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luckgods · 4 years ago

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Why all the white guys in whump?

I got Inspired by a post asking that question, and here we are. Warning: long post ahead.

I think it’s due to a combination of factors, as things frequently are.

The preference for / prevalence of white male characters in fandom is well-known and has been examined pretty thoroughly by people already.

What’s worth noting for discussing this tendency in whump in particular is that the ‘whump fandom’ itself is not a ‘fandom’ in the traditional sense of being made of fans of one single source narrative (or source setting, like a particular comics fandom, or the Star Wars extended universe) with pre-existing characters. Although subsets of traditional fandoms certainly exist within the larger whump fandom, a lot of whump is based on original, ‘fan’-created characters.

So, given the tendency of ‘traditional’ fandoms to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters due to the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc), if we say hypothetically that the whump fandom is split say 50/50 between ‘traditional’ fandom works and original whump works, you’d expect to see a higher number of works focused on white men than the demographics of the ‘traditional’ fandom’s source work would predict, but not as extreme of a divergence between the source material & the fanworks as the one you’d see if whump fandom were 100% based on popular media.

However, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Whump stories and art remain focused on overwhelmingly male and frequently white characters, which means that the tendency of the fandom to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters cannot be ONLY explained by the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc).

And, having established the fact that whump writers & artists presumably have MORE control over the design of their characters than writers & artists in ‘traditional’ fandoms, we have to wonder why the proportions remain biased towards men, & white men in particular.

—

The race thing is pretty simple in my opinion. Mostly, it’s just another extension of the fanbase’s tendency to reflect the (predominantly US-American, on tumblr) culture it exists in, which means that, in a white-centric culture, people make artworks featuring white people.

There’s also the issue of artists being hesitant to write works that dwell heavily on violence towards people of color due to the (US-American) history of people of color being violently mistreated. I’ve actually seen a couple of posts arguing that white people SHOULDN’T write whump of nonwhite characters (particularly Black characters) because of the history of actual violence against Black bodies being used as entertainment, which means that fictional violence against Black people, written by white people, for a (presumed) white audience, still feels exploitative and demeaning.

I'm not going to get into all my thoughts on this discussion here but suffice to say that there's probably an impact on the demographics of whump works from authors of color who simply... don't want to see violence against people of color, even non-explicitly-racialized violence, and then another impact from white authors who choose not to write non-white characters either due to the reasons stated above, or simply due to their personal discomfort with how to go about writing non-white characters in a genre that is heavily focused on interpersonal violence.

Interestingly enough, there’s also a decent proportion of Japanese manga & anime being used as source material for whump, and manga-styled original works being created. The particular relationship between US-American and Japanese pop culture could take up a whole essay just by itself so I’ll just say, there’s a long history of US-Japanese cultural exchange which means that this tendency is also not all that surprising.

—

GENDER though. If someone had the time and the energy they could make a fucking CAREER out of examining gender in whump, gender dynamics in whump, and why there seems to be a fandom-wide preference for male whumpees that cannot be fully explained by the emphasis on male characters in the source text.

I have several different theories about factors which impact gender preference in whump, and anyone who has other theories (or disagrees with mine) is free to jump in and add on.

THEORY 1: AUTHOR GENDER AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.  Fandom in general is predominantly female, although these days it might be more accurate to say that fandom is predominantly composed of cis women and trans people of all genders. However, pretty much everyone who isn't a cis man has had to contend with the specter of gendered violence in their real personal life. Thus, if we posit whump (and fandom more generally) as a sort of escapist setup, it's not hard to see why whump authors & artists might willfully eschew writing female whumpees (especially in the case of inflicted whump), because (as in the discussion of people of color in whump above), even violence towards women that is explicitly non-gender-based may still hit too close to home for people whose lives have been saturated with the awareness of gender-based violence.

