Saturday 19 December 2015

THE FIRST ROCK STAR Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound

THE FIRST ROCK STAR
Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound
by Alexis C. Madrigal
Rosetta Tharpe was born 100 years ago today—March 20, 1915, twenty years before Elvis, a decade before Chuck Berry. And she could play the rock and roll guitar better than anyone, before anyone.

Now, rock and roll has a lot of parents. Any movement so big in popular music isn’t just invented by one person. But if anybody can claim the title of Mother of Rock and Roll, it would be Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Coming out of the gospel world, she was willing to cross over into playing for secular audiences, and more importantly, she just knew how to wield the axe in a way that is uncannily modern.

“She had a major impact on artists like Elvis Presley,” her biographer Gayle Wald told a documentary film crew. “When you see Elvis Presley singing songs early in his career, I think you [should] imagine, he is channeling Rosetta Tharpe. It’s not an image that I think we’re used to thinking of in rock and roll history. We don’t think about the black woman behind the young white man.”


But we should! Not just because it is historical truth, but because Rosetta Tharpe is an amazing, amazing musician who was so far ahead of her time (and something of a superstar in her time, too).

“She did incredible picking. That’s what attracted Elvis to her,” Gordon Stoker, who led Elvis’ backing band, told the documentary crew. “He liked her singing, too. But he liked her picking first, because it was so different.”

Her 1944 hit “Down by the Riverside” features a solo section where she just shreds the guitar. Like, the kind of shredding Michael J. Fox’s character tries to pull off in Back to the Future. And this was before the end of World War II!

Just watch her go here, at the beginning of the documentary about her life. She was a rock star before there were rock stars.

In her day, it was mostly men who played the guitar. And not much has changed, except rock guitar players are ever whiter, as the music gets farther from its roots in blues and R&B. And yet, there she is, proof positive that there was a super talented woman blowing minds a half decade before Chess Records coalesced in Chicago and a full decade before Elvis Presley ever even walked into Sun Records in Memphis.


This isn’t to take anything away from later rock artists, who obviously extended the genre in ways that were good and interesting. But when we think of the pantheon of great rock figures, Sister Rosetta Tharpe should be at the front of the chronological list. Period.

Perhaps my favorite video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, though, comes from much later, 1964, after her work (like many other blues players) was rediscovered by British rock musicians. She toured England, and for the show in question, she arrived at the Manchester stage in a horse-drawn carriage. She’s nearly 50. Her hair is up. She’s wearing a thick wool overcoat that was cut to drape around her like a dress. Her legs poke out the bottom, elegantly dropping into high heels.

A guitar is slung around her neck. Hundreds of cheering fans sit in bleachers. As soon as she begins to play, you know she will bring down the house.

She died in 1973. It would be her 100th birthday today, and I’m sure if she were still alive, she’d still be doing exactly this.

Wednesday 30 September 2015

Common Madness an ongoing self ethnographic project about a series of works from 1984 to 2004 ( started somewhere in 2012 this notes for a paper or visual essay are been worked from now on in August 2015)

Common Madness
Elitist Madness 
Forbidden Madness
Secret Madness 
Real Madness 


Intro: 

I like to divide this paper in 3 parts

The first will be dedicated to update the work from a previous period, between 1984/2005,that has been linking issues of sexual and emotional abuse, addiction and mental disorders. Those issues were touched via certain symbolism as Vampire tales and references to various figures from our cultural background, detritus of today found in tales, cinema, comics or even real life transformed in celebrity culture.

My work entered a strong phase of therapeutical gestures and therefor almost exorcism, by conveying words, ideas and images that where iconic and other imaginary constructions, that helped me to deal with such deeply hidden emotions and experiences from my teenage-hood .

My idea, when using some real biographic information to be referred to as part of my work, comes from a very feministic tradition of self questioning, self exploration and self reference. But aiming at to actually erase oneself inside the archetypical and the universal.

So that I could call, those works as comments on Common Madness.

How it all was real and how that, that had become part of the abject, had found its mirrors in to Pop's Dark tales.

I have selected a few examples of some of the works, but also I like to note a few culturally influential references.


Carrie:

 (to which I related as an epileptic girl at boarding school) 

How was I treated by my schoolgirl mates as an epileptic companion?(I was abused and bullied) how I was treated by a male with authority? (my father abused at length his position and specially one teacher who persecute me and punish me till I quit school all together) how I have been treated as a medicated girl with epilepsy? Carrie, the movie, really affected me when I saw it first time. There was an intimate connection, but of course my glamorous friends of the time ( cinema producer, film makers and actors in late 70's Barcelona) could never imagine why this actually was the case. In a way, I was as is said of other "issues" in the "closet". Which is a typical strategy of anyone abused and victim of child emotional abuse. During a performance for the University of Birmingham as guest of Ana and Stuart of AAS Group as an invited performance artist. I presented a sort of Noise re-enactment of the moment when Carrie got the Pig's Blood all over her. In my case just tomato juice. It was quite an strong statement and sadly the film of the performance has been lost. 


