Author Archives: megarnold

Megan

SHOW AND TELL: Ed Video is hosting their annual Holiday Party (first one since before the pandemic?) on December 16th from 7-11pm! It’s going to be so fun!

“Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness” – Amy Sillman

Abstract painting is so far outside my frame of reference but awkwardness is near and dear. It’s in that cluster of descriptors and affects that includes clumsiness, the unrefined, the amateur, and cringe. My bread and butter! I thought Sillman’s definition of awkwardness was setting up a dichotomy between beauty and ugliness/meaning and destruction/empathy and hatred, but it turns out I started reading the article partway through: the first three paragraphs were tucked up on a separate page, above an image of one of her paintings. "Awkwardness is that thing, which is fleshy, funny, downward-facing, uncontrollable; it is an emotional or even philosophical state of being, against the great and noble, and also against the cynical. It is both positive and negative, with its own dialect and dialectic.” Oh. I see what you’re saying now, Amy. My bad. I may not “get” abstract painting but I get the Beckett reference–you have my attention.

Art-making as a metabolic process–the metaphor of digestion–is one I’ve come across before. Lately I’ve been feeling constipated: I’m still taking a lot in, but it’s not coming back out. There’s a block, or a lack of the right stimulating forces. “Finding a form is building these feelings (in this case, dissatisfaction, embarrassment and doubt) into a substance.” The digestive transformation going on in my brain is not going well and I’m straining to produce a substance that’s all wrong.

Sillman says “having a body is a daily comedy” and I want to add that it’s a tragedy too, and in my opinion tragicomedy is the only genre of real substance.

There’s this other bit in the text that caught my attention: “I know of no artist who is attempting to make something more beautiful, but I do know many artists who are looking for a form that ‘feels right’ without knowing why. Maybe it’s just satisfying to see something productive come of feeling like an idiot and the accompanying feeling of embarrass­ment.” First of all, I can’t imagine being an abstract painter because my attachment to the figurative is so ingrained. I also have the midas touch with paint–it turns to shit at my fingertips. But that’s not the important part of this quote. There’s a meme going around the Internet lately of a graph that shows the more you fuck around, the more you find out. This meme maybe distills this quote as well as Beckett’s “fail better”. This improvisational learning by doing makes a lot of sense to me, and every shameful piece of work I hide away is evidence of it.

“Having and Being Had” – Eula Biss

Like a comedian, Biss is highly attuned to the everyday: she picks apart, questions, and exposes the mechanics we take for granted. Her anecdotes end with sucker-punch-lines. Reading this excerpt, I found myself laughing – nervously. The sign of humour doing its work. 

There’s a tiny essay in Black People Are Cropped–a book of William Pope.L’s Skin Set drawings–by Helen Molesworth, who says, “Some people end up laugh-crying forever. Others, well, they just shake their heads, turn, and walk away. They might still be laugh-crying–you just can’t see them anymore” (23-24). And I think Biss is doing the same thing. A reaction–laughter or tears–is an implication. We’ve been had.

For the Skin Set drawings, Pope.L uses the formula “___ people are ___.” For example, “Orange people are my balls in summer.” “Green people are America eat its ass-ness.” “Black people are guilty.” The more nonsensical phrases highlight how nonsensical the ones that “make sense” already are. The perceived social “truth” of a statement like “Brown people are illegal immigrants” is weakened next to “Purple people are the Capote.” Like the house paint colours Biss names, both are highlighting the absurdity of racial codes within colour, and the social/moral values that come with them. Amanda Williams’ project Color(ed) Theory Suite takes its colours from products marketed towards black people, in the way that Biss’ house paints are marketed towards white (or what Pope.L might call “less-black”) people.  Marketing–what a strange and terrifying beast!

This excerpt made me think of Bridget Moser, whose work is very attuned to the absurd and disturbing power of consumer capitalism and socially constructed whiteness. Her palette is pastel, washed out, and inoffensive. This palatable palette lures you in. She uses strange readymade objects marketed to–who? Honestly, who? Why does this crap exist?! Moser, like Biss, is an astute observer of the everyday, and her tragicomic work incites that same uncomfortable laugh-crying. I know I can relate to having bought (into) something that ended up being completely useless. We’ve been had!

I wonder what my favourite colours say about me: Strawberry milk pink. Matcha green. Thai tea. King crab. Raspberry jam. Butter yellow. Peaches and cream.

WORKS CITED
Molesworth, Helen. “When Pope.L Shakes His Head…” Black People Are Cropped. Zurich: JRP|Ringer, 2013.

