Category: Uncategorized

#700

Since access to the Internet, a working computer with which to access it and the time, energy and resources allowing me to pursue a project like these are all insane privileges, I make a point to take a time out every 50th post to look at the broader context.

A huge recent issue is the pervasive migrant/refugee crisis. People are fleeing the wars (purposely plural) in Syria, economic turmoil in Africa, the fallout of the US’ failed drug war in Mexico, Central and South America. It’s all enormously complicated. Syria appears to be a damned if you do/damned if you don’t situation w/r/t external intervention. In hindsight, if perhaps something had been done several years ago… Meanwhile, things are coming unhinged in Yemen and intelligence analysts on the ground seem to think that boots on the ground would actually make a difference there. I’m against my countries position as World Police but at the same time, we have a mass of displaced people and as much as it disgusts me–the world we live in is better at destroying than it has ever been at creating.

I don’t pretend to have the answers–hell, I’m not even fucking citing anything in this post because I’ve read so many goddamn things and there are so many articles and opinions that I have no idea where to even begin. I do know that if you consider the general in the particular, if someone showed up knocking at your door in the middle of the night cold, hungry and terrified and you had a reasonable expectation that if you slammed your door in their face they’d be dead by morning–I’d like to think people would not be assholes but I look around and it seems that once again my faith in humanity is misplaced.

The pertinent bits of news in my country are another mass shooting and militant faction of the Republican party’s rabid efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. I feel like all the excellent points have already been made; namely, yes, providing health care to women who can’t afford it is a huge part of what Planned Parenthood does. However, this isn’t an argument that’s going to carry any weight with Republicans. After all, we know how they feel about free loaders (read: people who aren’t white). And really that argument is supposed to distract from the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. And you know what: fuck that. Yeah, they provide abortions. If you don’t want an abortion, don’t fucking get one. But you certainly don’t get to dictate what someone else can and cannot do based on your own case. Fuck that noise. I support a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body. Period.

And really, if right wing evangelicals are so into the sanctity of life–why are they so fixated on life that’s still shrink wrapped only. What about welfare moms trying to feed their kids on an $8.25/hour wage? Remember when ritually terrible persons Glenn Beck and Ted Cruz sent tons of toys to the children of refugees in Texas and their followers (the same folks who look arms and block med clinics) termed them traitors?

I was especially appalled at the right wing echo chamber having the unmitigated arrogance to suggest that Australia–after the Port Arthur massacre holding something on par with a gun buy back and Republican pundits stating that Australia had experienced a restriction of liberty. What unmitigated arrogance! (And even if it was a restriction of liberty, it was a remarkably effective once since subsequently there have been no mass shootings in Australia… hmmmm.) As the late comedian Bill Hicks wisely pointed out: there’s no connection between having a gun and killing someone with it and not having a gun and not killing someone with it and you would be a fool and a communist to make one.

The Daily Show, of all places, was spot on in calling evangelicals to task for being so pro-life but blindly supporting the NRA. (Consider presidential candidate Ben Carson’s comments that although he spent years as a surgeon pulling bullets out of people, he never thought that tragedy was nearly as bad as it would be to restrict the 2nd amendment. What sort of cognitive dissonance is necessary to actually espouse that?!?!!)

For the record, I personally loathe guns. (It’s not fear. Having a father who was in the military, I was raised to damn well know how to use them.) I don’t want to take anyone’s guns from them. However, there is no reason any civilian should ever own an assault rifle or a high capacity magazine. And please spare me your BS arguments about a defense against tyranny–you’re forgetting the “well-regulated militia” bit. And here’s the thing, if you think your stockpile of weapons is gonna do fuck all if they government doesn’t like your rhetoric then you clearly weren’t paying attention during the siege of the Waco cult compound. It’s not like you’re going to take an AR-15 deer hunting. As I understand in order to hunt you have to have a permit and that permit limits you to a certain number of animals per year. I’m not a hunter but I suspect that the total is likely half the number of rounds a normal clip for an AR-15 holds. So get outta here with that bullshit.

Oh and while we’re at it: Dear Bernie Sanders… if you want to improve mental health care in this summer. Great. I applaud you. But let’s really stop endorsing the mental health is the issue not guns after a mass shooting. The research shows unequivocally that the issue is a lack of effective gun control and anger issues (usually with a heaping side of racism and/or misogyny.)

Mihály Zichy – Naughty Satyr (18XX)

I’m not sure I can think of another artist as gleefully transgressive as Zichy.

Erections, cunnilingus and masturbation all feature prominently in his drawings.

