Jenny Holzer, Mom #Twitter

These are killing me!

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

TRYING TO BE POPULAR IN HIGH SCHOOL IS LIKE TRYING TO BE MAYOR OF A CITY THAT WON'T EXIST IN FOUR YEARS

26 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

A WELL-MEANING LIE IS A KIND OF TRUTH AND ON THAT NOTE YOU CAN BE ANYTHING IF YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF

2 Jan Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

DON'T MAKE THE MISTAKES YOUR PARENTS MADE AND THEN TAKE ALL THE CREDIT LIKE YOU INVENTED MISTAKES

22 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

I SAW AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF ARTISTS LOST TO AIDS, BUT NO, PLEASE GO ON ABOUT HOW DIFFICULT YOUR LIFE IS WITHOUT AN IPAD

21 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

THE FAMILY WILL GET A BIGGER TV WHEN YOUR MOTHER WINS A MACARTHUR GRANT, THAT'S WHEN

20 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

FORTUNE SMILES ON THE WELL-PREPARED BUT THERE IS NO REASON YOU WOULD NEED SIX CONDOMS TO GO TO YOUR YOUNGER SISTER'S ICE SKATING PARTY

20 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

THE APPROVAL OF AUTHORITY FIGURES IS A PURSUIT OF THE IDLE BUT YOU ARE NOT BUSY ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY GRADES THIS LOW

2 Jan Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

I'M NOT MAD AT YOU FOR BEING SEDUCED BY THE COMFORT OF STASIS, I'M JUST DISAPPOINTED

3 Jan Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

THERE'S VALUE IN KITSCH BUT KIM KARDASHIAN IS NOT AN AUTHORITY ON GOOD LIFE CHOICES

4 Jan Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

ROUTINE IS A NARCOTIC AND THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T GET PIZZA EVERY NIGHT

9 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

DIGNITY IS AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT BUT IT WOULD BE LESS ABSTRACT IF YOU WORE A CARDIGAN OVER THAT TOP

9 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

PERFORMING WITH YOUR HIGH SCHOOL'S IMPROV GROUP IS A GREAT WAY TO FIND OUT JUST HOW MUCH YOUR PARENTS LOVE YOU ANYWAY

20 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

FOR THE LAST TIME, FRAN IS THE WRITER, ANNIE IS THE PHOTOGRAPHER, AND I SWEAR YOU DO THIS ON PURPOSE JUST TO RILE ME UP

19 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

NOBODY HAS SEX IN HIGH SCHOOL AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE LIARS

18 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

I GOT YOU AN L.E.D. SCROLLING MESSAGE BELT BUCKLE -- DO KIDS STILL LIKE L.E.D. BELT BUCKLES?

16 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

WHAT YOUR MOTHER DID WITH CHUCK CLOSE WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, FRANKLY

15 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

IF YOUR FRIENDS AREN'T SILENTLY SOWING THE SEEDS OF VIOLENT UPRISING THEN THEY'RE NOT REALLY YOUR FRIENDS

13 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

A GREAT POLITICAL MOVEMENT BEGINS ONLY WHEN YOU PULL YOUR JEANS UP OVER YOUR UNDERPANTS

12 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

JennyHolzerMom Jenny Holzer, Mom

YOU WILL WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE WHEN BARBARA KRUGER IS VISITING

11 Dec Favorite Retweet Reply

Johanna Burton: Taking Pictures (The 80s)

This is a really amazing lecture by critic and art historian Johanna Burton. I've had multiple people recommend this - she's given the lecture in Los Angeles and New York and maybe some other places and I really hope that it becomes a book some day.

This edition of the lecture took place at SVA and they described it as such:
Johanna Burton discusses art history’s recent attention to “the 80s.” What’s gained and what’s lost when the recent past is deemed a proper historical object? Burton was associate director and senior faculty member at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program from 2008 - 2010, and is currently director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

First of all, I just wanna say Johanna Burton is a superpower. I will not run through her credentials here since they are explained in the intro to the lecture. I will say only that, Johanna you make me want to be a better woman.

