Why Is It Always Women?

Francien Krieg.

Francien Krieg.

The Creators Project has a feature on artist Francien Krieg, who has a series of nudes of elderly women. Aging bodies are hardly anything new in art, but there’s always a fuss. Yes, we all get to see just how much sway aging and gravity have on our bodies, and experience the sad wistfulness in the remembrance of a young, limber body, when the days stretched in front of you seemed eternal. It doesn’t take long before your bits make a rush to hit the ground, and it can be a hell of a lot of work to stave that off for as long as possible. The portrayal of the bodies of old people often elicit a revulsion from those who are young, simply because it hasn’t occurred to them yet that, yeah, if you live long enough, that will happen to you too. I remember that shock happening to me, when in my teens, I had to help my great-grandmother get dressed. That was an eye-opener. Now I’m 59, and my arse is making every effort to fall down to the floor and stay there. I’m not quite ready to let that happen, so it’s an ongoing fight.

So, old bodies. I understand the reasons for depictions, even those done for short-term shock value. What I don’t understand is why it’s always women. Can we not get out from under the constant pressure of sexist judgment in old age? Do we need to be paraded for the “ohgods eeeeuuuw” crowd? Where are all the naked old men, who are also just as subject to gravity as us women. A pair of 80 year old testicles aren’t any more fun to contemplate than 80 year old breasts; and depending on the old man in question, he might have comparable breasts to an old woman’s. I think such portraiture is fine, but I would like to see men included, and I’d prefer to see people who were proud and confident in posing, despite their age.

You can read and see more here, NSFW.

Conservation Lab: Renaissance Cabinet.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

Conservators look through microscopes to gather information about an object’s composition and construction—and on a regular day in the lab, knowing such things is an end unto itself. “It’s just interesting, that’s all,” one conservator once told me. When an object’s history is uncertain, however, those scientific results take on layers of meaning, each a potential bit of evidence that can help solve the mystery. In 2001, conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum undertook a thorough reexamination of a massive French cabinet long believed to be a fake: a 19th century piece designed to resemble Renaissance-era handiwork. Zooming in on a single brass tack turned out to yield important clues as to the cabinet’s making, and helped prove its authenticity.

When J. Paul Getty purchased the cabinet in 1971 for $1,700, curators warned against the acquisition. The cabinet’s pristine condition aroused suspicions, as did the coating of colored wax on its surface, which suggested someone had tried to make it appear older than it was. Experts concluded that the piece was likely produced in the 19th century, when Renaissance-style furniture was all the rage among American industrialist tycoons—prompting many fakes to voyage across the Atlantic. Even the cabinet’s excessively florid style worked against it: “A present-day tendency to associate heavy forms, sharp carving and dense decorative detail with neo-Renaissance cabinetry perhaps explains why further suspicions arose. The decoration almost suggests 19th century horror vacui,” noted curator Jack Hinton and conservator Arlen Heginbotham in a 2006 article about the object.

Heginbotham looked past all that noisy decoration and zeroed in on the science. Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, showed that the oak tree used in the object’s construction was harvested in the mid-1570s, and the surface wood and interior silk lining were carbon dated to the 15th and 16th centuries. Conservators then focused on the brass tacks used to attach the silk lining, whose appearance under the microscope—centuries later—would determine the date of their making.

You can see and read much more about this at The Creators Project.

A Few Words from Alan Cumming…

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the masks that we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown. #Model: @alancummingsnaps #Photographers: @StevenTrumon & @GINGERB3ARDMAN #MAKEUP: @makeupartbynoel #Retouch Collab: @shinehorovits #ArtistsAgainstTyranny #SpreadTheWord #LoveTrumpsHate #AmericaTheBeautiful #UnitedNotDivided

A post shared by Alan Cumming (@alancummingsnaps) on

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the mask we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown.

Source.

Looking for Knives.

Morissa Maltz.

Morissa Maltz.

Visiting Hot Springs, Arkansas is like walking into the past. A city stuck in time, it’s known as much for its history and naturally heated springs buildings as its mix of 1800s architecture and Art Deco—structures that are slowly crumbling yet still magical. One of the city’s iconic buildings, the gigantic and once abandoned Majestic Hotel, was recently demolished. A week before its dismantling, however, artist and filmmaker Morissa Maltz shot a video inside the hotel. Equal parts documentary, performance art piece, and music video for Dyan’s “Looking for Knives,” it is the final document of a space that held huge amounts of history.

