An unlikely connection? Not really if you know anything about the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  It is no accident Addams and her cohort have an underground cult following, every visit uncovers something extraordinary and original. In this case, I uncovered the fact Addams opposed the American occupation of the Philippines, and traveled there in her lifetime.  She brought a passion and interest in this part of the world back to the Hull House. 

Addams’ Labor Museum exhibited handicraft objects representing the new immigrant populations of Chicago’s changing 20th Century society. Many, if not most of these practices were by women, and Addams was keenly interested in supporting labor that could be done from home through hands-on workshops, exhibitions and training programs.  Much like some of today’s socially engaged art practice, these programs considered the intersection of craft, creative practice, and micro-industry.  In reading the fine print about the museum, I found it featured textiles and baskets of the Philippines on display. And, as it turned out, they were borrowed from The Field Museum.

Thrilled by this possibility, I picked up the phone and called James Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology. I was floored he picked up the phone, and we talked for quite a while.  He referred me with Almira Gilles, also a Field Anthropologist who has been liaising and organizing with the 10,000 Kwentos project.

From the project website: “In 2010, Dr. John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum, started conversations with members of the Chicago Filipino community about his idea of co-curation. Co-curation is the philosophy that a museum or cultural institution consult and directly involve the community from which the objects of culture originate. Dr. Terrell selected the Philippine artifacts collection and the Filipino community as his first co-curation initiative with the Field Museum.”

After a conversation with Ms. Gilles, she invited me along with my former student, Trisha Martin (a Filipina) to participate in selecting 24 objects from Mindanao for the 10,000 Kwentos project, a region of the Southern Philippines.  The images are posted online prompting community members to write about the objects through blog comments, and participate in this remarkable co-curation project.

Princess Emraida Kiram tells Trisha Martin what she knows about a gourd basket selected for the 10,000 Kwentos Project upcoming event June 1.

The day was extraordinary to say the least. Accompanied by Princess Emraida Kiram, a Wisconsin resident originally from Mindanao, a predominantly Muslim region of the Southern Philippines, we selected objects from these categories: textiles, weapons, musical instruments, worship, livelihood, and “your choice.” The Princess knew many of these items from her time in the Philippines. One of the items she selected was a horse saddle; though it was from the region where she grew up, she recalled her brother riding bareback.  Because it is a Western style saddle, she suggested it reflected American occupation influence.  Further, it had a coconut husk seat!  She laughed at the ironic image of Mindanao warriors on these saddles fighting the American occupation.

An object the Princess identified as a hair comb

I will continue research on textiles (found some made from paper from Luzon, the region I visited in 2008!) and baskets reflecting this interesting relationship between two of Chicago’s greatest institutions, and the Philippines. Jane Addams’ questions about labor practice are perhaps more urgent today than ever, as these crafts practices are disappearing, and the women who once made them now experience massive unemployment and disintegration of their traditional cultures.

With my deep appreciation to Almira Gilles, Jamie Kelly, Dr. James Terrell Princess Emraida Kiram, Michael Armand Canilao, Jelly Carandang, Victor Miller and Trisha Martin.

And thank you to the city of Chicago, a fascinating confluence of ideas and activism!

Greetings from Serbia! I am so thrilled to share an interview with Jeremy Loveday today. This is an amazing and powerful project I think has the real capacity to change lives.  Hundreds of thousands have watched the video.  And if Mr. Loveday is right–that words shape our thoughts–we have reason for hope.

Thank you so much for this important message, which is also a very beautiful work of art.  I just returned from working in a region in the Caucasus where the violence rate against women is 92%.  It is so shocking and frustrating to me our culture hasn’t eradicated gender violence.  Why do you think this violence persists?

I think it is part of a broader context of a culture of violence and domination.  This violence will continue until we break the cycle of shaming and blaming victims. Silence is an atmosphere where violence can continue unchecked. So we must speak up, women and men! I believe that the movement to end gender violence has to involve men.  It has to involve men speaking to other men and breaking out of the the mold of violent and toxic ideals of manhood.  That being said, men have to be prepared to take the lead from women on this issue and listen, really listen.  

Your message is so clear and well informed.  I particularly enjoyed your analysis of the culture of silence and denial that all men are trained to be violent, which then becomes a form of complicity.  What was the pivotal moment that heightened your awareness? How did you become so well informed about gender violence?

I wouldn’t say that I am particularly well informed on the topic of gender violence.  Masks Off came from a process of introspection and analysis rather than research.  By the time I actually put pen to paper I knew exactly what I wanted to say.  I knew my message and I just needed to massage it as it hit the page.  Seeing Jackson Katz speak at a Men’s Leadership Breakfast was a defining moment in my process as well.  I saw him right as I was formulating my poem.  I think he is doing some amazing work.  

I am also intrigued with your thoughts on language and its relationship to violence.  How do you think language transforms into violence against women?

Language shapes our thoughts and is shaped by our thoughts.  I think that when we use sexist language, make rape jokes, and the like, we normalize the culture of violence we live in. Just the fact that we call it “violence against women” rather than “men`s violence against women” shows that the victim is the focal point – not the perpetrator. That`s such a big question…I`d love to read a book on the topic.  Hey internet, do you have any suggestions?

White Ribbon is such an extraordinary organization, such a refreshing approach to making gender violence an urgent issue for men.  How did you get involved with them?  Do you think their programs have been effective?

I connected with the White Ribbon guys out of Toronto when I launched Masks Off because I wanted to point viewers towards an organization where discussion can continue, where men can take action and learn more.  I am working with my local Member of Parliament Murray Rankin (NDP) to setup a White Ribbon event in Victoria, BC.  Jack Layton, the former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada was one of the founders of the White Ribbon Campaign, so there is natural support there. Jack Layton even put his house up as collateral when White Ribbon was in financial trouble.   It`s great to know this cause has some political support in Canada.

Tell us a little bit more about the impact of your video.  What has the feedback been like?

Honestly, the feedback has been overwhelming.  I`ve had so many amazing and brave people reach out to me.  From men who have been waiting to hear another man say those words, to a young man who wrote to tell me that he now thinks about his use of language in a new way.  I`ve also received many intensely personal messages from women survivors. To my surprise, I`ve received more messages from women than from men.  There has also been hate mail!  The “Men`s Rights Activists” have labelled me as a man-hater and many worse things. That`s been really eye opening and it just shows how necessary these conversations are!  If I`m pissing them off, I figure I`m on the right track. Overall, it has been an honour and a privilege to connect with so many people from every corner of the earth and to have so many people open up to me.  It has been so affirming and encouraging.

What are some of your upcoming projects?
I`ve got lots coming down the pipe in 2014!  Look out for new videos, a book, and lots of touring.  Check my Facebook page to keep in touch: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeremy-Loveday/150308848350487

What a great way to ring in 2015 on Gender Assignment, with one of the great discoveries I made this year, Mothernism by Lise Haller Baggesen. It is a treat to behold—purple with silver text block bling–and to devour. (I read it in one sitting.) Haller Baggesen runs the gamut on topics, from pinkwashing breast cancer campaigns, to little-known artist, Hilma af Klint. She considers their cultural significance in letters to her sister and daughter, as well as passionate essays full of personal experience, and lesser-known sources. I was lucky enough to score an interview, which got me thinking as much as Mothernism did.

I loved your letter to your sister in which you talk about your desire for a daughter to share your feminist legacy with. As the mother of a son, I had the same desire and am recalibrating my dreams. What does a mother/son feminist legacy look like?

The short answer to that one is: a mother/son feminist legacy looks the same as a mother/daughter feminist legacy.

My son is now 15 and I see as much of a feminist in him as in my daughter (who is 8), but of course it manifests in different ways and he grabbles with different aspects of it than I have, and than (I guess) his sister will. For example we had a conversation the other day, in which he asked me why it was called “Feminism,“ instead of for example “Egalitarianism” or “Humanism” as it pertained to an egalitarian ideal including all humans? To which I answered that as long as the female half of the human population took the brunt of the inequality that is dished out along gender lines, anything other than the word Feminism sounded like and euphemism in my ears, designed to gloss over the scope of the problem. He could agree with that.

The long answer is off course a little more complicated —and as I outline in that letter to my sister, it is also relates to a bodily female experience that we share with our daughters but not with our sons. The basic premise of the book is that a functional, practicable feminism must be rooted in absolute bodily autonomy, regardless of gender expression, sexual preferences, desires etc. combined with the understanding that with great autonomy comes great responsibility and that if you want other to respect your autonomy, you will respect theirs. This by the way relates to all interpersonal relationships, so not only sexual ones, but also relationships between educators and students, employers and employees, parents and children etc. But since the female body is scrutinized, regulated, and policed harder than male ones through (reproductive) policies, religious dogma, popular media and so forth we may have to work a little harder on our daughters (and ourselves) to assert that bodily autonomy and on our sons (and partners, brothers, fathers or whoever else we may have in our lives) to respect it.

That said, I am not subscribing to a subset of feminist discourse that seems (to my eyes) overly concerned about gender stereotyping of children, and whether we should be raising them gender neutrally or using gender neutral terms around and about them. In practice “gender neutral” is often closer aligned with the male than the female (i.e. “neutral colors” are anything but pink and purple, that are in turn labeled “girl colors,” hence of secondary value or importance). So I am not choking on the purple LEGO’s, and to those who are concerned about the pink and blue baby rompers, all I can say is that: one shape fits all!

I grew up in the unisex seventies –which I absolutely loved—but we crystallized so hard and so fast along gender lines when we hit puberty. So it makes me happy to see how kids of my son’s generation, who were targeted much harder than we were commercially, and grew up among Disney Princesses and Ninja Turtles, are now much more experimental along the lines of gender expression without framing it in absolute terms of masculinity and femininity. My son for example has very long hair (like myself) and he is endlessly patient about educating his surroundings that no, he is not a girl —he is just a boy who likes to have long hair. And just like Jada Pinkett Smith spoke out to critics who scolding her for “letting” Willow cut her hair, I don’t “let him grow it.” He takes care of that just fine by himself, thank you very much!

Haller Baggesen’s installation for Division of Labor at Glass Curtain Gallery

I was really taken with your letter to your daughter about rape, it had a completely different vibe than most feminist discussions on sexual abuse. I love the idea that if it did happen, it shouldn’t be a shameful experience, and life could go on despite how horrible it might be. What is your take on the scourge of college rapes being exposed? In particular, what did you think of the Columbia student mattress protest?