Christiana F 

(as I was a sort of meta-junky, a junky with out heroine but with chronic medication and opiates and junky friends every where) 


Christiana F, was a very special reference, as many of my friends in mid 70's had the "habit" and I had some times even sustained their elastics around their arms, wile looking away for them to inject.
Again, this times, where impregnated of a sort of nihilism, the context was a mix of bourgueois and very rebel outsiders, from the lower classes, including, gipsies ( many times dealers and consumers) or ex mates from prison. This context was a very particular specific of this times, and some how reflected the tiredness of some of being under a fascist regime for so long 
(40years)but also as maybe you know it was a consequence of the social engineering designs, that made of rebel creative folks, that seceded from their own social context duties and had already experimented creatively with some drugs, just zombies that stole old ladies bags. In the midst of all this, and after some of this friends had died of OD, here it came Christiana F,that was a real bio as Film.

Later I will use the icon of the junky girl, to remind in my work, that a girl that uses Heroine is some one who must have been abused in a way or another, and deceived by the society that was supposed to protect her.Some folks will criticise my works of Heroine Chic, with out even caring to find out, why was it that I used such iconography.

Of course the suggestion to the use of opiates,as the tranquillisers that had been prescribed to me wile as a kid I had a serie of epileptic seizures, was then more than enough to give me a sort of insight on this theme. 


The first reference to my treatment appeared  in 1996, I had a show all related to Insomnia, Medication and Isolation.

  



Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School 

(The amazing bad schoolgirl whom I discovered in a London bookshop called Dylan's, wile I was waiting to go to my dance classes at the Urdang Academy in Covent Garden in 1981. Later, I will had an small fragment of her text ( her obsession with Jean Genet in Tangier)   translated for the magazine V.O. which was the last of series I had edited and published in 1985) 




Since those times in London and after being exposed to the works of Acker and I had an attempt at making some performatic work inspired on the female fucked up decadent prostitute role for my publication V.O. the same one that featured an small translation of Kathy Acker’s text from Blood and Guts in H S. 
This women was hanging out in Argelia and Tangier too, my representation was based on the idea that Barcelona as a port, had similar essences and the mediterranean flavour of seedy city port night times. 

In 1986, I travelled to Tangier, Tetouan and Rabat and was already a fan of the work and life of Jane Bowles. Her situation fascinated me, I really liked her way of life and her text. 



Me in Rabat 1986,imagining becoming Jane Bowles during a trip with photographer friend Jorge Esteva, who did the picture at our Hotel Room

Jane Bowles and Kathy Acker seem to merge in to one, when I improvised this aesthetic or this performative image of my self for the series of pictured my friend take of me in Rabat. The image, what you see in the photo, is not a pose, or a fake like when doing a character for a film. It was realistic, as I was then re-interpreting sources of inspiration, a sort of role models for me.
Looking backwards, I realise that both ladies where North American, and at least one of them was a jew ( for which the connection, is then more full circle) also important to note, is the fact that in those times I was starting to be more and more aware of the cultural colonialism to which we had been submitted either by UK or USA, but nuances in relation to the countercultural or international figures like those women, did not apply. I saw them quite similar on a sort of feminist structural sense.  

 This whole idea of being this hetero queer, this wild women, this independent sort, was really my inspiration and on the time, I did not have knowledge of any women like this in my own context in Barcelona. As far as I knew, I was in to a solitary quest. I was writing erotic tales one of which had two male making it in Tangier port, one night and I was "daring" to write as if I was a male and a gay guy. In a way, if Bataille could write Le Histoire de L'Oleil, and other authors like Flaubert could travesty themselves as female, I could do the same on to the other side. 

Thinking about exotisms, is not that, I was inlove with the seedy Barcelona I was living and had discovered since mid 70's. This world of lost people in Arab ( North African)Mediterranean southern spaces, where all was left down, slower, erotic and intoxicated, really attracted my imagination during those years.  

Eddy Sedgwick

The lost girl continues as a lost “pretence of a women” Bob Dylan in this sense defines perfectly how was like to be ”Just like a Women”.



The aesthetic its clearly a residual echo of a kind of victim of Andy Warhol and of Bob Dylan and other male figures as it feels that obviously Eddy Sedgwick was. 

And who’s victim role was studied on a great text published at ZG and translated to spanish and pirated by me,to be published in my mag in fascist Spain in 1984.

It also reminds me of the song Bob Dylan may have dedicated to her: Just Like a Women. As there is a teenager still at heart who ends up in such vulnerable place she is not in control of that womanhood, she is just lost. 




In this weird early neoliberal times, to remember Eddy and the drugged and covered up decadence( vulnerability )of her vital and toxic journey across
 the 60"s New York underground world of Andy Warhol manipulative domains, came to me as a call to be reminded what where "accidents" the that during my own teenage and transition to women like life, in chaotic transitional Spain/ Barcelona had been.


First Part


Some early attempts to represent a fucked up lost women, with drug, addiction problems and obviously abused.