The talk really runs through an amazing array of topics from Madonna and Paris is Burning to the "Man Trouble" of Paul McCarthy and John Duncan. Burton does a great job of taking out the Judith Butler magnifying lens and exploring the gender politics and queered theories of these subjects and objects, but also of exploring the differences in our own individual views. Who is Madonna to a gay man in New York versus the teenage girl in suburbia - can she really be everything to everyone?

As a side note, I was just excited that I own the Madonna Justify My Love VHS that she talks about in this lecture. I was unaware of its 'banned on MTV' status but I think I bought it ages ago at a flea market because she just looks so hot and Marlon Brando-ish. Its my favorite Madonna phase.

Johanna Burton: 02/24/2011 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

The question and answer period at the end of the lecture is actually really great also. Don't skip it!

I was really taken with one question that an older member of the audience asked. She wanted to know why younger women -Burton's generation and my generation presumably- haven't adopted a different term than Feminism to describe themselves. She sees the word as old now and wonders if there isn't a more up to date word that could be adopted. It started making me think about my own position on that.

I use the term feminist to describe myself because it is still relevant. It's relevant not only in that the fight for equality between sexes is still relevant but also in that it does still piss people off and/or make people uncomfortable - its too radical of a term to have gathered much dust. In a sense I suppose we've been protecting and fighting for that term for so long that it feels hard to let it go.
I also do wear it proudly because of its history. There is a strategic divide and conquer tactic used on women wherein younger women are taught to fear older women and older women are taught to fear younger woman. This fear is meant to keep women focused on the impeding doom of wrinkles or the possibility that a younger woman will steal your man. If we fear each other we won't form connections or build a dialogue. Without that connection we will lose our mentors and devalue the progress they made - consequently each generation's progress will die with it. So in this way I do adopt the term feminist because it is the term that thousands of women before me have used to fight for the rights that I get to enjoy.
Feminism is equated with older women these days. As anyone who has ever been through junior high will note, it is also associated with lesbianism. So be it! For me it means not being afraid of myself or other women- of aging or the realistic fact that not all body types or sexual preferences or life paths will be the same. It means that I am part of a belief that celebrates that.
In my personal acceptance of the term, I consider the term feminist to be a jumping off point for an understanding of equality in many forms. I take it to be a refusal of domination for any group of people. Perhaps, I use the term Feminist because I've got lady parts or have lived my life as a female and so I come to the world with that view point. Yet, I understand the equality between men and women to be just as important as race, class, sexual orientation, and any other way that we have been divided in order to be conquered. The desire for equality is just that -equality for all.
As Johanna says in her response, her understanding of feminism is"not a subject position but as an operation that has a history". I think I'm going to have to think even more about that. Yet, I do think it is an operation and in that sense still developing and still forming its history.

Just This One Set Of Eyes

I spent a while yesterday thinking about Collier Schorr's photography- then having dinner time conversation about it later on. There are aspects of her work that I'm not that sure of - mainly using the framework of essentialist understanding of gender and the fact that I tend to have a hard time personally getting into photography as an art form since it seems to always be a narrative thing and doesn't mess with the material or form as much.

Okay anyway though, that's just me being annoying, cause there is also something that I like so much about her photos. I think that one way she does interact with the medium is that there is such emphasis put on the moment when she is taking the photo- how she can only see the subject with her own eyes, and the subject can only portray themselves with their own understanding of self - but how the viewer and subject do influence each other. The way that she plays with identity not just in gender but in nationality and religion becomes more complicated than the initial expectation - such as her work as a Jewish woman photographing Germans.

One of the strongest aspects of her work is that she is able to photograph androgyny and sexuality in both genders in a way that I don't think anyone else can. Her statements about how she can only look with female eyes are so interesting to me because her portraits of men - specifically the ones based off the Wyeth photos are so attractive and sexual in a way that recalls nostalgic pangs of first boyfriends or the photos of Leo Dicaprio that were so all consuming when I was in 7th grade. This is most interesting to me because I think that the male body represented in art has so often belonged to gay men and most of the time I can't relate to it at all - yet these photos by a lesbian woman make me wonder if there is something to this idea of a female gaze. In addition, though many of her photos of women were done for commercial projects, such as magazines, these also feel equally sexual. Her representation of the model Freja or actress Kristen Stewart manage to be erotic in a way that still feels like its meant for female eyes - gay, straight, or somewhere in between. Maybe they're attractive to men too, I'm not sure. Whether in portraying men or women, Schorr manages to convey androgyny in a way that is for once warm. She removes the android from androgyny and in finding what is soft in men and hard in women she plays on our sexualities' interest in power and submission but also that feeling of intimacy that comes from accepting what is unconventional in our lovers.

