“[…] herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, —who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
Dancing Queens
Since being introduced to the Emmy award winning show RuPaul’s Drag Race my freshman year, I have watched it religiously every Thursday night. For those that aren’t obsessed or even familiar with the drag queen pantheon and culture the show has made famous throughout the world, RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality competition hosted by the 90’s drag superstar RuPaul Andre Charles, based roughly on a combination of the show America’s Next Top Model and the drag ball culture shown in the 1990 cult documentary Paris is Burning. It is revolutionary gay representation on mainstream television. However, as a female fan of the show, sometimes, in the back of my mind I sometimes wonder why it takes men dressing up in drag to celebrate women.
A Design Challenge
I believe my first experience with Dan Dezarn was when he was in the role of Director of Sustainability. I was part of an environmental club interested in reducing the school’s carbon footprint. At the time I didn’t know he had formerly been a professor of Fine Arts, and it is such an interesting transition in roles. For me I see overlap between designing the transition from a fossil fuel based economy to a carbon neutral world, and the Reconstruction era in the South overseen by the Freedmen’s Bureau that WEB Du Bois talks about in the “Dawn of Freedom” chapter. The design challenge of a whole new way of life as evaluated through some of the art vocabulary we learned in class, as well as the text and paratext of Dawn of Freedom will be the topic of this blog. Later in life, Du Bois became interested in Marxism (as evidenced by his book Black Reconstruction).
Pall Bearers
I don’t know how to start this blog post. I want to talk about death. Generally American American culture compartmentalizes death from life. Instead of integrating into the “circle of life”, like the New Orleans dirge does, we see life as a linear start and finish. Death inevitably visits us all, and keeping death away from life slows the grieving process. I deeply appreciate when artists like Steve Prince speak about death and loss, as he did in his Kitchen Talk at Geneseo, which I will talk about below. When I see someone like Steve Prince who lives so wholeheartedly and creates positivity from painful experiences, I feel like I can talk about those things in my life too. The institutional, slow violence that Prince as a black man in America experiences and has spent his career being an activist against is different than regular medical tragedy, but death is a commonality that all of humanity can relate to.
Art and Memes
We gather around the plate of glass onto which light purple, blue, and yellow paint is dabbed, overlaid on a picture in a magazine. Garth Freeman let us loose on the paints and paper after he spoke about his experiences as a collage artist. This method he introduced of plate glass printing allows free expression of color, replicability, and intertextual interaction between existing media like magazines, or copies of the Lamron, and us as the artists.
Connections of Mourning Through Music
I know jazz is conceptually crucial to this course, being the music of the New Orleans dirge, incorporating repetition, and just as a genre invented by black Americans.
The Gaia Hypothesis
“The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.” ~ Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
April 24th. That’s the day that my mom says the leaves will come out every year. They’ve come late this year, probably due to our strange (though, perhaps we shouldn’t consider it to be so strange anymore) winter/spring/winter/spring weather — the snow and the sun and the snow and the sun made the buds hide for longer than normal. But they’re here now, their green-ness slowly emerging, creating interlacing shadows on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. As I emerge the library for the first time in hours, after reading paper after paper about genocide and war and food insecurity, I breathe in the scent of the blossoms on the breeze and shake off the hazy film that coats my brain after I spend too long under fluorescent lights. I let the fresh air wash over me, change the song to something gentle, and walk. I do this a lot as spring (do we have such a season? I do it as the frequency of warm days increases) comes, meandering about random sidewalks and expanding my mental geography; I sit on random benches, walk into churches, wander around stores, sit in fields, find shapes in clouds, watch sunsets and sunrises and moonsets and moonrises, talk with friends, pet cats (if they deem me to be worth their time). Continue reading “The Gaia Hypothesis”
Overcoming Symbolism
During Dr. Kim Vaz-Deville’s lecture last month, and during the breakfast myself and my colleagues shared with her the morning after her talk, we spoke a lot about the Baby Dolls, including their origins, and addressed a lot of issues that center around racism and injustices that continue to happen today. One thing Dr. Vaz-Deville said that I found especially interesting is that the fleur-de-lis was a brand used to mark runaway slaves, a Louisiana symbol of Black Oppression. Upon learning this, I immediately made a connection to a few of the pieces of art I had seen in my Renaissance English course with Dr. Samuel Fallon on world-making. Continue reading “Overcoming Symbolism”
Show, Don’t Tell
Towards the beginning of the semester, Dr. Joe Cope began our class period by passing out small pieces of fairly thick paper, and told us we should use them to create art cards. More formally known as artist trading cards (ATCs), this project helps us to realize the significance of creativity and the way we can use it to relate to and understand each other on a deeper level.
GENESE『O』: The Myriad of Navigating Geneseo’s Binaries [endING]
I take in a deep breath as I open up my mailbox and see the mail. Credit card information, old medical mails, magazines, and deep inside my mailbox is a big white envelope. On the side of the envelope in the sky-blue text is the name: GENESEO. I take in a deep breath, exhale, and grab all of the mail. I go over to the elevator nearby and press the button.
I look up, the electric sign reading: 15. I look over to my right and left, past the people in winter coats, I see the two staircases. I tap my shoe and fold my arms into my chest as I steady myself. Butterflies flutter the wings against the inner walls of my stomach. I rock slightly-back and forth and look down at the floor. I felt taller than usual, wider than before, and more aware than previous.
Just as I turned to take the stairs, the elevator doors slowly come apart and people walk out. I walk past them and stand in the back of the elevator. I continue to tap my feet as I purposefully avoid eye contact from other people.
The elevator reaches the eighth floor and I exit when it does. I walk quickly over to my apartment door, unlock the door, and run into the kitchen. I quickly open the package and in the big white envelope is a blue folder. I open up the folder and the first words I can vaguely recall are:
“Congratulations! You have been offered admissions to SUNY Geneseo as EOP student.”
And that is when my college career began…
Continue reading “GENESE『O』: The Myriad of Navigating Geneseo’s Binaries [endING]”