Here are some of the pics, I was the Editor and publisher of a magazine, trying to make it, as was inspired by Rosetta Brooks, ZG mag and to be really involved with politics and aesthetics.






Pic: Me when I was 24 and editor, publisher, performer, writer of V.O. magazine in Barcelona. By Betty Evers

Already quite punished by the male powers and hung-ups of my social context for daring to publish such cool magazine and for being not only a good writer but also a powerful editor, where already felt and experience as a progressive social alienation. 
Those days where very lonely and as incipient solo performer my naive attempts to impersonate a lost women had taken inspiration in a mix of muses. 
Encouraged by the roles of Kathy Acker, her voices and her persona, the many punk and post-punk ladies I hung out with in London(where I was studying contemporary Dance 1978/1983)and the postcard, fashion mag/art book Icons as Eddy was those days, a symbol already a sort of women Rimbaud, but dead and drugged till the end. 

The main star of this amazing magazine discovery,was Cindy Sherman and also,from the books that where sold those days in the same arty bookshops I used to inspect, I found Francesca Woodman, who was touched by the aura of her suicide again: failure and rejection, loneliness and alienation at the core of an amazing work.  

My attempt was shy and somehow, I hid on my own publication, leaving this solo photographic impersonation path lying dormant till many years later when unexpectedly I came back to the whole instinct and inspirational sources. 

By then,I had added to the list the amazing Ana Mendieta and as I was recovering my dance practice /performance and visual arts I found that by then, those published series of pictures and my own phantasmatic persona had also become a muse.

Why I had been so inspired in this kind of young women? 

I guess by intuition I knew they where the sensitive problematic romantic proto feminist, heroines of a kind,ex-flappers,flowers of cities with dirty ports and sailors,drug trafficking and the squizo- capitalist drum beat. 

With this four feminine figures of a teenager/or just like a women archetypes of our pop/art culture, I intended to talk about my own wounds for the first times: 

Those women/girl, are not only brought out to light for their great iconic characteristics,they are also the medium from which to talk about society’s behaviour around and about stigmatised people and in specifics(for my discourse was to expose the behaviour of society around female girls are but projects of what a woman may become) so a failed teen is a failed socially correct women, in this case Eddy Sedgwick is a great and sad example of this, but its also Francesca Woodman and her inability to sustain rejection.  

By the times I was “just like a women my self” it was official 
that I had always been rejected by the so called representatives 
and distributors of normality and was only welcomed by all that 
was queer, bohemian, Marxist and stigmatised, a whole collective 
of otherness formed the acquaintances and friends towards which 
I drifted naturally.

Either on the Mediterranean islands self-exile journey after leaving school, where mainly writers, musicians,actors,dancers …artist … but most of all bohemians or intellectual and social deserters from the bourgeoisie contingent.




me at 16 1976, pic by friend artist( can't remember his name)

From the other side, all that actors, theatre people, musicians and dancers with whom I worked since my mid teens, where usually coming from working classes but where all in touch and relating to the leftist from up town. People knew each other by their names, nothing like what ones parents did was relevant. We where there because we where different and risking the same persecution, censure or even prison.
  
               me photographed by friend Pixi in Deia, Majorca 1977

During the times we can call pre-twin towers, even if we can consider the couple of years immediately after included. 

I mostly only produced the fanzines Dark Star 1998 to 2002 (with an extra edition round 2004) my work was presented as the expanded publications on installations  with films or slide shows, music from my band, and posters made out of some selected pages of my publication. 

Some of the shows used to have hips of empty pill silvery cases.
The aesthetic will have strong teenage angst flavour as the highlight was to point out at abuse as the main reason why a women to be (a girl) loses her mind and gets in trouble. 



I was accused by Martin Herbert of playing with Heroin Chic iconographies plus been a rubbish artist with a rubbish band performance project,a critique that some how reverberates till 
this days.

Truth is that the kind of aesthetics etc got very quick co-opted and turned on to superficial hype, which is what always happens to any art soon or later.

In any case and whatever the critics short mind, my work was an expanded tool of exposure of an uncomfortable truth and at the same time was generating a real community scene all my performances take place in the neighbourhood with young musicians and inhabitants of the east end, they had drug problems and they lived in the artificial paradises that this concrete atomising city offers as a way to bare the enormous pressure that means to live in.
I was pointing to the lack of Love and the use of Heroine(the drug of the sensitive people )as a result of the life in London,this monster city,this metropolis for slaves.
During these times I developed with one of the artist and founder of Five Years a concept and a term that was used for a seminal show at Five Years Underwood street in 2000 that contained the situation and its components the term Dark POP.







Second part 

A very specific Dark Star re-appeared in 2004 as more formal specific less collage just text and photos, some drawings …

I was also building up a line of work dedicated to the social estate houses( I lived there with my partner till 2007 when we split) and constructing a narrative that had buildings,flowers,cemeteries, birds and young lonely people inside their rooms(even if where dreamers and beautiful losers,losers they where,and losers they stayed)this is what happens when one does not became a soldier or a guerrillero,it becomes a idle flower of self poisoned substance abuse creature of the metropolitan city, the after Baudelaire’s .. the Rimbaud’s that could not flee,the real people one had written sad poems about. 
Defeated and seduced by journeys in to oblivion and self obliteration with soundtracks of fading times, rooms filled with posters and medicaments,alcohols and higher drugs.