Below are photos from a series of German Soldiers, a series re-creating Andrew Wyeth's Helga, commercial fashion photos, and newer photos of still lives with flowers and landscapes. I think in the most recent flower series she takes the medium to a new level, abandoning narrative and using the medium itself to explore identity.

Objectification has usually been a male mainstay. Homosociality is, without a doubt, present in any project that involves itself in a male dominated arena, such as sports or the military. However, it may be that some gay male critics have become too comfortable in the idea that male sexuality, or men being caught in the gaze, is the property of male homosexuality. That type of "ownership" allows that women don't look at men and that when men appear a certain way it is a performance for other men. It's just another way that women's desire is undermined. This does give me pause, not in image making as much in the editing process afterwards. The struggle is how to represent men in a more fully defined way -- i.e., tenderness, vulnerability, physicality -- without falling into the trap of an assumed gay male gaze. In a way you have to search for varieties of ugliness, to almost de-aesthetify the image, to try and divest it of iconic perfections, all the while making pictures where the camera seems to fall in love.
-Collier Schorr




"In the Helga pictures I set out to create a total portrait of a young man using Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings as a template to explore how one defines someone in images using a description of femininity to describe a man, so that you start to wonder with the Wyeth portraits whether it is a feminine pose or an artist's pose. Is it Wyeth's pose, is it Helga's pose?"
- Collier Schorr





"Having a boy play a girl (and when I say "play a girl" I don't mean that he is represented as a girl, because he is represented as a young man) is complicated. He knows he's looking at photographs of a girl and copying those poses. So the audience sees him as a man, but he can only see himself as a woman, because that's the model he's looking at. It was a really interesting exchange."
- Collier Schorr



"The work is about conflicting obsessions- twinship and opposition. It's about people who look the same but aren't, about boys that look like girls or girls that look like boys, or boys that look like athletes and aren't, or boys that look like soldiers and aren't. It's a metaphor for the Jew and the German- German Jews thinking they were the same as Germans and yet being so different..."
- Collier Schorr



"The landscape is filled with relics and memories. So many things are buried in the landscape in Germany. So many uniforms and medals. And you hear stories of people coming upon buttons and helmets in the fields."
- Collier Schorr


"The first soldier pictures I took were of Herbert and his friends. They all collected army stuff and they would go on campouts, play army, and raid each other's bunks. I was really surprised to find that all the army stuff was American and that they were dressing up as Americans, in a territory that was in fact occupied by American soldiers."
- Collier Schorr





"Some people fit into uniforms and are soldiers; some people don't fit into uniforms and aren't soldiers. Some pretend to be soldiers. I wanted to show that political causes change but soldiering is consistent. It's about putting young guys in scary places, asking them to die for someone else, to die for a cause they might not understand."
- Collier Schorr





"The androgynous part of the work comes from the fact that I can only imagine with a girl's brain. I'm creating a boy's world from the emotional center of a woman. Whenever they look soft it's because I don't really know what it is to be a guy. I only know what it is to be a girl. So I think that paints them with androgyny."
- Collier Schorr










Quite in the same way that the portraits were realized. Using a landscape to heighten the sense of drama. I looked at a lot of Mapplethorpe pictures in the last years and I was really drawn to the bondage pictures and wanted to bring that kind of tension and domination to a still life. That was the idea behind tying up the flowers, so they were elevated and trapped simultaneously. The nature becomes staged and I think I was always so aware of the forests and fields as being the locus of some theater, the military theater was only one possibility. It is also the theater of escape, migration and gentrification.
- Collier Schorr

Eileen Gray: Doing It All

Eileen Gray modernist architect and furniture designer could do just about anything!















Furniture:









This "Dragon Chair" above holds the record for highest price at auction for a contemporary work of decorative art.





Architecture:












Interiors:














A cool light:




Lacquer Screens:





Rugs: