Blogs

Ellen Cohn

12/6/13

Barnes Reflection

Play in the City

Who is “Barnes?”

            Alfred C. Barnes was born in 1872 to two working class parents. He proceeded to build himself up in the world, and became a true renaissance man—meaning that he was educated in many fields and created a name for himself in many various areas. With all of the time we have spent in class studying his foundation, the movement of it, and his perspective on how it should be used, I began to think about how the actual person Barnes fit in. How did his personal life tie into his motives in creating the foundation, choosing the specific works he collected, choosing the location for the foundation, and limiting the audience.

            Barnes’ first success was in the medical field. At the age of twenty-seven, Barnes worked with a German chemist to develop a drug—Agyrol, which was marketed as a treatment for gonorrhea. During this time, Barnes showed a business-oriented mind, and the drug became an immediate success financially. By the time he was thirty-five, Barnes was a millionaire. He sold the business in 1929, a few short months before the stock market crash (which led to the Great Depression). He also conveniently timed his sale to happen before the discovery of antibiotics, which soon replaced Agyrol in the medical world.

There was so much anticipation in my head when I went to the Barnes Foundation. I had wanted to go for a while, since my mother had told me about it, and how it housed pieces by some of my favorite artists: Seurat, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and much more. Impressionism was one of my favorite eras of art, and I was going to take advantage of this trip into Philadelphia.

My mother had informed me that there was a period where Albert C. Barnes wouldn’t let anyone into the foundation. Countless amounts of people had written requests to Barnes, asking to visit, but many had been rejected. My mother may have also mentioned there was some controversy with the foundation, but I think she touched too lightly upon the subject for me to completely register and remember the facts. Therefore, I had walked into the Barnes partially the way Walker Percy had intended us to: without a lot of prior knowledge.

However, I had built the museum up in my head a lot. I do this a lot with other things, too. Sometimes I’ll say that someone absolutely has to watch a movie or read a book, and that it’s probably the best movie or book in existence. When this happens, people are usually disappointed. While I did build the Barnes Foundation up a lot in my head, I was not disappointed at all. I feel as if the difference this time was that I didn’t know what paintings would be in the foundation, and that I didn’t know how the foundation would be set up.

Mainstream feminist dialogues, including our own Serendipian dialogue, are exclusionary. Alternative exclusionary dialogues often form within marginalized communities, addressing gender-based discrimination and other experience-based conversations that present uniquely in certain groups. Marginal groups can protect themselves from the lack of inclusion within dominant dialogues. Feminism is often defined as community based and inclusive as possible, but advocating for the protection of multiple groups, especially those who are marginalized by dominant dialogues and existing power structures, necessities inaccessibility of conversation.

Dialogue within marginalized groups is inherently exclusionary. It allows individuals within a group to build on the foundations of shared experience to build community (instead of trying to make descriptions of those experiences accessible to the dominant group). The barriers keeping nonmembers out of the discussion form a protection that creates a safe space. The barriers that protect the conversation within marginalized groups from the violence of the dominant group are formed from an enforced silence of the marginalized group toward those outside of it. Access is limited to the few in languages of identity that the oppressors do not understand, by intentionally obfuscating language in code, and by referencing experience that outsiders do not have access to.

Unbinding Feminist Intentions

As a young black woman in America, I have had my fair share of troubles with accepting feminism. Author bell hooks, in ‘Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics’, defines feminism as an all-encompassing ‘movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression (hooks, p.1).” However, as I have previously understood it, through social discourse and mass media portrayals, feminism arose from a reaction of well-to-do white women to the oppressive patriarchal system that confined them to the household. So, as a result, these women sought and gained equality in the working world of their well-to-do counterparts.

According to hooks, however, feminists initially concerned themselves with women’s liberation from the oppressive, sexist, and violent domination of the patriarchy. However, it became polarized by a division between reformist thinkers, who wanted to alter the existing system to include more rights for women, and revolutionary thinkers, who wanted to overthrow the system and terminate the patriarchy entirely.

The intimate gesture of touch can convey caring and concern or, just as easily, dominance and disrespect. Micro-level interactions, be they handshakes or long-term relationships, affect and sustain macro-level institutions of dominance. Despite the fact that body integrity is vital to one's sense of autonomy, kyriarchal systems have a history of appropriating bodies, and continue to do so as a way of systematically securing supremacy. In her essay, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” theorist Judith Butler makes a call to reclaim the body in an effort to combat kyriarchal establishments. She asserts that violence, from blatant genocide to interpersonal cruelty, reinforces itself through a process of making the recipient “unreal”. This violence, and it is violence regardless of form, is not limited to women, or even humans for that matter. The perpetrators, however, excuse their actions by deeming their victims as unworthy, to the point that “the very bodies for which (the victims of violence) struggle are not quite ever only (their) own.” (26) Through this process, Butler maintains that when “the violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” (33) These arguments are the framework for her theories on derealization, or the act of stripping someone or something of its individual worth in order to grant oneself impunity and to justify acts of cruelty in order to preserve power.

After several changes of plans, I planned to go to see the Dream Garden in the curtis center and Washington Square around there, and also go to the "free" "PECO Family Jams: Recycled CD Ornaments" in the Magic Garden to make small ornaments today. My schedul was tight because my work ended at 12:30. Because the train got delayed, I decided to only go to the Magic Garden. It was apparent that I was the only one who showed up at the event. Even though the event was still on, I realized it was "free" with admission. So I left for the Dream Garden instead. On my way, I had this feeling that it might be closed and I forgot to check. And unfortunately, the security guard in the Curtis center told me it was closed for today.

Originally, I planned to see the mural arts in the city, but it is so hard for me to walk a lot in the snows. I know there are some mural arts along the Broad street and I choose a way I nerver walked before. It is a surprise that truning around the corner, there it is! I never imagine that the new way is even easier and faster. It was so cold that I bought a pair of gloves on the way. I stared the mural art near the Macy's for about 3 minutes and I can't focus, so I escaped into Macy's. Luckily, I saw the light show in Macy's. I can feel the enthusiasm people show to Christmas, but to be honest, I am not attracted to it but I still feel happy. I recognized that on the way to Anne's house, I just rushed across the street and just passed by some mural arts. I felt sorry to those mural arts that people just pass by them and it seems that they are not important. Also, because of the gloves, I can't type on my phones. And since I don't have internet on my Iphone and the map on Blackberry is not good, I check the information on blackberry and navigate the way on iphone; at the same time, I need to carry my camera and protect it from the snow! So I took off my gloves manytimes and catch two phones, one camera, and even one cup which has a leaking cap and rushed in a snow day!

Unbinding feminism has been the greatest challenge presented to me yet in this course.  All semester, our class has explored the confined of being a feminist—the varying components (and intersectionality) within feminist identities.  To deconstruct the goals and desires of feminism feels impossible without questioning the word itself.  The word suddenly feels inefficient.  Not incorrect, yet still inadequate for a form of activism that no longer relies on gender or sex to define itself.  I first question the possibility of feminism’s unbinding.  Then, alternate terms.  I’m pretty fascinated by the etymology of the word itself, and supplemental terms used by varying groups of intersectional identities to better define themselves.  As Wendy Brown asks, “Are we proposing to be after sex and gender, no longer bound by them or perhaps no longer believing in them, and yet in the peculiar offering that only temporality makes, bringing along what we are after even as we locate it behind us?” (Brown 98).  In the unbinding of a term that at first felt so simplistic, yes, that is quite what we intend.  But are we left with feminism?

This morning I ate 5 sugar cookies for breakfast. Immediately after I washed down the last cookie with some lukewarm English Breakfast tea, I began carefully planning the rest of my meals for the day, excluding anything sugary, whilst reminding myself that I exercise twice a week (but that’s enough to keep off the weight, right?). This worried, calculating, self-shrinking mentality accompanied my logic for skipping meals in middle school, telling my mom that the cafeteria food too hard to chew with my braces so, yeah, of course, Mom – I had eaten when I got home when, in reality, I hadn’t.

It’s nearly 2014. Never before has there been a time more centered on self-care and abolishing the extreme, inaccurate mass-media portrayals of women. Despite this, though, how can women still have these self-defeating, body shrinking thoughts?  

Some Huffington Post statistics have taught me that women experience an average of 13 negative thoughts about their body each day, while 97% of women admit to having at least one “I hate my body moment” each day.

And women are bound quite literally by their clothes. Skin-itching, thigh and stomach suffocating, sequined, short, skinny clothes. So much so that the damage is left irrevocably on their skin with grooves in their shrunken skin from skinny jeans and bras. Only 5% of American women naturally have the body type advertisements portray as ideal.

(the first picture is the view out my window, as I was waiting for your arrival,
and the last one is the same view, after the snow had stopped...)