In 2004 I was invited by John Russell to write a fiction text for his project that was Text as Art. His collection  called Frozen Tears and my text was featured on the first tome of this art /text editorial project. 

He set up the basic themes those where sci-fi and horror .
I submitted a text written in first person where I am assuming many identities related to real or fictional characters on film and literature ,so that I was Mary Shelley , then The Creature, then Jack The Ripper, then Mina Harker,then Nadja ( Breton), then Cat People,then Olaya (R L Stevenson),etc etc… but at the core of the story there was a killer who suffered of Ennui ( The English Maladie)and that pioneered Snuff movie making.
As an addict, killer on spleen I walked and drifted alone in the massive metropolis.

The Opium Den being one of her hideouts:






The whole text breathes,dark pop and psycho-geographic elements, it also reclaims Surrealism and Romanticism. 
And what is all this if is not a critique of society as a Capitalist Beast ? 
Who is Dracula ? we know what he represents, we know what Jack the Ripper represents too.
I am going to read a small piece where I am cutting and pasting Olaya soliloquy at the short tale from R L Stevenson’s called by the same name in between my own text as the “voice” of Thee ( the tale):

When my perplexed walkabouts around the insides of
the huge London, as if in a never ending monster,
reproduced themselves in my dreams – then I felt 
possessed by a feeling of void, and the anguish and the
anxiety filled all my house and my conscience …

"And looking at the portrait of my father I would ask
myself:There is my hand to the least line, there are my
eyes and my hair.
What is mine, then, and what am I? If
there is not a curve in this body of mine, not a gesture
that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look
from my eyes, no, not even now when I stand in front of
him, but has belonged to others?” 

They were dead, all dead. I am dead but what’s the 
difference, between life and death? Death is all over us,
death unifies us in her warm womb. They where dead, I
was dead, dead, dead – but I was undead … I had to be
there … in the infinite, in the horror and in the eternal
melancholy 


Of course this text has not yet been analysed for what it maybe meaning. 
I know what I had in my head when I had written the tale, my father’s abuse, my life in London and the malaise, the loneliness and coldness around me. 

The Capitalist way of life, the way artist around would do any thing to any one even kill( symbolically at least two some women had betrayed me and stop talking to me) them just for the sake of their careers etc etc. The horrible heartless and pulse of this dark side of London, living in its East End, feeling its ghost and spirits of so much suffering and exploitation that is buried under its lands.
I did wanted it to be a subliminal Critique of the Art World. But maybe it was too subliminal.

In any case yes, we agree the figure of a first person, a narrator and a women or girl is clearly my voice and it reflects it so.
Against all the “buts” around people who are self referential,I can say it makes sense for me because my background is dance and theatre, even TV .. 

So that I am my own tool, my physical condition is always used, but used to represent issues that I know( so that had happened )to be filtered to be exposed in a way that becomes more symbolical and less right out biographic.

When doing the pictures and the friends and my life around the Estate Houses in the East End of London etc etc, I am doing a documentary, but when I pass this material on to my publication or expanded on film then there is the narrative/poetic license, that pushes things further in order to make us actors to say some thing that needs to be covered in order to be revealed.


Part Three 

coming soon ......







Wednesday 9 September 2015

Negging those who negg us ......

