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Panel from "Fun Home". Image from salon.com
I have been reading a lot lately. This might not be unusual for most people, but it’s quite rare for me. In addition to my Novel challenge (ha), I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A family tragicomic. I am most familiar with the Bechdel move test, where in order to pass the movie has to have 1. two named female charcters, 2. who talk to one another, and 3. about something other than men. I am also acquainted with her series Dykes to watch out for. We have a ton of the books in the GSC library.
After I finished it, I talked a little bit with Scott (known for his love of all things comic). He said that he liked it, but thought it didn’t quite succeed as a graphic novel. That you could have taken out all the pictures and it would have been just as successful. I can’t say I disagree, though I think the subject matter is far more compelling than any other graphic novels I have read. I found the book so affecting. I love reading about how she finally put a name to her sexuality in her college library, and the insatiable desire to read all things queer after that. She reads Collette, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Well of Loneliness, all books I read in the past four years, and all books in the GSC library that I worked so hard to wrangle and organize. I think I’ll donate my copy to the library, because we don’t as yet have one but I definitely think we should.
Father-daughter relationships are always interesting to me. Bechdel’s experience with her father was so unlike my own, but there were aspects of that relationship that I identified with. It is odd to think of our parents as people unto themselves, and she seems to have had some extreme revelations about who her father really was. It is heartbreaking both that she only started to know who her father was so close to his death and that he had lived so much of his life in secret.
I’ve recently been posting a lot about publications. Well I just uploaded the GSC’s latest, Bodies, to the internet!
Cover of Bodies, published by the GSC. Photo: Megan Hafner.
From the GSC website:
Our bodies are sites of pleasure, pain, gender, sexuality, joy, shame, and celebration. Our new publication wants to navigate our relationships with our bodies. We want to explore subjects like body positivity, health and illness, fat acceptance, sex, ability, sexual violence, modification, and any other way society shapes the way we view bodies.
It is a really beautiful book made entirely of contributions from the Carleton community. People contributed poetry, written pieces, drawings and prints (including my print, which I posted about earlier), and their editing and design talents to create a wonderfully cohesive book about so many facets of our human bodies.
You can read more about Bodies and all of the GSC’s other publications here on the website: https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gsc/publications/
Read it here:
Bodies (Online Book) | Bodies (PDF)
I have been reflecting a lot on post-Carleton stuff lately. One of the things that is getting me through is looking at the work of Dustin Yager, a Carleton alum from not that long ago. We met him at NCECA where he had a piece in the La Mesa. The piece in the show was called “Orgy Basket” — a pristine porcelain basket with simple line drawings of men having sex with other men. He filled the basket with flowers, which I think is a particularly memorable touch.
Porcelain, 2010; image from ceramicsandtheory.com
Much of Dustin’s work is in series form (with some exceptional titles): “Will You Fake Marry Me?“, the series that the Orgy Basket is from, which includes many other baskets adorned with various masculine/feminine/gay/straight visual indicators; “Rimware“, a porcelain table set with gold lustered rims, on which are drawn illustrations of various stages of a rim job; and “Cups with Something to Say“, a series of porcelain cups on which he wrote or imprinted phrases often heard in the context of gay/queer culture, but also phrases relating to sexual relationships. I love how he pairs a very drawing technique with brash and uncomfortable images. His work is astonishing, and I am very glad to have met him.
Dustin is an artist that I really relate to. He approaches ceramics as a vehicle to express ideas about culture and form. He makes beautiful pieces in their own right, but what makes them exceptional is the decorative elements. He combines drawing, pottery, and commentary seamlessly into his pieces. They make the viewer uncomfortable, which is something I always appreciate especially because his work deals with queer issues and those are very important to me. Sometimes I find it frustrating to make ceramic work (particularly thrown work) that isn’t just beautiful and functional. It’s not that that area of ceramics isn’t valuable and fantastic, but sometimes I find myself aching to make something more meaningful. It is reassuring to find artists making poignant work combining traditional ceramic forms, substance, and beautiful surfaces.
