j's Art of 2020

[dunie]

Arting is something I consistently do, but rarely share outside academic and personal networks. When I am out of those spaces, I most often than not shut off intellectualism and try to just chill out. This thread is to dump post art that's developing or engaging important topics that I find timely for myself, firstly, but art that can also be important launching points to silently encounter or verbalize some sort of discussion. Because I specialize in forms of art production that purposely resist hegemonic institutions, discourses, and normalized beliefs of art - because it feeds my own academic positionality and is just more personally affecting- I will "dump" mostly performance-, conceptual-, intermedia-based creations. Chat away, or, not. Ask random things, or, not.

[dunie]

Wed, 1/2/19, 1:58PM Encounter:

Martine Gutierrez, Apathy, ~5m video:
https://youtu.be/m7i_Ips5Fbg

STARRING: BHENJI RA / CELINA R / CHAPLIN TYLER / DARA ALLEN / DAVIA SPAIN / DEVAN DIAZ / FARIDEH ARBANIAN / JASMINE INFINITI  /MARTINE GUTIERREZ  / NOMI RUIZ  / STAR AMERASU

DIRECTED BY MARTINE GUTIERREZ / MUSIC WRITTEN AND PRODUCED BY MARTINE GUTIERREZ  / CAMERA BY DARIAN BRENNER AND MARTINE GUTIERREZ / EDITED BY MARTINE GUTIERREZ

Covered yesterday on Artforum by Devan Diaz, https://www.artforum.com/music/devan-diaz-on-martine-gutierrez-s-apathy-78242, whose strongest commentary is: "As I now see this video of myself alongside the other women, it is clear that there is no distance between the fantasy and our real-life personas.

Background info via quote from Artist's Website, http://www.martinegutierrez.com/about-the-artist1.html:

​"I think of each work as a documentation of a transformative performance. I am interested in every facet of what it means to be 'genuine', especially when performing in a role society would never cast me in. I stage the scene and emote, but the viewer sees what they want to see; they can actively engage with the work or passively make assumptions. While gender is inherently a theme in my work, I don't see it as a boundary. The only profound boundaries are those we impose upon ourselves."

The unavoidable point in Gutierrez's current practice is the forceful address of trans Latinx existence, and of course her own existence in one of these bodies guides a lot of the ideological work, too. Transwomans's identities these days are commodified through the culture of high fashion, or even conflated with fanciful drag, or even curiously embracing of drag or passing. What struck me most about this video, and which is why I chose to post it, is because Gutierrez is approaching the absence of transwomens's bodies beyond built, safe environments. The binary of apathy and love become a naked feature in many ways so as to not belabor points of absence. Instead, the gazes are numerous, the skin is supple, the camaraderie is evident, and nature is nurturing in public. I'm still working through my feelings of its music video format, because I am drawn most to the usage of white and red. The video's format, I think, makes it most palatable to a general and likely small-minded audience that mostly interfaces with queerness via RuPaul and screaming "yas kween!" But at the same time, I think this is a very smart decision on their part considering the use of white and red across centuries by painters: both colors and their material are often strategies for universalizing something or playing with contexts of purity and silence.

[dunie]

4/8/19, But Last Weekend Encounter

Fangirling: Lola Flash
http://www.lolaflash.com

I've only known about Flash's work for the last few years. I think I encountered it online first, and only once in person, but I do remember that it was around the time I was renegotiating my own affect. I'm bisexual. It's been easier to identify as queer when I am around younger people and a certain type of lesbian. Part of my own soul searching in how I wanted to move through certain spaces found a bit of peace in Flash's images: herself a lesbian but one often misgendered and misperceived racially. I was just at a conference in DC and geeked more than I could ever be to know she would be present and speak. It wasn't just about seeing her, hearing her: it was also about seeing her counter-hegemonic work and voice ring throughout spaces that also reproduce normative heterosexual ways of being; it was high time that a lesbian artist who makes work about LGBTQ lives had a space in that conference and on that campus. Flash shared this story about being in London (or somewhere UK-ish) having walked up to a younger queer performer who seemed miffed she would even address her; that this important photographer felt small and useless. Some moments later she finally came to realize that this person could not have had a platform without standing on her shoulders and the shoulders of others, especially the many, many others whose faces don't don the t-shirts or tv shows or most-followed social media accounts. To me, it felt like an incredibly Black feminist way of acknowledging a mass of experience that opened up the little spaces and possibilities today. Wrapping it back into my own story, it reminded me that my unease of not fitting the "cool" appearance of queerness was itself misguided, and that many people don't have the privilege, or want to bear their sexuality for others and that's okay. Flash's newest Legend series offers photographic evidence of the people and communities that impacted and supported her, so that more faces can exist alongside icons-- rendering significant the everyday person.