This chapter was added late in the game and arose from a conversation Caroline Picard and I had about various things we had refrained from doing at various times in our lives –be it traveling alone, staying out late etc. –because “we might get raped;” and how that threat is used to keep females in check on so many levels.  In no way I wanted to underestimate the dreadfulness of the experience of actual rape, sexual harassment, battery, etc. but I wanted to address how the dreadfulness of the actual experience is often exasperated and prolonged by this idea about it being the “the worst thing that can happen to you” —the absolute unspeakable.

I debated back and forth with Caroline for a long time whether to include it or no —it is such a delicate topic and I felt I was walking a really thin line—but based on the response it has gotten so far, I am really glad I did. It seems to have hit a nerve with a lot of people (rape survivors among them) who were discontented with the tenor of the current feminist debate with regards to rape –which was also my incentive to write it.  Basically I was frustrated with the way the rape narrative is often laid out in feminist(ing) terms, as I feel that a lot of these internet feminists are aligning themselves (knowingly or not) with right wing Christians, incarceration hard liners and the prison industrial complex. To paint a picture in which female sexuality is defined by modesty, respectability and cultured-ness whereas men are caricatured as beasts that are all about “that thing, that thing, that thi-i-i-ing,” I believe, is a naive assumption at the best of times and a downright lie at worst.

Amanda Hess says it best on Slate, in response to the recent debacle surrounding Rolling Stones’ shameful mess-up of investigative journalism conduct, with their coverage of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, in which she states that: "Whatever really happened at UVA one Saturday night in 2012 cannot possibly undermine a social justice movement because any understanding of justice must accommodate the truth. “ and furthermore that "It is wrong to assume that seeking the truth—to the extent that it is discoverable—comes from a place of mistrust or outright derision of rape victims. Carefully examining the Rolling Stone debacle and taking rape seriously as a national problem are not incompatible goals; we are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

She concludes:  "Perhaps the sort of self-examination that journalists and UVA administrators are going through now could also serve activists and feminists. Big ideological narratives about sexism and rape culture don’t need to fit neatly with every incident in order to remain compelling. In fact, they are strengthened when they are accepting of nuances and aware of their own limitations. “[1]

As for the Columbia mattress protest, I think it works extremely well at the level of protest as personal testimony and as gesture of solidarity with other victims. I am not so sure how I feel about it on the level of performance art —especially after Jerry Saltz has canonized it as the number one best art show of this year.[2]

I doubt that Saltz has experienced the work first hand, by walking in one of the protests for example (–although if I am wrong about this, more power to him!) but instead rates its success by its social media footprint.  Saltz’ endorsement and his particular mansplaining throughout his list of feminism-as-art does nothing but selling ourselves back to ourselves as a new brand of “sexy feminism” and yet another young-girl trope. His branding of Emma Sulkowicz piece “Carry the weight” (the mattress protest) as “radical vulnerability” opens the work, which in terms of art, I find, is rather thin and one-dimensional but sincere, up to being interpreted as narcissistic and potentially titillating. That is really, really painful —but there, I said it.

I found your chapter on breasts very painful—engaging, but complicated for me. I am a breast cancer survivor; I was diagnosed at age 39. I found my own tumor by self-exam. To be sure, the medical community widely acknowledges and promotes breast-feeding as a known breast cancer preventative (as well as having babies under age 30). But where does that leave women who would never, could never reproduce? There are so many of us in so many iterations. Where is our common ground? What do non-reproducing women have to add to the discussion on the liberation of women?

The origin of this letter preempts the time I even started writing my thesis on “the mother shaped hole in contemporary art-discourse” or indeed a book on the topic. The obligatory curriculum of MAVCS includes a course in “the history of Visual and Critical Studies,” in which we took turns at presenting some theoretical heavy hitters to the class. I had picked Melanie Klein’s “Envy and Gratitude” and had worked myself into a state of academic anxiety about being a “good enough scholar.” So, in order to get a handle on the text I decided to unpack it along the lines of the reparative potential of creativity, but also to relate the text to my own experience of breastfeeding my two children. It divided the class —where some found it very clarifying, others found it inappropriate and “oversharing” —but it did set me thinking about how women are so used to having their own body(parts) explained to them and to second guessing their own experience. And it set me thinking about what kind of imagery is employed to this end. Cleavage billboards and Mammograms are two (very different) types of images that we are frequently confronted with that shape our relationships with our own bodies in a radical way. (I guess this is common ground for breeders and non-breeders alike?)

The case of mammograms is further complicated by the fact that as lay-women we are not in a position to interpret these images ourselves. This is something I unpack further in the letter about Ultrasound imagery, which if anything is even more rife with moral and ethical pitfalls –in terms of how we define personhood, bodily integrity etc.—than mammograms. It is a lot of trust we put in the people who administer and interpret these images for us, especially when these are also the people who promote them to us. So it was really a slap in the face for me to learn that the Susan G. Komen Foundation, who I had —naively— deemed naive in their upbeat propaganda that we can all just walk, talk, and shop our way to the cure, were far more cunning than I had giving them credit for, and had misused my trust (in the form of my money) to support a right wing pro-life agenda (which still didn’t stop them from collaborating with Smith and Wesson on a ladies pink hand weapon —“Shoot for the cure, “ I presume?).

That said, I am not advocating against mammograms. Like yourself my mother is a breast cancer survivor, while one of her sisters died from the disease and another from cancer of the spleen. My maternal cousin, who is the same age as I, was diagnosed in her early thirties with a BRCA-1 mutation tumor, round about the time my mother was also diagnosed, and underwent a double mastectomy and hysterectomy —same procedure as Angelina’s.  Here decision to go down this radical route was motivated by her wish to there for her young children (again, just like Angelina) and certainly relatable to me as my own son was an infant while this was all going down. So I have been screened diligently and regularly ever since.

My reasons for relaying these different and shifting sets of relationships I have had with these same pairs of breasts, my mothers and my own, over the years, were off course both stylistic and poetic, as well as pragmatic and didactic; my mother, after all has been somebody who has gone before me and also set an example as to how one can deal with what life sometimes throws at you —although I may not always agree with her, I respect her choices. One thing she has been very good at pointing out is how the parameters wherein we deal with a given situation fluctuate with socioeconomic and political circumstances; In the late sixties when I was born –and women were needed in the workforce—the advice was given to wean the babies early and get them on solids or at least the bottle before they (we) were three months of age (which was the average maternal leave in Denmark at that time). Now that unemployment is higher and workplace participation among women is on the rise, we are advised that babies need at least a full year of breastfeeding. So we are continually praised and shamed for having babies, not having babies, feeding them too much, too little, too often, too publicly etc. etc. —which again take us back to the constant policing of our bodies, and who we give the authority to make and shape our body image.

And, I really, really wanted this letter to end on a hopeful note; that what ever your choice, it is yours to make –so I hope this message carries over to women who by choice or circumstance have not reproduced?

Well, I live in a breast parallel universe. They weren’t used for food, and even if I could have, I probably wouldn’t have. Can we reclaim them from mammograms AND breastfeeding as something meaningful or important to us? Why did I keep my breasts? (The surgery could put my arms at risk of lymphedema is the short answer, but if it weren’t for that, they are basically just ticking time bombs attached to my front.) And the medical community terrorizes women now to have kids early and breast feed, so you can see the result—it of course was “my fault” on some level I got the cancer as a non-reproducing woman.

Perhaps what we are coming at from both sides, is that breasts are the part of the female body per excellence that is supposed to be “for others” and not for ourselves —be it for the nourishment or for the sexual arousal of others. So when we (re)claim them for ourselves, and for our own pleasure it is seen as provocative —like for example your choice to keep your breasts in spite of the medical advise you were given, and taking the full responsibility for it.

That said, I wasn’t “bullied” into breastfeeding my children —on the contrary. I had to stand my ground extremely hard and fast in order to do so, and doing it was one (two) of the most reparative, blissful and empowering experience(s) of my life. Apart from being a bonding experience with my kids, it also allowed me to “re-bond” with my own body after two extremely traumatic pregnancies and birth experiences, including two times pre-eclampsia, a liver cholestasis, botched mammograms and one emergency c-section (+ one planned one which was a walk on the beach by comparison). So, I felt pretty let down by everyone at that point; my doctors, my nurses, my Amsterdam midwife (who dropped me like a hot potato when she realized I was not going to be another text book home birth) but most of all I really felt let down by my own body. I felt like it had failed me, that it had malfunctioned, and breastfeeding my babies made me feel like I had a (fully) functional body again —and also it felt like I was taking full responsibility over it. (A responsibility that had been taking away from me once I was handed over to the hospital as a “medical case.”) So in that sense I guess you can say that I reclaimed my body THROUGH breastfeeding, as something meaningful to me.

I don’t know if this makes any sense to you, but I know it made sense to me at the time (and still now). And maybe the parallel between the two narratives is that the sets of circumstances: the advise given, that action taken, the pleasure (and the anxiety) derived from it are not strictly clear cut, but entangled —our lives with others, our pleasure with others, our suffering with others…

To your discussion on Greenbergian modernism, I was recently on a panel in Taiwan where a “blind” jury selected 2 women out of 15 top cash prize finalists. What do you think is at play subconsciously that makes these blind panels still overwhelmingly favor men? Do you think Hilma af Klimt, the spiritualist painter whose biography you so lovingly recount in Mothernisms, would have fared better today than among her own peers?

Since you don’t mention anything about how the rest of the panel —and the sample of artists you were picking from— were composed, I am going to assume that they were all an even-Steven, hunky-dory, fifty-fifty. Even so, the parameters of quality we employ at such selections, while supposedly universal are also strictly local both in space and time. We don’t escape the cultural bias of thousands years of art history —which has consistently favored a “male gaze” and the subject matters and pictorial language associated with it—in a few decades. Within (abstract) painting a certain bravura of gesture and format is often appraised with the compliment that the painting “has balls.” I my years in art school I was often applauded that I could “paint like a man,” but never that my paintings “had ovaries.” On the contrary; paintings by female painters, or paintings with a more “female hand” or subject matter, were often described in derisive deride terms such as “lipstick paintings.” (Luckily I feel this is changing in recent years, as the queer conversation has entered academia and has also spilled over from theory into other departments. But Rome wasn’t built in a day.) Add to that the way that, although in the majority of undergrad students, female art-student are consistently weeded out as they advance through graduate programs, residencies and professional opportunities (gallery representation, museum shows etc.) and you get into the chicken-and-egg situation of not enough “good enough” female artists because they are not given enough “good enough” exposure. Female artists are routinely denied the opportunity to bite of more than they can chew, and are often judged harder when they do —but you don’t grow as an artist unless given the chance to fail famously and gloriously.

