Category: Uncategorized

VinZ – Swan Lake {Vienna, Austria} (2012)

I dig this mural a lot and all but that’s the secondary consideration as to why I’m posting it.

I posted this image to my Facebook timeline as part of a semi-regular “Today’s gender” series of micro curation. Facebook suspended my account because they said I was in violation of their policies for posting sexual explicit material.

I demanded that they review the decision and the standards team agreed that I had violated their Terms and Conditions by posting the image. (I knew it was a risque image but I regularly post things that I think are far more edgy than this but somehow three women with swan heads in a tub overflowing with a fetid fluid is a bridge too far…

Roman Pyatkovka – Untitled (2017)

I’m not 100% on board with this composition–the way the woman is looking back over her shoulder seems like a failed effort to counterbalance the prominence of the binoculars in the frame.

On the one hand, I think this strategy does focus attention to the reflection in the open casement window behind her–which is straight out of Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. On the other hand, however, the woman’s eyes don’t match the rest of her expression and this diminishes the degree to which any attention is practically diverted to the reflection behind her. (Instead, there’s a focus on the extreme shadows surrounding her.

To me: what is most intriguing about this is the way it seems almost like a hyper realistic drawing–something that’s seems to be big right now. (Several people I know aren’t into art have posted Buzzfeed-esque human interest stories on folks from Africa and the African diaspora making these completely batshit photo-realistic pencil drawings. (The only one I could find was this Colossal featurette on Arinze Stanley–there are at least two others making similar work, including one kid who is in his early teens, unfortunately I’m not having any luck finding the things I saw on them again.)

Additionally, I like the way this looks like the frame out of a brooding graphic novel. It makes me want to actually clear out a block of time to start working on this idea I have of figuring out how to replicate the high contrast, intricately detailed panels of a Moebius’ comics into an analog, in-camera ‘preset’ that can produce photos that can be printed to look like B&W comic book illustrations.

Source: pyatkovka

Eadweard Muybridge – Jumping Over a Boy’s Back {Leapfrog} from the Animal Locomotion series (1872-1985)

Like any good art student, I hear Muybridge and experience a Pavlovian response where Horse in Motion pops into my head.

And it’s not a bad association but I tend to think of Muybridge as a scientist who used photography as his laboratory.

Unfortunately, that’s been a barrier to really exploring his work. It’s not that I don’t like science, it’s more that I struggle with thinking of a photograph as evidence. Or, as Wolfgang Tillmans has correctly observed: “photography always lies about what is in front of the camera but never lies about what is behind.”

I feel like that’s actually the perfect quote to contextualize Muybridge. Yes: his work leads with a rigorous precision. However, I feel like that’s maybe more a statement about Muybridge’s personality than an accurate account as the scope, form or function of his work.

During a lecture earlier this week I was shocked at the sensual, Whitman-esque humanism of some of his work. Like some of it is straight up erotic in it’s obsessive fixation on an effort to measure the differences between motion as we perceive it and motion as an amalgam of discrete, constituent parts.

This isn’t the best example but I couldn’t find the one from the lecture–but I still think this is pretty damn daring, actually.

Also, Rebecca Solnit–one of our best living essayist–wrote a biography on him. I started reading it a while back but didn’t finish because it started to get into the scientific facets of the work that just presented an obstacle to my engaging with the proceedings. I suspect I am going to have to revisit it when I have some free time. (And who the hell knows when that’ll be… going to grad school FT and working FT is rough, y’all.)

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

It has been shown that at least part of the information received by the optic nerves is routed through and affected by memory before it reaches the part of the brain that deals with visual impulses (input). Now René Dubos discussed the distortion of stimuli: we tend to symbolize stimuli and then react to the symbol rather than directly to the stimuli. Assume this to be true of the other senses as well.

