Tracey Emin? Really?
Category: Uncategorized
Happy mother’s day!
Every art is really a miniature
“When Claude Lévi-Strauss was a child, his father, Raymond Lévi-Strauss, a portraitist and genre painter whose works were exhibited in the Salons de Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, gave his son a Japanese etching. The young boy used it to adorn the bottom of a box. Later, when he was old enough to be given pocket-money, he would spend it on miniature items of furniture bought from a Parisian shop called The Pagoda. Little by little, he assembled, in his box, a miniature Japanese house.”
– Boris Weisman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics
“…the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.”
– Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
“Every art is really a miniature, and when the earth itself becomes a miniature you can reverse it. You can look at a grain of sand as a gigantic boulder; it’s just how you want to view it in terms of your scale sense. And that is why scale is one of the key issues, in terms of art.”
– Robert Smithson, interview, 1969
Nemo (Cute Tuxedo Cat) Plays Fetch!
I wish I could draw
“The dollhouse is a version of property which is metonymic to the larger set of property relations outside its boundaries … its appearance is the realisation of the self as property.” (Australian Feminist Law Journal)
“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.
Someone asked me whether the dollhouse was "art"
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I don’t know, it felt like sort of a loaded question. Isn’t everything an artist does art if she says it is? And isn’t it also problematic to assume that kitschy/marginalized/”women’s” pursuits like dollhouses are in any way not art? Is making dinner art? It is when Rirkrit Tiravanija does it in some kind of trendy art-sanctioned setting. Then someone else commented sort of belittlingly on how much I like handicrafts. Interestingly, both of these comments came from women artists whose work I adore. Is it that they want me to do things that are somehow more evidently accepted cultural-capital-gaining modes of art? Or are they positing some sort of a distinction between what I am doing with a project like this and what they do when they go off to artistic festivals for recognition and validation? I don’t know. I once mentioned to Carolee Schneemann that I had taken up sewing and she looked very concerned.
I don’t know, erudite readers, what do you think? Is this art? All I know is that I’m putting a lot of my self and my time into it, it’s full of emotions, the regressive aspect of it is totally seductive to me and heartbreaking too because of lost time, lost hopes, and the sway of contingency over everything.
I feel very isolated and I am also isolating myself in this tiny space.
I told you
I’m writing my memoirs.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Otohime 