As for Hilma af Klint, do I think she would have had a better chance at being recognized as the abstract pioneer that she was, had she been active in the Scandinavian art scene of today (and had we not had a whole century of abstract painting being the Lingua Franca of the Modernist art conversation): Absolutely!

Do I think that was ultimately her goal: not so sure. What I have read of her biography and her notebooks is rife with ambiguity, and off course I have projected my own ambition and frustration (on her behalf) onto her persona. Perhaps she would have been content sitting at her masters feet, had Steiner embraced her or even promoted her — but I think it is naive to paint her just as a recluse mystic and solitary genius, when her formal language and her subject matter seem so aware (and even ahead) of what is going on in Scandinavia at that time, with and around Munch and Josephson in particular.

You also talk about the problems of Lean In (I agree with you, to me, it’s bourgeois capital feminism) and defining “success” in different ways. What does success look like to you? Now? In five and ten years?

Yes, I do feel that the cult of work-market participation and consumption (particularly here in the United States) is running rampant at the moment. In the arts this paradoxically has resulted in a situation where large groups of content-providers are working for free or for scraps, while generating jobs and income mainly for others. There is a lot of exploitation in the “do what you love/love what you do” economy, on several levels, and a lot of people have rightfully pointed to that. So, on those terms success could very well be to organize, or to walk out. Given the state of the world and its limited resources, being less (re)productive rather than more might be the sustainable choice. I applaud Naomi Klein’s advocacy for at three-day workweek –while I am not blind to the paradox of her working herself to exhaustion and touring the world thin, telling everybody to stay the fuck at home. But, like the heroic whores of my book, she must do whatever she needs to do, in order to do whatever she needs to do. As must I.

I am a strong believer in art-for-arts sake and off course I do love what I do —and also I am not insensitive to more mainstream notions of success: I do want my work to be seen and read. I am very bad at long term planning; so right now success looks like getting back into the studio and finding out what the next work will look like.

In five years time I would love to have a couple of substantial (solo) shows under my belt and another book out. My son suggested I write a sequel to Mothernism and call it “Mother Harder” —not sure if that is gonna happen, but there are definitely some conversations and questions that have arisen around the book that could be further unpacked. And a lot of those have to do with what has been dubbed “the maternal turn” and art historical matrilinage.

As time progresses, and if the revolution hasn’t been televised yet –in which case it would be redundant—it would be nice if people still read my work.

In ten years I want to be the Nina Hagen of painting —Unbescheiblich Weiblich in four octaves— and mistress of the universe. That will do nicely!

My family enjoys the Division of Labor installation

Tell us about your installation in the wonderful Division of Labor show at Glass Curtain Gallery.

The installation is the mother ship of the tent and (my fictive female protagonist) Queen Leeba’s future-feminist basecamp. It took shape early on in the project —as I was still writing my VCS thesis— when I decided that, rather than making a thesis “about motherhood” in wanted to make a thesis work that worked “something like a mama.” It is a reading/chill room inspired by the Dutch term “snoezelen room” which is a therapeutic space (originally invented for the treatment of autistic children, but is now also popular with demented elderly etc.) in which you can explore (snuffelen) while dozing off (doezelen), thus enter a liminal space where sensing and learning overlap. In here knowledge transfer is propagated through cross-pollination and exchange—creating a synergy between cerebral and embodied cognition, between “being in it” and “thinking of if.”

 In previous iterations it has held QL’s library (the primary texts for my thesis, among others) but for Division of Labor Christa and I decided to let it function as the reading room for the whole show, with texts by the participating and related artists. But, off course it can be whatever you want it to be. For the opening party of DoL it was a toddler disco, but it has also been a lactation room, a make-out space, a classroom, and a salon. I like this multi-faceted facilitative quality of the space, because it both reflects on the maternal role, but also emphasizes that the (often pragmatic) concessions you need to make in order to align your family life with an artistic practice for example, are not a sign of weakness but of capable adaptability. Same thing goes on with the “protest chic” banners that hang above the tent —you can hang them round your neck as scarves and be chic or you can let your freak flag fly —the choice is yours, and neither will make you an unfit mother!

Originally from Denmark, Lise Haller Baggesen has shown internationally in galleries and museums including Overgaden in Copenhagen, the Municipial Museum in the Hague, MoMu in Antwerp, Württembergischem Kunstverein in Stuttgart, CAEC in Xiamen, The Poor Farm in Manawa, Wisconsin, 6018 North, Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. MOTHERNISM (Green Lantern Press, 2014) is her first book. 

[1] Amanda Hess: “Feminism Can Stand Without Jackie,”  Slate,  11 December 2014 http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/11/_istandwithjackie_and_the_feminist_response_to_the_unraveling_of_rolling.html (Accessed December 31 2014)

[2] Jerry Saltz: “19 Best art Shows of 2014,”  Vulture, 10 December 2014 http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/19-best-art-shows-of-2014.html (Accessed 31 December 31 2014)

The Re-enactment.  Photo: Shana East

Today is the final installment of my fascinating and historically very pithy interview with Jessica Peri Chalmers about the Town Bloody Hall Re-enactment at Columbia College Chicago.

Mailer is far from stupid, and the venom, indignation and self-justification are all wrapped up in a fairly digestible poetic meter:

“When a man and a woman have a bitter, furious, violent quarrel, there comes a point if a man is stronger, as he usually is, not always, but usually, when he’s either gonna hit that woman or not.”

At this, the audience becomes understandably enraged.  There are men there, absolutely, but in speaking of hitting women, Mailer has touched a raw nerve that is unambiguously gendered.  A female voice shrieks out, “Let us teach you!” and the war of the sexes is hideously exposed to view. 

“I’ll teach you and you teach me!” responds Mailer, getting more and more worked up.  “Fuck you, I wanna teach you, too.  I’m not gonna sit here and listen to you harridans harangue me and say, ‘Yes’m, yes’m.’”  

He is in the midst of answering a question and he wants to continue.  The issue seems touchy for him but it isn’t entirely clear why.  He is about to make an argument about men’s relationship to their biology that establishes dubious parity with the idea that women are tied to their bodies.  It is not clear, however, that he really believes that either should be tied to their biological fates, since he also makes several related statements about the way technologies of the future will bring relief to these questioned.  Among other things, Mailer is known for not believing in contraception.  Father of nine (including one stepchild) and husband to six, he is not however a conservative in the usual sense.  He calls himself a “left conservative.”  He is a primitive, especially where mating is concerned. 

His argument about men is that they are in general tied to their fury.  Men are tied to their rage, he implies, as women are tied to their reproductive function.  Yet, as Mailer is known for having drunkenly and publicly stabbed his first wife, nearly to death, it is hard not to understand what he says next as other than a defense of his own actions.  The audience continues to express dismay as he opines that, “when a man is sworn that he will not strike a woman, and the woman knows that and uses that and uses it and uses it.  She comes to a point where she’s literally killing that man, because the amount of violence she’s aroused in him, it’s flooding his system and slowly killing him.  So, she’s engaged to that point in an act of violence and murder even though no blows are exchanged.”  

It is hard to imagine these exchanges occurring today, at least in the mainstream media.  Our public discourse has been tempered.  It is tamer, but more respectful (and I am aware that what I complain of above is about our educational culture is also a result of this tempering.  We sacrifice, maybe, as much as we gain through this imposed respect).  As a result, Mailer’s arrogance doesn’t read well, especially to young people, who have not often experienced the full, unimpeded airing of the male ego in exactly this way.  

The terms in which biology is discussed on the panel have also changed, rendering some of the statements fuzzy-to-illegible to audiences today.  While the question of being tied to one’s reproductive system still resonates in some ways, it has been transformed by advances in technologies of reproduction, as Mailer mentions.  While we seem today stuck in the morality play that is the debate on abortion, in 1971 it was only one of many issues relating to female biology and sexuality. 

The element that is the most foreign today is probably the panelists’ references to the controversy regarding the Freudian distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms.  While the controversy did, in fact, appear recently on the show about the 50s researchers Masters and Johnson called Masters of Sex – where it is described as a myth that is in the process of being debunked – and it is discussed in Naomi Wolf’s recent book Vagina- it has not generally been a topic of discussion for many years.

The students, while unfamiliar with the debate, were nevertheless titillated by the image of the mid-60-ish Trilling talking about sex.  Trilling, a member of the New York Intellectuals group, has that mid-century New York nasal snobbishness, and her revulsion against feminist absolutism, like her defense of Mailer, distinguishes her from the others on the panel.  The idea that a mature orgasm is achieved only through vaginal intercourse was then being disputed by feminists, most publicly in an essay by Anne Koedt.  In a tirade that I for one am fully behind, Trilling reacts to the feminist reaction against Freud, saying that

“it is remarkable that the same people who properly criticize our society for its harsh and unimaginative treatment of homosexuals have no hesitation in dictating to women where they’re to find their single path to sexual enjoyment.  I am talking about the campaign now being mounted to persuade women that there is no such thing as a vaginal orgasm and that therefore, they might as well dispense with men, even in bed.  Nothing in the sexual culture of recent decades has been more justifiably attacked than the idea of a single definition of what is or is not normal in sexual desire or response.  As an added benefit of our deliverance from a tyrannical authority in our choice of sexual partners or in our methods of pursuing sexual pleasure, I could hope we would also be free to have such orgasms as an our individual complexity we happen to be capable of.”

At this, the audience of 1971 explodes with laughter.  After a few seconds, the 2013 audience, prompted by our sign-holder, does as well.  

The other outstanding difference between then and now is the separatism of Jill Johnston (played by Raven Allen), who speaks at the Town Hall panel only to leave mid-way through after rolling around on the floor with two other women – to  the consternation of Mailer, who famously chides her with “come on, be a lady, Jill.”  The antics were part of what made the panel famous, they were, in a sense, a counterpart to Mailer’s mad railing.  Later Johnston wrote that  “Though I never liked Mailer or his writing, his outrageousness was an example that entered my own gestalt during the sixties.”   Mailer and Johnston were, in some way, engaged in a contest, one-upping each other, each playing trickster to the audience-within-the-audience of their fans.  Mailer was certainly more famous than Johnston, but she was also a star, and her constituents in the audience were those who had read her many articles for the Village Voice, or they were women who, seeing her, were turned on. 

Johnston’s account of the evening in Lesbian Nation is accusatory, lucid, persuasive.  It is with no small amount of pride that she presents herself as different, even as a “lowdown disreputable unsavoury character appearing under … fancy expensive auspices.”   Her difference is also the result, she says, of her disassociation as a lesbian from other women’s situation, and it is here that the past and the present also differentiate.  “I didn’t relate to the subject very well,” she writes.

