a path, a methodology, a change theory, by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively. Embodied transformation is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics pragmatically supports our values and actions becoming aligned. It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other and life around us...Somatics is a practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community, and collective liberation.” (17)

I notice the use of the words change and transformation. Within oneself and one’s community and society. Concentric rings. We cannot just focus on ourselves. A theory of change and transformation -- not seeking a rigid neutrality. Balance is never still but always slightly oscillating. 

The Orient and Other Others (Queer Phenomenology Chapter 3)

“And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. A unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit, but out of implicit knowledge.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Bodily awareness - 

I recently had a conversation in which we discussed intention and reception (in regard to someone not wearing a mask because they were unaware of the science behind it *extreme eye roll*). Privilege is not having to think about how something is received. It is feeling comfortable that your good intention will be seen and not having to think far enough ahead to reception. 

“Where phenomenology attends to the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character of embodied reality, Fanon asks us to think of the ‘historic-racial’ scheme, which is, importantly, ‘below it’.” (110)

“For Fanon, racism ‘stops’ black bodies inhabiting space by extending through objects and others; the familiarity of ‘the white world’, as a world we know implicitly, ‘disorients’ black bodies such that they cease to know where to find things--reduced as they are to things among things. Racism ensures that the black gaze returns to the black body, which is not a loving return but rather follows the line of the hostile white gaze. The disorientation affected by racism diminishes capacity for action. For Fanon, racism ‘interrupts’ the corporeal schema.” (111) I write these words and recognize the wisdom and learning in them but I also want to push back or question a little bit. I wonder about Ahmed taking away agency in this section of writing. Or rather, I wonder, as some things are not as in reach or possible when Black, what other things that are not in the white imagination become available? 

“process of racialization...consider racism as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (111). I really appreciate this reframing of racism as a process. It is active, we are active. But we can also bring attention to and redirect this activity. Racism is not a structure we are passively sitting inside of, that exists outside of us.