oneironazi

ngreenbean:

skullvomit:

ngreenbean:

julianahuxtable:

servethework:

SERVE: The Work is an ongoing visual collaboration between photographer Alejandro Santiago & transsexual performance artist Nina Arsenault.

SERVE: The Work documents the life cycle of the creative impulse as it is manifested and experienced through the body.

SERVE: The Work integrates the body and the spirit; the light and the dark; the ascetic and the erotic; the masculine and the feminine; the conscious and the unconscious; the sublime and the profane.

SERVE: The Work honors the innate creativity of the human spirit.

Serve the Work: Book I is the first installment of the series.

www.servethework.com to order your copy NOW

this is so intense and i’m loving this so much. I love how direct and transparent Nina is about her body and how she’s changed it. Today I was talking to a coworker about Coming of Age (more like, Coming of Gayge) in New York with all these gorgeous, super high femme, super glam trans women, and how transparency about bodies and changing them was never really a means of relating to each other, but more of a way of competing with each other.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Trans Women Artists and the use of the body in performance (and video and photography as documentation and/or as the work itself), and curious if there are Trans Women Artists making Art Objects? I haven’t really come across any, and feel kinda weird/alone being a Trans (Woman?) Artist making Things that don’t involve my body in and of itself.

That’s a good observation, and one I’ve thought a lot about myself. I think a lot of it has to do with the emphasis on identity and the need many of us have to define and reclaim our bodies and control the context of it on our own terms?

There are a lot of trans artists here on tumblr who create in traditional art objects, but few of them are trans women /trans feminine folks, and few of us who are openly trans feminine make art that isn’t mostly about our identity. Not to bash that, I think it’s important necessary work and it’s something I’m trying to tackle too, just not exclusively?

It’s interesting though, I actually first started to come to terms with my trans issues via my art, in a pretty subconscious way. I realized recently that I wrote poems about dysphoria without knowing it at around 16, and more recently in 2008 I began painting and drawing trans women regularly and almost exclusively for a bit, but it wasn’t util around 2010 that i slowly began to piece things together and even then it was in writing and art before it was ever actually said aloud in a coherent fashion.

So yeah, I thought this commentary was interesting, since my art objects were kind of part of how I came out to myself I guess?

(Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, it’s 6 am and I’m about to go to bed).

i think this is all really spot on. i was talking about this with a friend a while ago (DavEnd, who’s also a mtf spectrum trans performer), and she was talking about authenticity of the body or identity, and how using the body is a way to convey that, or address that really directly. I guess I’ve been making images that are meant to represent my body, so in a sense, it could be very similar, and i’m definitely discussing identity and like, presentation in the world, maybe because that’s just a huge preoccupation of mine as a kind of gender queer trans lady-ish. I’m really interested in/excited about the fluid nature of your drawings (Royce), my work is less like, working shit out, and more like, coming to somewhat fuzzy conclusions about my body/place in the world and finding ways to visually articulate them, i would love to get to a more fluid/consistent place with my art making. Who are some of these trans artists your thinking of that are making objects? (I assume you mean these are ftm spectrum folks?)

CUNY Graduate Center | Pixelated Politics: Still & Moving Images in the Digital Age »

intimacyopportunity:

towerofsleep:

Apr 9, 2013, 6:30pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre

Pixelated Politics: Still & Moving Images in the Digital Age

Mariam Ghani, Lev Manovich, Nick Mirzoeff, Christiane Paul , Natalie Musteata, McKenzie Wark

“The contemporary world is hypervisual,” says media theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff. Television, computers, iPads, the Internet, and cell phones are associated with the increased distribution and reception of still and moving images. The global rise of cell phones in particular has enabled the proliferation of what filmmaker Hito Steyerl calls “poor images”—low-resolution film footage made all the more popular by platforms such as YouTube. In an age of accelerated digital imaging and communication technologies, the velocity with which information travels is such that it invests the image production with newfound power. This panel invites media scholars, curators, and artists to discuss how this endless stream of degraded, pixelated images, videos, and films has significantly altered the way we experience and understand our contemporary politicized world.

Participants include: Mariam Ghani, artist and writer; Lev Manovich, Digital Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Media, Culture and Communication, New York University; Christiane Paul, Media Studies, The New School, and New Media Arts at The Whitney Museum of American Art; McKenzie Wark, Culture and Media, The New School.

Organized and moderated by Natalie Musteata, Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Cosponsored by the PhD Program in Art History and the Certificate Program in Film Studies.

WE ARE ALL GOING TO THIS

bugkisser:

a selfie a day keeps the self hate and internalized oppression at bay

Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.

Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes.

The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it.

It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.

“

—	The 7 Worst International Aid Ideas (via rapierwitdoessomething)

garlandgrey:

Post-Cascading Epiphanies Selfie

A document of what you look like when you are enough for you.

I’m torn by the feeling that the narcissism of documenting your life on the Internet can be a great form of self care but also feeling like it’s a lot of work and nobody’s damn business.

reverendmother:

Idk I’m the worst.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

“

—

John Berger Ways of Seeing (via spartanbitch)

This is super fucking relevant.

And why self portraits (selfies) are often such an act of self preservation and resistance.

(via sexxxisbeautiful)

Hahahaha this so much. I knew so many creeps who always idolized women’s bodies to the point of fetishizing it, but the second a girl showed any self-love? Oh, no, she’s foul.

(via quietly-creeping)

That’s why when people call me vain or conceited I tear their throats out. Nobody loves me as much as me, shit.

(via thegoddamazon)

I posted a photo of myself in a short black dress & some J Simp heels and IMPLIED that I thought I was cute.

Lost 8 followers instantly.

If we bring race into this and talk about how a BLACK woman can’t dare think she cute, we’d be here all day.

(via tashabilities)

The importance of selfies, ya’ll!

(via revolt-shesaid)

Oh shit. #chubby.

(via premierboner)

After many years of feeling deprived and wronged, some narcissists lapse into “sadistic generosity” or “sadistic altruism”. They use their giving as a weapon to taunt and torment the needy and to humiliate them. In the distorted thinking of the narcissist, donating money gives him the right and license to hurt, chastise, criticise, and berate the recipient. His generosity, feels the narcissist, elevates him to a higher moral ground. Most narcissists confine their giving to money and material goods. Their munificence is an abusive defence mechanism, intended to avoid real intimacy. Their “big-hearted” charity renders all their relationships – even with their spouses and children – “business-like”, structured, limited, minimal, non-emotional, unambiguous, and non-ambivalent. By doling out bounteously, the narcissist “knows where he stands” and does not feel threatened by demands for commitment, emotional investment, empathy, or intimacy. In the narcissist’s wasteland of a life, even his benevolence is spiteful, sadistic, punitive, and distancing.

“

—	The Misanthropic Altruist - Narcissism, Pathological Narcissism, The Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), the Narcissist, and Relationships with Abusive Narcissists and Psychopaths in the interest of intellectual thoroughness, I’m leaving this here

The screen of cinema, video, and the computer is a threshold that divides the ordinary and the everyday from other realms that seem truer or larger than life. The interface between this world and the other world of imagination is a culturally produced and historically shifting construct that has taken many shapes and forms. Masking off part of the world permits images and symbols to invoke the other scene—not what is, but what could or might be or what was in some other time and place. Like a semi-permeable membrane, the screen filters out
some things and not others, conjuring an auratic gleam from signs and symbols. Clearly, the alchemy of the screen is in the service of power as well as desire.

“

—	Margaret Morse, Body and Screen (via cloudnoise)