“I’m certain this is because as a real lesbian my position as woman or victim was relatively remote like that of a ghetto minority to the center of action, I mean there are varying degrees of intimacy in relation to the oppressor and child care and equal pay and abortion rights are the issues based on the greatest intimacy and such issues no longer concerned me personally and my position in fact was to disengage such that these issues would no longer be issues but practical problems in a woman’s society.  My message in other words was all about women and not women in relation to men.”

If she means to say that lesbians are in some way exempted from the victimization to which heterosexual women have been subject, it is probably because the discourse of lesbian liberation is so new.  She is all power and utopia in the best tradition of the 60s.  While to a certain extent, she is right, of course, since problems of birth control and abortion are not usually given to those who don’t sleep with men.  It is hard to imagine, though, why she would think that issues of child care and equal pay should not be of concern.  The utopian thread in her writing – so attractive to the young or to those like Johnston herself, who had married and had children and then left that domestic situation – should be read in the spirit of the radicalism of the newly emergent identity into which Johnston was maturing. 

The absolute wall she draws between feminism and lesbianism might seem surprising today, just as T-Grace Atkinson’s stance against sex was surprising to me and my nascent feminist teenage classmates.  Radicalism is surprising, and not just because it is not currently in fashion.  It is surprising because it is a jolt to the system, one that carries with it the assumption that living in the now means living in accommodation to a set and standardized One, in other words to a tradition or a set of conventions or an ideology that is standing in the way of one’s freedoms.  In today’s noisy, busy multi-worlds, that One seems imperceptible – or is it?  It is always possible that monoliths of conventionality are obstructing our view without our knowing, or that the monoliths to which we have become accustomed have changed and that we must in our turn change. 

spider boy, embroidery on tulle, 2012 by Matt Morris

Wow, just wow: as part of The Feminist Art Project Illinois Chapter’s art walk last weekend, we got a guided tour of the Effeminaries exhibition by the curator, Matt Morris. It’s not everyday I hear someone speak with such conviction about gender play and display, and to top it off, the artworks featured in the exhibition were astounding. Matt raised so many points that piqued my interest I had to interview him immediately! I found a kindred spirit on the road to richer gender identities. Added bonus: I got to know his remarkable artistic practice in the process.

The show you curated at Western Exhibitions, Effeminaries, was a total revelation to me. Tell us about your inspiration for the exhibition.

Curating for me is adjacent to my studio practice, when a set of questions exceeds what can be treated effectively with my range of moves in sewing, painting, blogging, cruising, photographing, and arranging. This exhibition is especially close to interests I have in understanding how gender and sexuality are constituted within sets of social forces and rigid, rarified forms. Scott Speh, Western’s splendid director, and I had begun by talking about several other projects in which I had been thinking about sex through objects and through form rather than explicit representation (for additional reading, here is more writing by Matt Morris.)

Visual and conceptual abstractions led me into this project. I was looking for moves within art practices that might be read as parallel to society’s codified effeminate gestures: limp wrists, swaying hips, “girly” colors. Situations in which traits typically (and forcibly) assigned to female bodies (a category that is, in itself, an assignment) are transposed on male bodies. There are these reactionary moments in art history, particularly Post-Minimalism, where artists are working from some of the tenets of the austere (and largely masculinist) approaches to production in Minimalism but deflating them, flouncing them. Distillation remained, but inflections of bodily references, considerations of palette start to occur in projects by women and men, many of whom are working from and against Minimalism as a feminist gesture.

The artworks in Effeminaries were, at times, faggy, slyly decorative, campy, sensuous, coquettish. But along with male dancers and references to sitcoms and films with female ensemble casts, the show also gestures toward a social apparatus in which these conceptions of identity are produced: Nike advertising campaigns, Mike Kelly’s studio, materials like the glittery gritty high friction tape that Cameron Crawford uses that behaves aesthetically here, but is typically used to restrict access or movement in exhibition displays when it marks out a perimeter around an art object.

You mentioned your visit to the Sackler Center to see Judy Chicago’s, The Dinner Party. What was your experience with that installation?

One of my high school art teachers had separated from her husband and gone to live with Judy Chicago for a summer, so breaking from the more typical public school art education, she had us read parts of Chicago’s Through the Flower and Beyond the Flower. From a really early moment, feminism has shaped what I consider possible through art, particularly in how the tooling of aesthetics may run productively alongside more explicit activism. Judy Chicago’s stripe of feminism is often framed with a sort of second wave essentialism that makes me uncomfortable, because I’m not prepared to accept that there are underlying cohesive traits shared by all bodies or individuals marked as male or female.

other otter, oil and wax on linen on panel, 2014 by Matt Morris

The Brooklyn Museum is a regular on my itineraries while I’m in New York, and I’ve spent a bit of time with The Dinner Party over the years. While I was initially drawn to the objects (the lacy Emily Dickinson plate), I think I’ve come to appreciate even more the recuperative history project that the work represents. A cool thing that the Brooklyn Museum had been doing for a while online was to show individual elements of the installation, like the place setting underneath the dinnerware made in honor of Virginia Woolf. I’m very drawn to this deconstruction, and in some ways, the discrete elements of the installation may generate more open thinking about the work than the sum of its parts.

On this particular visit I referred to, the Dinner Party installation, it was supplemented with the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963-74. What a revelation! Her formal vocabulary hadn’t quite settled into the abstract-but-legible floral-vagina-butterflies that she came to be so celebrated for. This early work isn’t uncomplicated: I believe Chicago herself has complained more than once that this work was imitative of a dominant Minimalist form in order for her to be taken seriously (by the guys). And yet, many of the moves and visual devices she was exploring are very fresh and inspiring today—it looks like a lot of things happening in young queer and trans artists’ studios today who are working with form that certainly conjures gender but doesn’t ground it in such a stable reproduction of historical binaries. She was using industrial (car detailing?) paint methods, tinted rainbow spectrums, sensuously fleshy grid paintings, and playing with language like the “Click Cunts,” almost hub-cap like drawings on muslin. Really amazing stuff that works with tensions between very charged references and abstraction.

I appreciate your incredible attention to the theoretical implications of this show, and you cited Judith Butler as a major influence. As well, you mentioned something particularly interesting to me: this idea of the violence embedded in femininity. Tell us more about that.

Jillana Enteen, a brilliant lecturer in the Gender and Sexuality program at Northwestern, was coaching me on writing about art while I was in grad school. It was a breakthrough when she helped me to see that I needn’t apply gender theory onto my readings of artworks but rather trust and watch for how the art is a kind of theorizing in itself. This relationship between femininity and violence is an example of a theory emerging from the gathered works on display in Effeminaries. I would be attracted to, say, Cameron Crawford’s Orphan Pool; rifle, eczema, with other woman jabber, 2014, because of the woven pink silk ribbons, and in talking to him, would come to understand that one source for the form and composition of the piece was the structure of a rifle. This happened over and over as I selected artists: the suicides and death in The Hours and Uptown Girls that are paid homage by Chris Edwards, the small lilac broken finger at the end of Kacie Lambert’s rope of severed cords. And so a kind of theory emerges from the material, formal, and aesthetic investigations of this group of producers: that as we approach a gendered form or expression, an underlying violence is sure to present itself as well. 

And this makes a kind of sense: the divisions of peoples into categories, the forcible application of identification onto individuals without consent (“it’s a boy!” at the time of birth, remarking on whether or not a body “passes” for the gender it is presumed to be in pursuit of)—exertions of power accompany the regulation of gender categories. Effeminacy, butchness, prismatic queer expressions of untidy gender transgress those regulations, and violent force reinforces and maintains those categories.

This is the first show I’ve seen on gender experience that takes such a highly intersectional approach to race, age, and class. Can you talk more about what you hoped to accomplish there?

Working classes and a history of slavery precondition the societies in which we live that have given form to rigid genders and the roles they are meant to play, built always, it seems, on the subjugated backs of minority peoples. Michael Warner writes in his Fear of a Queer Planet, an early collection of essays around queer theory and politics, “Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.” I WISH every queer-identified person operated with that knowledge of how all of these issues spark against one another.

To be honest, I’ve rarely curated anything that is directly related to the art market, like presenting work in a commercial gallery, and all of the registers of advantage, not only around gender and race, but also age, class, education, location, sexuality are further excited in those environments. I have been beyond grateful for Scott Speh’s support and shared interest in these questions as they were posed at Western Exhibitions. Effeminaries and the show I curated before it at the Hills Esthetic Center Miss Kilman + She Were Terrible Together try to keep these interrelated issues in mind, but honestly may still do so too subtly.

Tell us about your art work, and what you have next on the horizon.

My art practice is research-based and looks to realize connections between cultural and critical fragments drawn from art history, contemporary life, and performances of my own subjectivity. I search out the yet to be revealed (and usually eroticized) aspects of a given area of investigation. I work to establish intimate proximities in relation to the institutions that I critique, and here I mean not only ‘Institutional Critique’ proper but also inquiring into the structures of personhood and supposedly stable selves. Consequently, the form my work takes can permute, though there are a few ongoing modes of production that are currently swishing around my studio. I hold onto a conviction that even the most abstract, colored, formal works are attached to long art histories and through those also social contexts and political implications.

I taught myself how to embroider when I was a kid using an article in a Valentine’s Day issue of Martha Stewart magazine. I’ve recently been making these quiet color fields of thread stitched into barely-there pieces of tulle netting. For several years, I have also been working on sheets of 30”x40” archival tissue paper, plotting across them in silvery watercolor grids of dots. The latest set of them is called The Good Enough Kiss and will appear in my exhibition The Perfect Kiss (QQ)* *questioning, queer at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH. For that exhibition I’m working with objects made by the artist James Lee Byars borrowed from several collections and showing them interspersed with a number of my own works. That opens this May.

I’ve also been making work related to my (NSFW) tumblr: http://mattmorriswerks.tumblr.com. The archive prints and objects that I’m making are these dense, excessive arrays of images appropriated and gathered from tumblr, the blogger-cum-curator web platform. I’m interested in source and in collaging disparate images into composites. The most recent one was shown at Vox Populi last fall. It was called archive IV (#emma frost #telepathy). In it, I’m tracing back the white-on-white aesthetics that have long appealed to my sensibilities and I’ve associated with Agnes Martin, Twombly, Karin Saunders with much earlier touchstones from my personal experience, particularly an X-Men comic book character Emma Frost, aka White Queen. In drawing these aesthetics out into other cultural reference points, I’m trying to uncover how aesthetics of whiteness (white cube galleries, ivory towers, etc.) move into issues around race, class, cultural initiation, and sex.

Archive IV (#emma frost #telepathy), archival inkjet print, 2014. by Matt Morris

In the past year that I’ve returned to making oil paintings on linen, stretched over birch panel. I’m still learning what these modestly scaled monochrome works are doing, but I am thinking about containment, closed sets, opening up possibilities and looking for nuance—all of these goals are simultaneously formalist and identificatory concerns.  

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago, who has recently exhibited at Vox Populi and Fjord in Philadelphia, PA; and peregrineprogram and Queer Thoughts in Chicago, IL. He holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. He teaches in the Sculpture as well as the Painting and Drawing departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the art editor at Newcity and a contributor to Artforum.com, Art Papers, Sculpture, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

Pietà (Memento Maury) is a video compilation of clips taken from 200 episodes of The Maury Povich Show, filtered through facial recognition software programmed to search for faces resembling the Madonna’s of Michaelangelo’s Pietà.  Copyright: Tiffany Funk

What can I say, I’m a lucky blogger: this interview with artist, cultural critic, professor, and PhD candidate, Tiffany Funk brought up at least five aspects of parenting, technology, and the bizarre interfacing of the two I had never considered before. Tiffany and I got to know each other in the department where we both teach, and even more intimately as I’ve taken on parenting and really look to her for sage advice and a shared value system. This one is worth at least a few reads–you’ll walk away as fascinated and inspired as I am. 

Tell us a bit about your blog, Fetal Circuit.  You have a great manifesto that inquiring luddites like myself want to know more about.  What is cybernetic reflexivity? What are technoutopias?

Fetal Circuit (fetalcircuit.com) is a funny animal - I started it on a lark, because I saw how Tumblr functioned as a cross between social media and blog entity.  Originally Fetal Circuit was just a place for me to repost interesting tidbits so that I could come back to them later for research purposes, but I came to realize that it could be a vital part of my practice.  The blog functions as a meta-commentary on what Tumblr is - a reflection and meditation on internet sharing and what procreation means in a cybernetic context, spiked with commentary here and there on technology and art.  In the future, I want to beef up the commentary part of it and share more original artwork.

The manifesto for Fetal Circuit came organically, and I riffed on several sexy key terms central to my interests as an artist and historian of computational art practices.  Cybernetic reflexivity sits at the very center of Fetal Circuit, and I’ve been heavily leaning on the concept in order to explain my thoughts on human/technological relationships; N. Katherine Hayles, the She-Ra of Cybernetics and Post-human history and theory, explains cybernetic reflexivity as a shibboleth amongst information theorists and cultural critics immersed in media theory; basically, if one believes that all things - all living organisms and their surroundings - are part of larger feedback systems that continually inform and recreate one another, she is part of the third wave of cybernetics; in fact, she goes on to claim that this line of inquiry not only unites disparate academic disciplines (which is at the core of what the founders of cybernetics intended), but has come to fundamentally alter the human sensorium.

In her text “Boundary Disputes,” she provocatively states, “Half a century beyond the watershed of the Macy conferences, feedback loops have become household words and cybernouns are breeding like flies, spawning cybernauts, cyberfutures, and cybersluts. People no longer find it strange to think of material objects as informational patterns."  In other words, we no longer think of ourselves as discrete beings, but part of larger self-organizing systems.  You only have to turn on a television and watch a yogurt commercial filled with rhetoric about probiotics and bacterial flora to see these concepts at work.

But the main crux of arguing for an understanding of reflexivity is to explode so many concepts that seem mutually exclusive.  My inclusion of "technoutopias” and “technodystopias” is an attempt to approximate the two, perhaps to urge readers to confuse and elide them.  I often tell my students that one’s utopia is another’s dystopia, and that holds true for the various science-fiction futures we imagine for ourselves and our children.  A technoutopia, where all our problems are solved by technology, is such a vague concept.  I’d imagine that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner denizens, the ones who live in the awesome crash pads in the clouds, live in something that approximates that. Technodystopia is for all the underworld citizens, or the people in the various poor districts in The Hunger Games.  But the reality is that children of the working poor on the South Side of Chicago don’t have access to computers, but the majority have smart phones and regular access to Twitter and Facebook.  They can’t get fresh fruits or vegetables, but they can post everything they do to Youtube or Instagram.  There’s hints of dystopia and utopia mixed up in all of that.  In reality, the two can’t exist separately.  You cross a street in Chicago, and you see Divvy Bikes… or an Apple Store… and these things are hints of that unachievable technoutopia.

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We had a great conversation online about parenthood and technologies/conveniences that promise to streamline the process. Do these “improvements” inform culture, or are they a product of it? Do you think they have a role in evolved family units?

A: Both, and in a fascinating variety of ways!  One of my pet projects, and one that I explore in-depth in my dissertation research, is the concept of “prosthetic relationships."  When I had originally read Sigmund Freud’s "Civilization and its Discontents,” I was absolutely struck by his claim that “Man has… become a kind of prosthetic God,” but hedging it with, “… they still give him much trouble at times."  He follows this with one of the saddest but truest passages I’ve ever read:

"If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would never have left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice. If there were no vessels crossing the ocean, my friend would never have embarked on his voyage, and I should not need the telegraph to relieve my anxiety about him.”

And that’s where we’re left; we continually solve problems that create yet more problems to be solved.  As technological beings, we continually invent, and through our inventions, re-invent ourselves.  And these inventions re-invent our relationships with each other!  This is the essense of what I call the prosthetic relationship.  My description of it is an attempt to reconcile media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler, both so influential but fundamentally at odds.  Unlike McLuhan, I believe that media is much more than just an “extension” of ourselves.  However, I wouldn’t go so far as Kittler, in which he describes technology as autonomous to humans.  Media are neither simply attachments to the body, as we would imagine a kitchen appliance with multiple functions.  But, to temper Kittler, it is important to focus on humans as the center of the argument, as technology has yet to demand a moralistic autonomy (contrary to whatever science-fiction entity claims otherwise).  Regardless of whether we ascribe to cybernetic reflexivity as a foundation for reality, I believe that so many humans are treated in sub-human ways in the name of capital (and thus at the mercy of “things”) that it is absolutely crucial to argue first and foremost for human-centered theory and practice.  It’s a moral imperative.  I’m not ready to jettison humanism for some sort of trans-humanist or post-humanist philosophy because of this.  Of course, I’m not the first theorist or artist to expound upon these ideas - there is a wonderful interview by Adam Zaretsky in which Shannon Bell explains these reservations more eloquently than I have here.

(Side note: This is my main problem with the growing interest in Object-Oriented Ontology as a mode of discourse.  I’ll just leave that there without an explanation and let google and Wikipedia do the work for me.)

Portraits (Terminators, 2001) Single channel video, 3D tracking and postproduction software. Copyright: Tiffany Funk
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You mentioned online breast milk sources in your response to The Feminism of Fast Food.  It got me thinking about the fact that I really consider my biological involvement in parenting very, very little. How does biology play a role in our contemporary culture in ways that convenience culture and technology seek to answer? Can we evolve past our biology without going the Handmaid’s Tale route? What about outsourcing, and the role of race, class, and gender exploitations necessitated by it?

A: This is a tricky subject, and a lot of it is wrapped up in that nasty concept of the “natural,” and how it’s so co-opted by neo-liberal capitalism at this point that it’s absolutely impossible to get away from it, no matter your economic status and political leanings.  There’s such an emphasis on what is conceived of as “natural” that any intervention seen as even hinting of “technology” (another co-opted and misconstrued term in this context) is demonized by a variety of groups.  I remember when I was pregnant, my absolutely wonderful and feminist doctor told me to “stay away from the internet crazies,” and I soon found out what she was talking about.  The moment you even bring up the idea that you might put disposable diapers on your child on parenting forums, you are worse than Hitler.  You’re supplementing with formula?  Hitler.  You didn’t space out your vaccinations?  Hitler.  And don’t even dare bring up circumcision…

But to get back to the point, convenience culture seems to be something that we are conditioned to be ashamed of, and for complicated reasons.  My gut tells me that it’s wrapped up in issues of history (the myth of the perfect 1950s housewife, for one example) and class and economic stability.  All of this has that sheen of conservative, prudish “OMG WE ARE SO AFRAID OF WOMENS’ BODIES!"  In short, if you have the economic means, you can still go "natural” with a ton of expensive work-arounds - like using diaper services that advertise 100% eco-friendly methods, online breast milk sources with same-day guaranteed shipping, or live-in surrogates that promise to keep to any crazy dietary restriction you demand.  That way you can stay far away from actual biological involvement, but still be “natural”.  In so many ways, we’re already living in a quasi Handmaid’s Tale, but without the dictatorial politics.  The handmaids in this reality are invisible or ignored because their wares are internet-based, or we refuse to discuss the reasons they, for instance, sold their eggs or put their womb on craigslist.

That would be a terrifying and interesting project - tracking down and interviewing people who went through the process of donating eggs.  From everything I’ve heard, it’s not at all pleasant.  How’s that for a Handmaid’s Tale sequel?  The Handmaid’s Tale II: Electric Boogaloo, or: Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Painful Hormone Injections for Cash and Profit?

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You also mention some great stuff about technology and the younger generation.  I don’t even know where to start, except that I haven’t had a phone conversation with a person under 30 in years. What is your take on technology in the contemporary American family, and in 21st Century communication? How does that relate to gender roles?

A: There’s a technophobic vibe I get from so much parenting material, as I alluded to above.  These phobias seem to be directed at women more than men, which I find especially disturbing.  But instead of making this a screed against anti-vaxxers and those internet memes that shame mothers for answering emails on their cell phones while their children play on the playground (“You’re missing their precious and magical childhoods, you self-absorbed monster!”), I’ll point out this wonderful article I read a year ago in the Atlantic about tablet usage and children, called “The Touch-Screen Generation,” written by Hanna Rosin.  

Without all the sensationalism so rampant in parenting media, Rosin explores a lot of the research that had been done about how children use touchscreen technology, particularly iPads. She researched how various media was “engineered” to focus on educational content for specific age ranges, and interviewed various technologists and writers on their studies on the effects of technologies and childhood development.  Most of the article paints the media as fairly benign, and at best actually serves to develop a sense of social norms and interest in educational materials in even the youngest children.  When faced with the question of technology and childhood addiction, she concludes by conducting an experiment with her own son, in which she allows her toddler to play with her iPad whenever he wants instead of limiting his time with it.  She recounts that, for ten days, he used the device heavily, sometimes for hours on end and past his bedtime.  However, at the end of this binge, the iPad simply fell out of rotation.  He dropped it under his bed with some of his less desirable toys and didn’t even look for it.  Rosin, fully aware that one case such as this doesn’t hold true for all children, nevertheless correlates usage of iPads and gaming devices to books, explaining that she realized that all media can be used to avoid social interaction.