Background from Artist Website:

Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. She received her bachelor's degree from Maryland Institute and her Masters from London College of Printing, in the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4x5 film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. In 2008, she was a resident at Lightwork. Most recently, Flash was awarded an Art Matters grant, which allowed her to further two projects, in Brazil and London. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  Her work is featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, currently on exhibit across the US, and she is in the current award winning film “Through A Lens Darkly”. Flash’s work welcomes audiences who are willing to not only look but see.

You might also recognize Flash as the woman on the right in the ACT UP ad by Gran Fury, at the height of the AIDS epidemic:
https://taliawhyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/kissing-doesnt-kill.jpg

ACT UP (and Gran Fury) is part of a much larger history that I will not cover. There are many great write-ups, but you can also find a wealth of information from their website: http://www.actupny.org/video/. But in short, ACT UP formed as an activist group by the demands from gay and lesbian people to counteract mainstream misrepresentations of AIDS and to fight for humane treatment, and impartial sex education.

Photography is a brilliant medium. It has, in fact, lead to a greater ability to rescue stories obscured, identities suppressed, actions obstructed. It has equal potential to do wrong, sure. Nevertheless, I just want to highlight that Lola Flash's practice in photography is purposeful by attempting to democratize understanding and presentation of who speaks or gets to represent queer identity. And still to this day, gay males (due to #patriarchy) still hold the highest amount of representative power; were one to be petty, the hierarchy then extends to white trans women but lastly to lesbians, and especially older lesbians. The cool thing about Flash's overall work is that it is not petty, it's not about the oppression Olympics. Her presentation of this non cis gendered world of people she knows is always inflected with a broad and integrated understanding of things. And that's hard. And exhausting. And yet she still manages to keep it up. It'd do those of us interested in photographic practices well to keep her work in our purview.

Nice profile of her from 2018 here:
https://aperture.org/blog/lola-flash-ready-moment/

[dunie]

I heard about Mosse's photography during a podcast, and to catch up, this Wired article is a generally good summation:

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/richard-mosse-heat-maps/

Mosse uses a military thermal radiation camera to create remarkably detailed panoramas of refugee camps in his ongoing series Heat Maps. By employing technology more typically used in surveillance and warfare, Mosse offers a critique of how refugees are too often treated—as a threat to be mitigated or a logistical problem to be solved. “It’s my attempt to use that technology against itself, to create an abiding image of very provisional, temporary spaces that we’d rather overlook in our society,” says Mosse.

The Irish photographer has worked with infrared before, shooting with Kodak Aerochrome, a Cold War-era infrared satellite film, to document the war in Congo. He found the inspiration for Heat Maps in 2014 when wildlife cinematographer Sophie Darlington told of him about a military camera, designed to identify and track insurgents, capable of detecting bodies up to 18 miles away. Mosse placed an order for one, and received it nine months later. He won’t say much about it, but the 50-pound rig requires two computers and a 110-pound automated tripod to operate. “There’s a lot of moving parts to the system, which means a lot more can go wrong,” says Mosse. “It’s been a bit of a nightmare.”


Idomeni Camp, Greece, 2016 RICHARD MOSSE
Mosse says the camera is classified as a weapon under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Before traveling beyond the European Union with it, he often works with a lawyer to obtain an export license from Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs. He's visited some 50 refugee camps in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Upon arrival, he spends a few days scouting locations a mile or two away from the camp before setting everything up.

Although the final image is a still photograph, Mosse is using a video camera to make it. The camera pans slowly across the scene for as long as 80 minutes, pausing at two-second intervals to create a series of smaller images. As many as 900 of those photos are compiled into a final image using Photoshop, a process that can take more than 100 hours.

The final photo feels a bit like you're looking through night vision goggles or the scope of a rifle. Unsettled confusion gives way to recognition as you begin discerning small details—people sitting on the grass, sleeping in tents, chatting with neighbors. Then you realize the image teems with life. "That feeling of the unethical, this invasiveness and anonymizing, stripping of the individual—that’s what the camera was designed to do," Mosse says. "But there’s also a re-humanization of people, as the camera reveals them as fellow humans."

Smartphones are doing for art what the printing press did–a larger scale democratization of one's belief to be a participant in aesthetic enterprises. This is cool, though what's often disregarded in conversations about contemporary western practices (enacting agency, photographing different narratives, etc.) is just how tied our devices are to imperialistic warfare and genocidal exploitation. At some point, I wonder when or if the "ally" Mosse will extend his unusual privileges of ownership to his subjects.