more here: http://www.manipulations.info/hes-just-not-that-into-you-negging-and-the-manipulation-of-the-negativity/ 
Counter Counter-Culture
The style of the subcultural milieu of negging is one that draws, as we’ve seen, on many sources. It is motivated by revenge. This revenge is one taken on women but also, of course, on feminism and various other social gains that emerged from the revolutionary moment of the long 1960s. If neoliberal governance is the overarching roll-back of those movements, while absorbing and retooling elements of the counter-cultural programme, negging is another twist on this recuperation. The neggers claim a freedom that they see as at threat from any infringement on their ‘rights’. They claim and pervert the French 1960s slogan ‘Enjoy without shackles’ [jouir sans entraves]. Alain Badiou has noted how this slogan implies a ‘de-linking’, a nihilism which then turns to the notion that any enjoyment can be bought.[15].
The line between ‘radical’ nihilism and capitalist nihilism is a short one. While the counter-culture has its own well-documented problems with feminism we should note that it also formed an horizon from which questions of liberation could be posed. Feminism was a revolution in the revolution. The reworking or recuperation of these radicalisms by the capitalist restoration, which begun in the 1970s and accelerated since 1989, aims to nullify or pervert those radical negations into the service of the market. Therefore negging is expressive of the empty core of capitalist subjectivity and this process of roll-back.
Negging is not simply one of the ‘new’ counter-cultures, which freely borrows elements from past counter-cultures to construct its ‘retro-sexism’ as the expression of a ‘true’ freedom. It is a counter counter-culture, amplifying the worst elements of the counter-culture (sexism, a de-linked vision of life, radical individualism, etc.) and using those to neutralize any thinking of freedom as a social form by confining freedom to the freedom to enjoy on the sexual marketplace.
While the social conditions that made the counter-culture possible have exhausted themselves, while that dynamic is ‘saturated’, as Badiou would put it, this does not mean this ground should simply be ceded. The neg-ativity of negging is the sign of what comes to fill the absence: the cultural forms of capital lack their own dynamic capacities are operate as parasites on past invention, draining or perverting their content to serve the cultural marketplace. What negging reveals is the violence in this process. Abstractions turn malign and absorb and channel a negativity become malignant once it is blocked from the process of the realization of freedom.
This is why negging is an activity, an endless yearning that freezes liberation into the form of liberation into abstraction and the ‘joys’ of exchange rendered as violent exploitation. Although definitely a minor and peripheral form, this activity attests to a wider series of strategies that inhabit the mode of scandal and shock as affirmative of the status quo. The signature expression of these strategies is the line: “we are just saying what everyone really thinks”. Invoking an uneven and socially necessary policing of speech as ‘totalitarian’ oppression and manipulation, what we are ‘all’ really thinking turns out to be the molten core of capitalist ideology: racism, misogyny, class hatred, fantasies of dominance and control.
Where once the counter-culture aimed to reveal the manipulations of capitalist ideology, the counter counter-culture of neg-ativity reveals the ‘manipulations’ it imputes to any attempt to regulate, control, or restrict the commodification of existence. This is why the neg-ativity of negging is emblematic of the blocking of any transition of negativity to the affirming of freedom. Instead it offers a pseudo-freedom, which is ‘pseudo’ because it is bought through the subjection of the Other, qua victim, and the concomitant emptying of the self. It inhabits neg-ativity as a state of ‘yearning’, which only confirms the world ‘as it is’, or better the ideological vision of the world as violently colliding elementary particles.
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His most recent work is Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014).

Sunday 6 September 2015

what it really means to be rejected by a jury composed only by women?

This post starts a a therapeutic journal.
I have done previous attempts to write spontaneous thoughts on a sort of online journey but in this case I wanted it to be less about diaristic issues and more about a follow up on a series of Institutional rejections suffered by my work, or by me, who knows?

The drop that filled the anxiety and sadness felt about a series of rejections ( lets say that those rejections could start at school, when treated like Carrie by my fellow girl companions) that are all about me and my work produced since I started with my publication V.O.

I am not going to list here all this string of events that where all about dismissing me and my work.

Is just a way of introducing the issue giving it enough weight so that it its left clear why is it that one decides to study its own experience of been rejected as artist ( our work ).


Hamaca is an archive online based in Barcelona that collects archives artist moving image from Catalunya.

They struggle with economics and get to do calls for submissions every two or even three years.
The few years before this I had applied fro the first time to be considered and was rejected, I was surprised as I have considered the work submitted enough relevant and asked some one for its feedback. Seems that the fact that I had been too honest and told that the film was accompanied with live music made them ( the jury) feel that the film will be not on its real format ( as was an expanded film) to be archived.

I believe that this sort of issue is already an amazing one to be studied and contested urgently as well. For what happen to the many expanded films that exist if they can't be archived because they have not "the live element" within it?

Now I rather go straight to the case:
Hamaca called again for submissions this year ...

here is the brief :

CONVOCATORIA HAMACA-MUSEO REINA SOFÍA 2015

Posted in Uncategorized by admin on the junio 10th, 2015
Tras las últimas ediciones  de 2008, 2011 y 2013, HAMACA y el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía anuncian una nueva convocatoria pública para la recepción de vídeos que pasarán a formar parte del catálogo de videoarte y artes electrónicas de Hamaca.
Las piezas seleccionadas serán difundidas a nivel nacional e internacional  en bibliotecas y mediatecas. El objetivo de HAMACA reside en primer lugar en poder hacer llegar este tipo de trabajos a un gran número de personas o instituciones, para facilitar de esta forma su difusión y visionado, y, en segundo lugar, en multiplicar las posibilidades de producción para los artistas.
Estos vídeos también serán incluidos en la base de datos de la Biblioteca del  Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, para que puedan ser consultados con fines de investigación.
A continuación se detallan las condiciones de participación:
PARTICIPANTES:
Cada autora/autor, de nacionalidad o residencia española, podrá presentar hasta un máximo de tres vídeos de cualquier fecha de producción. Las obras tienen que estar realizadas bien en castellano o bien en cualquier otro idioma, siempre que incluyan subtítulos en castellano.
PRESENTACIÓN:
Para presentarse a la convocatoria se debe enviar un mail a info@hamacaonline.net con los links de cada vídeo que se quiera presentar (un máximo de tres) y los passwords correspondientes si los vídeos estuvieran en privado.
En la descripción de cada pieza se deberá incluir la siguiente información:
0-Convocatoria Hamaca 2015.
1-Título del video.
2-Nombre del/de la autora/autor.
3-Sinopsis (máximo 100 palabras).
4-Link a los datos biográficos  de la autora/autor (en caso de no tener web, se puede adjuntar un pdf al mail de inscripción)
4-Datos de contacto del/la autora/autor (correo electrónico y número de teléfono).
INSCRIPCIÓN:
A la recepción de este mail, el interesado recibirá una notificación de inscripción, con su correspondiente número de referencia. La inscripción es gratuita.
CONVOCATORIA
La convocatoria se mantendrá abierta entre el 10 de junio y el 10 de julio de 2015. Sólo se aceptarán aquellos e-mails cuyo envío no sea posterior al viernes 10 de julio -se tomará como referencia la fecha y la hora de su recepción -.
SELECCIÓN:
El comité de selección se reunirá a mediados de julio y estará formado por Cristina Cámara, conservadora de cine y vídeo en el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS); Lucía Casani, directora del centro social y cultural La Casa Encendida;Marina Díaz, Técnica de cine y audiovisual en el Departamento de Cultura del Instituto Cervantes; y Virginia Torrente, comisaria independiente.
Toda la información correspondiente a la selección de los vídeos se hará pública en www.hamacaonline.net y se notificará por correo electrónico a los participantes.
Para cualquier duda, podéis poneros en contacto con la organización a través del siguiente correo electrónico: info@hamacaonline.net

