Month: December 2003

Fiber Artist Judith Scott

From Caterina’s blog, I followed this link about Judith Scott, “a fifty-five year-old woman with Down’s Syndrome [who] has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture.”

Awe.

THE GENIUS OF PATRIARCHY

A couple of passages from my current reading:

If I had to name one quality as the genius of patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. science split from art. the earth itself divided: national borders. Human beings categorized: by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum, The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality. We are all affected by, wounded by, this capacity. It’s reinforced by every institution around us each day. (Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover, p. 51)

and from page 328:

But we have seen that revolution is insufficient. Transformation is necessary to save ourselves, sentient life on the planet, the biosphere itself. transformation requires that we recognize out own just anger as being o vast that mere violence could not possibly address it. Transformation requires more than mere seeing; it requires all forms of perception, including remembering, imagining, intuiting hallucination, dreaming, and empathizing.

And transformation requires that we act, that we step off the wheel, outside the prescribed boundaries altogether. Transformation requires that we enter history on our own terms and audaciously place ourselves at the center of it.

Gerda Lerner declares:

The shift in consciousness we must make occurs in two steps: we must, at least for a time, the woman centered. We must, as far as possible, leave patriarchal thought behind.

. . . . As for stepping outside of patriarchal thought:

Being skeptical toward every known system of thought: being critical of all assumptions ordering values and definitions . . . . , developing intellectual courage, . . . . the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most “unfeminine” quality of all-that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world.