Blogs

Many people view the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia as a complete violation of a dead man’s will. After all, Albert C. Barnes would not have enjoyed the audio tours, easy accessibility, gift shop, website… The list would be endless. His sole intention for the Barnes was to educate and enlighten those using art, and he arranged every single inch of the space with his way of seeing: through an artist’s lens, with thought and purpose in every part of the wall.

I started looking at the paintings one by one; I wanted to see every single piece of art in the area, which is usually my attitude when I go into a museum or gallery. The museum contained works by some of my favorite artists: Manet, Seurat, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Renoir. I enjoyed looking up close at the paintings (not too close, obviously, as there were clear markers around the perimeter of each room) then seeing the painting as a whole. In a Renaissance painting, it’s easy to see how the strokes contribute to the overall work. In comparison, an Impressionist painting has short, choppy strokes. Out of context with a small close-up of the painting, you would not be able to tell what it is. However, once you look at it from afar, you could see how the strokes make a face, flower, or change the lighting. However, I noticed the furniture, and door locks on the wall. I wondered what their purpose was.

Hi Class!

Just read this interesting New Yorker article by Michael Pollan that follows a group of scientists who are seeking to prove that plants are a lot more like us than most people realize, capable of learning, memory, cognition and computation! I thought that this was incredibly relevant for the ecofeminist argument against specism. Skim through the article if you get a chance to take a break from finals week.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan 

Trying to make out a "map" for my group's teach-in was an interesting experience for me. I wanted to do something that was my own, but I couldn't come up with any "locations" to draw for a map. On top of that, I didn't know how to relate it to feminism at first. I finally decided to draw feminism in a way that made sense to me: as an entire body, a "creature." I wanted to draw the dragon because, though we cannot see it, we can see the power of fire, which it breathes. This is similar to feminism because, though many people cannot see the theory that goes behind it, they can see the actions that destroy harmful institutions and help create progress. Like the body of the dragon, though all the parts have different functions, they all can cooperate to have one common goal. I felt that drawing my "map" helped me better understand the idea of feminism as well as educate the class on my perceptions.

Here I am! Writing my last post on the teach-in that Emma, Erin, and Rachel shared with the class last tuesday.  If you don't remember our concept, we each drew "maps" of our personal feminisms.  Before presenting in class, we had actually started our maps together, but finished them separately.  Point is, I hadn't seen the finished products, and was pretty amazed by them.  For example, I was really only expecting to see topography and road maps, but instead, Erin came out with a dragon! How interesting to think of feminism as a body--or, at the whim of a writer like Acker, maybe that's what it always was.  

I've thought more about the topography of my feminism in the past few days.  When I drew "Binary Arch", I constructed it so that the winding path of identity/cathedral of self lay BEYOND it.  I thought by making that choice, I was freeing up the idea of gender and arguing that by looking past gender, we can be englightened with ourselves in a way that is impossible within strict gender performance.  However, the irony of a gender-fortress is perplexing and misleading...

Project Notes

15 - 20 minutes

- Write name of each (good) and (bad)

(Prepare body notes beforehand)

1) Bring in slips of paper and post it notes. (Ari) and double sided tape (Faith)

2) Write a category that you’re comfortable in. It can be one that you’ve given yourself or one that was chosen for you (put it on the back). And one that you’re not comfortable with (put it on the front).  

3) Ask people to write what they’re comfortable with and then we’re going to take those categories and switch them around. We’ll ask people if they’re comfortable with their new given categories  and we’ll ask them to share their thoughts.

4) Ask people if they’re comfortable with their new given labels.

5) Ask people if they’ve ever publicly denounced a label that they’ve been given and ask if they’ve ever felt like they’ve been given a label that doesn’t represent them at all.

6) Now do what you want with this category that we’ve given you. You can crumble it up, display proudly, put it behind you, put it in front of you, whatever.

I think the idea of "against interpretation" is fetched. Even she's trying to ask people not to interprete art, I feel like interpretation has to happen in the interaction with art. If you don't have any knowledge or experience of art, you would not even be willing to come to an art piece and spend time with it. And it's not like if you stop thinking, you would have a better approach with art. Many paintings have their own stories, without interpretation, the original story would be lost. I don't believe there could be any bare appreciation of art with no interpretation.

We are going to play Feminism Jeopardy!!

If you can get  into your Teach-In groups and that will be your team.

1 team starts and they choose a category and a point value. They have 30 seconds to answer the question.

You must answer it in question form.

If the team does not get the answer in 30 seconds it will default to the next team.

Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

We wanted this to be an all-inclusive exercise. We tried to make it as fair as possible and accessible for all teams. We wanted to include a lot of theory, but also supplement that knowledge with how it was applied in class. We realize it is not fully accessible for everybody, but by taking this class we learned that it is a continuous learning process. Everybody defines feminism, accessibility, intersectionality, etc. differently and so we learn from each other. From this process we hope to not only think about the theories, but think about the different ways in which our classmates define and think about the theories so that maybe we will think about them in different ways that we have not thought about before. This is one of the main things we learned from this class.

If I’m going to tell you what my definition of what a city is, my personal style dictates that I use a slightly unconventional metaphor for it. This one was thought up today whilst I was burning calories in the pool. 

Imagine a bowl half-filled with water. 

Now imagine this bowl with blue food coloring diffused coloring in it. It’s a pretty shade of lavender. There is no obvious nucleus where the color leaks from because you’ve stirred the bowl to avoid this. 

Next, you carefully place the vial of food coloring into the bowl of water. Being only half-full, it bobs happily on the surface. Since you spilled a little on the vial itself before putting it in, the immediate water enveloping it is a darker shade of lavender. 

The bowl is the border of a country, the vial with the food coloring is the only city, and the water is everything in it. Granted, I can’t think of any country that only has one city in it, save for the Vatican but they don’t count for the purposes of this essay. 

Here is a link to the source we referenced in our presentation on Ecofeminism:

http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/bibliogs/ecofem.html

We hope that our presentation answered any questions, opened everyone's mind to the possibilities that Ecofeminism has to offer and accurately recognized the reality to the movement.