Some 1930s babes, drawn by Jenna Brager (via Historical imaging | Sassyfrass Circus)
"Even though I cannot be sorry that certain dead visionary women have attained in death the adoration they deserved in life — I’ve already mentioned Sylvia Plath, or Anne Frank or Virginia Woolf (Marilyn Monroe? Amy Winehouse?) — there is also something creepily avuncular and overheated about the culture industry “cumming” all over what it either never honestly bothered to nourish or insisted on taking only exactly the way it wanted to. Female commentators, including the brilliant ones, are often beset by the problem of (over)identification when they write about such figures, while male commentators cannot seem to give praise or produce readings, however just, without betraying a kind of respectful arousal (or aroused respect?) rendering themselves the somewhat abashedly horny liberal uncles of the world, free to jizz into history on the figure of the actual woman whose intention it was decidedly not, via her photographs, to merely physically seduce them."
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Ariana Reines, “An Hourglass Figure: On Photographer Francesca Woodman” (April 4th, 2013)
I’ve read this twice in twenty-four hours. I cannot shake this.
Fresthetic Artist Talk: Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
I talked with Fresthetic about my work, and the upcoming show Stop Telling Women to Smile.
Fresthetic does a lot of cool stuff, and I encourage people to also watch some of their other artist talks. (Especially Joshua Mays’. He’s so damn good.)
Stop Telling Women to Smile opens this Friday at Fresthetic from 7-10pm.
If you don’t know Tatyana Fazlalizadeh yet, watch this!
(Source: stoptellingwomentosmile)
"In the psychic moving stream of Tumblr, teen girls build and perform their individual aesthetics, which are not anonymous, even if individual images are not interacted with in the same reverent (or highly art-critical) way with which one might encounter a Monet in a museum. The teen-girl Tumblr aesthetic is less about an individual image that might be dissected and praised or excellence in a specific medium, and more about “articulating a point of view."
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I found this article equal parts baffling, super important and way too intense. It took me three tries to make it to the end, and I can’t get past the fact that they used the death of a young woman as the declencheur for this conversation.
I also wonder how distorted my own visions of these topics are since I’ve only been using Tumblr since the age of 22. Not to mention how sick I am of people lauding/touting Molly Soda as representative of this so-called “Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic.” “Tumblr-famous tEEN GuRL?” She’s 23. Bitch was on livejournal just like the rest of us, never used Tumblr as a diary or a tumblelog in the traditional sense, but as a hyper-parodic art school experiment exploring notions of girlhood. The more people talk about her, the more people talk about her and convince themselves she is some sort of elected representative of every teen girl on tumblr ever? When in fact, she’s mostly mocking it? Snore.
Also, very curious about the absolute absence of discussions around race in this piece… the central figure is Asian, but that is not addressed at all. This is compounded by the fact that all of the images and examples used are very much centered around whiteness and white privilege. There have been countless important discussions challenging the way white young women in these online spaces react in knee-jerk ways to being challenged to at least address these questions. Not to mention, more importantly, how many POC resist those dominant scripts by creating and sharing their own images, giving voice to “girls like them” in a way that hadn’t been nearly as accessible/widespread a few short years ago.
I’ve got lots of feelings, most of them not good. Like, knot in the pit of my stomach not good.
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) remains best-known for her vibrant self-portraits, which comprise 55 of her 143 paintings and combine elements from traditional Mexican art with a surrealist aesthetic. This dual mesmerism with indigenous Mexican culture and the spirit of the new imbued Kahlo’s entire sensibility – she even insisted on stating July 7, 1910 as her birth date, rather than the correct date her birth certificate reflected, in order to make her birth coincide with the start of the Mexican revolution and thus align her life with the dawn of modern Mexico.
Kahlo was befallen by a disproportionate amount of medical misfortune. As a young child, she contracted polio, which prevented her right leg from developing fully – an imperfection she’d later come to disguise with her famous colorful skirts. As a teenager, while studying at Mexico’s prestigious Preparatoria school as one of only thirty-five girls, she was in a serious traffic accident, which left her with multiple body fractures and internal lesions inflicted by an iron rod that had pierced her stomach and uterus. It took her three months in full-body cast to recover and though she eventually willed her way to walking again, she spent the rest of her life battling frequent relapses of extreme pain and enduring frequent hospital visits, including more than thirty operations.
It was during her time in recovery that Kahlo first began painting, at first as a way of occupying herself while bedridden. Her mother even had a special easel made for her in order to be able to paint in bed with her father’s set of oil paints and brushes.
“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best,” she famously reflected on her self-portraits.
Two years after the accident, in 1927, she met the painter Diego River, whose work she’d come to admire, and he went on to encourage and mentor her work. In 1929, despite her mother’s protestations, the two were wedded and one of art history’s most notoriously tumultuous marriages commenced. Both had multiple affairs, the most notable of which for bisexual Kahlo were with French singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker and Russian Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky.
Despite her work being inducted into the world’s most prestigious art institution when the Louvre purchased one of her self-portraits in 1939, Kahlo didn’t reach wide critical acclaim until the early 1980s and the advent of the Neomexicanismo movement. Previously, she had been frequently reduced in historical accounts to “Diego Rivera’s wife.” Today, her work endures as one of the most prominent and singular voices in twentieth-century art.
In her final days, shortly before turning 47, Kahlo wrote in her diary, “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.”
Learn more: Wikipedia | Smithsonian Magazine
love love love the reconstructions project, but hate that wikipedia is recommended as “learn more.” learn more by going to see her paintings, by reading her diary, by reading her letters.
red & black girls by kaye blegvad on Flickr.
