… an article in Hyperallergic introduces me to a feminist film streaming service, Another Screen, which in turn introduces me to a feminist website, Another Gaze, which finally takes me to an article on Cinema Scope, In Search of the Female Gaze, like a series of Russian dolls… a lot to explore… more later…

… [an interesting article](https://hyperallergic.com/647998/what-the-nefertiti-hack-tells-us-about-digital-colonialism/ “Sarah E. Bond: What the “Nefertiti Hack” Tells Us About Digital Colonialism, Hyuperallergic”) on a famous bust of Nefertiti exported by German archaeologists at the turn of the last century… European and American museums house a large amount of antiquities from Africa and other continents, many exported from their countries of origin illegally or under marginally legal circumstances… Europe held the power cards at the time…

A black and white photo of the bust of Nefertiti from a postcard available from the Staatliches Museum, Berlin, Germany (1956) reveals how and why color photography would have been key in the inspection of the Amarna finds in 1912 (image by Brück & Sohn via Wikimaedia Commons).

… the article discusses the impact of colonialism on even the present day digital copies of antiquities with interesting anecdotes on things like the refusal of European institutions to train natives as archaeologists…

Whether in the Antebellum South or in 19th century Egypt, White control over the literacy of marginalized persons has always been a tactic for control. Egyptology did not begin to be decolonized and to encourage the training of native Egyptians within the Antiquities Service until the 1920s. French oversight within the Antiquities Service in Egypt did not end until 1952, after almost a century of colonial control. Mostafa Amer, its first Egyptian director, was appointed in 1953.¹

… Letters from an American, May 24.2021

… we learn about Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and the shocking abduction of Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega (his girlfriend) by forcing the commercial airliner they were on down when it crossed Belarus airspace… Europe and the US are protesting in strong terms, but the question is whether anything meaningful can be done… can the journalist and his girlfriend be saved?…

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, an authoritative scholar of authoritarianism, notes that autocrats are watching to see how the West reacts, since they, too, would like to be able to control their dissident communities in exile, showing them: “You are not safe. You are never safe. Not even if you live in a democracy; not even if you have political asylum; not even if you are sitting on a commercial plane, thousands of feet above the ground.”¹

… of course!… Art Bites!…

… and then i look up one of the recipes and there is nothing in it that connects to art history… hmmm… and then i look up another recipe and it does contain history, like this recipe for chickpea flatbread with olives… this citrus and avocado salad recipe had no history attached to it, but i wonder about the combination of rhubarb and avocado?, hmmm…

Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.¹

… a new motion picture is set to the story of Gary Webb, who ran afoul of the CIA with an expose on the connection between drugs in African American communities and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, supported by the American Government as opposition to the Sandinista government in the 1980’s

Amos Bronson Alcott via Wikipedia

Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.¹

… and yet, most of us struggle to get these simple things right… making it more complicated than it really is… or are we led by a social and economic construct that really doesn’t want us to realize how simple a matter human life is?… if we did, and we were content with it, wouldn’t we buy less?… the bet of consumptive society is that we won’t…

… this photograph of Tina turner and Azzedine Alaia in 1989…

Azzedine Alaïa & Tina Turner, Paris, 1989. © Peter Lindbergh (courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation, Paris)

… wow!…

… J’s birthday… chicken dying, glad i am not the one to deal with it this week, will probably be gone by next weekend… wrote a check that catches us up on medical insurance payments, have not liked the feeling of having to wait, decided that even if i use personal money to do it, it was a nagging thought every month i wanted off my mind… need to start down path of scheduling colonoscopy, i am overdue… getting caught up on medical care post pandemic… we drive over to L’s for brunch today… a cooler day than when we went to J’s… lots of intrusions in my daily routines… want to get back to them…

… nice article in Lenscratch on this Guggenheim Fellow photographer… many amazing images, this is one of my favorites…

©Carl Corey, 8922 • Sault St. Marie, Michigan

… many more in the article…

… an article by Art Blart about the Tate Modern exhibition of her work… i don’t know if the exhibit is still up, but if it were and if i were in London, i would go see it…

There are so many words that you can say about an artist and their work. So many unnecessary words. All you have to do is look at the work. Does it speak to you? does it make you feel, does it empower you?

For me, artists either have it or they don’t… and in this case, visual activist Zanele Muholi possesses it by the bucketful. Panache, flair, downright unclassified fabulousness, call it what you want. They just have it.¹

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007. From the series Being (2006 – ongoing).

… i strike the metal bowl,

… the end of spiritual observance,

… now, what’s not important?

… i read of Kyoto and cuckoo’s cries; roads not travelled and autumn evenings; whitebait with black eyes in nets; felled trees and moonlight; autumn moons and chestnut worms; snowy mornings and dried salmon; crows and bare branches; outhouses, moonflowers and torchlight; crane’s legs shortening in spring rain; how spring implies autumn; weathered bones and wind-pierced bodies; misty rains that obscure Mt. Fuji…

… this is what Basho has to tell me in twelve poems… he makes much of little things, brief crystalline moments… i think back to the irritation of messy food falling in my lap, repeatedly, a little thing, a brief moment, a moment i was alive and present… should i be grateful?…

… it’s Sunday,

… i make the metal bowl sing,

… and read haiku in lieu of prayers.

… long, hot day yesterday… drove down to middle NJ to see J, have lunch… she seems to have landed in a nice place, gated community, mostly white from the few people we saw, though they said their upstairs neighbor is black… it was hot because the AC wasn’t working anywhere on our journey, not the car, not in J’s house… i fixed the AC in J’s house, will have to take the car in to have it’s AC fixed, how much will that cost?…

… after such a long hot day, i was cranky… dinner was a very messy sandwich from Redline Diner which dripped profusely into my lap to my great irritation… then the salsa fell off the chip into my lap on its way to my mouth… pissed off, i tossed the rest of my dinner… H believes i was mad at them for what was ordered, not true, just really pissed that messy food was winding up in my lap even though i was leaning over the table… this is the content of ones life, the inconsequential bits of content that are most of what we experience?…

… thinking about S, thinking my feelings might be jealousy… it would explain my disquiet about them…

… i brought Fiona with me this morning… it limits the picture making but it’s nice to have her along…

… a long article on famous artist pairs who did or did not marry, but maintained long creative careers wherein it sometimes became difficult to parse out who influenced who and what they might have been without one another (the patriarchy has too often assumed that any vigor and brilliance in the woman’s work can be attributed to the man they are with)…

I want to believe that the institution has changed, that there are ways this elaborate ceremony is not as conventionally damning as some make it out to be. If anything, today we are less enamored by the idea that any partnership is for life — even if I have entered it believing this with my heart and soul. Divorce is no longer so scandalous. Love is possible at any decade. Financial security and education point to women marrying later, and to lower birthrates. Yet it still feels like we are struggling, as a culture, to put the female artist on the same pedestal as her male equal, as so many women writers and artists, Paul among them, have pointed out in their lives and in their work.¹

… and this from Toni Morrison via the article…

_I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Before that, all the men I knew did know better, they really did. My father and teachers were smart people who knew better. Then I came across a smart person who was very important to me who didn’t know better.²

… interesting article on the problem with naming women artists, who’s histories are all too often tied up with men more famous then they during their lifetimes… and then there are the ways that the patriarchy patronizes women when it names them…

In 2017, French novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s succinct biography of early 20th-century German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, was published in English. In it, Darrieussecq calls her subject Paula, while the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was her friend, is called Rilke. When asked about this disparity in The Paris Review, Darrieussecq was blunt, “It’s the truth about men and women. It still is. It’s hard to have a name when you’re a woman.”¹

… as in, we haven’t seen from her before… this work is up my alley, no people, just the evidence of people, lots of landscapes scarred by the activities of people… i am not really inspired, but one image is significant to me…

Hannah Taylor

… i have a thing about Christian cross symbolism and utility wires… my images are not about actual Christian crosses in the landscape, but utility poles, which often mimic Christian crosses, and the wires they carry, which bring power and communication to the masses… there is something for me about the connection of communication and symbols of Christianity… haven’t totally put my finger on it, but i collect images that think about it…

… which means there is a bigger investigation going on… this article makes it sound as though it is more about corruption in the prison management system, but the conspiracy theory in most of us would wonder if something more significant is afoot…

… the threat of authoritarianism is global… this article discusses the possibilities in Italy and points to similar rising threats in France and Spain… have the consequences of hard-right nationalism during the 1930’s and 40’s been forgotten?…

… last night i posted on FB that i wasn’t sure what to make of the food insecure arriving at a food distribution center in a Lexus… i saw two of them in line for food this past Wednesday… i saw other cars that, while not considered luxury cars, were new and expensive… in general, it seemed that most in line had relatively new cars… i am not judging here, just trying to understand… are so many people always just a calamity away from being on food lines, outward appearances not withstanding?… do we make car ownership too easy?… do we too easily fling ourselves into debt to live the “good” life, the American Dream?… i’m sure it is more complicated than it looks…

… trying to figure out the order of the day… we should leave for J’s by 10 AM, need to pick up BP meds before, something for desert… i am glad we are seeing J and her new home…

… woke up in the middle of the night, strangely uncomfortable, almost in all over pain, but not quite… eventually, it went away and i went back to sleep…

… Brad Feuerhelm tells us he is a pioneer in the use of color photography, not completely groundbreaking, but with significant accomplishments…

Being first or the most original is not everything. I can say with 100% conviction that though Helmer-Petersen may not have been the first artist to invoke a particular affinity to konkrete Photographie, Deformations (After Penn) geometric abstraction, or silhouetting as found in many of his sub-interests, I can say that his execution of these subjects was masterful.¹

… this need to break new ground, to be masterfully breaking new ground, what is it?… isn’t it enough to be a master of the ground you stand on?…

… these sentences catch my attention…

Largely due to the lack of economy afforded to artists working in photography at the time, unpaid work could largely be de-manacled from its relationship to the market. As the market would not develop in American until the late 1970s, this allowed artist working with the medium in the first half of the twentieth century a freedom to create bodies of work which existed independently from one another. The artists were not expected to form a career from highly stylized and easily recognizable features thus making experimentation a pursuit that would be rewarded with approval from one’s colleagues over the pressures of the gallery to perform sequential hits. The downside of course is that one’s life in photography may continue on forever unobserved outside of intimate circles.²

Elisabeth Van Vyve, Untitled, 1993–2013

© Clément Van Vyve/Collection Bruno Decharme

… Photo Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie at the American Museum of Folk Art, New York City…

_The artist I kept returning to in the show, time and again, is its most spartan and tranquil, an outlier in an assembly of often cacophonous outliers. Elisabeth Van Vyve, a woman with autism and hearing problems who now lives in a retirement home in Antwerp, has used disposable color-film cameras for decades to catalogue her circumscribed visual environment in obsessive detail, creating albums of thousands of snapshots that inevitably evoke the postmodern banal-sublime of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and early Fischli & Weiss.¹

… i read that the Biden/Harris administration is under pressure to do something to alleviate the worldwide microchip shortage… the shortage is impacting the availability and pricing of consumer goods dependent on them and idling workers in manufacturing facilities, “complicating” economic recovery… read more here.

… i am wondering if i should get that new iPhone now?…