In “Looking for Knives,” Maltz’s camera drifts through the hotels innards. Though The Majestic suffered a fire in 2014, the video focuses instead on paint peeling off walls and floors turning into dirt. Inspired by female artists like Pipilotti Rist, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren, for whom the body expresses emotion inside a space, Maltz also performs in the video, moving through the hotel’s crumbling corridors and interacting with its surfaces.

A lovely, haunting video and song. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.

The War Over the Blackest Black.

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^That is Vantablack, a ferocious matte black which absorbs 99.96% of the light that hits it, and no matter what’s underneath Vantablack, it looks flat and completely empty. Vantablack was extremely exciting in artist’s circles when the news first broke, but it had barely broken before Anish Kapoor brokered an exclusivity deal. That didn’t go down well among artists. The world’s blackest black, and only available to one artist? Stuart Semple, another British artist, fought back with the World’s Pinkest Pink, and the Most Glittery Glitter, available to everyone except Kapoor. Now Semple has come out with Black 2.0, his answer to Vantablack 2.0:

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Before anyone starts scratching their heads over this, wondering WTF, yes, artists are rather obsessed with black, and in particular, a matte black which will eat light. It’s a thing, what can I say?
Black 2.0 is available to all, except Kapoor.

Now, with the recent release of Vantablack 2.0, which is the world’s newest blackest black, Semple has released his own newest blackest black. Called Black 2.0, Semple calls it “the most pigmented, flattest, mattest, black acrylic paint in the world.” Much like Vantablack, it’s able to turn 3D surfaces into flat-looking holes, but it’s not quite got the staring-into-the-abyss qualities of the original. (Or the laser-eating capabilities of Vantablack 2.0, which the researchers at NanoSystem have said is “so black that our spectrometers can’t measure it!”)

You can read all about the blackest of black wars here.

Sunday Facepalm: Jesus’s Nets of Neo-Porn.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an "erotic" net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an “erotic” net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

A mural in a cathedral-church has gotten much attention, of the “blasphemous, disgusting, and demonic” kind. It is deliberately erotic, which is what has so many uptight knickers in a knot. Why, you can even sort of see Jesus’s tarse, oh no! Naturally, this isn’t just about the mural, it’s about Paglia’s oh-so-debased nature in designing a sex-ed class which was decried as “thoroughly immoral,” “entirely inappropriate,” and “quite tragic.”

Personally, I don’t see a problem with depicting people in a body-based manner, we are our bodies after all. When it comes to Christian thought, the idea is that while people might strive to overcome their carnal nature, this doesn’t happen until after death, and you get to heaven or wherever, yada, yada. In that sense, the mural would be accurate. Anyroad, this is being dragged into the limelight again, because Paglia has been promoted in the church.

Paglia commissioned homosexual Argentinean Ricardo Cinalli to paint the cathedral mural in 2007. It depicts Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions.

[…]

Dr. Ward questioned Paglia’s recent appointments to influential posts within the Vatican given his artistic sensibilities.

“Given that Archbishop Paglia is in the net of erotic figures going to heaven, and given that he discussed every detail with the painter, the question has to be asked by parents worldwide why was this man put in charge of a prototype of sex education aimed at Catholic children throughout the world?” he said.

“Catholic parents must look at the scale of evil [that has infiltrated the Church at the highest levels]. They have to wake up to what is going on: It’s a moral nuclear wasteland,” he added.

Christine Vollmer, president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family as well as a founding member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, called the mural “disgusting.”

[…]

Wilson said it is “incomprehensible” that Pope Francis appointed Paglia not only as head of the Academy for Life but also as the Grand Chancellor of the Saint John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. She also called it “scandalous” that he was selected to oversee the launching of the Vatican sex-education course for teens, a course that she said is “repulsive and destructive to the innocence of children” as well as “contrary to the true teachings of the Catholic Church.”

[…]

Catholic artist and author Michael D. O’Brien criticized the mural for giving the viewer the “false message” that “all sexual activity, regardless of how depraved, is blessed by God.”

You can read much more here.

Wrap My Hijab!