Also, these toddlers took to touch-screen swiping, pinching, and poking commands faster than adults.  They are being tactilely and kinetically prepared for a future that we can’t even imagine yet, and I find that incredibly exciting.  I often feel like I’m in the minority, however, especially amongst cultural critics.

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If you could make the ideal scenario for any human wanting to explore career and family simultaneously, what would it look like?

A: Aside from monetary issues (because, if I start on that, I would say that it would make everything a ton easier if one were independently wealthy), I would urge anyone to tap into every avenue toward community-building that they can.  Having a child, especially without an extended family very close, can be extremely isolating.  I grew up in rural Wisconsin, but only just recently, upon re-watching The Shining, did I see the close connection between what we can crudely call “cabin fever” and the sort of depression and mania that can befall a primary caregiver. I was watching Wendy doing laundry and organizing canned goods, and I remembered my aunt saying something about how she felt her brain was warping because all she used was kid-speak all day with my young cousins, and the only adult conversation she was privy to was daytime soaps.  Suddenly I was so disinterested in Jack and his stupid privileged alpha male writer’s block psychosis and fascinated by what I presumed was Wendy’s uncomplaining, stoic adherence to a caregiver’s routine; I started to invent scenarios in which her horror was not at a haunted hotel but the overpowering awareness of her mistreatment and subjugation flooding into her consciousness all at once.  (Now I’m thinking of menstrual blood and that elevator opening scene, and even though that’s certainly a ham-handed interpretation of that image, it gives me a chuckle.)   

I connected with that feeling of isolation because at that time I was sharing caregiving responsibilities with my partner - my son was born in July of 2013 - and using the rest of my time to teach graduate seminars at Columbia and research and write my dissertation.  That’s almost all we did for nearly a year, and it took its toll.  I saw my partner very little, and rarely spent any time with him alone.  And being a teacher and lecturing isn’t the same thing as having a conversation with peers.  I was always in the role of the caregiver or educator, and I found myself absolutely starving for a conversation outside of those contexts.  It caused a considerable amount of emotional trauma, some of it I’m still trying to figure out now.

_______________

Tell us about your PhD project, and what it’s been like at UIC.

A: There have been a ton of changes - mostly positive - at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the development of the newly minted School of Art and Art History.  For one thing, there’s more communication between those studying art history and theory and the practitioners.  That wasn’t the case when I started at UIC, and around the time I finished my MFA in New Media Arts there, I saw the beginnings of that positive transformation.  I’m also very pleased that UIC, as a public institution, is getting such recognition on the strength of its graduates.  I’m not going to name drop, but I think so many of the strongest and most interesting artists around these days are UIC MFA graduates.

My own research has really benefitted from being involved in a public institution - particularly one with such an amazing history of computing.  The University of Illinois system has long been at the center of computational research, especially research into the computer in the arts.  (UIUC had one of the first and only Departments of Computer Music, and the University of Illinois at Chicago still has the Electronic Visualization Lab.)  

Currently I’m writing about John Cage’s involvement at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, specifically his partnership with the computer scientist and musician Lejaren Hiller, Jr.  They worked on an immense computer-assisted event called HPSCHD (pronounced “harpsichord”), involving both live and recorded musical elements generated by the university’s revolutionary super-computer, the ILLIAC II.  It took nearly two years to develop, but there exists very little scholarship about the process.  The crux of my thesis is that the programming aspects of such a large computational construct need to be considered part of the performance, not only because it explains computer art in such a way as to contextualize it within the larger art historical movements of the 60s and 70s - primarily conceptual practice and performance art - but also serve to expound upon how software is programmed, executable behavior and not a literal, tangible object, regardless of how neo-liberal capitalism has cast it.

Also, by opening up the history of computing to art history, I will eventually be able to further explore so many important female figures that were key to the eventual development of art and technological practices, such as Laeticia Snow and Jasia Reichardt.  I see much of my future practice continuing to explore gender roles in media, both in the procreation of humans and technology.

My personal feminist timeline is featured in the International Museum of Women’s show, Imagining Equality.  “In this fresh take on "the personal is political,” multi-media artist Melissa Potter situates her identity as a third-wave feminist within her family’s history and evolving national and international laws.“

Chinese Maoist propaganda poster

I am sympathetic to the fact that not everyone’s Sunday morning motor gets running with The Global Gender Gap Report just released. Fortunately for you, it does me, so let me put my sleepless nights (spurred by a PDA I can’t kick out of bed for eating crackers) to work for you. Colored, of course, by my relationships to particular geographic locations. Hey, read the 397 page document yourself if you want more.

This annual report, initiated in 2006, measures the gender gap in 136 countries by evaluating women’s access to health, education, economic participation, and political empowerment.  It does so by measuring “gaps vs. levels,” which means extremely poor countries with terrible standards of living for all–many manipulated and exploited by US interests in land, resources, and labor–may look good on paper.  We can’t look to this report for a discussion on “equality.” The LGBT and marriage debates are missing here, so is a general discussion on sexual rights and empowerment and that’s because you need to understand this:

The discussion on gender in today’s marketplace is about populating the labor force as our older populations are growing.

This is not about liberating women because it’s right. It’s about assuring as much labor as possible, and as much breeding as possible to offset the non-working global population.

That said, there are some incredible things to consider in this document, and they range from the shocking to the wacky. They defy certain expectations, and uphold others.

Iceland holds the #1 position, just as it has for years. This happens to be a country I’ve visited. They are seriously breeding like rabbits, and they are doing it young. One morning, we were overrun by a fleet of women pushing their Bugaboos uphill in a charge line up the main drag. They park them all over the streets. They even leave their babies in the strollers outside shops.  Icelandic rights to have children and reenter the workforce with finesse are often reserved for the local population.  Iceland does better than it’s Nordic neighbors who hold position 2 - 4 in the survey, but racial prejudice as it relates to gender is not evaluated in this report and should be considered in any discussion on rights for women.

Baby left outside a shop in Rejkjavik

The Philippines holds the fifth spot in the list. They are 10th in the world on the political empowerment index (women in parliament) and very high on the education parity indexes. Some perspective: the U.S. holds the 23rd spot, France holds the 45th spot (take that, you silly “our mommies parent better and have more croissants without caloric consequence” writers of late!), and Japan is in a miserable 105th position. Though Japan recently focused on educational opportunities for girls and women, without workplace discrimination legislation, there can be no return on investment. A smattering of top twenty rankings include Nicaragua (10,) Cuba (15 with the highest percentage of women in parliament in the world,) and South Africa (17.)

And now for the puzzling and wacky.  Serbia, always the outlier: they rank #1 in accumulated weeks of parental leave: 200 weeks. Did I read that right?? 200 weeks? Someone please go back and read this, that’s over 4 years** special thanks to an update by my long time friend, Ellen Kay whose math IQ is clearly higher than ahem Gender Assignment’s (I originally posted this was 16 years.) Talk about trying to create some incentive to reproduce, yikes!  As mentioned, these policies favor patriarchal values of normativity.  The Philippines has one week paternal leave for “legitimate wives.” No baby mammas there. Chile has an interesting breastfeeding law that allows women to feed with full pay for up to two years.  So much for adoptive parents. Overall, Republic of Georgia (86) and Hungary (87) have Turkey beat by a mile (120,) that’s saying quite something given the virginity test debates currently going on in Georgia.  Hungary got a lousy rating because their female representation in government is 9%.  Good job, Qatar: 0 women in government.

Downtown Belgrade, 2009

From the feminist perspective, the question remains whether closing this gap will ever achieve true equality. My short answer, deeply influenced by radical thinkers like Shulamith Firestone: no. To achieve such parity, we need to overthrow concepts of the family unit in general, and its attendant fabrications of power, ownership, and wealth.  In the meantime within the status quo, there is a lot of work to be done. The United States–one of the wealthiest nations and certainly among the most exploitative in the world–has a lot to answer for, from garbage parental leave, to a mere 13% women in government. We’ve got a long way to go, baby.

Self portrait with masks from ethnographer, Robert Chenciner’s collection of festival masks from Daghestan.

I just returned from London where I conducted some fascinating research on Caucasian ethno-crafts with ethnographer, Robert Chenciner who specializes in the region, Daghestan in particular. In fact, he was the first person to write an ethnographic history of the country. 

When Miriam Schaer and I worked with Georgian feminist activists in Tbilisi last June 2013, we made masks as well as banners for their street protests, which by that time had become intensely dangerous. They were inspired by my conversation with Chenciner, which began with a simple question earlier that year about symbols we found on felted rugs created by women in the mountains of Republic of Georgia. I wondered if they shared history with the tattooed mountain women he wrote about in what is now one of my favorite books of all time, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan. He generously replied with an incredible email full of information that caught my imagination, and I’ve been enamored of the craft arts of this region ever since.

Back in 2007, I created a short video called Boy Brides & Bachelors about a January costume festival that took place in a small town in Serbia. In that region, unmarried men dressed in costume, and sometimes as women–even as brides. Girls were not invited to participate. I found it all very puzzling, and of course intriguing. The short’s question: what would it be like if girls got to masquerade as the boys did? What would they invoke?

Amazingly enough, this was exactly the research I conducted at Chenciner’s. I poured over his fascinating short essays, photos, and transcripts. These masked carnivals are in a way a celebration of masculinities: they invoke fertility, agricultural wealth, and successful hunts. It is the realm of men in these traditional societies. They are pagan rituals, old astral cults from centuries ago.

And so what do the women do? In remote villages of Daghestan, they tattoo themselves. It provides the same protection from the evil eye, the same good tidings for babies, families, and the harvest. The images are birds, tree of life, spinning wheels, and animals. Just like some of the line work on the masks. 

by Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Matt Morris

View of Matt Morris’ studio wall arranged with perfume advertisements and other ephemera discovered in drawers of his father’s office desk.

The art world has, it seems, always smelled of perfume. Across the past century, ‘visual art’ came under comment in key moments where art practices came to involve smell or at the very least employ conceptual language about scent in objects, text works, and immersive installations. Artists like Leonor Fini and Salvadore Dali designed flacons for the Surrealism-inspired Elsa Schiaparelli: Fini’s flowering bodice design held the 1936 Shocking; Dali’s baccarat crystal sunrise encased in a gold seashell was made for the 1946 release of Le Roy Soleil. Years later in 1983, Dali would release his first perfume under his own brand. There are now a honking sixty-nine different fragrances from the Dali brand that has outlived its namesake. Other celebrity artists like Andy Warhol and Niki de Saint Phalle have lent their names and aesthetics to signature scents.