SHOW & TELL: November 5 trip to London to see Artist Materials Fund at artLAB Gallery, hunter gatherer at McIntosh Gallery, Spectral at Museum London, in and as an ecosystem at Good Sport, and Chains & Crowns at Forest City Gallery.

NOTES TO PRESENTATION

SLIDE 1

  • -Belcourt: writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation, bday October 21st (a Libra, like Foucault – 2 days before my bday), now teaches creative writing at UBC
  • -Published 2020
  • -Part collection of personal essays, part memoir (the Grindr chronicles)
  • -Challenging, poetic prose (challenges “simplicity”)
  • -Explores interconnected themes of utopia, joy, love, sex, Indigineity, queerness, trauma, loneliness, pain
  • -Beautiful preface, a dedication to his nôkhom

SLIDE 2:

  • importance of queer + Indigenous worldbuilding: “ancestral art” (8)
  • NDN: internet/SMS vernacular
  • “Joy is art is an ethics of resistance” (8)
  • utopia of love: “…I inch closer and closer to a Not-I. I end up at the gate of a becoming-us, which is a non-place at best.” (91)
  • “A Poltergeist Manifesto” – feral theory – an adaptation of his PhD thesis
  • trauma: a trip to the hospital; an inability to speak about the past; mass suicides of queer NDN youth; Pulse
  • “I turn into a wounded animal feral with insecurity.” (57)

SLIDE 3:

  • Nico Williams – Anishinaabe artist based in Tiohtià:ke – “Silence No More” (2015)
  • “I gave a quirky and discomfiting talk at the 2016 gathering of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in Honolulu called ‘Anarchic Objects and the Autoerotics of Decolonial Love,’ in which I argued that indigeneity is an erotic concept. Against the sexual pulse of colonially, its perverse sensuality and all that it elaborates in NDN social world, we have the safe haven of us, this flesh, however caught up in the sign systems of race we are.” (49)

SLIDE 4:

  • Kablusiak – Inuvialuk artist based in Mōhkinstsis – “Dildo” (2019)
  • “These theories of masturbation nod to the geographies of joy that manifest where we are trained not to see them. Remember: we need to keep watch of our own pleasures.” (49-50)

SLIDE 5:

  • Kablusiak – “Looking at Facebook” (2019)
  • “(Scrolling through tweets while my bladder emptied, it occurred to me that straight men my age likely don’t partake in this form of multi-tasking. Standing to pee seems like a relic of a bygone era; nowadays we maximize excretory time. Yet another unanticipated confluence of the gay agenda and late capitalism.” (89)

SLIDE 6:

  • Kablusiak – “Life Is Okay Sometimes” series (2014)
  • “The biopower of each and every ‘faggot’ hurled at me at the grocery store, at the university, in northern Alberta, courses through my veins, making my body feel too much like a body, a feeling I’ve wanted to evade my entire life.” (57)

SLIDE 7:

  • Dayna Danger – Metis/Salteaux/Polish artist, Treaty 1 territory – “Masks” series (2016)
  • “To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world. A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization.” (44)

SLIDE 8:

  • Dayna Danger – “The Outlander” (2013)
  • “Our fury is animalistic. [….] I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else.” (44)
  • “A tree screams in the forest-forgive me, not a tree, but an explosion of girls, an apocalypse of girls.” (78)

SLIDE 9:

  • Diane Obomsawin – Quebec-based Abenaki cartoonist and filmmaker – “I Like Girls” (2016)
  • “We… sleep on my twin-sized bed, as though the next day were a Sunday and there were only Sundays from here on out.” (56)

SLIDE 10:

  • Natalie King – Anishinaabe artist based in Tkaranto – no title or year
  • “When two bodies embrace they become a window. Gender is what’s heard when wind touches glass. Remember: by the time sound reaches the flesh, innumerable bursts of light have already shot through us.” (82)

SLIDE 11:

  • Natalie King – no title or year
  • “NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn’t to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, ones that swing open. There isn’t only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the colonially of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.” (111)

SLIDE 12:

  • Natalie King – no title or year
  • “With hints of a world-to-come everywhere we are and have been, a red utopia is on the horizon!” (9)

Works Cited: Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Columbus, Two Dollar Radio, 2020.

“The Case for Nothing” – How to Do Nothing – Jenny Odell

Like a lot of artists, when that first lockdown hit and I couldn’t go to my job at the virtual reality arcade, I found myself scrambling to use my time wisely. I was supposed to go to a 2-week residency in Hungary in April 2020, but since this was obviously cancelled, I tried to reconstruct the lockdown as a “home residency period”. Despite how freaked out and upset I was feeling, I felt the need to sign up for as many Zoom workshops as possible, write and record a new album, and finally start trying out yoga. I kept asking myself, “When am I ever going to have this much free time again?”