Shalene Valenzuela is totally rad. She makes ceramic irons, blenders, shoes, pencil sharpeners (The Grind, pictured left), nail polish bottles, pot holders, toasters, and all kinds of other girly shit. She’s delightful! She takes these objects and paints on them stereotypes of women’s roles, and sometimes text about the dichotomies women are often placed in. A lot of her work is a commentary on those dichotomies, which I think are entirely damaging to any true understanding of a person or experience. I have always loved those 50′s illustrations of women (a la Vogue patterns or something like that) and I really love when people use them to subvert conventional ideas of gender. I highly recommend checking out her website at http://www.shalene.com/.
As you can probably tell from my post about Misty Gamble, or my entire life if you know me at all, but I’ve been thinking tons (more) about gender lately. Mostly about gender representation and presentation because of my comps (which I am tentatively calling Sexual Dimorphism). So much of femininity is tied up in appearances and presentation. I put antlers and other animal-gender-signifiers on women initially because I am obsessed with antlers and because antlers are beautiful. But antlers are associated with aggression, power, and ownership. They are prized, valued, and hunted — words I normally associated with courtship (can tell I’m in man-hater mode of late?), but also words that I associate with women’s quest to adapt to typically masculine mannerisms in order to succeed. Antlers are at once masculine and feminine, and I think my point is that nothing is ever as simple as you think. Every situation, every gender and experience with gender, is more nuanced than you think.
I also like Shalene Valenzuela because she has a blog. It’s hard to follow, but it’s there. I really like hearing artists’ ideas about their work and their lives in a vernacular that is less formal than an artist’s statement. I also really love that she plays up the kitsch factor. So much of my work (especially in ceramics) is kitschy, and I can’t help but love things that are gaudy and tacky despite my love of simplicity too. Valenzuela’s work en masse reads like a pantry, which I think is so tremendous. I would love nothing more than for my future house to be populated with household wared designed by her, with my goofy antler junk on the walls. That would be some kind of heaven. I love work that really gains momentum as you add more, and Valenzuela’s work especially plays into that cluttered 50s advertising aesthetic when you see her pieces together. Anyways, I love her and her work. I leave you with probably my favorite piece of hers, the Virgin Mary in a slice of bread:
I am obsessed with Misty Gamble.
My favorite of her works is the Chanel / Big Hair series. She makes ceramic sculptures of older-looking women, all
sitting in chairs, wearing Chanel suits, and with enormous hair. They’re beautiful. Many of her pieces focus on issues of femininity: the Tan Hands series — ceramic hands on a wall, each differently positioned with a ring on a finger; or the Sweet Terror series — 5 sculptures of young girls, each innocent and horrifying in their own way. In Chanel / Big Hair, Gamble explores the blurred line between youth and age among cosmetically altered high society women. Their suits are classic and pristine and their hair is extremely well kept, but there’s something strange and terrifying about them.
My favorite piece by Gamble is a ceramic “stump” (she dicthes the traditional bust or torso and calls them stumps) with a beehive hairdo (pictured at right with the artist). That’s exactly how I wore my hair to senior prom in high school! I also love that this particular stump has red hair just like me! Unfortunately that’s where the similarities end. The stumps are modeled after dress forms, have skin textured like fabric, and oddly protruding necks. They are so fascinating. I love them and I am also jealous of their hair.
On her website she has photos of her working, which I find particularly illuminating. It is so cool to see artists at work, especially when that artist is coil building enormous hairdos. I am building some busts of my own for comps. I tried to coil build one of them, but I think building solid and hollowing out is more suited to my needs. I had some issues hollowing out the first one (pictured left) and it got kind of wonky when I put it back together again. It still hasn’t been fired and doesn’t have antlers yet (I am making them separately) but at least it’s something.
For more info on my favorite, Misty Gamble, visit her website at www.mistygamble.com.
