art & more art
seeing yourself
Francesca Woodman
by ALEINA EDWARDS | MAY 1st
Francesca Woodman was dead before she turned twenty-three. Maybe it’s distracting to start with that detail, but that’s the first thing I learned about her. She was a photographer, raised by two artists in Boulder, Colorado, and is most famous now for her self-portraits.
The self in these portraits is elusive. She is often naked, but obscured by architecture or furniture, limbs hazy. In a photograph of three nude female models [1], each one holds up a photo of Francesca’s face over their own—it’s unclear if Francesca herself is present. In another photograph titled My House [2], we see a crumbling corner of a room, an empty bookshelf, a body—presumably Francesca’s—wrapped in sheets of plastic. She is barely recognizable as a woman. She is something shoved in a corner.
Come fetch me. Photography captures—that’s the usual verb. It snatches, it fixes, it pins. It began as a science, not an art, a manner of recording the world as it truly was. At first I wanted to say Francesca upended that convention, but now I think she depended on it. Her work shows her as she really was: present but inaccessible, volatile. That’s how I feel when I look at her images. That’s how I’ve felt in my own body—that it’s not mine at all, that I have no say over it. Her clothes, ditsy florals and ethereal cotton, make sense for the ‘70s but read as older, like Victorian signifiers of femininity. I would want to shed them too. The interiors she shoots in are empty and dilapidated, but she is young and vivid. She becomes more or less than an actual person; she is a point of comparison. In a piece called Self-deceit [4], Francesca crawls around the corner of a crumbling wall, looking at herself in a fractured mirror propped against it. Her head and shoulders are softened with motion, her hair is wrapped up into a crown of braids. The photo evokes what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the mirror stage, that period when children begin to conceive of themselves as a body in space. A girl given shape by a gaze, external or self-imposed.
[1] About Being My Model, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
[2] My House, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
[3] Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–1978
[4] Self-Deceit #1, 1978
a guide to reading and knowing absolutely everything
by ISABELLA BYERS | APRIL 12th
Perspective is everything. I do not need to tell you this—you hear this, you know this, you feel this. Perspective you find in clouds that look like train cars, in the window seats on planes, in Midwestern cousins’ posts on social media, in childhood friends, and new Hinge dates. In my twenties, I have found comfort in a shared perspective, when I otherwise feel very lonely and isolated. Shared perspective is beautiful and community is made in likeness. But that is not what is most beneficial about perspective—the uncomfortability is. I do not mean this to say that you must find perspective in right wing media or your grandmother’s homophobia (“but she’s just a product of her time!”), I mean perspective that forces upon you reconciling the fear of growth and the fear of staying the same.
The idea of “not knowing” has become increasingly unnerving to me. I find myself obsessively consuming whatever media I can, often to my detriment. I find myself obsessively seeking knowledge about death and grief (what happens when that inevitably comes my way?), about history and the future, about money and the lack of it, and about love and why, even though I have it, do I feel so lonely and afraid. This scares me. Do I obsess so much about perspective that isn’t pertinent to my life that I am sabotaging my future? Can I be a part-time waitress with enough spare time for panic attacks and days spent reading, forever, or do I need less thinking, more doing? Though gaining perspective, creating connection, thinking about what constitutes “culture” and why we need it is monumentally more rewarding than idealizing a monotonous ideology that dictates my future. But that seems pretentious, too. Ugh. I think that perspective is wanting more, however pretentious or authentic or humble or insane that is. More, more, more, but less.
I find that the most intimate of perspectives are found in writing. Talking is talking and writing is talking but also thinking, and with thinking comes the thoughts you cannot say while talking. Intimacy. This is my long winded way of introducing the books that have given me true perspective—shaped my individual school of thought in some way or another. For any other twenty somethings, or thirty, or forty, or fifty somethings who want more, this is for you.
by OLGA TOKARCZUK
I believe this novel is one of the best pieces of modern contemporary fiction. To call it a mystery novel resigns it to very little— it is so much more than a quick thriller. Originally published in Tokarczuk’s native Polish, it is a story about a woman in a small village who spends her days obsessively documenting the astrological charts of those around her and advocating for animal rights. When a serial murder spree begins, suspicions arise as our protagonist, Janina, takes matters into her own hands.
