La Pudicizia
Cappella di San Severo Napoli
La Pudicizia
Cappella di San Severo Napoli
Edmonia Lewis is today’s Google Doodle! She’s great; you all should learn more about her. A couple of really good recent scholarly works have touched on her, her work, and broader problems in art history writing about race: Kristen Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject and Charmaine Nelson’s The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in 19th-Century America, which has chapters on Lewis and is fantastic overall.
(She was also part of the circle of female sculptors, many of whom were queer, living and working in Rome that also included Harriet Hosmer, on whom I’ve written and researched extensively)
I saw an image online and thought how interesting it is that many painting throughout Western art history are called The Conversation or Two People Flirting or The Couple. You’re clearly meant to see this as a pleasant interaction, but the look on the woman’s face is so clearly, “Someone, please, for the love of God, get me out of here. I wish I were dead.” I don’t want to make sweeping generalisations, but I love the idea that basically for 600 years of Western European art, male artists were thinking, ‘That’s the look women always have on their face when you talk to them. That’s not boredom, that’s just their listening face.’
In art history, especially if your area of specialization is modern/contemporary art (as mine is), explaining the major art movements of the 1910s-1970s to someone who starts from a “but I just don’t understand how it’s art” position and getting them to understand if not appreciate it is something of a test. Like, if I can get someone in that initial position on board with why Kazimer Malevich made his Suprematist Composition: White on White or why the even the general public went a little gaga over Jackson Pollock or why Yoko Ono sat on a stage and let people cut her clothes off of her, I consider it an accomplishment.
I just spent six hours over two days doing just that with fifteen college students, and I am wiped the fuck out but I think it worked. Like, I think I actually sort of know what I’m doing when I’m teaching. Honestly they were more resistant to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (so many questions about copyright! I did not anticipate that) than to Carolee Schneemann getting naked and pulling a scroll out of her vagina, which puts them firmly ahead of most US senators, so.
deosluxmea asked:
honeyandwormwood answered:
This may sound cheap, but it isn’t: one of the big answers is “stuff.”
I care about the material world. I think matter matters.
While there’s a very long story about how I sort of randomly landed in TEC before testing out other welcoming denominations, I have definitely chosen TEC over and over again along the way. I went to a multidenominational seminary. I had choices. A lot of choices. From Orthodox to RC to Pentecostal to every mainline. I had choices, and I kept picking TEC. Not unlike a marriage.
I need stuff, and I think stuff matters. I think real bread and wine matter. I think beautiful linens that hundreds of years of saints have faithfully washed and mended matter. I think beauty matters. Perhaps it makes me weak, but I need all those things, for worship. Maybe someone more saintly than me can be in a white room with a wood podium and folding chairs and be in ecstasy with God. (I’ve found mostly that that scenario helps people enshrine their own feelings as idols, or think that their feelings are God, but maybe I’ve just been in the wrong rooms.) I need old stuff. I need to know buildings and fabrics and icons were here before me and will be here after me.
I need structure. I need liturgy. I need a place in this chaotic world where I don’t have to predict what’s coming next, or brace for it. I need a worship container that isn’t predicated on the personality of the priest, that resists emotional manipulation, that is difficult for a charismatic white dude to co-opt for his own need for adulation. I react very violently to feeling like I’m being played, after some abuse, and I hate someone assuming I’m stupid enough to have One Specific Submissive And Teary Feeling after a certain guitar chord sequence.
TEC is also full of weirdos. There’s a looooooooooot of theological room for pastors - I’m not going to get disciplined for having expansive theology. I’m allowed to think and to fight. I couldn’t survive somewhere where that wasn’t true. It’s a place where the life of the mind is allowed to thrive and where there is (barely) enough room to include me.
I need Communion every week. I think more people need Communion every week. The meal matters. Consuming Christ matters. Having a service where the words/Word is in surrender to the meal, the bread and the wine, the feast, the real presence of God among us, the physical act of consumption - that matters. A hipster dude weep-shouting at me for 40 minutes is not my game. Pretending the Eucharist is a play meal with pretend things is not my game. I believe in the stuff. God matters, literally, in the Eucharist. God becomes matter. I need a place where God matters.
For those of you as enamored as I am with Anna Campbell’s After Anne Carson, After Sappho (2015), you can purchase an edition here at Fuse Works.
I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it’s in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.
And those people are artists. They’re the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that’s Sonia’s poetry or Ta-Nehisi’s rather startlingly clear prose, it’s a dangerous pursuit. Somebody’s out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.
We’re happy to announce that Craft/Work’s paper entitled “Hirst, Don’t It: Revealing the Invisible Labor of Female Fiber Artists in Twentieth Century Art” is now available online! For free! The document not only includes the paper, but also information about and images of our accompanying project, “His/Ours,” a hand-dyed and sewn quilt that recreates one of Damien Hirst’s famous lithographs. Please share with whomever you think would appreciate! And, as always, we’d love to hear what you think!
*****
Craft/Work Online: tumblr, twitter, instagram, website (2014 project), wordpress (new! The Craft/Work Collective), facebook
I finally got this online! @laluchita have been working on this project for over a year now so it feels really great to get it out of my computer.
*confetti emoji
Evening reblog!
Further to that last post and also the long, possibly slightly incomprehensible lecture about John Singer Sargent I gave to a very amused and hopefully delighted @loveisofthebody when visiting the Art Institute, I just feel the need to express why aspiring to embody everything about Sargent and his portraits appeals to this femme dandy, androgynous-ish queer lady.
Basically: portraits of imperious women in frothy gowns, of women who give no fucks, of well-groomed men delighting in the luxuries of life, of girls who are daydreaming about kicking you in the shins, all painted by a dandyish confirmed bachelor, recognized as an exceptional talent while also being a striving, uncertain ex-pat with class issues and an affinity for both social outcasts and self-made socialites, all of which express the general instability of American national identity in the Gilded Age. What’s not to love?





For teachers looking to integrate more art into their math curriculum.
…you guys…
Just read an excerpt from a productivity/goal setting book that concerned Tolkien.
His publisher mentioned that people wanted more about the hobbits after Tolkien published The Hobbit.
So Tolkien started another novel.
And apparently bounced between the depths of despair and the height of confidence for the entire process (he said that: “his ‘labour of delight’ had been ‘transformed into a nightmare.’”)
He gave up multiple times.
That book? Fellowship of the Ring.
You know what kept him going? C.S. Lewis’ support.
First lesson: if you’re stressing over your book, remember that Tolkien did too.
Second lesson: Writers have to support each other. Seriously. It might be the difference between a book that becomes beloved by hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) even existing or not.
This is fair! This is so nice! I love this!
You know what else kept him going while he wrote Lord of the Rings? Well,
Let’s be real. Tolkien’s literary accomplishments are very impressive, but he L I T E R A L L Y
was doing them on his work clock with the full support of a pit crew.
To be fair, I love the man. And I love the huffy apologism in the Tolkien Gateway: “Writing [The Fellowship of the Ring] was slow due to Tolkien’s perfectionism, and was frequently interrupted by his obligations as an examiner, and other academic duties.”
I’m ??? sorry that writing a novel on the company dime was frequently interrupted by occasionally having to do his job???? oh my god I love and hate this so much,
Dianna Wynne Jones, of Tolkien’s students at Oxford, commenting “of Tolkien, they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…”
maybe because that’s what academics are SUPPOSED TO DO, it is their job,,,
He would also deliberately mumble incomprehensibly, ignoring his students, deliberately delivering terrible lectures, so that they would all go away; but Dianna actually wanted to receive some of the education she’d been promised:
“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid).”
God love the man! Deliberately teaching so badly because he planned to alienate his students and collect a paycheck! He would be flayed on social media for less, today. There would be news articles about the Lazy Professor. He would be fired, and buried, and dug up, and fired again.
A choice Diana Wynne Jones quote on Tolkien’s mumbling, from her essay “The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings”:
“When I was an undergraduate, I went to a course of lectures he gave on the subject—at least, I think that was the subject, because Tolkien was all but inaudible. He evidently hated lecturing, and I suspect he also hated giving his thoughts away. At any rate, within two weeks he succeeded in reducing his substantial audience to myself and four others. We stuck on, despite his efforts. He worked at it: when it did appear that we might be hearing what he said, it was his custom to turn around and address the blackboard.”
It’s a lovely essay about The Lord of the Rings, but you can tell that she was still very salty about the man’s lecture style, however many years later it was that she was writing this essay.
One of my Uni tutors had also gone to lectures by Tolkien, and said more than once that whatever else he had learned, the most important was “This is how not to give lectures”…
I have confirmation that this blog has been flagged as explicit and will therefore go offline on the 18th. I mean—

Again, not surprised, but it is pretty annoying that a) my blog settings does not show that my blog is flagged as explicit; and b) I have, you know, two weeks, basically, in the busiest time of the year, to save and relocate six years of content, connections, and getting angry on the internet. As I’ve mentioned previously, all of my blog is downloaded locally and none of it will be lost just because Tumblr decided to be a cock for the holidays, but it may take me a while to find a good new online home for all of my content.
I’m going to leave the blog up for as long as Tumblr lets me, mostly so that people can find this post, but with this post I would like to salute you all and log off. It’s been surreal, everyone. @staff, I wish I could say it’s been fun, but! I fucking hate this blue hellhole and won’t miss a single fucking thing about its broken-ass platform and terrible UX!!
I will miss my friends, though. We are over here discussing where we go next; we’re just getting up and running, so give the mods some time to find our asses nipples, female-presenting or otherwise, with both hands. In the interim, I am greywash on Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, Fanlore, and, first and always, the AO3—come say hi.
💙 💙 💙 💙 💙 💙 💙 💙 💙 💙
[ETA: fangirl-says replied to your post: “wellllll, it’s not a surprise, but—”:
I’m so confused…how did you get the info that your blog has been flagged?
since it looks like Tumblr is maybe pulling some bullshit with links to that site, Imma do this like it’s 1999: postlimit (dot) com, and put in your url. When I put in mine:

