The Industry of Frida

rgr-pop:

A few days ago, I posted two of Nickolas Muray’s portraits of Frida Kahlo. They are modestly blowing up. My dashboard is flooded with snippets like “she’s so beautiful” and “how was she so pretty?” and “#tears in my eye over how flawless you are” and “frida, you dirty girl.” Dirty girl.

I am reminded of something Garçonnière wrote, part of her continuing commentary on tumblr, credit, and context but specifically in relation to the circulation of decontextualized images of (often by, but always of) Kahlo on tumblr. The Frida industry, as we know, runs on Frida’s body herself—her face/hair/person has become a commodity partially because her face/hair/person was her medium and her most frequent subject. The thing is, though, that commodifying that face/hair/person removes that image from the reasons why it was her medium and subject: her politicization of her indigenous woman body vs. others’ politicization of her indigenous woman body; her sexuality/not sexuality; her work to materialize memory and place and pain, in order to do which she worked through the body as much as with it; and most notably her work as a response to the condition of her own body.

As my followers and friends know, I’ve been working through feminist representations of hair—the political, embodied, tenuous, tactile, poetic, ironic, painful ways women relate to the hairs that grow and fall out of us. Oddly enough, my mind didn’t initially turn to Frida.

This month my work project has been shifting LOC numbers TR—the photography subheading. During winter break, with the library mostly empty and Fine Arts that much emptier, I’ve spent most of my shifts in that back aisle, shifting and sorting photography books. In those long, lulling afternoons I’ve got plenty of browsing time (especially since our librarians remind us not to shelf-read for more than twenty-five minutes at a time or we’ll lose our minds). So I’ve been pulling books and flipping through them, looking for images and thoughts about hair. The other day I pulled TR680.F735 2010: Frida Kahlo: her photos.

The two photos I posted were spread with one more, a photograph of her head in traction, placed between them. I was so blown away by the succession of the three photos, of the way both photographer and subject were grappling with her physicality, of the way the sequence disrupted what we take for granted about her body and, mostly, about her hair. I should have included that third picture between the two that I posted, and removing it from that context feels now, to me, so exploitative. 

In order to consider the context of the photos, one should consider the book I took them from. “Her photos” are actually the photos that she was given or collected as much as the those she created. It’s a book of photographs from the files uncovered and filed in back rooms in her old house, the Kahlo museum. They were all photographs she owned. It’s a really, really brilliant book which frames the collection as Frida’s own responses to the art world at large as both an insider and an outsider (considering her family portraits, self-portraits, as well as works gifted and acquired by Brassai/Weston/Bravo/Man Ray). It also places her own photography as a conversation with her other work and her position as a collector, and it paints a really compelling image of her collection/creation as an obsessive act, a search for grounding. In the chapter which documents her days in bed (most photos in which were taken by Muray), snippets she collected (anatomical drawings of pelvises, diagrams of gestation) are paired with portraits of her pain, her posing in pain, or her working through and about pain. The book draws a genealogy of making which includes not just artmaking but collecting, modeling, bodymaking.

Muray’s photos of Frida in bed are noted for their stillness, their sense of classicism, a jilting image in contrast to how we’ve all come to think about Frida. They stuck with me because of the ways that her body was so politically unmade. A condescending Kahlo commenter might say that her image was always categorically unmade; that Frida’s body and images thereof were political because they were outside of contemporary beauty processes. (“Radical ugliness,” maybe.) But really, we know that making her body, making her image was one of Frida’s most dedicated labors. She was not unplucked and unfashionable because she was Mexican; she opted out of Euro/white fashion as a way to dramatically construct not only an indiginisma but to make her body into the other/outside/off that she was trying to materialize. Frida was an artist whose artistic identity was so defined through self-portraiture, but for her, self-portraiture and construction of body was also a seamless process of making.

Thus the unmade photographs: the unmade white sheets, the undressed, the undone hair, the Odalisque so classic[al] as if effortless. But there, in between them, that ultra-constructed traction brace. I am left unknowing what is body and what is material, what is made and what is unmade. And in the middle of all of this was her hair.

Frida’s hair is fundamental—the radically unplucked feminine indigineity, her relationship with her mother, her making. But I have only recently begun to think of Frida’s construction of her hair as an extension of her making of herself, as a process embodying her own tenuous relationship to her body. To me, and people like me, hair is an analog for so much more; making with hair is both a compulsion and a language. Seeing Frida with her hair down and not just down but wrapping her up calls me to a more thorough reflection on hair as meaning/medium in Frida Kahlo’s work, her collections, her paintings, her photographs, and her self-making.

I’m looking at those photos again and at the hump of her hip and her peeking glare. That hump is one which, I guess, people tend to sexualize—or anyway, that’s what tumblr has done. That arching, jagged, fleshy hump. I guess it’s just as useless to reflect on that patch of body, the subject/object of these photos, without talking about Nickolas Muray. There’s this tension, between her own sexuality (and her relationship with Muray) and her absolute desexual objectification of her own body. And here was this photographer, in love with this woman, broken and holed up in her bed, photographing that flesh. Still, I’m grossly uncomfortable that all a viewer takes from these works is that she’s beautiful, that she’s sexy.

Even to the extent that Nickolas Muray was thinking about sex, even to the extent that she was thinking of sex, even to the extent that it was sex, I don’t think these photos are about sex.

But that returns us to that Industry of Frida, right? There was a reason that she was such a powerful self-image-maker, but those reasons have evaporated not just because of enterprise or uncrediting tumblr, but also because of art history itself. We are taught, when we are taught of Frida, compartmentally: there was indigineity, there was Diego (and therefore politics), there was pain (therefore psychoanalysis). We are not taught to examine her and her work for itself, for herself, and holistically. We are not taught to discuss her sexuality in the context of her artmaking and her politics. Frida, whose labor was making image, has been reduced to an image.

Maybe I should have mentioned all of this the first time I posted those photos.

 !!!!!!

(via meredithgraves-deactivated20121)

Francesca Woodman

fucktronic:

—Woodman’s photographs always remind me of Duane Michals’s works. The narrative, use of lights and surrealism style. That’s what made me fascinated by her photographs. Woodman seems to obsessed with existence and reflection, it shows in her works that have a lot of ‘invisible’ theme on it. She killed herself when she was 22 by jumping from the window of her apartment in Manhattan. Its hard not to relate her suicide with her works, which are have a ‘haunting’ and afterlife feels. Like Sylvia Plath, i can’t stop asking “what would she be like right now if she didnt killed herself”.—

“Born in Colorado, she studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, and the body of her work was produced in response to school assignments. From her time spent in Rome on scholarship and in New York after completing her degree, she produced an oeuvre that is often described as brief yet powerfully accomplished. Woodman photographically blurred and mutated her body via a deft mastering of prolonged single exposures. In these images, her body traverses dilapidated interiors, is sometimes lodged behind disintegrating scraps of wallpaper, and often appears to move across space despite the static nature of the form, her edges foggy and shifting.”

Woodman’s genius had concrete foundations. Her mother was a successful ceramicist; her Harvard-educated father a professor of painting. From an early age, she spent long spells in Italy with her family. Clever, creative, encouraged by her parents, she soaked up every artistic trend, from postmodernism to the Baroque. When most teenagers were experimenting with make-up, she wore Victorian-style dresses and read Proust.

Distortions, faceless bodies, cropped bodies, dissolving bodies, all contribute to the idea of a constant transitionality and mutability of being. Woodman engages her body in a subtle and at times strongly dynamic physical exchange with the built environment, thus achieving the goal of both revealing and concealing her body and identity. She is the girl hidden under the detached mantel of the old fireplace, she is the woman in the wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, imprisoned in the overlaying pattern, creeping around the circumference of the room, who is unnamed because the experience she is undergoing robs her of her identity.