My submission where two videos of which I am going to leave here a link.
Looking for the results happens that I was not selected.
( you can go online and see who did got selected and make up your mind) 
Why is it so painful this case? What it symbolises that disturbs me so deeply?
Why is even more painful that the jury were all women?
What is there that the fact that were all women makes this rejection so hurting and deceiving? 
What is it that one was hoping for? What kind of solidarity or recognition that evidently they ( the four women) did not need did not feel?
What it really means ( in terms of institutional canon) to have been rejected?
Is my work so bad?
Why is it not worth to be archived?

Maybe as it already happened with my publication V.O. it would need to be even more late in time to be recognised.
As just now my publications have been bought by MACBA in Barcelona for its archive of artist books and publications.

I really want to be forensic about this, I really need to know why.
I can't just seat down and shut up about it.
I am tired of this I am angry and think its unfair to not been considered worth.
Specially when I know that the two films had great feedback.

Lets see what happens next, and I will be posting as soon as more information comes this way. 

Saturday 5 September 2015

Écriture Féminine: Luce Irigaray

Women need a “house of language” where she can live and speak. To parler-femme is to speak (as) woman, to bring her body into language and to refuse the mastery of the patriarchy. Irigaray proposes a feminist strategy of “rétour et retouche,” which is a healing metaphor. In this poetics of the female body, the two lips indicate auto-affection: women loving themselves and refusing the male by replacing the male monological speech with a plurality of voices.Women need to rethink the cultural imaginary and to create a female imaginary which is fluid and mobile and indifferent to logic. The female auto-affection is a counterpart to the oppressive man-to-man as the universal “I” and means to love oneself.
Male discourse, in suppressing the feminine, is an inherently political institution and its acts of attempting to silence women are acts of political suppression. In America, the watchword was “the personal is political,” meaning that the private lives of women, long announced to be outside of the realms of serious speech acts, had to be understood as part of a strategy of oppression. In fact, the life of Luce Irigaray underscores the fate of women who dare to speak out. Note that the American and British feminists either selected their points of assault on male edifices carefully or approached the power source of male institutions more obliquely than the French feminists. But Irigaray directly challenged the heart of male oppression, the very site of silencing women: Enlightenment philosophy. Even more confrontationally, she posed a theoretical challenge to both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan on the topic of women. Although she had been a student of Lacan and was a practicing psychoanalyst, when Speculum of the Other Woman was published in 1964, she lost her teaching position at Vincennes and was expelled from Lacan’sEcole freudienne de Paris. Her opposition to the Enlightenment “Othering” of women and her exposure of the male bias in her field revealed that psychoanalysis is historically determined and impacts upon the social attitude towards women.

The task of écriture féminine, like that of Marxism, is to demonstrate that there is nothing natural or universal. If it can be convincingly demonstrated, using the methods of logic, that the presence of women has not been acknowledged, then insisting on including women in the discourse causes a crisis in knowledge and a problem of the legitimization of the entire discursive system. If male philosophers are the only speaking subjects and if the subject of philosophy is the male, and if women are silenced, then how can philosophy be universal or transcendent if half the human race has been left out and rendered mute? The only way male philosophy can claim universality or transcendence is to write out women, but once women insert (note how phallic the language is) themselves and insist upon making themselves known as human beings, the whole system is in crisis, because, according to this system and its rules, the Feminine is a sign of unrepresentability.

more... http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/ecriture-feminine-luce-irigaray/

Tuesday 18 August 2015

Lee Lozano ( just a late discovery of she who wanted to disappear )


From various sources:
1 Obituary:

Lee Lozano, 68, Conceptual Artist Who Boycotted Women for Years
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 18, 1999

Lee Lozano, an eccentric artist who pursued Conceptual Art and painting in the 1960's and then left the New York art world for self-imposed exile that included an embargo on contact with other women, died on Oct. 2 in the Dallas Health and Rehabilitation Center in Texas. She was 68 and lived in Dallas.

