A wise man once said, “You don’t have to take photo to take photos.” Okay, so that wise man may have been my dad, and it may have been on the occasion of my not getting into art school and thus becoming a performance artist. But as the saying goes, Art School Shmart Shchool. I still dabble in photography and I’ve decided to share the most recent addition to my photographic oeuvre with you, my trusted readers. I call the series, “Valentine’s Dinner For One.”
xxx
Shmerm
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What’s new for 2011? Well, I predict that the line between subversion and selling out will grow ever thinner. For instance, it is the year that I finally succumbed and sold my image, prepackaged for the masses, to the fascist dictatorship that is Twitter. Let’s face it, this ain’t no radical zine, it’s a performance blog with an elite URL. And I figured that the best way to ensure a steady stream of Shmerman in our fast-paced world would be to supplement the WordPress with Tweet(s). Fear not, comrades, you will continue to encounter original and in-depth material here on Cindy Shmerman, but for the moments in between, when you need a quickie, let me direct you to http://twitter.com/#!/cindyshmerman.
My guest bloguère reminded me today that the upcoming apocalypse in 2012 makes this year’s resolutions more urgent then ever. I hope that my occasionally avant-garde megalist of resolutions will inspire you to resolve. It’s time to live like we’re dying, folks.
In no particular order, my 2011 resolutions are:
As always this blague is about collaboration, so feel free to share your resolutions with the blagueosphere in the comments section of my blague. Here’s to a happy 2011.
Love,
Shmerm
If I were Anne Sexton,
I think I, too, would be jealous of Sylvia Plath:
I think I get where she’s coming from.
The floor beneath your feet, the skylight above you, the walls that enclose you: they are all part of a space that we call “the museum.” The “museum” is postmodern and modern all at once, it was known to the Greeks and the Hun before them. For centuries, this hallowed space has determined our understanding of works of art, of our culture, and of our past.
“Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” asks Paul Gaugin in a somewhat risqué mural of the “other” on the walls of this “space.” Well, Paul, mon ami, the “museum” provides the answers.
But how does the “museum” decide? Who is this Oz behind the answer to the question “Who are we?” I guess what this writing on the wall is really asking is who is He? But that is not for us to know.
Picture, if you will, Oz. Except he’s not Oz. He has an asymmetrical haircut and ahistorical glasses and he wears saddle shoes and his favorite film is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. This Oz is a “curator” and he makes “sense” of the past for us. His job is all about making choices. Black or white? Red or white? Should I keep this (porcelain) baby?
It is Him we have to thank for deciding our past and thus our future. In this digital age, we are blessed with such an able steward.
It is this curator who instills in us a sense of pride for our national, racial, and masculinist heritage. But what is lost? What do we “forget”? Is the museum a “forgetting machine” as it were? And for better or worse?
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Tagged our heritage; ourselves, oz, the museum question, What can you do with a PhD?
Perhaps via juxtaposition?
Bathroom Beauty.
Caught–nay, captured by the camera’s lens as she beheld herself in the bathroom mirror. It was this headless beauty who caught my eye with her clever juxtaposition of black on black on black. It really is astounding what a little black on black on black can do, don’t you think?
What I find most interesting in this afternoon’s screening of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is the now-infamous, anachronistic shot of a (post)modern Converse All-Star. This is really what interests me most in the film. I wonder if others would agree–and I hope that we can discuss further in class!–that this is a sort of fetish object onto which all of the repressed sexual energy between Kirsten Dunst and her n’er-do-well “companion,” Jason Schwartzman, has been displaced. I really find it telling the way that this fetish object has been severed, as it were, not only from the foot to which it once belonged, but from its temporal context and historic specificity as well. There is also ample room here, I think, for a Marxian analysis of materiality–does Coppola suggest that “materialism” is something that by its very nature transcends historical eras? In our discussion we must also pay heed to the formal aspects of this shot: what would Mulvey say of the framing of the gaze? Whose gaze is it? Is it the twenty-first-century gaze, or is it beheld by a period eye? I look forward to our discussion.
I think that if there is one point of view that is missing from the blogosphere, it’s that of Metric lead singer Emily Haines.
Dear Emily,
Would you like to guest blague?
Love,
Your Fans
It’s looking like yesterday’s post may have initiated a paradigm shift.
Cindy Shmerman 