In this way, the distinctions between artist and perfumer have blurred so that designers in niche houses like Serge Lutens, D.S. & Durga, Régime des Fleurs, or Blackbird are generally thought of as artists in their own right. Meanwhile, there have been artists whose conceptual practices have led them to the use of scent in galleries. Among the technologically experimental research projects by British artist Paul Etienne Lincoln, in 1985 he produced In Tribute to Madame Pompadour and the Court of Louis XV (Perfume Set), which included vials of perfume and honey. Glasgow-based Canadian artist Clara Ursitti pioneered artists working with perfume chemistry that had previously been mostly arcane, protected knowledge of major fragrance manufacturers: in 1993 she made Eau Claire, a small bottle of scent produced from the artist’s own bodily secretions. Artists like Brian Goeltzenleuchter and organizations like the Institute for Art and Olfaction continue to explore the potential for the olfactory as a meaningful dimension of artistic experience.

Installation view of “Falling for You” Act 1: Joel Parsons’ arrangement of Catherine Sullivan’s work.

At the level of Chicago, no one could be said to be doing more to enrich the discourse around scent and art than Debra Parr, Professor of Art and Art History at Columbia College. Parr deserves her own full articles about her research, curating, and teaching around scent; she deserves many such articles. In 2015, she curated Volatile!, an exhibition at the Poetry Foundation on the intersection of poetry and scent. Last year, the inimitable Kate Sierzputowski and Mary Eleanor Wallace organized Dinner Party at Tusk in Logan Square; I was honored to be included among a group of artists who presented “courses” of olfactory artworks in four seatings across two days. Then in December 2017, Falling for You saw Memphis-based Joel Parsons intervene in an installation by Catherine Sullivan, organized by Triumph in Pilsen. Parsons embellished Sullivan’s tableau with caps and lids from his collection of mostly vintage perfume bottles, elements that read as miniature pink-and-metallic post-minimalist sculptures.

Throughout these cultural shifts around art and perfume, I’ve had occasion to chat with a number of artists and arts workers in Chicago’s community who share my enthusiasm for the possibilities for profundity that perfume carries. For this piece of writing I circled back and reached out to them to see if they would respond to a questionnaire about their personal relationships to wearing fragrance, in the spirit of fashion magazines sidebars, chunky September issues in anticipation of fall styles, and alternative points of access for what these creatives do. There were so many more folks than had time to participate in this round or could fit in a digestible essay like this; I think this is the first of more such collections of responses to sketch out more thoughtfully the ways that what we’re smelling fits into our identities, memories, and visions for artistic thriving.

–MM

Io Carrión is an artist and  curator originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico.  She obtained a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in photography.  She has also attended the Grasse Institute for Perfumery (GIP) in southern France and ISIPCA in Versailles for her perfumery studies.  She is a multidisciplinary artist who uses personal narratives to inform her work.  Recent curatorial endeavors include  “The Way In” a survey of contemporary Puerto Rican art since the 1990’s at Popular Center in Puerto Rico and “Los Turistas” at Diablo Rosso Gallery in Panama.

When did you start wearing fragrance?

As a kid I loved to get a spray of my mom’s perfume and my grandmother would always give me a splash of cologne after a bath. I purchased my first perfumes as a teenager.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I’m drawn to its powerful link to memory. And response. Smell is more directly in contact with the emotional regions of the brain than any of the other senses. So we first respond emotionally to an odor then we identify it. I also think it is fascinating that each of us has a unique odor identity, like a fingerprint.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

Light and fresh. More drawn to clean citrusy scents. Neroli is a particular favorite. I like crisp sparkly notes, nothing too heavy.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

The avoidance of heaviness perhaps. Like scent, some things don’t need to be heavy to be profound. There’s meaning in light and playful too.

Mutual friends have told me that you’ve been making fragrances too. I’d love to hear about what you’re working on.

I am actually working on the bottles now so I am really enjoying how scent has made me experiment with form. It has allowed me to play with different materials, which in turn inspires new scents.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

I am originally from Puerto Rico so the colder weather allows me to experiment with bolder scents I wouldn’t normally wear. I noticed quite a few of the new perfumes launched in the fall have ginger notes so it will be interesting to try some spicier scents.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bassos

Jaime DeGroot founded the corporate and private art consulting firm, DeGroot Fine Art, in 2016 after more than a decade working in arts advising and administration. Utilizing her Master’s degree in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jaime strives to create meaningful connections between her clients and local network of artists, galleries, and vendors. To learn more about her business visit www.degrootfineart.com. She lives in Chicago with her artist husband, Geoffrey Todd Smith, who mostly wears Les Exclusifs de Chanel “Sycomore.”

When did you start wearing fragrance?

Like many little girls of the early ‘80s, my first scent was probably Love’s “Baby Soft” which will forever hold a place in my heart along with the smell of Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, but the ground shifted for me when I got a bottle of Debbie Gibson’s “Electric Youth” perfume later that decade. I wore so much of it my older brother complained and I was banned from wearing it until that Halloween when I came up with the idea of dressing as a skunk– who would smell like “Electric Youth,” naturally.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I wear very modest amounts of perfume to the point that I am usually the only one who can smell it, making it almost entirely personal. That said, I love helping people navigate their interest in it. I’ve had a lot of discussions with artists about the connections between perfume and fine art. Reading about it is a large part of my interest as well. My freshman year of college I read Diane Ackerman’s “A Natural History of the Senses,” and was astounded at the idea of someone crying at a piece of sulfur because of its exquisite shade of yellow, that you could tag butterflies in a eucalyptus field somewhere, or visit a laboratory where they had test tubes of “kitty litter” fragrance. I wanted to travel for sensory experiences like her and have spent a lot of time since then in places like New York, Paris, and Amsterdam meeting with perfume houses and the perfumers themselves, hearing wonderful stories and meeting some exceptional personalities. When I can’t get my fix on the road, I also enjoy reading perfume reviews on the Internet. These tiny critiques, ranging from hilariously snarky to passionate, are truly one of life’s little delights.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

I am not an artist myself, but rather someone who has formally learned to appreciate it. As an art consultant, I share my experience with my clients using vocabulary I have built up around my sensory experiences. When I started training my eyes to make connections between art and life, my world lit up, and I love illuminating it for others in this way. I equate fragrance to art often, in that learning to connect what you smell to your brain is very similar to learning art history. I read once that everyone’s nose is equipped similarly and to have a “good nose” essentially means you have taken the time to equate what you know already to what you smell. Learning about fragrance is like putting a monocle up to your sniffer– your world can become that much more electric with this sense being brought into focus, making food and alcohol taste more interesting and certainly adding a heightened awareness to your perception of the arts.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Autumn is a terrific smell season in Chicago, with its singed leaves and petrichor (earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil). I chose this time of year to get married a few years ago in part so that its associated smells and the perfume I wore could always be connected to the love it brings. We held our reception at an old dive bar, The California Clipper, which is known for being haunted by a woman wearing white and smelling of perfume. For my wedding day, I wanted to subtly evoke the mystical feeling of a ghost from another era and chose Santa Maria Novella’s “Marescialla” to finish off my look. This mace-forward fragrance was created in the 1600s to scent the gloves of a Countess who was later burned at the stake on suspicions of witchcraft. It is one of the original scents of the famous Italian apothecary, and indeed smells like an old medicine cabinet with top notes of nutmeg and citrus followed up with woods. I wear new perfumes every year, but will always circle back to this for our anniversary.

Photo credit: Stephanie Jensen

Rosé is a multidisciplinary performance artist living in Chicago. Their work is in direct conjunction with their spiritual practice as a Reiki healer, spiritualist and initiate of Ifa and Lucumi, an Afro-diasporic religion.

When did you start wearing fragrance?

I guess you can say I started wearing fragrance sometime around the age of 8 or so. I used to spend a lot of my time with my grandmother and she had a dazzling vanity set along with a fabulous collection of perfume bottles. I was always captivated by the ones that were up on the high shelf. The bottles were like architecture. Some of my favorites at the time were Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, Christian Dior’s Poison, and of course Chanel No. 5. I was hypnotized by there powdery scents and learned properly from my grandmother that you must “walk into the scent” so that it graces your body. My grandmother always had the finest taste even when she didn’t have the most money. Thinking back now, I learned much about escape from my grandmother. She always wanted to have the best of everything.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

It’s one of the first things I notice about someone and the sexiest thing a person can do. I still use scent as a form of seduction. There is something desirable about being seduced by something that you can’t see that really turns me on. Scent lets you know how aggressive some can be or how soft someone’s touch is. Sometimes your scent can linger in a room. It lingers like a shadow and people still think of you. Having a scent commands a sort of attention and it gives you a following. That person will always remember you.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

I am attracted to earthier scents like tree sap, grass, smashed wood, swamp blooms, and tobacco leaf. I also adore muted floral notes like ylang-ylang and touches of jasmine. I am also a sucker for white musk, sandalwood, myrrh, and Peruvian amber.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

Since scent really triggers memory I often think of certain things while building performance and installations, burning incense prior to the start of a performance or even during. I often use materials such a wet dirt or cover my body in mud, pools of water strewn with hibiscus leaves and orange linger. Pieces of metal and iron linger around space treated with rainwater. Using or thinking about the scent in a performance or installation creates much more of an environment or a site. An environment that is captivating and holds you, prisoner,

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Oh yes, when the weather starts to cool I prefer spicier notes to wear that are much more warming such as black pepper, cinnamon, and red musk. Even bergamot which I find can be a peppery citrus. I like my fragrance during the cooler and colder months to really pierce the skin.

