karaj

“’Snuggling’ - surely the most pleasant thing in the world. Scrunching further and further into the mattress as we struggle closer and closer warmer and warmer nearer and nearer, our bodies like a letter fitting into an envelope, my legs over her legs, our hips sliding against each other, her arm tighter and tighter around my shoulders, my face nestled more and more firmly into her collarbone. It is bliss. The simplest and most primitive bliss. A childlike, sexual, friendly, animal bliss.’”

—

Sita by Kate Millett (via suicideblonde) (via bohemea)

this time last year i was trading phone calls with kate millett. we never did end up speaking. 

“shifting the gaze: painting and feminism” at the jewish museum from sept 12-jan 30 reminds me that many of my favorite feminist artists—hannah wilke, judy chicago, audrey flack—are jewish. this shows focus on painting feels a little retro, but maybe thats good. (also, i have a date with mikki to see shulie again.)   

pre-feminist feminist artists: my favorite. i have been looking forward to “seductive subversion: women pop artists, 1958-1968,” at the brooklyn museum from oct 15-jan 9, for months. yayoi kusama (above) did it all first, even if warhol and oldenburg have gotten most of the credit. 

i am still sad that i missed pipilotti rists last show. “heroes of birth” is at luhring augustine from sept 11-oct 23. one of the works features “imagery of body parts rippling in rhythmic motion, mesmerizing in their perpetual search for synchronicity in bodily language.” so performance studies. 

richard move, who is in my phd program, curated “where is ana mendieta?”  at nyu’s fales library through oct 8th. 

another ana mendieta retrospective at gallerie lelong from oct 28-dec 11. 

please read cunt. you will read it in like two hours. you will never laugh so hard. you’re going to want to call me every 30 seconds. it is the most next level and essential for our advanced feminist humor.

she talks in crazy detail about her abortions and how if you positively envision your uterine lining shedding, you can basically induce a miscarriage. It’s BONKERS. But it’s also really compelling. There’s a whole part about her blood rag or something. She wears it wrapped around her waist at home—she has roommates—on the first day of her period and wipes the blood off her thighs with it and sits on it but otherwise lets herself bleed. on the floor. of her apartment. where other people live. inga muscio went to evergreen in case there was any doubt about that in your mind.

i like that marisa knows exactly what to say to get me to buy this book, like, asap. 

it sounds like i need to read it for my dissertation! when people ask me what i study i might just start saying “menstrual art.” 

this information was not lost on me when i was deciding which college to go to. 

also:

“Looking too feminine wasn’t in,” recalls Mira Lehr ’56. “I started wearing less makeup and very simple clothes and hair cut — kind of a female version of what the guys were wearing at Princeton and Yale. I was dressing to show intellect and to be part of the elite.”

this article might be about vassar in the 50s, but some of it could be about vassar in the 90s. i was pretty into my baby doll dresses and knee-highs and glitter nail polish, though apparently others felt more like mira lehr ‘56: a perpetually jeans-and-t-shirt-clad girl once asked me why i always looked like i was about to go to a business meeting. that girl was “not a nice girl,” as the editor-in-chief of one of the fashion magazines i later worked at would say. that girl also now lives in the midwest and works in marketing for a massive corporation. i bet she has to go to a lot of business meetings. 

at 90swoman, marisa and i finally gchat about lilith fair fashion, free tampons, how selling condoms (even flavored ones) is not very 90s, how the indigo girls should start doing britney spears covers, and more. ps. lilith fair was the best. 

The archivist brings work to visibility by seeing it, knowing it in her way, and connecting it to other video and viewers that will frame and hold it: giving context, making friends, building arguments, forming associations. Unruly archives need curators. Their holdings nothing but inconsequential detritus until loved and re-purposed.—alexandra juhasz

literarypiano:

In 1976 Ruth Iskin, director of the Woman’s Building Galleries in Los Angeles, along with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven, asked artists who consider themselves feminists via mailed invitations to respond to the question, What is feminist art? As her response, painter Joan Snyder (b. 1940) sent this list of words defining “female sensibility”:

FEMALE SENSIBILITY IS LAYERS, WORDS, MEMBRANES, COTTON, CLOTH, ROPE, REPETITION, BODIES, WET, OPENING, CLOSING REPETITION, LISTS, LIFESTORIES, GRIDS, DESTROYING GRIDS, HOUSES, INTIMACY, DOORWAYS, BREASTS, VAGINAS, FLOW, STRONG, BUILDING, PUTTING TOGETHER MANY DISPARAGING ELEMENTS, REPETITION, RED, PINK, BLACK, EARTH FEEL COLORS, THE SUN, THE MOON, ROOTS SKINS, WALLS, YELLOW, FLOWERS, STREAMS, PUZZLES, QUESTIONS, STUFFING, SEWING, FLUFFING, SATIN, HEARTS, TEARING, TEARING, TEARING, TYING, DECORATING, BAKING, FEEDING, HOLDING, LISTENING, SEEING THRU THE LAYERS, OIL, VARNISH, SHELLAC, JELL, PASTE, GLUE, SEEDS, THREAD, MORE, NOT LESS, REPETITION, WOMEN CRITICS, WOMEN, WRITERS, WOMEN ARTISTS, EITHER NOURISHING US OR EATING US UP ALIVE, TOKENISM, CURATORS, UNIVERSITIES, TOKENISM, FEAR OF OTHER WOMEN TO AKNOWLEDGE FEMALE SENSIBILITY, HOSTILE BOY ARTISTS, ACCEPTING MEN ARTISTS, SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE BOYS, DIVIDING WOMEN, PIECE OF PIE-ISM, MONEY, ART, SEX, BREASTS, LAYERS, SYMPHONIES, MULT-IROLED, MULTI-PART, STORIES, NARRATIVE, PAINT/FLESH, SERIOUS, OVERWHELMING, SOFT, HARD, WOMEN WORKING, WORKING WOMEN, HANGING, DANGLING, BREAKING, BEING FRUITY, ANGRY, NAIVE, BORN AGAIN AND TRYING TO DESCRIBE HOT WHITE FLESH TIES.

From Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, by Liza Kirwin.