The translation is a masterclass in the use of the
English language. It is brilliantly elaborate, yet succinct, and so fulfilling. The novel, at its core, addresses morality and justice and places humans as the very, very small epicenter of a wildly infinite hierarchical order. If you find yourself thinking about how our fate is controlled and by who, why the human race has become so domineering, and how we create distinctions of what is “right” and what is “wrong,” this is for you.
My favorite perspective:
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
by ANNA DORN
Astrid Dahl is a perfume and Adderall obsessed writer in Los Angeles who is navigating having recently been cancelled on the internet. When a Hollywood actress (think Reese Witherspoon, but overtly queer) wants to adapt her latest novel, she throws herself into a flurry of self-sabotaging behaviors (yay, Lesbianism) that keep her constantly on the verge of threatening her career and her sanity.
As a lesbian, it can be hard to find novels that are, for lack of a better phrase, made for me. That is not to say that there are not stellar queer writers that are creating meaningful, sincere work—but the market for LGBTQ fiction has become oversaturated on capitalistic novels that survive on the Target Pride Month Collection commercialization of queerness. This, for me, is a perfect novel because it is a lesbian The Bell Jar without racism and institutionalization—sleepy and dreamlike, or nightmarish, and also uncomfortable. But also intensely funny (The Bell Jar was not).
Perfume & Pain is a wonderfully witty, sensual, authentic account of inauthenticity. It satirizes the profitable market of being a gay woman, and plays on stereotypes of lesbianism in a way that feels relatable and heartfelt. This novel’s perspective lies in its proximity to the ethics of cancel culture (I sound like a Republican man on a podcast, yuck), growth, navigating success and relationships, and substance abuse. It feels viscerally real while still existing in an out-of-reach Hollywood plane, and doesn’t truly take itself too seriously. It is campy, raunchy, and pays homage to lesbianism and cult classic pulp fiction.
My favorite perspective:
“The weird thing about being a writer is that at 25, you’re passionate and eager to share what you consider to be your sui generis perspective, but you haven’t practiced enough to be effective, and no one takes you seriously either way. And then ten years later, you’ve finally written enough to know what you’re doing, but you’ve completely lost the sense of urgency, you’re officially middle-aged and shop at the Gap.”
by GRETEL EHRLICH
The month before I turned twenty one, I moved to Montana. I still do not really know why I did this. But, I read this book right before I chose to pack all of my belongings into the back of a Subaru Forester, so I think that says enough.
Aside from being an exquisitely stunning and truly unique portrait of the American West, The Solace of Open Spaces is truly everything one needs in a memoir. It is gritty and raw, at points leaning towards graphically harsh and violent while remaining lyrically beautiful.
Ehrlich was a writer and filmmaker from Santa Barbara when she moved to Wyoming for a series of documentaries. Shortly after filming, her partner, David, passes away. Feeling lost, yet called back to Wyoming, Ehrlich moves once again, this time to work on horse ranches. It is an incredibly moving portrayal of grief and sacrifice, of small rural communities and those who live in them, and near death experiences. If one day I could view and catalog the world around me in the ways in which Ehrlich does, I will have known that I have lived.
My favorite perspective:
“True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.”
seeing yourself
International Women’s Day
by ALEINA EDWARDS | APRIL 1st
I deleted the Instagram app, but I still check it from my browser. It’s International Women’s Day, and the internet is celebrating. I see a post about Joan Semmel, famous for painting her body from a first-person perspective. She looks like Antelope Canyon, an entire landscape of flesh.
In her film stills, Cindy Sherman wears woman like a costume: she is a housewife, an actress, an ingenue. By the time I was born, the French artist Orlan had nine plastic surgeries, all on camera. I find a clip: a medical assistant in Issey Miyake lifts Orlan’s face and gives her Mona Lisa’s smile, a Botticelli chin. I watch a video of a spinal fusion, the same surgery I had when I was fifteen, and see a girl get unzipped. I watch The Substance—the wound down Demi Moore’s back looks just like mine.
Louise Bourgeois said a woman is like a spider. She mends and she makes—I do, I undo, I redo, she said. I have been unraveling too. In her Silueta series, Ana Mendieta laid herself down on the earth, let her skin grow flowers, her body leak blood. Her margins are dissolving, but photos capture the transformation.
She is a silhouette, a grave site and a garden.
A woman is a shape in the sand, changing with the tide.