Photo courtesy of Joshua Kent

Joshua Kent is an artist working in writing, sculpture, and performance. Situated in the attic of St. Francis House, a grass-roots community when they live and work, Kent’s practice explores the embodied dynamic of an immersive life practice. More about Joshua’s work can be found here: Joshuajjkent.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

When I was young I read in a children’s rainy day activity book that one could brew perfume with flowers from the backyard. I marveled that such alchemy could occur with an empty salt shaker, rubbing alcohol and lilacs stolen from neighbors. As I waited for the scent to cure, I dreamt of how I would soon dab the essence of spring behind each lobe. Of course, my recipe flopped, and upon my return, I was greeted with the aromatic failure of brown, rotting matter—perhaps an apt metaphor for my relationship to scent, or a foretelling of how I would orient my aspiration towards elegance, a vehicle by which I might transcend my class and gender.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

I tend to stick with one scent, and only recently have begun to combine fragrances through the day. I always wear dark, muskier smells with heavy base notes. As we enter the colder months I find myself yearning for a touch of citrus, or some quality of airiness. This is remedied by fresh flowers (tuber roses, jasmine plants)—smells I would detest on my body for long period, yet which I adore when appointed in a room.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I think of Babe Paley wearing a blood red dress by Charles James. Swaths of fabric gather and are stitched at the side, giving the impression that the wearer is forever lifting the hem off the ground, revealing endless folds of off-white pleats. I think of perfume as I
think of this image. The impossible moment: the alchemical yearning bottled and held. A careful orchestration of contrasts: she is always entering but never spoilt. Muybridge reduced to a single vessel. A blossom long past, one might still hold.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

My work explores instances of bounty amidst professed scarcity. Informed by a desire to democratize aesthetic experiences, I create images in the world that hold together seemingly incongruous class signifiers. And so I pile the donated roses atop the compost heap at the shelter where I live and work. I light a scented candle in the bathroom of our crumbling halfway house for eighteen: in memory of that which is small, (and too often feminized and dismissed) but could be called a mutual longing for something more, a rose-scented sublime amidst the brutal neglect of the world.

Jessie Mott. Serpent Twins, 2017 Pen, watercolor, acrylic marker on paper, 24” x18”

Jessie Mott, based in Chicago, IL  is an emerging social worker and visual artist best known for watercolor animal drawings and collaborative animations with the artist Steve Reinke. Mott’s work explores themes of queerness, eroticism, power, and vulnerability. More about Jessie’s work can be found here: jessiemott.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

80s pop star Debbie Gibson created a fragrance called Electric Youth, of which I was overjoyed to receive on my 9th birthday. A neon pink spring floated diagonally within the champagne-y liquid.  It was a sticky July afternoon and I immediately sprayed it on my neck. It was sweet with a sensationally immature fruitiness that somehow managed to not be cloying. I remember the way it changed on my skin, mixing with my child sweat through the end of the birthday night reverie. When I choose fragrances now, I tend to steer clear of the fruit, but I recently made an exception for Byredo’s Pulp, on the opposite spectrum. It verges on souring plums, apple flesh funk, damp fur, jammy candies.

I dabbled with other drugstore perfumes in my youth but the real desire for scent emerged when I read in a fashion magazine, circa 1994, that Madonna wore a particular tuberose. My heart exploded with this news, a tangible way to connect with my idol. My father kindly tracked down the perfume for me at some fancy store in Manhattan and brought me a sample. I was quaking with excitement, thinking I was about to be one with Madonna. Unfortunately, however, the headiness of white flowers with something sharply synthetic–I don’t know, gasoline?–was an olfactory assault. I was not ready. I felt distressed that I could not attach, but I dropped it on my pulse points anyway.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I mostly wear scents that I’m interested in, more so than for another person. It is a form of self-expression, but also a way of feeling grounded. It elevates my mood. There is something thrilling about experiencing the changing of a fragrance throughout the day. It may start out cardamom in the morning but end up leather by evening.

I like to associate times in my life with particular scents. It is amazing how you can smell something and be transported so viscerally back to another world. I remember smelling the floral heart of Anais Anais on my mother’s coat when I was little, and feeling so comforted by it.

Choosing scents can create opportunity to forge new identities, conjure old memories and create new ones. A portal to new desire, a resurrection of haunting love. When the right alchemy emerges you get the tingles.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

The animal features prominently in my work and as it happens, I have an affinity for animalic scents.

Most often, I am making drawings/watercolors. There is always vacillation between structure and all out violence/bleeding of color. The tension between control and fantasy is something I am interested in, and there is a similar dynamic in fragrances as well. I have a collection that ranges from sophistication to a certain skank - a refined chypre iris to an aggressive damp pelt. You never know what you will need for a day’s work.  Art and scent are both experienced in a primal way, deep in the lizard brain. I prefer engaging with scent and art making that is rooted in the marrow. Arousal of all the senses. There is enough disappointment. We need pink peppercorn, tangy smoke, beaver sacs (synthetic, obviously), felled trees, vetiver. Color choice and scent linked by intuitive processes.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

My go-to cool weather fragrance has been, for over 12 years, Heeley’s Cardinal. I am a bit obsessed with it. It is an incense scent that has a chill to it. My favorite feature of it is a frankincense note, but it also has a bright element that is hard to identify. Some say linden, but I am unconvinced. It is refreshing for a gothic church. I have many happy memories associated with it, so I can’t  give it up. I also have a sample of MEMO’s African Leather that I am toying with at the moment. It has soulful leathery warmth and spice that is kind of intoxicating. The bottle is so beautiful, with a cartoony cheetah on it; I am a sucker.

Willy Smart. Page 18, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. The Centenary Edition. London, 1878. 2018 Etched mirror, blush, flower waters

Willy Smart is an artist and writer who works in presentational and propositional forms. Willy makes lectures, sculpture, and publications that propose extended modes and objects of reading and recording. Willy directs the conceptual record label Fake Music (fakemusic.org) as well as a personal website (willysmart.com)

When did you start wearing fragrance?

Fairly recently — maybe two years ago. Though I’ve enjoyed the quiet loft of florals for a lot longer.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I like the repeatability of perfume, and I like the misdirection a fragrance affords. I like flowers without flowers.

I recently read Alain Corbain’s great book on scent in the French cultural imagination. In one chapter, he chronicles the shift in 17th century as the vogue for musky scents was overcome by a new proclivity for florals. Corbain explains this floral ascendance as a symptom of a bourgeois mode of seduction, which consists of ‘setting the mood.’ A musky scent—essentially a poopy scent—draws attention to the body of its bearer; while a floral whiff, obviously not of the body, draws attention to the wearer’s surroundings: this room, this curtain, this slant of moonlight. I don’t really think I wear fragrances for ‘seduction’ purposes but I do like the way a floral allows me a kind of dispersed presence. Or maybe the floral is about a fantasy of a entirely different body: she wants her body the body of the bloom.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

There is something surfacey about fragrances — both in the way perfume is often imagined as frivolous and of course in the literal application of a fragrance to my skin’s surface. I’m attracted to similar aesthetic moves: using materials or that operate on the level of suggestion rather than of definition; or working in depth with ’superficial’ forms of language like wordplay and description. I think I am learning as much for my practice from reading perfume reviews than I am from wearing them and I certainly do more of the former anyway.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Annick Goutal’s Ninfeo Mio!

Michelle Wasson. November Rain, 2017 acrylic on raw canvas, 95” x 74”

Michelle Wasson is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Chicago, IL. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, REFUSALON in San Francisco, and Brand Library Art Center in Glendale, CA.  She received her MFA from Washington University in 2001, and has served as faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She currently co-directs Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. More about Michelle’s work can be found here: Michellewasson.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

It was the year I realized that I would be an artist. In 1985 Christian Dior released their mysterious perfume Poison. Scent and memory are so indelibly linked that when I recall that iconic purple bottle on my childhood dresser, I hear Purple Rain on the turntable and feel my favorite grey parachute pants on my skin. I was developing an enduring love of color, epic guitar solos and dance.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

Scent can set or correct the mood of my day. Fragrance has the power to set an intention, evoke a strong memory or recall a place of safety or comfort.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

Some works in progress have been simmering for more than a decade. It’s rare for me to make a painting—like a single note perfume–in one sitting. I would rather have a few concoctions go awry than stick to the same, safe scent everyday. If a subject, process, or sensorial experience becomes comfortable, it’s time to move on. I’m drawn to complexity and not at all concerned with creating a signature scent for myself—nor do I subscribe to a singular camp of painting. I find binary scents for men and women boring so I experiment with samples and trade bottles with friends—just as I prefer to layer paint to create complex color or texture.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

I escape from the harsh Chicago winter to a fantastic imaginary Middle Eastern souk. My husband and I share Myrrh & Tonka Cologne created by Mathilde Bijaoui for Jo Malone. It’s an incredibly warm and lush scent with a top note of hay lavender, a middle layer of myrrh and a base of vanilla, tonka and almond.

Roland Miller, co-director of Julius Caesar, applying one of the four parfum that comprise’s Matt Morris’ Copycat Killer, 2017

Matt Morris is a piece of marzipan. He has wanted to be Germaine Cellier for quite some time, both nationally and internationally. He is a contributor to a foundation that the artist set up to raise money for the purchases of future additions of perfumes to a growing archive. He is educated, and now works as an educator. He’s a Fairyologist. More about Matt’s work can be found here: http://www.mattmorrisworks.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

There was a white wicker shelf with several bottles of fragrance that my father and mother wore when I was growing up. I remember Cool Water, 1988, by Davidoff, its minty marine notes, how they would smell of my father’s skin, and the ways a sweeter amber facet would come forward on me when I would put it on.

Why do you think you’re interested in personal scent?

I’m interested in nascent forms of becoming ourselves, those ways of sensing and expressing something understandable about a person in ways that aren’t visual. I want to think about the ways that we are marked and sometimes mark ourselves. I’m obsessed with art historical precedents for disrupting identity signifiers with perfume, such as Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy and her signature scent Belle Haleine eau de Voilette, 1921. While scent as a means of attraction is certainly always at play, my wearing perfume is first of all a form of self care by which I make a space for my own fantasies, cast protection spells on myself, and dare to attempt the very treacherous work of remembering.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

Orris (the root of iris), very creamy sandalwood notes, rubber and plastic and anything that signals artifice in intelligent ways, milk, ambrette, mimosa, heliotrope, saffron, peaches and apicots, a thoughtfully developed violet, galbanum, tuberose. I also have a soft, sweet spot for notes of marshmallow, Play-Doh, cola, waxiness, powdery cosmetics….

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

I broke a bottle of perfume in the gallery where I had my first solo exhibition after completing my BFA (on purpose). Henceforth, there have often been olfactory dimensions in my art. Last year I made Copycat Killer, a set of four hand-blended parfum based on the fragrances my sibling, my parents, and I wear. The four directors of Julius Caesar (and sometimes substitutes for them) graciously sat in the gallery space wearing those fragrances, layering the notes of the original perfumes references and my memories of those smells changing on our skin, which mingled into the body smells of Kate, Josh, Roland, and Tony.

We’re headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

When I want to sparkle, Bois des Iles by Chanel. When I want wooden spikes, Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens. When I’m re-watching Buffy, Hemlock Shade by Lvnea. When I want to smell like cement and clay and southern mourning and childhood trauma, Only Children Weep by Sixteen92. Most autumn days, I will want to smell like Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens.