… again, following up on note 05 from today, i find my way to the digital exhibition On Protest and Mourning at the Caribbean Cultural Center & African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) website… i read curator Grace Aneiza Ali’s statement…

Protest is a form of mourning; and mourning is a form of protest. Throughout these images we see a consistent narrative, a shared language, a call to action: we must resist slipping into numbness, we must always cry out against a state’s militarized violence, against the emotional and mental brutalities it wields. And, as a matter of survival, we must always cry out for the Black lives loved and lost.¹

… Black Lives Matter…

… relative to the exhibit at The New Museum, i think, CCCADI is better positioned to curate a visual art representation of the oppression, grief and protest of black and brown people…

… i am ambivalent about doing this in the cultural institutions of white patriarchy… i think it is important to have a conversation, a conscience… to admit the wrong of systematic oppression… but i can’t let go of the idea that oppressive cultural and political structures have a huge capacity for self critique without changing… the object of the self critique being to say, we see, we understand… maybe some do, but overall, there is little change as a result…

… is the critic who wrote the article i mentioned in the previous post… an African American Man with a PhD… this gives him the right to be critical of the exhibition… a white critic might or might not be astute in their critique, but does s/he have standing to make the critique?… then i think, she might, because she too may have felt a certain kind of patriarchal oppression… it’s a morning of puzzling thoughts and reactions… i make my thought process transparent as i grope forward…

… there are two exhibitions discussed in this article… the first is what gets my attention… i am interested in the critique of star power rather than the subject of the exhibition… is this my white male privilege rearing an ugly head?…

… an article on Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back… it is a little expensive, even in the Kindle version so i add it for now to my list on Amazon…

… as i read the book, i think a few things… i think that i tried to have a career where i loved my work, but it did not pan out in a satisfying way in the end… then i switched to being a photographic artist… i don’t have to make money doing it, thanks to H mostly, but it is nice when i do… yet, i am ambivalent about the gallery system, the gatekeeping, etc. which has me focusing my art in ways i would not otherwise… still, i have come to a compromise, where i make what i make and wait for opportunities to have something come of it… right now, i write a blog that i think of as part of my artwork… nobody reads it… i don’t publicize it much, i would rather people discover it and let me know if they liked it…

… it seems appropriate to follow up the last post with something on feminist artist Barbara Krueger…

Wielding the power of art, Kruger went on to address conversations around feminism, consumerism and individualism, challenging how we think and behave. She has never been afraid to push boundaries.¹

… very nicely composed photographs, about place, anchored by a river…

Dan Wood?

… the article attributes the photographs to Mike Gaynor(?) in their captions, but the book, and one believes, photographs are decidedly by Dan Wood?… confusion… i don’t know that there is anything exceptional about the book other than very well made photographs… there are many books about place anchored by a flowing body of water, Sleeping By the Mississippi comes to mind…

Liat Yossifor, “Water” (2021), oil on linen, 80 x 78 inches

… something about this abstract artwork… she is on to something… on view at Miles McEnery Gallery (520 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 19…

_ The exhibition’s title comes from André Breton’s 1932 book Les Vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels), which was partially inspired by Sigmund Freud’s writings about dreams and dreaming, and the connections between the interior imagination and everyday facts. By using this title, Yossifor suggests she believes that paint enables viewers to recognize connections between the imagination and the ordinary world without relying on the overtly pictorial._¹

Lilliana Castro producing “Temaquixtilitzli” (2019) (photo by Jesica Vasquez)

…this lead in photograph does pull me in, and apart from the fact that she is a young attractive woman, it is, for once, not my male gaze that pulls me in, but her earnestness… she is concentrating and creating and i fall in love with just that, a young, earnest woman creating a graphic, sending a message to the world…

… as i read the article, i realize it is by a woman, about a woman, creating artwork that is about the condition of women…

… all of the women in the article are LGBTQI… i don’t know what the I stands for…

… i wonder, to what degree is woman choosing woman to love physically about their rejection of the patriarchy?…

… an article on Jasper Johns draws me in and i read it from beginning to end… drawn in because the paintings speak to me…

Jasper Johns, Green Angel, 1985

… the article solves the mystery of origin…

The page in question from Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (screenshot by the author)

… fascinating… find out more about Torse de la Cenauresse et Minotaure, Auguste RODIN…

… this painting drew me in…

Malak Matar, “When peace dies, embrace it. It will live again.” (2019)

At age 21, Malak Matar, a Gaza-born artist, has survived three wars and untold trauma. She also recently lived through the 11-day Israeli assault on her city that killed over 240 civilians, including dozens of children. A fragile ceasefire was signed on May 20 between Israel and Hamas, which rules the besieged Gaza Strip. But suffering in Gaza, one of the most impoverished cities in the world, hasn’t ceased. The grief and loss continue with entire families slain; over 70,000 people displaced; widescale damage to property; and continued misery under Israel’s ongoing blockade.¹

… her paintings are hopeful, remind me of the primitivism of Picasso, Gaugin…

… her Etsy store…

… an art show at the Carriage Trade Gallery in NYC, curated in partnership with Rectangle, Brussels… the exhibition displays the critique of colonization by 12 artists… setting aside for the moment what John Berger told us about the capacity of the establishment to absorb critique and present it without doing damage to itself (art galleries are capitalist entities for the most part)… or can we?… how effective is the critique?… does it change anything?… or is it a PR campaign of its own, designed to suggest that Eurocentric capitalist culture is sensitive to its ill effects on the planet and its peoples?…

There is a common misconception that countries in the Global South are “developing,” when in reality, many of them are still recovering from centuries of imperial dominance.¹

… [an article](https://hyperallergic.com/645965/the-very-real-motherhood-penalty-in-the-art-world/ “The Very Real “MOtherhood Penalty” in the Art World”) on how women are penalized in their professional careers for having children… the art world is no different, given its male domination… and here is an interesting quote:

The cultural industry contributes a greater share to the United States gross domestic product than agriculture, transportation, or construction, proving that creative work is **work.¹

… nice article in Lenscratch on this Guggenheim Fellow photographer… many amazing images, this is one of my favorites…

©Carl Corey, 8922 • Sault St. Marie, Michigan

… many more in the article…

… a long article on famous artist pairs who did or did not marry, but maintained long creative careers wherein it sometimes became difficult to parse out who influenced who and what they might have been without one another (the patriarchy has too often assumed that any vigor and brilliance in the woman’s work can be attributed to the man they are with)…

I want to believe that the institution has changed, that there are ways this elaborate ceremony is not as conventionally damning as some make it out to be. If anything, today we are less enamored by the idea that any partnership is for life — even if I have entered it believing this with my heart and soul. Divorce is no longer so scandalous. Love is possible at any decade. Financial security and education point to women marrying later, and to lower birthrates. Yet it still feels like we are struggling, as a culture, to put the female artist on the same pedestal as her male equal, as so many women writers and artists, Paul among them, have pointed out in their lives and in their work.¹

… and this from Toni Morrison via the article…

_I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Before that, all the men I knew did know better, they really did. My father and teachers were smart people who knew better. Then I came across a smart person who was very important to me who didn’t know better.²

… interesting article on the problem with naming women artists, who’s histories are all too often tied up with men more famous then they during their lifetimes… and then there are the ways that the patriarchy patronizes women when it names them…

In 2017, French novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s succinct biography of early 20th-century German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, was published in English. In it, Darrieussecq calls her subject Paula, while the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was her friend, is called Rilke. When asked about this disparity in The Paris Review, Darrieussecq was blunt, “It’s the truth about men and women. It still is. It’s hard to have a name when you’re a woman.”¹

Elisabeth Van Vyve, Untitled, 1993–2013

© Clément Van Vyve/Collection Bruno Decharme

… Photo Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie at the American Museum of Folk Art, New York City…

_The artist I kept returning to in the show, time and again, is its most spartan and tranquil, an outlier in an assembly of often cacophonous outliers. Elisabeth Van Vyve, a woman with autism and hearing problems who now lives in a retirement home in Antwerp, has used disposable color-film cameras for decades to catalogue her circumscribed visual environment in obsessive detail, creating albums of thousands of snapshots that inevitably evoke the postmodern banal-sublime of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and early Fischli & Weiss.¹

Cave paintings created around 40,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, among the world’s oldest cave art, are being destroyed by the climate crisis. A new study conducted by researchers at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit of Griffith University in Australia describes the damage of rock art panels in recent decades due to climate-induced haloclasty, or salt crystallization.¹

Hand prints in the Pettakere Cave at Maros-Pangkep, Indonesia (image via Wikipedia Commons)

… i wonder how many cycles of ecological disaster the planet has been through?… i am not at all religious, but i was given exposure to Christianity as a child… responsible parents did that… i liked the story of Noah’s Arc… i combine it with the (Buddhist?) concept of cyclical worlds to render a cyclical series of floods, sort of a Groundhog Day, but spanning hundreds of thousands of years with each epoch offering a full flourishing of the planet and humanity that is summarily wiped off it’s face and started over again by an increasingly frustrated God… lets see if they get it right this time… it is sad to see that record of the current epoch is being erased by the effects of climate change…

… i try to avoid most mentions of 45, i refuse mostly to say his name, he remains a clear danger to democracy… i am glad to [read ](https://hyperallergic.com/646642/biden-scraps-plan-for-national-garden-of-american-heroes/ “Biden Scraps Trump’s Bizarre Plan for a “National Garden of American Heroes”, via Hyperallergic”) that Biden/Harris admin is scraping the heroes garden…

_In a small but important step toward restoring sanity in America, President Joe Biden has officially scrapped Donald Trump’s plan to build a “National Garden of American Heroes.” The outdoor sculpture park would have honored a perplexingly eclectic mix of nearly 250 figures — from athletes and pop culture icons to the conservative former Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia and, ironically, Hannah Arendt, known for her writings on the dangers of totalitarianism.¹

… Dr. Marcus Bunyan reviews this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago…

… i saw a review of the show a while back, made me wish i could afford to get to Chicago…

This is a harrowing exhibition. In reality, in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be, for the problems that it investigates – the psychological, physical, and emotional realities people encounter in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility; the lack of open acknowledgement of pleasure, the lack of access to abortion, trauma, and the loss of fertility – should not longer exist. Women’s bodies are not vehicles for reproduction as see through a patriarchal, capitalist lens.¹

_“I’m trying to visualise a history of misogyny so we don’t forget what’s in the past and don’t get too comfortable in the present; so we take a look at things that sometimes we don’t want to – in a visual way that doesn’t make you just turn the page but makes you engage somehow and think a little bit.”²