Woodman claimed that she was interested in ‘the relationships that people have with space’ and created ghost and angel female bodies that move between the oppositions of inside/outside, self/ surroundings. Sollers observes in Woodman’s work that: ‘When one doesn’t really exist, except in the impossibility of being an angel … one has a tendency to float, to levitate, for space and weight obey new laws.’ The ghost-like identities of Woodman’s photographs appear like apparitions due to their unique relationship to the rooms and spaces they inhabit, defying gravity and the possibilities of human movement. The literal blurring in Woodman’s shots between the fixed subject and the space it moves through creates images of liminal and unstable figures and places. This instability works to ‘simultaneously create and explode the fragile membrane that protects one’s identity from being absorbed by its surroundings’. Just as ghosts mythologically possess the ability to ‘walk through walls’, Woodman’s female ghosts melt into and move through the locations that seemingly enclose them.

MORE OF HER WORKS HERE

TEXT CREDIT :

Surrealism and Self-representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman by Eva Rus

Transitory Ghosts & Angels in the Photography of Francesca Woodman by Georgie Boucher

Francesca Woodman, Palazzo della Ragione, Milan by Rachel Spence

<3

(via killyourinspiration)

8 REASONS CAPITALISTS WANT TO SELL YOU DEODORANT

missquitecontrary:

garconniere:

kimclit:

dropdeadtwat:

1. Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.

2. Body smells remind us that we are animals. Capitalists don’t want us to be reminded of that. Animals are dirty. They eat things off the ground, not out of plastic wrappers. They are openly sexual. They don’t wear suits or ties, and they don’t get their hair done. They don’t show up to work on time.

3. Body smells are unique. Everyone has her own body smell. Capitalists don’t like individuality. There are millions of body smells but only a few deodorant smells. Capitalists like that.

4. Some deodorants are harmful. Capitalists like that because they are always looking for new illnesses to cure. Capitalists love to invent new medicines. Medicines make money for them and win them prizes; they also cause new illnesses so capitalists can invent even more new medicines.

5. Deodorants cost you money. Capitalists are especially pleased about that.

6. Deodorants hide the damage that capitalist products cause your body. Eating meat and other chemical-filled foods sold by capitalists makes you smell bad. Wearing pantyhose makes you smell bad. Capitalists don’t want you to stop wearing pantyhose or eating meat.

7. Deodorant-users are insecure. Capitalists like insecure people. Insecure people don’t start trouble. Insecure people also buy room fresheners, hair conditioners, makeup, and magazines with articles about dieting.

8. Deodorants are unnecessary. Capitalists are very proud of that and they win marketing awards for it.

I think this is pretty much the maniacally-liberal equivalent of ‘my own shit don’t stink’. Give me a fucking break. B.O. stinks, and everyone knows it. I’m not insecure because I think sweat has a bad smell. Go for the healthiest and most natural version of such things, for sure. Buy things produced in an ethical manner. But don’t stink up public places with your sweat!  Seriously, as much as gross-overly-perfumed deodorants give me migraines, so does B.O.

Or maybe this is a joke and I’m just taking it too seriously. Please, tell me it’s a joke.

it’s not a joke, but it might be perceived as a bit exaggerated. i think anti-perspirant is more of a problem than “deodorant,” personally. stopping your body from its natural process of sweating by putting aluminum in your armpit every single day is pretty messed up in my opinion. especially when given the fact that very few people are questioning that very fact or studying the potential impacts on our bodies. i agree with a lot of the points raised, mainly 1, 5, 6, 8 (even though i wear pantyhose), even if i don’t necessarily like the way they are worded. they made you think, though, right?

as for your points, i totally agree with striking a balance, finding something that works for your specific body (hopefully one that is ethically produced and a healthy version) rather than necessarily rebuffing the idea of wearing deodorant altogether especially if you dislike the smell of body odor. i personally started using this one after being disatisfied with my past experiences with at least six different brands of aluminum-free deodorants: theo deodorant. i quite like it.

i reblogged it because i found it nice to read something from the other end of the spectrum. everyone’s body is different, and produces different smells, but we are constantly bombarded about how we need to alter our bodies with products to be deemed “acceptable” bodies. whatever your personal feelings about body odor, i think the main point of that post (and the reason it has so many notes) is about deodorant as a product, and the whole culture of repulsion towards human smells in general. i found it pretty refreshing to read.