THEORY 2: SICK OF SEXY SUFFERING.  Something of an addendum to theory 1, it's worth noting that depictions of female suffering in popular media are extremely gendered (in that they specifically reflect real-life gender-based violence, and that said real-life violence is almost exclusively referenced in relation to female characters) and frequently sexualized as well. There's only so many times you can see female characters having their clothes Strategically Ripped while they're held captive, being sexually menaced (overtly or implicitly) to demonstrate How Evil the villain is, or just getting outright sexually assaulted for the Drama of it all before it gets exhausting, especially when the narratives typically either brush any consequences under the rug, or dwell on them in a way that feels more voyeuristic and gratuitous than realistic and meaningful. All this may result in authors who, given the chance to write their own depictions of suffering, may decide simply to remove the possibility of gendered violence by removing the female gender.

THEORY 3: AUTHOR ATTRACTION.  I'll admit that this one is more a matter of conjecture, as I haven't seen any good demographic breakdowns of attraction in general fandom or whump fandom. That said, my own experience talking to fellow whump fans does indicate that attraction to the characters (whether whumpers, or whumpees) is part of the draw of whump for some people. This one partially ties into theory 1 as well, in that people who are attracted to multiple genders may not derive the same enjoyment out of seeing a female character in a whumpy situation as they might seeing a male character in that situation, simply because of the experience of gendered violence in their lives.

THEORY 4: ACCEPTABLE TARGETS.  The female history of fandom means that there's been a lot more discussion of the impacts of depicting pain & suffering (especially female suffering) for personal amusement. Thus, in some ways, you could say that there is a mild taboo on putting female characters through suffering if you can't "justify" it as meaningful to the narrative, not just titillating, which whump fandom rarely tries or requires anyone to do. This fan-cultural 'rule' may impact whump writers' and artists' decisions in choosing the gender of their characters.

THEORY 5: AN ALTERNATIVE TO MAINSTREAM MASCULINITY.  Whump fandom may like whumping men because by and large, mainstream/pop culture doesn't let men be vulnerable, doesn't let them cry, doesn't let them have long-term health issues due to constantly getting beat up even when they really SHOULD, doesn't let them have mental health issues period. Female characters, as discussed in theory 2, get to ("get to") go through suffering and be affected by it (however poorly written those effects are), but typically, male characters' suffering is treated as a temporary problem, minimized, and sublimated into anger if at all possible. (For an example, see: every scene in a movie where something terrible happens and the male lead character screams instead of crying). So, as nature abhors a vacuum, whump fandom "over-produces" whump of men so as to fill in that gap in content.

THEORY 6: AMPLIFIED BIAS.  While it's true that whump fandom doesn't have a source text, it's also true that whump fans frequently find their way into the fandom via other 'traditional' fandoms, and continue participating in 'traditional' fandoms as part of their whump fandom activity. Bias begets bias; fandom as a whole has a massive problem with focusing on white male characters, and fans who are used to the bias towards certain types of characters in derivative works absolutely reproduce that bias in their own original whump works.

—

I honestly think that there is greater bias in the whump fandom than anyone would like to admit. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems as though whump fans avoid introspection and discussion of the issue by bringing up the points I talked about in my previous theories, particularly discomfort with depictions of female suffering for amusement.

However, I think that, as artists, we owe it to ourselves and one another to engage in at least a small amount of self-interrogation over our preferences, and see what unconscious or unacknowledged biases we possess. It's a little absurd to argue that depictions of women as whumpees are universally too distressing to even discuss when a male character in the exact same position would be fine and even gratifying to the person making that argument; while obviously, people have a right to their own boundaries, those boundaries should not be used to shut down discussion of any topics, even sensitive ones.

Furthermore, engaging in personal reflection allows artists to make more deliberate (and meaningful) art. For people whose goal is simply to have fun, that may not seem all that appealing, but having greater understanding of one's own preferences can be very helpful towards deciding what works to create, what to focus on when creating, and what works to seek out.

—

GENDER ADDENDUM: NONBINARY CHARACTERS, NONBINARY AUTHORS.  Of course, this whole discussion so far has been exclusively based on a male-female binary, which is reductive. (I will note, though, that many binary people do effectively sort all nonbinary people they know of into 'female-aligned' and 'male-aligned' categories and then proceed to treat the nonbinary people and characters they have categorized a 'female-aligned' the same way as they treat people & characters who are actually female, and ditto for 'male-aligned'. That tendency is very frustrating for me, as a nonbinary person whose gender has NOTHING to do with any part of the binary, and reveals that even 'progressive' fandom culture has quite a ways to go in its understanding of gender.)

Anyways, nonbinary characters in whump are still VERY rare and typically written by nonbinary authors. (I have no clue whether nonbinary whump fans have, as a demographic group, different gender preferences than binary fans, but I'd be interested in seeing that data.)

As noted above with female characters, it's similarly difficult to have a discussion about representation and treatment of nonbinary characters in whump fandom, and frankly in fandom in general. Frequently, people regard attempts to open discussions on difficult topics as a call for conflict. This defensive stance once again reveals the distaste for requests of meaningful self-examination that is so frequent in fandom spaces, and online more generally.

—

TL;DR: Whump is not immune to the same gender & racial biases that are prevalent in fandom and (US-American) culture. If you enjoy whump: ask yourself why you dislike the things you dislike— the answer may surprise you. If you create whump: ask yourself whose stories you tell, and what stories you refuse to tell— then ask yourself why.

#eposting #whumpinions #whump #whumpblr #whump community #essay #i wrote this so yall all have to read it lol #but seriously the next person who implies that a nonbinary person is just 'woman-lite' or 'man-lite' is going to Die By My Fucking Sword #mine

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feathersandblue · 8 years ago

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hansbekhart

reblogged your post and added:

I’d rather discuss what you think of my argument.

Then I hope you don’t mind me putting this in an extra post, as the original thread is getting quite long.

I’m copying/posting your last reply here:

I don’t think it’s a contradiction though. I think it’s a miscommunication, stemming mostly from privilege. The disconnect in this argument is over what, exactly, is problematic.

Fandom has always imagined itself as a place of progressive values - a place where (predominately) women can explore their own sexuality and recreate community in a way that isn’t hostile to them, as a lot of the real world is. But this world we’ve created still has all of the prejudices that each member was brought up with - there’s no way that it couldn’t, firstly because many of our prejudices are invisible to us, and secondly because a lot of fandom works were created specifically to remix that already-existing culture: fan fiction is a mirror that we bend to find stories that include ourselves.

I think that the expression “fandom has always imagined itself” is a bit of a generalisation that does not hold up to close scrutiny: fandom is extremely diverse, and I don’t necessarily think that everyone who participates in it - or even the majority of people who participate in it - frame their contribution in these terms, or see it in that light.

So while such a narrative exists, especially when it comes to the defense and representation of fandom in media, I wouldn’t agree that this idea of “progressiveness” is at the center of fandom for a majority of fans - at least not for those who never engage on a meta level. People often politicize fandom, but I’d argue that fandom, as such, is personal rather than political.

I absolutely agree wtih you that fandom content reflects our perception of the world, and all of our biases. But for me, that’s pretty much a given, and I’d like to add that the same applies to every kind of art and literature: whether we try to avoid it or not, everthing that we create is a reflection of our environment (geographical, historical, political), our personality, our prejudices and biases, our personal issues.

And since it’s squeezed through what could arguably be called a feminist lens (because it positions female sexuality and self-exploration at its center), we fool ourselves into thinking that all the bad stuff - the parts of the world we were so alienated by that we were compelled to fix them - all that ugliness, we think it all gets left on the other side of the glass.

I don’t think that is the case, actually. At least I can’t confirm that from my own perspective and experiences. Very few people that I’ve spoken to - very few people who I argue with - would claim that fanworks are necessarily “better” or “less problematic” than the sources they derive from. Such a statment, I think, would be difficult to uphold when one takes a closer look at the average fanwork, the 90% between “My Immortal” and your Personal Favorite.

I think that there might be a bit of confusion - or disagreement - about the nature and purpose of fanworks. In my understanding, fanworks are a form of wish-fulfillment and self-empowerment for those who create it. Fanworks can be progressive, sure, and they can be political, but I see that as side effect rather than a primary purpose. First and foremost, fanworks are hedonistic. They are the self-expression of individuals, the purely self-indulgent outlet for personal creativity.

Of course, I have no idea what goes on in the mind of any given fan creator or writer. But speaking from my own perspective, when I write fanfiction, I write things for my own, personal enjoyment, for my own, personal amusement, or, if I wanted to be flippant: Because I can. Nothing inherently progressive about that.

I’m saying “we” not just as a fan, but as a demographically representative one. Fandom is majority straight, white, and female - I’m two of those things, and can pass for the third. The reason I called this the White Feminism of discourse is because that’s where I think it comes from: a centering of a certain sort of narrative and victimhood to the exclusion of all others. Not necessarily out of maliciousness, but because a large proportion of fans don’t see the persistently racist problems in fandom - because it doesn’t affect them. Because they’ve never experienced racism personally, and are blind to the way they (we) perpetuate the microaggressions or outright racism that literally every fan of color has experienced in fandom. It’s a language we can’t hear unless we really, really listen.

Fandom is mostly white and female, though not necessarily straight, but that’s another matter.

I think we need to make a distinction here, and that’s between fandom as a space for individuals, and the idea of fandom as it is currently presented in media by pro-fandom voices, which indeed often paints fandom as a beacon of progressiveness and female empowerment.

When it comes to the individual fan and their contribution to fandom ... I hate to say it, but there is no reason why any given fan should priotitize anything but their own, selfish enjoyment. I’m not in fandom to contribute to the joy and happiness of other people. I’m here for my own.

Creating art of fiction is always a selfish act. No writer writes something they don’t want to write (unless they’re paid for it, or course), no artist paints something that they don’t want to paint. That’s how we create: it’s our personal, self-indulgent vision that we turn into something that other people might enjoy. Or not enjoy, whatever the case may be.

The argument that I often hear is “if your personal enjoyment comes at the price of other people’s hurt feelings, it’s oppressive and immoral”, but that only applies when I actually force people to consume the product of my imagination. But as long as they have the freedom of choice, why should their feelings take precedence over mine?

Especially, and I feel that this is an important point that doesn’t get stressed often enough, when I don’t even know who these people are? We’re on the internet. I have no idea whether the person I’m dealing with is actually who they claim to be. I have no idea what their life looks like. I have no idea whether they were actually “triggered” by something (I’m using quotation marks because the way the word is used here on tumblr, it can mean anything, from mild annoyance to great anxiety) or are just striving strive for power and control.

I can totally get where the people who write this sort of positivity posts about fandom are coming from, and I can get why it seems like these are attacks out of left field. But when you (and not meaning you specifically, OP - all of us) claim essentially that all media/fandom is good, and all ways of consuming media/fan fiction are good, that ignores the way that media/fandom continues to be a really hostile and ugly place for a lot of people. You may mean, “There is no bad way to explore your sexuality,” but it can sound like you really mean “Even if it includes explicit, unqualified racism.”

But who says that media/fandom has to be “good”? Who made that rule when I wasn’t looking? When I “joined” fandom, I never agreed to limit my own, personal enjoyment to what minorities find acceptable. And while I get that some people think they’re entitled to that - that it should be my goal as a “decent person” to make them feel included, safe, welcome, and cared for - that’s not what I’m here for.

You may find this a controversial statement, but actually, it shouldn’t be controversial at all. I get that some people would like me to sign a metaphorical contract, with the fine print written in their favor, but the truth is that such a contract does not exist within fandom.

No other person has the actual authority to tell me that my own enjoyment should not be my sole and ultimate goal. People might think they have the moral authority to tell me that, but there is no reason why I should have to accept that.

Why should I let other people dictate what my contribution to fandom should look like? Or, what’s more to the point, why should I let a bunch of strangers with funny urls do that, who willingly choose to engage with the content that I post on my blog or to my AO3 account?

ESPECIALLY because, when confronted with that exact challenge, a lot of people double down on that and admit that yeah, the racism doesn’t really bother them. Which is what’s happening here.

It’s not a contradiction, but an unwillingness to confront an ugly truth about fandom because it doesn’t personally affect you. Fandom has a huge problem with racism, and pointing that out is not an act of The Morality Police.

Well, I’m one of these people. Though I think it’s fair to say that while racism does, in fact, bother me, my understanding of racism does not conform with the US American definition, and I’m not inclined to re-frame my worldview according to US American sociological theories just because fan culture happens to be dominated by US Americans.

It’s not only racism, though, is it? It’s “abuse” and “homophobia” and “transphobia” and “ableism” and “misogyny” and so on, and I can tell you that most of what I’ve written and published would raise the hackles of one minority or another, if they came looking.

Or rather, raise the hackles of some individuals, which is another issue: very rarely, in my experience, has there been an agreement within a minority group on whether something was actually “harmful” or “offensive”. So, when I’m faced with a couple of people who come to my inbox, often in a very hostile manner, to tell me that something is offensive to people of color, or Jewish people, or trans people, or disabled people, and so on, they might be making a lot of noise, but I have no real means to say whether they are actually representative of the minority they claim to speak for.

In reality, it might look a little like this: My piece of dark fic, which was clearly labeled as such, got twohundred hits. Ten people left kudos, one left a positive but trivial comment, and now suddenly three people, one after the other, leave their comments in quick succession, neiher politely worded nor inviting a discussion, informing me that this piece of fiction is problematic and needs to disappear. Because they say so.

That’s the point where I have to ask myself: if I give in to that kind of intimidation and pressure, am I doing it because these people are in the right, or because I’m afraid? Am I willing to follow their moral code, which apparently includes dogpiling, intimidation, and name-calling, or do I trust my own?

Meanwhile, the people in my comment section are in all likelihood not willing to take my opinion into account. Any attempt on my side to justify myself just leads to statements like “check your privilege”, “you’re a nazi apologist”, “white (cis, straight, abled) people don’t get a say in this”. Disagreement is not an option. They’ve decided that my content problematic, that I am problematic, and that’s that.

I’ve seen this play out in a variety of instances, and quite honestly, I think it’s very important that people don’t give in to that kind of bullying.

Finally, let me just add, for good measure: I think you’re right in one point, and that is that we might want to stop pretending that fandom is all about progressiveness, when progressiveness is mostly accidental, and yes, we can absolutely point out that fandom content reflects the preferences of those who contribute to it. If that’s mostly white women, the content will reflect that, as we’ve basically agreed above.

On the other hand, if everyone keeps making the kind of content that they want to see, instead of bemoaning that others don’t make it for them, fandom will continue to change.

Just don’t expect fans to go to great length to make fandom a better place for others if that’s not what they signed up for.

#hansbekhart

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flauntpage · 5 years ago

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Review: Institutional Garbage

It’s December. The time of year when all the ‘Best Ofs’ and just-in-time-for-Christmas reviews spill out from the internet, beckoning you to consider your engagement with the year just passed. In January of this year, I was invited to “write something” about Institutional Garbage, a book published by The Green Lantern Press and edited by Lara Schoorl in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. Like the residue that is the content in the book itself, my review got buried in the rubble of other demands. So as I (finally) sit down to write, three things are at the top of my mind:

Critical reviews of books usually serve two functions: to lure readers to read or buy the book in question, or to bolster the significance of the book or its contents.

Book reviews are derived from the books they review, which in turn are derived from their subjects. This means both are traces, at least once or twice removed from their sources. In other words, they are debris – the garbage leftover from experiences.

Reviews of books produced outside of a timeline deemed relevant to their release date are even more garbage-like.

This, of course, is subjective. But in this case of this review, given that Institutional Garbage the exhibition took place in 2016, that Institutional Garbage the book was published in 2018, and that my review of it takes place in the final dregs of 2019, I think it’s safe to say we’re in the garbage zone. Thus, I posit this a sort of ‘anti-review review’: one so late as to hardly be useful, and which is more a reflection on the possibility (or impossibility) of the book’s content, rather than a review of ‘come hither’ promotional value. Another trace.

So, what was (or is) Institutional Garbage?

According to those in charge of describing it, it (is/was) an experimental publication that endeavors to grasp the memory, feeling, and trace of an online (and physical) exhibition that took place in the fall of 2016 through Sector 2337. The (no longer extant) gallery’s website states that it is “the administrative residue of imaginary public institutions produced by artists, writers, and curators. Contracts, email correspondences, documented unproductivity, syllabi, scanned objects, obstacle courses, and other fragments were collected to illustrate the backend activities of imaginary bureaucracies, to trace the private life of institutional endeavors.”

But what (is/was) it really?

Having been to the physical space that was Sector 2337 three years ago during the time of the original exhibition, I have some impression. There were details about the exhibition printed on paper towels in the gallery’s bathroom by artist David Hall, which viewers wiped their hands on and promptly tossed (I kept mine, to add to my ironic consumable-art collection – ever more ironic in the face of Maurizio Cattelan’s recent exploits). There were physical performances, and a website I was encouraged to (and, my apologies) did not really engage with. Probably there were other things. Then came this book.

The authors of Institutional Garbage encourage you to go through it in any direction or order, which I promptly ignored in favour of a classic cover-to-cover engagement. The book, after all, does nothing to break convention. It is artfully designed in a way that I can only describe as contemporarily Dutch, like many of its contributors. (I get off saying this because I’ve lived in The Netherlands for the last two years, and trust me – any poster in any city for any purpose is done with near identical visual cadence and designerly minimalism, down to the Helvetica Neue and Knif Mono typefaces). In the midst of this perhaps atopical slickness, reading this book is a bit like an act of rummaging. I will categorize and highlight a few “finds” here:

Teasers: Daniel Borzutzky’s “Data Bodies (excerpt),” which came in the form fragments of poetry and text that left me wanting more, such as the rife-with-implications correspondences between Chelsea Manning and an unknown other in which she describes listening and lip-synching “to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history”

(Grimly Familiar) Traces: Jane Lewty’s “Dear Committee [To be Read Alongside CV],” which painfully engages institutional biases around gender and mental health

Gratifying/Formally Succinct Works: Lise Haller Baggesen’s “The Archive,” a series of science-fiction emails to be read from the first to the last (in other words, backward) that chronicle the interaction between two women around female genius in the year 2033, rife with productive feminist metaphor, and ending in a baby swap…

Negating/Formally Succinct Works: David Hall’s “The Lid on Garbage Can,” which does well not to appease in the robotic ‘spamming’ of its own text (a coded program that renders a fragment of barely sensible legalese completely incomprehensible)

Bird’s Eye View: Jill Magi’s “Thirteen Thoughts Contextualizing “Institutional Garbage”,” that describes garbage as an expression of middle-class consciousness/good citizenship, and waste management as theatre for an institution’s ecopolitical stance

Garbage: The overblown academic-speak of Rowland Saifi’s “Statement for a Configured Curriculum,” which exhibits a flagrant wastefulness of language: “A hermeneutic condition of Open Chronotope Objects is conducted in the state of Deep Interlocking Ambiguity and, therefore is in a state of multiplicity. This creates the condition of an Architecture of De-puzzlement.” Like most writing of this kind, one has to do backflips to get anything from it, even in context, and I won’t.

In the end, what struck me about Institutional Garbage was how my experience reading it was so very unlike the process of sifting through trash (a task that I have, in varying states of poverty and privilege, done a great deal of). The book does self-consciously attempt to complicate itself in some ways, as with the curatorial section largely blanked out with white ‘paint’ (then promptly ‘explained’ by descriptions of the actual events curated for Sector 2337), with images of these performances Ben Day dotted to near oblivion, and with mixtures of fact and fiction. But the strong curatorial vision and inherent desire to preserve the integrity and relevance of its contributors is staunchly maintained.

Perhaps the only clear thwart I found was buried deep in Institutional Garbage, in Jill Magi’s “Curious, Fugitive, and Unedited (The Art Labor Archive of Teaching Days).” In this writing, Magi re-presents “the detritus of in-class writing exercises” by her students as part of her own work titled “The Labor Archive.” It is unclear whether or not she obtained permission for this, but her “dangerous citational practices” are precisely where the rubber meets the road. As any homeless person in the United States could tell you, trash becomes public property once it leaves private grounds. This is what makes dumpster diving possible, and why some businesses have resorted to compacting or, even more heinous, to poisoning food waste to keep humans out of it. In some ways, I almost wish the creators of this publication hadn’t curated or commissioned anything at all, but rather had taken what they wanted from what institutional garbage they could access. What would the ramifications have been for a publication which picked through digital trash, and braved negotiating the line between digital garbage and digital property?

In their emails to one another, Caroline Picard and Lara Schoorl speculate on the impossibility of a perfect, imaginary, “alternative, ideal, utopic institution” might look like. As a reader, the more pressing questions at hand seem to be these: are curating and garbage-making polar opposites? And what does it mean for curators to ‘make garbage’ (render slightly less clear, slightly less complete, and in some cases, slightly less contextual) the practices of art-adjacent people? I’m reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s “sixteen miles of string,” which in order to achieve its overarching vision intentionally paved over and inhibited viewing other work in the exhibition. Contemporarily, of course, it’s a dating faux pas to view curation in this light. In Institutional Garbage, Tricia Van Eck produces a hand-written letter called “Alchemy and Curation,” stating that “[…] it’s important for curators and artists in group shows (and even in solo shows) to share the oxygen in the space for all artworks to breathe.” Trash is stifling – it erases meaning through its surplus of meaning and scarcity of space. Aesthetically, this book has a lot of breathing room.

Of course, proclamations of impossibility and desirable failure such as those in the correspondences between Schoorl and Picard are like get-out-of-jail-free cards that anticipate any potential wrongdoings. But I think the real key to Institutional Garbage lies in Fulla Abdul-Jabbar’s essay, “Always,” at the book’s end:

“What we really want from our time with this book is that which is not this.

I don’t think you mean to sound that way.

Do you mean to say it like this?

Perhaps you can rephrase this.

Can you expand on this?”

To which we respond, of course, always. But not now.

Epilogue:

On a small shelf in my house a sun-baked candy from Félix González-Torres “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” oozed and leaked in dangerous proximity to my Ai Weiwei “Sunflower Seeds.” So I took David Hall’s paper towel program and wiped it up. I’m not sure, but I think this has something to do with art.

Thank You, Kathryn.

Shit is REAL

Will I Space Close from Lack of Funds?

Top 5 Weekend Picks! (6/28-6/30)

Top 5 Weekend Picks! (2/18 & 2/19)

Review: Institutional Garbage published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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flauntpage · 5 years ago

Text

Review: Institutional Garbage

Critical reviews of books usually serve two functions: to lure readers to read or buy the book in question, or to bolster the significance of the book or its contents.

Reviews of books produced outside of a timeline deemed relevant to their release date are even more garbage-like.

So, what was (or is) Institutional Garbage?

But what (is/was) it really?

(Grimly Familiar) Traces: Jane Lewty’s “Dear Committee [To be Read Alongside CV],” which painfully engages institutional biases around gender and mental health

“What we really want from our time with this book is that which is not this.

I don’t think you mean to sound that way.

Do you mean to say it like this?

Perhaps you can rephrase this.

Can you expand on this?”

To which we respond, of course, always. But not now.

Epilogue:

Make Up the Breakdown: Music as Self-Contained Instruction in 140

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