–Bruce Nauman, Artforum Dec. 1970

Vixen – Seduced by a Local feat. Jia Lissa & Christian Clay (2018)

There are things this video does well (an emphasis on communication and by dint an implicit consideration of vocal affirmative consent and what appears to be a real honest to goodness female orgasm) and things it’s not so great at (the blocking isn’t as bad as other porn but it’s underwhelming to know this is film in beautiful, coastal Greece and the location is de-emphasized in favor of the typical canned porn shoot lighting).

All that being said: I have been following Jia Lissa for several years now and I am definitely a fan of her work.

She started off doing solo softcore and artsy masturbation videos, moved to working with other women. To the best of my knowledge this is her first straight sex scene and her first with Vixen.

As to why I’m a fan–when I first encountered her, I think I’d have said that I thought she was just unusually my type. However, I’ve been realizing that what I held up as my type previous to coming out as a trans girl, has more to do with a projection of how I view my self in my own mind’s eye.

So I have mixed feelings about this video. On the one hand, it’s the first time I can recall her legitimately orgasming in a performance–meaning she’s not a lesbian like me. (Also, I adore the blue dress she’s wearing in the first part of this video–alas, it’s not an outfit I could ever pull off.)

But I watched this whole scene from start to finish without fast forwarding because I am really into how uncomplicated her enjoyment of sex comes across as well as her expressions–both with regard to mien and pillow talk.

I’m sort of curious if her comments in the video about going to art school in Moscow are her character or her–because she’s always struck me as someone I’d love to collaborate with on some sort of art project.

After seeing this I only want to collaborate with her even more and even if that never happens, I suspect Lissa is going to eventually gain the notoriety of someone like Sasha Grey or Stoya, honestly. She’s both intriguing and has a luminous on screen presence.

Peter Hujar – [↑] Reclining Nude on Couch (1978); [↖] Robin Brentano {1} (1975); [^] Sarah Jenkins with Head Brace {3} (1984); [↗] Bill Elliot (1974); [+] Fran Lebowitz at Home in Morristown, NJ (1974); [↙] Candy Darling on Her Death Bed (1973); [↓] Lucia Rudenberg (1979); [↘] Pregnant Nude {Lynn Hodenfield} (1978)

When one of my classes stipulated that I would be required to see one from a list of five current big ticket exhibitions in the San Francisco area, it wasn’t a choice–at least for me: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life all the way.

He was not only phenomenally gifted, I count him as one of my personal art heroes. (He also made one of my favorite photos of all time–the center image in this photoset I posted back in 2015).

The show is at BAMPFA through November 18th and I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it’s always great to get a chance to look at work actually emanating physically from the body of any artist you adore.

My sense of the show was that the curators wanted to downplay the degree to which Hujar’s being gay during the AIDS crisis up to an including death as a result of AIDS related complications of pneumonia informed his work. The things I walked away from the show thinking about had to do with the way he chose to install shows (arranging the framed photos two high and then stretching the length of the wall in such a way that no portrait would sit next to another portrait, and no landscape would share an edge with any other landscape, etc.) as well as the fact that he apparently loved taking pictures of animals just as much as people. (There are a lot of cow pictures, for those of you who love mammals of the bovine persuasion.)

There was at least one great anecdote: apparently my aforementioned favorite photo caught Richard Avedon’s eye during it’s exhbition. So much show that he got in his car, zipped over to the gallery, double parked and ran upstairs with a handful of cash to buy it.

I was talking with my teacher about it and he at first didn’t agree with my characterization of the show but subsequently relented that he did find it odd that the show didn’t mention that apparently Hujar held Robert Mapplethorpe in abject contempt. One problem, it seems Mapplethorpe was desperate for Hujar to be his friend. (So much so that he used to give his work to Fran Lebowitz in an effort to get her to mediate some sort of relationship between them. I take fiendish pleasure in this story as I def. prefer Hujar to Mapplethorpe.)

The other thing I thought is that I’d be quite frankly shocked if Hujar didn’t wield an outsize influence on Joel-Peter Witkin, actually. The photo of Sarah Jenkins with Head Brace (above) predates most of Witkin’s work and shares a very similar tone and aesthetic.