A few weeks passed. There was no sign of the endless free time coming to an end. I was stuck in a bedroom that was 2/3rds bed. The Zoom workshops took up a couple of hours each day for a month or two; I wrote and recorded a new album; I made some new drawings; I wrote a short play. But because I still had free time, I figured I wasn’t being productive enough. Like Odell's super-flexi work environment, 24/7 of "what you will" turned into 24/7 potential productivity. That question–“When am I ever going to have this much free time again?”–was a finger wagging in my face.

Jenny Odell: “What I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.”

As the months went by and the weather got nicer, I started going on “silly little mental health walks”, as the girlies called them on Instagram. I walked to the park almost every day and watched the goslings grow up. I watched different flowers bloom. I started getting into birding (but I never got as into it as Jenny Odell) after a pigeon took a crap on my head. I was noticing things I had never noticed before, and my own ignorance surprised me. It wasn’t until that first lockdown–over 7 months after moving to England–that I realized European robins are different from North American ones. What I did with all of that free time was start getting to know the spaces my body occupied, and the other bodies that I shared those spaces with. Like Teju Cole says: “to divert my attention away from the stupid news and towards something life-giving and lasting.” Instead of taking pictures of the meals I was making, I took pictures of every cat I passed by.

Odell mentions something about the ultimate project of “living a good life”, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Churning out masterpieces isn’t on the list of what it takes for me to live a good life. Getting the blue checkmark on Instagram or Spotify isn’t, either. But petting all the neighbourhood cats and dogs, feeling the sun on my skin, and making art whether it’s good or not, are.

“Learning the Grammar of Animacy” – Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

In 2021, the first book I read was Braiding Sweetgrass. I read it mostly in my chilly bedroom in a shared house in south Manchester, snuggled under the pink duvet while the frigid January rain drizzled down outside my window. It was the first book on a reading list based around nature writing, the outdoors, and walking. In the deep of the first full winter lockdown, I read about going outside instead of actually going outside.
The chapter “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” is one that stuck in my brain. Having lived in southwestern Ontario for most of my life, I often thought about language–especially naming–as a colonial tool. Moving to England was jarring. When I told people I was from “London, Canada” I would usually be met with laughter. How silly it is that there could be a London, Canada! Do those Canadians still wish they were British? 
I took the bus to Salford on one of those drizzly winter days to see what the Salford Quays was all about. The names I noticed there were surprising. Streets were named after North American cities, like “New York Street”. (The multilevel irony of New York Street in Salford is just… *chef’s kiss*.) Even more surprising were the bays and basins, which were called “Huron”, “Ontario”, “Erie”. Slave-harvested cotton from the American South would be transported up to the Great Lakes, where they would be loaded onto ships that eventually docked in Manchester, the heart of the textile manufacturing industry during the Industrial Revolution. I wonder if any Manchester residents see those names and link them to their Iroquois roots or the cross-Atlantic slave trade, in that way that we immediately link “London” to England.

I’m thinking of the work that I’m making about this train-human relationship, and how automotives are gendered “female” by the men who love them in order to heterosexualize their desire. Kimmerer writes about the grammar of animacy within the Potowatomi language to illustrate an Indigenous worldview that protects the non-human. It makes me laugh to think how this is used in the English language to protect men from queerness when they’re doting over their ’68 Mustangs.

Spring came early in Northeastern England in 2021. With “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” in mind, I started asking, “Who’s that?” when I passed a bird I hadn’t seen before on a walk along the Mersey River. “Who’s this?” I’d ask the flowers and trees whose names I still haven’t learned. I perched on a gritstone escarpment on a section of the Pennine Way in Calderdale and felt the warmth of the rock through the butt of my pants, warmer than my own body.
I took a lot of pictures on those spring walks in Northeastern England: of trees, rocks, cats, drystone walls, sheep, rivers, houseboats. Like Kimmerer, I didn’t grow up speaking my ancestral language (Kapampangan); but unlike Kimmerer, I haven’t tried to learn it. I don’t know what Kapampangan grammar is like, or what a pre-Spanish Filipin* worldview is like. But applying the grammar of animacy to English (beyond gendering cars) is, I think, a way to shift to a worldview that suits me better than the colonial one I’ve inherited. It’s certainly widened my experiences of being outside, among so much aliveness.

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