The cause was cervical cancer, said Mark Kramer, the artist's cousin.

Ms. Lozano was a quixotic, confounding rebel whose decade long New York career seemed always to involve pushing one limit or another. Her early paintings, executed in an Expressionistic cartoon style, confronted issues of sexual and painterly decorum. They featured a robust messiness, distorted close-ups of the body, intimations of violence and suggestively exaggerated images of tools.

By 1967 she had taken the systemic approach of Minimalism, making nearly monochromatic ''Wave'' paintings based on wavelengths that pushed the limits of visual perception. In the mid-1960's she also began to execute a series of life-related actions (she didn't like the word performance) that tested, among other things, her stamina, her friends' patience and the conduct of everyday life. These works reflected her friendship with Conceptually inclined artists like Sol LeWitt, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Carl Andre. They also reflected an increasing disenchantment with the art world that bordered on hostility.

Many of these pieces were proposed or recorded in written works that she considered drawings. Sometimes she designated everyday activities like thought, conversation or marijuana smoking as art, attracted by the idea that they were unsaleable and democratic. Her ''Throw-Up Piece'' proposed throwing the 10 most recent issues of Artforum, the leading magazine of contemporary art, in the air and letting them fall where they may. In ''Transistor Radio Piece'' she listened to a radio while attending a panel discussion on art.

In 1969 and 1970 Ms. Lozano began a steady withdrawal from the art world in works that she titled ''General Strike Piece'' and ''Dropout Piece.'' She decided to boycott women for a month or two as a means of improving communication with them. For unexplained reasons, she continued this piece to the end of her life, despite the great inconvenience and, one supposes, even greater rudeness.

Ms. Lozano was born Lee Knastner in Newark in 1930. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. A brief marriage in the late 1950's to an architect, Adrian Lozano, ended in divorce. She leaves no survivors.

Ms. Lozano had her first exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1966 and was then associated with the Green Gallery. In 1998 her work, long absent from the New York scene, returned when three SoHo galleries, Mitchell Algus, Rosen & Van Liere and Margarete Roeder, each showed a different phase of her painting. At the same time the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford exhibited her ''Wave'' paintings and notebooks. All the dealers and curators involved with these exhibitions were men.

2 Frieze :
Lee Lozano

P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, NEW YORK, USA

Lee Lozano left the art world almost 30 years before her death in 1999, ending a decade-long career in New York that included drawing, painting, Performance and Conceptual activities. In spite of the accomplishment of her paintings, she is best known (in so far as she is known at all) for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks. In General Strike Piece, begun in 1969, she decided to withdraw from the art world, and recorded the process by documenting the last times she visited museums or attended gallery openings. That same year she began a month-long ‘boycott’ of women, which she then extended and continued for the rest of her life.

This survey of Lozano’s work – the first major effort since her death – included a wide selection of notebook pages, drawings and related paintings. Lozano’s paintings have drawn new praise in the last few years (David Reed called her ‘Wave’ paintings, 1967–70, ‘one of the three great series of American painting’, placing them in the esteemed company of Barnett Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’, 1958, and Andy Warhol’s ‘Shadow’ paintings from 1977–8), and her Conceptual works prefigure many relational aestheticians of the 1990s (such as Christine Hill and Rirkrit Tiravanija). Nevertheless she remains an enigmatic and elusive figure, fraught with contradictory positions on questions that challenge efforts to canonize her work.

Lozano was born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey, in 1930 and attended The Art Institute of Chicago before settling into the New York scene in the early 1960s. Many of her early drawings share the formal humour and line quality of Philip Guston’s later works on paper, and her gendered icons evoke early Claes Oldenburg in their cartooned stylization. With a few exceptions, however, most of the drawings in this show seemed unremarkable and almost insistently immature (in development rather than style). Although Lozano’s emotional investment is evident, her cutting anger begins to feel dulled into a mannered passion, dampened and constrained by the limited iconographic approaches she takes in the drawings. Phalluses of all types are paired with funnily irritated one-liners such as ‘fuck you it’, or with other suggestive formal equivalents (a crucifix, a flashlight) that sometimes amount to more than a silly visual pun, but often don’t.

The notebooks shed light on the rigour of Lozano’s regimented approach to painting, and describe some ideas for paintings that anticipate the obsession with subjectivity that would characterize later stoner artists such as Charles Ray. A note from 1968 suggests that ‘if the canvases are on warped stretchers, let them be hung on specially built warped walls’, which could easily have described a convex self-portrait photo for which Ray built a convex wall to match. Lozano also proposes a series of paintings, each to be executed while stoned, drunk or sober, for the sake of comparison. (She also envisages painting while tired, horny, sick or in love.) Lozano examines basic questions of perception on both sides of the table – the altered mental state of the artist (is it visibly manifested in the work?) and the viewer’s knowledge of this state (does it affect our perception of the work?).

Included among the notebook pages are her better-known Conceptual projects, such as Dialogue Piece (begun 1969), for which she invited people over to her loft for conversations, including those whom she ‘might not otherwise see’ because of the General Strike Piece then underway. This convenient loophole existed within another artwork, which poses some complications from a critical perspective. If we are to evaluate General Strike Piece on its relative asceticism and doctrine of negation, how do we accommodate relaxations of the project’s rigorous constraints if conducted in the course of a different ‘piece’?

More challenging is Lozano’s seamless intermingling of artifice and real life. ‘I will be human first, artist second’, reads a 1971 note, though she had already rendered this distinction practically meaningless. To whom, in any case, is this declaration addressed? Perhaps the most disturbing and interesting aspect of this show was her conspicuous consciousness of audience, co-existing alongside sentiments that seem pointedly reclusive. ‘Note to myself’, she writes in one case – lest we think the thought was intended for us. It’s a bit like discovering that the diary you’ve been peeking into has been written with you in mind. How much of this is as honest as it might first appear? Honesty, though, seems beside the point. Lozano’s confusion between private thought and performed emotion, both in art and in life, remains richly nuanced, intriguing and irresolvable: all characteristics of enduring art.

Very little is known about Lozano’s life after she moved into self-imposed exile in Texas in 1972. Even less is certain of her struggle to stay true to her last two projects. The strictness and boldness of her goals for General Strike Piece and the boycott of women demand that we evaluate these pieces by the degree to which she maintained her stringent programmes. Quite deliberately, Lozano didn’t want us to know more. Why not honour that choice? The most responsible appraisal of this troubled artist’s final exit from creative life may be to offer no reading at all – a refusal to engage with a work critically, albeit under the guise of criticism.


Peter Eleey



Dear Seeb,
December 4th, 2007 ·

The artist Lee Lozano wrote in her notebook on December 20, 1969: “Confinement is the near root of all my rage.”

Recently, I’ve been trying to imagine her name as a verb. Lee Lozano. Do you know her work? I think you would like it. She’s mostly known for her tool drawings and paintings—big graphic sucker punch hammers and silvered screw drivers with dicks and cunts (I know I’m being crude, but it’s fitting).

One drawing is of a cross necklace hanging between two breasts. The cross at the end is morphing into the head of a penis. Next to this image Lozano scrawled “A tits man he was not.”

She exhibited in New York from 1965 to 1971. She was kind of a big deal, which is amazing since most people never know who I’m talking about when I mention her name. She had a one-woman exhibition at the Whitney in 1970—huge Wavepaintings that were mathematically planned and loosely based on electromagnetic wave theory.

Lozano would work on one canvas for days, non-stop, applying flat waves of paint after flat waves of paint. A reviewer for Artforum described the works as “off-putting” and ”oppressively decorative.” Lozano wrote to a friend: “Turns out the Artforum critic is a Bennington girl!” Bennington is a college in Vermont that was known in the 1960s for its interest in formalism. Rosalind Krauss, for instance, is a Bennington girl.

Lozano was tough, but I think this review hurt her. She moved to Dallas and quit making work the next year. She “dropped out.” The act of leaving was her last definitive piece.


I think the art world missed her. Sometimes I think I miss her, even though I know she could never miss me. She quit speaking to women in 1972.

Carl Andre missed her. In 1983, Andre wrote that Lee Lozano, born Lenore Knaster, now wanted to be known as “E” for energy. In a notebook page dated 1964/67 Lozano created a list titled All Verbs: “ream, spin, veer, span, cross, ram, peel, charge, pitch, verge, switch, shoot, slide, cram, goad, clash, cleave, fetch, clamp, lean, swap, butt, crook, split, jut, hack, break, stroke, stop.“

What happens when someone leaves? Are they forgotten forever? Does dropping out mean leaving the people you love? Can agency exist in absence?

She wrote in her notebook on May 9, 1968 “Once and for all, the sum of myself to date is in terms of the verb.”

As “E” she left the world of pronouns forever. Andre wrote, “To me matter must stand on its own, not be an image, not disappear when the lights go out. Lee could and did make pigment matter. I thought that unholy. We argued. Her paintings were and are right. “

And then,

“I was wrong, Lee Lozano’s notebooks of the 1960s contain some of the most beautiful depictions of matter I have ever seen. Then, mattering pigment was no longer enough. Matter outside of the mind became unimportant. It became necessary to dye the canvas of the brain. Lost were four vowels and four consonants. Literally. “


What Andre isn’t saying here, although I think it is felt, is that Lozano was mad. It is rumored that she went crazy and in 1999 died homeless and alone. This is a familiar story, but you can hear Andre’s regret.

She was a shifting yet truly honest character, Lee Lozano. No paper tiger for her. She wrote on May 9, 1968: “Art does not need to be monumental, but movement (change) does.”

Love,
Katie,http://weirddeermedia.com/2007/12/dear-seeb/