Mona Haydar, a Syrian Muslim-American poet and activist, released her first-ever single and rap music video in honor of the world’s first-ever Muslim Women’s Day on Mar 27 … all while she’s pregnant.

Given the current rise of Islamophobia around the world, Haydar wanted to fight the hate. And what better way to do that than with music?

“This song is a party,” Haydar wrote in a Facebook post.

After the song went live, some people began shaming Haydar and the other hijabis in the video for having fun, as they sing and dance away.

“So even if you hate it – I still wrap my hijab!” the lyrics say in anticipation of the hateful remarks.

But, Haydar did not let the hate ruin the moment, and instead kept on celebrating.

You can read more here. I think it’s a grand song!

The Pretension and Fawning Go On.

George Bush, “Sergeant Leslie Zimmerman U.S. Army, 2001-2004” (undated), oil on stretched canvas, 20 x 24 in.

George Bush, “Sergeant Leslie Zimmerman U.S. Army, 2001-2004” (undated), oil on stretched canvas, 20 x 24 in.

It’s no secret how much I loathe the pretentiousness of the art world. It’s not easy to find equal levels of pompous puffery, arrogance, and pretentious fawning that infest the art world. The latest person being painted over with fawning pretension is George W. Bush. Seph Rodney at Hyperallergic takes on the fawning of the New York Times.

Take the recent New York Times piece, “‘W.’ and the Art of Redemption” by Mimi Swartz, about the portrait-painting practice of former President George W. Bush. The piece, among other things, reports the landing of the book of his paintings, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, on the New York Times best seller list. It’s part reputation rehab, part art review, part commendation, and part audition for the job of Bush’s headstone writer. We might one day see, etched in marble, something like: “Here lays the former president who found his true calling only after serving the highest office in the land.” And verily there will be tears.

[…]

The piece veers upward from there, lifted by the imprimatur of key art critics Jerry Saltz and Peter Schjeldahl, who use terms like “innocent,” “sincere,” “earnest,” and “honestly observed” to describe Bush’s portraits.

I don’t think Bush’s paintings are awful, they aren’t. I don’t think they are terribly good, either. They’re okay. If you inhabit the art world, or have wandered into it on occasion, you’ll find that “innocent”, “sincere”, and “earnest” are code words for primitive and childish, not worth anything as art, but hey, former president! I haven’t been in the art world for a while, so I’m not sure about “honestly observed”, but I’d wager a guess that it means something along the lines of “he’s doing his best.”

Swartz continues her transformation of the feckless leader into a sensitive and empathetic artist by tracing his tutelage under several art teachers: Gail Norfleet, Roger Winter, Jim Woodson, and Sedrick Huckaby. She makes Bush out to be a student, willingly learning from others, instead of the leader and “decider” he once touted himself to be. We are led to believe that all of this learning, nurturing, and patient working in obscurity, outside of the “swamp” that is Washington, DC, have now turned him a perceptive human being. Swartz tells us that “the proceeds from sales [of the book] will go to a nonprofit organization that helps veterans and their families recover,” and the George W. Bush Presidential Center website confirms this. (The hardcover edition costs $35, while the deluxe, signed and personalized edition costs $350.) But Swartz doesn’t ever acknowledge that it was Bush and his employees who started the Iraq war and put these very same people in harm’s way in the first place.

This is also a fine example of the dishonesty which comes into play when those in the art world decide to play at pointless flattery.

To be clear, this is the same man who, as president, pursued a war that was illegal and declared that coalition partners were “either with us or against us in the fight against terror” — terror only as he and his administration defined it. Even his press secretary, Scott McClellan, later admitted that a sophisticated propaganda campaign sold the war to the public. Bush manipulated and strong-armed the media into supporting his reprehensible war, and this is what we lost in it: 134,000 Iraqi civilians, though Reuters notes that the conflict “may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number”; “$1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans,” according to Reuters, referencing the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies; and $33 billion in “U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war,” according to the initial Costs of War report in 2011, with that number rising to $134.7 billion just two years later.

The idea that people should forget such an enormous cost because Bush now paints portraits of military personnel is a pernicious one, at best.

