"The ideal woman has always been generic.
I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today.
She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation.
She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who
believes she was made to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you see
her—on remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a carefully styled table,
surrounded by beautiful possessions or photogenic friends. Showcasing herself at
leisure is either the bulk of her work or an essential part of it; in this, she is not
so unusual—for many people today, especially for women, packaging and broadcasting your
image is a readily monetizable skill. She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend
or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming
her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached."
"“The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel
specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment...the loose threads, the strange dreams,
the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence
and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.”"
"There are, of course, many scenarios where we need to speak about bodies without
specifying exactly how each particular body moves and perceives. It would be impossible
to talk about bodies at all if this kind of specificity was mandatory in every instance.
But talking about “bodies” instead of “the body,” is more than a semantic difference.
A body that we haven’t specified is not the same as a body in general. Bodies, plural,
means something distinct from “the body,” even when we don’t describe in detail the
differences between the singular bodies that make up the plurality of “bodies.” An
implied multiplicity is very different than the substitution of a monolith. In many
cases “the body” could be replaced with specific qualifiers as to what body or bodies
we are talking about: “my body,” “your body,” “his/her/their body,” even “our bodies.”
Though these designations might not be fully described, they give the bodies in question
context, place, and position—all prerequisites to an adequately diverse theory of human
beings. Wherever there are bodies, there is the possibility, even the guarantee, that
there is difference. Our use of language should reflect this."
"Can an image be carved into the air? “I wanted to send a smoke … An image made out of smoke into the atmosphere,” she once said. Mendieta’s art frequently made overt reference to ritual, mythology, and magic, particularly those of her native Cuba, from which she was evacuated in 1961 at age twelve, during Castro’s ascent to power in the years just following the revolution. “My earth-body sculptures are not the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature and conceptualizing religion and culture.” There it is again, emotional. Here its use is specific, I think. It means she—I, you, we—can gain access to something, somehow, somewhere that is not here. That is not here, as in this place, but also not here as in not visible. This is both cultural—“Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature)”—and cosmic—“My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.” It is also formal: Mendieta’s silhouettes were primarily witnessed in the flesh, so to speak, only by the artist herself. She documented them extensively in photographs and film, then selected a single image that would stand in for the work. This is what the viewer sees, the photograph of the thing.
Emotional. "
"In this house, I’m a fetus, cradled, protected, fed and watered inside these nourishing walls.
Four months marooned in the apartment and each day I feel more dependent on this animate carapace.
It would be unheimlich if it weren’t so home-like. I pad around in truly hideous house shoes touching
faucets and outlets and light fixtures, thanking them one by one, and they all spark joy. "