There are two things I find especially fascinating about his work. Zichy essentially had two styles–his sexually explicit tableaux are always equal parts humorous/playful and presented in a distinctly Renaissance style while his more exploratory sketches appear rigorously formal, reminiscent of little more than an Anatomy text. (Interestingly, if you split the difference between these two styles you stumble upon something not altogether different than the sketches of Klimt and Picasso–both who would almost certainly have been familiar with Zichy’s oeuvre.  Secondly, although his fixation on male sexual response can come across as a bit grating to modern sensibilities–he acknowledges rather less than implicitly that women are not only able but should be allowed to derive pleasure from sex.

I’m not 100% certain that this image is actually called Naughty Satyr. It’s a good title though. If you remember your mythology, Satyrs were demigod drunkards. As such, Naughty Satyr is a bit rendundant. And I like to think that the reason the Satyr here is deemed naughty is not the fact that he’s sexing up this nymph, it’s that he’s enjoying her flesh and abdicating both his pleasure as well as hers up to her alone.

I would think (drunk or not) a less selfish satyr would have braced the palm of his hand on the inside of her thigh in such a way that his thumb could shuttle back and forth over her clitoris.

Source: docepaprica

Ashley Armitage – Untitled (2015)

There is a lot of work being made by twenty-something-ish women who draw heavily from their own experiences as women in this our fundamentally sexist culture.

I’m constantly amazed at how varied, creative and interesting the better part of it is. There’s Arvida Byström in general and her infamous VICE editorial There Will Be Blood, in particular; Prue Stent’s jaw dropping and frankly unrivaled surrealist meditations on femininity and visual representation also spring to mind.

With such work, you can’t swing a cat without hitting some codified notion of the work as a manifestation of the female gaze–the female gaze being a reaction/response/rejection of Berger’s art historical ‘male gaze’.

The first time I encountered the term it was in reference to the work of Masha Demianova. I flat out don’t think the term applies to her work in the slightest. It’s also used in reference to Petra Collins–personally, I wouldn’t deploy it in her case either; however, I am much less convinced I could argue away the assertion to the point of refuting it.

For me, if you want to talk about a female gaze, someone like Mercedes Esquivel is where you’ll find it.

That being said: I think there’s a way in which it is befitting Armitage’s work even claiming it as a primary impetus for the work is somewhat pretentious. I think there is a way in which her photos are a sort of exercise in photography as a means of curation–since their the prism of her images pervasive themes and motifs in someone like Collins work are zoomed in upon to a microscopic level and are then subsequently replicated.

I feel as if there is a great deal of overlap with someone like Jeff Wall, for example.

Source: Flickr / ashleyarmitage

Harry Gruyaert – Title Unknown (1966)

My dalliances with photography began out of a certain degree of misdirection.

Long story short: I took a film-making course in college to see if I could successfully complete a film that was (by some miracle) not unwatchable. Next I knew: I was a film-making kid.

Initially, my interest was directing. However, increasingly, I gravitated towards the cinematography side of things. (If you’ve ever questioned why I am so vehemently anti-digital, I learned both platforms side-by-side and was thus able to experience first hand the possibilities/limitations of either–digital is just awful if/when analog is an option.)

The reason I ended up shooting still images was less my being proactive due to the cost of shooting 24 frames per second on film and truthfully more to do with the fact that I have an outsize problem with authority and I repeatedly ran afoul of The Powers That Be™ in my film program/institution.

Cut off from access to school equipment, I purchased a Nikon 8008s and a circa 1960s Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens.

I mention all of this to illustrate a point. Yes, I have absolutely benefited from an albeit short-lived but thoroughly academic indoctrination to so-called fine art photography. But that arrived subsequent to a period of autodidactic exploration.

Often folks find my ideas and approach to be heavily skewed in favor of underground/outsider work. Such is not a rebellion against my late-in-the-day academnification (or not only that); I spent those first two or three years trying to find stuff I thought was cool on Flickr.

The flip side of that background is there are still large swaths of historically significant photographers that I know seriously fuck all about.

I’d never heard of Gruyaert until early this week. His work is effing stunnning. I could follow the thread of his work down the line to Storm Thorgerson and Monika Bulaj; but, what I feel is more interesting is to compare his work–entirely contemporaneous with William Eggleston’s first divergences in color.

As fond as I am of Eggleston, I realized–and this is entirely in keeping with a theory I have regarding Eggleston; namely he was a Balthus level pervert (and pervert is a word like ‘slut’ that I think needs to be reclaimed already) who never managed to figure out how to make peace with who he was–his work fetishizes color; his dye transfer prints are fetish objects.

Gruyaert, on the other hand, uses color to abstract, highlight shape and/or form.

As great as the work is, it seemed like something I’d never get to showcase here. Then this afternoon I stumbled on the above image. It was featured in a showcase of 14 Magnum Photographers explaining what image of their own making proved to be the A-ha! moment that propelled them to the next level.

Here’s Gruyaert on the above image:

In 1966, I was losing my girlfriend, to her new lover. So, I decided
to make a movie about her and him, hoping that, when she would see the
result, she would understand how much I loved her. Filming her, I was
able to create distance. I became less vulnerable. I understood her and
myself better. I was able to let her go.This became an important thing
in my photography, to be less there and more there at the same time.

Support Acetylene Eyes creating short essays

It’s with some trepidation that I’m posting this. I suspect it’s positioned in a bit of a moral grey area but…

I work as an IT system admin. It pays the bills but–truthfully–I hate it. I’ve vowed to get out ahead of the impending Windows 10 migration (it would be the fourth such migration I’ve managed and I’m sick and fucking tired of reinventing the same goddamned wheel).

I don’t expect to make a penny from blogging and I’ll keep doing what I do here regardless. I’ve just reached a point where I’ve realized all these ways the project could be improved. I want to focus on them, to work to realize them; however, I’m spending approximately two dozen hours a week on this as is. I don’t have more time to spend on it.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about the advice: find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. I love what I do here–maybe not as much as making photographs but at least this project is more relevant to photography than fixing printers and arguing with the partners about whether or not the organization I work for really and truly needs a firewall.

Given the growing number of followers (which still baffles and humbles me), if everyone contributed $4/month, Acetylene Eyes could realistically become my day job.

And if that were the case: I’d be able to travel more, visit museums, interact with artist and art around the world which would then filter directly into providing a richer more nuanced perspective with what I do here. (Plus, I’d have the energy and ability to make time for more personal/creative endeavors, to hone my craft further and with greater regularity.)

I think there are definitely better curators to support. I’d much rather you support @lesbianartandartists, for example. (They’re incredible and are getting some incredibly vital and revelatory stuff out there.) 

But, you know: if you tune in here regularly and get something out of my ramblings, then maybe give some thought to contributing.

Thank you all so much for bothering with this project. I wish it was possible for me to convey a fraction of how much I appreciate y’all–suffice it to say it’s damn profound.

Be well.

Support Acetylene Eyes creating short essays

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

When ever someone tells me: you write well. I always kind of look around with an expression like: I do?

It’s not that my grammar is atrocious–I made it through to my senior year in high school without ever being taught anything about the mechanics of writing. (My senior AP English teacher tried but eventually gave up and instead taught me how to hear something wrong in a sentence–which doesn’t really help as I am too impatient too go back and read 90% of what I write out loud after I finish it.)

But, writing is actually a painful process for me. I don’t particularly care for it but my soul demands it. What finds its way out onto the paper is usually such a poor approximation of the thoughts I struggle to fit to words.

The reason I mention all this is because for all my awkwardness and social phobias, I’m more comfortable with gestures–specifically using touch as a means of bridging the gaps between words and thought.

A hand placed on an arm in an unpremeditated way can have the effect that stylists will tell you saying the name of the person to whom you are writing can have in fomenting intimacy.

A hug can been domineering, as a means of trying to draw someone out of an emotional morass, and (counter-intuitively) a way of giving yourself permission to let go of someone.

Meeting others who speak this language of–for lack of a better term–gestures, is rare. They are always fighting to convey something of the immense silences of being a person who has lost full access to their first language and instead always fumbles for the almost right words in a faulty second tongue.

I love this .gif because of the way his lips twist at the most sensitive spot. The way the coating of saliva on the cock glistens. But most of all I have the way the stroking hand says all at once: “what you are doing to me feels divine” and “your skin is beautiful and soft” and “every part of you belongs to me”.

:::shivers:::

Source unknown – Title Unknown (19XX)

Ultimately, this isn’t technically a good photograph–it’s unclear what the woman at the extreme right of the frame is doing and given her position where the upper horizontal third of the frame insects with the frame edge and the dark shelf or curtain directly behind her, the eye drifts across the frame to her and her eyeline isn’t accurate enough to draw attention back to the act of cunnilingus.

Still I like the feeling of the image–the weary-yet-curious way she’s taken his hard on into her mouth, the way he’s watching her but also gently pulling her hair away from her face so that’s out of her way allowing him and the camera an unobstructed view. I love the way her hand is pressed against the other boys side–a means of communicating her own sexual response through touch since vocal cues may not be as readily interpretable given the present configuration.

Yes, everything is staged toward the camera but not in an overly winking exhibitionist sort of way. This is another example of an image where I wish I had been present with a camera to document things. (Although I admit, my personal preference would be for the woman and the boy going down on her to switch places. (MMF scenarios with bi-men are v. haute.)

Also, something that gets me about this picture and honestly any depiction of group sex is that seem to allow for something I feel stymied by in my day-to-day–namely, they allow a safe space for those participating to perform their sexuality in a way that isn’t intrusive, unwarranted or unwelcome.

That openness is something completely absent in my life and as much as the advice is: be the change you want to see in the world, this blog is really the only means I’ve found at maybe halfway accomplishing that feat.