What’s insidious about the Times piece is that it puts readers in the position of feeling the need to forgive Bush and recognize his current artistic work as somehow redemptive; otherwise we seem mean-spirited or, perhaps worse, unfairly unable to evaluate another person beyond stereotype. Swartz writes: “Mr. Bush discovered what many who paint discover: that as he worked on their portraits, he came to understand his sitters, and their pain, as well as their love for one another.” But art of this nature is not redemptive — it never is unless you shut your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and yell nonsense. Art does not restore a soldier’s arms or eyesight, or provide them with physical therapy in order to learn to walk on prostheses. It does not heal their PTSD or bring back innocent Iraqi civilians from the dead.

I don’t believe Bush came to understand those he painted; I certainly don’t think he has the slightest idea of their pain, trauma, or bonds. I’m sure he’s selling that idea, and it’s a pity some people are licking the kool-aid off the floor. To even come close to a deep understanding of your subject, well, more is required than just painting. Going by the portraits at Hyperallergic, Bush didn’t even come to a shallow enough understanding for it to be reflected in the paintings. When an artist has an access of empathy while working, that tends to get into the work, in a visible way.

But we need to expand our imaginative faculties to viewing people in terms other than the ecclesiastical story of fall and redemption. Sometimes when you lose, you truly lose. And we lost that war, lost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and a dwindling supply of international credibility and respect. George W. Bush may be a good painter and a caring friend to soldiers, but he’s also the man who callously put those soldiers in harmful situations, and has now reduced them to characters within a feel-good narrative that he can tell to friends, family, and the rest of the world.

I agree with that, absolutely. I can, and do, see Bush’s work as a way for him to feel better about himself, and in the end, it all comes back to putting focus on Bush. It’s yet another way of using people, the same people he used before. Well, at least the ones who survived.

The full article is at Hyperallergic.

The Penis Seat.

Men using Mexico City’s metro trains got a shock when they sat down on a seat featuring a lifelike penis.

Campaigners against sexual violence placed the seat, which is moulded in the shape of a male body – complete with genitals, on public transport in a drive designed to show men the difficulties women face every day.

A note on the floor in front of the seat read: “It’s uncomfortable to sit here, but that’s nothing compared to the sexual violence suffered by women on their commute.”

A video promoting the stunt has been watched some 800,000 times on YouTube and is part of a UN Women campaign, alongside the Mexico City government, to tackle the problem of sexual assault.

In it, men can be seen leaping straight back up after trying to sit in the seat. Bemused, confused and disgusted expressions are seen on passengers’ faces as they catch sight of the moulding.

Mexico City moved in 2000 to make the first three carriages of metro trains women-only all day because of a surge in complaints about harassment, but it appears the problem remains.

This is a great idea, because it drives home the problem of harassment in a very real way, not only with the seat, but as you can see later in the video, the camera screens at the station were focusing in on men’s arses, much to their consternation and alarm. As a woman, it’s quite easy to laugh about the reaction of the men, because we spend whole lifetimes putting up with such shit, and it is always a difficult task to get the depth of the problem through to men. Here’s hoping this campaign does get more men to understand.

Holly Kearl, founder of the Stop Street Harassment campaign in the US, told the BBC: “Too often initiatives around women’s safety focus on what women should or should not do, so it is refreshing to see a creative campaign aimed at men.”

On YouTube, the reaction was not universally positive.

One angry male commenter condemned the video as “misandrist” and said it accused an “entire gender” over the actions of an “idiotic and uneducated percentage”.

A woman wrote under the video: “These misandrist campaigns make me angry. To other women I say, ‘Don’t you have sons, fathers or partners? Do you agree with generalising and demonising the male sex in this way?’”

As there has been little done to diminish centuries worth of generalising and demonising women, I’d say when that sort of shit stops, we can stop targeting those who commit the highest levels of harassment. Why is is alright to continue on with the “don’t do this! don’t do that!” garbage women and girls get from day one? Why is it not alright to target harassers and rapists? Those campaigns actually work. And the standard disclaimer: No, not all men harass, assault, or rape. All men do know other men who do those things. All men know other men who are sexist assholes, who tell very nasty jokes about women, who complain constantly about how evil women are, so it’s okay to do this or that, and so on. And the probability is very high that most men don’t tackle all those other men about that sort of stuff. Until men stand up to other men, we won’t get far.

Full story here.