I am, talking in images

and then she said ...

binoculars on girls on safari

rough and ready - the les of the future-past/ past-perfect?


And for consideration in our list of titles: breasts of the 70s, 80s, 90s and today

Intervention or enough said?

The JD Set, a collective of four young documentary filmmakers, will be present at the screening of their first full-length feature Katy Perry Dumped Me for a Straight Girl during the Highlight Queer Film Festival. It is rumoured that Beatrice Krill worked as screenwriter on the project, but when asked The JD Set said, ‘we did dial her phone number. But she doesn’t really answer the phone. We bumped into her one night at a party and she was really enthusiastic about what we were doing. After that we lost touch. She has a credit in the film though. We called her ‘Fog, Mist and Wind operator’ even though the film is dominated by clear skies.’

Does BK Like Baba Ghanoush?

friends to watch out for

• Article in this weeks NZ Listener on 'It gets better'

• The street-facing lightboxes' audience will include taxi-drivers waiting in the taxi stand. I noticed one driver today who had a cross with Jesus on it dangling from his rear view mirror

out in high school

well, I wasn't ...

here's a cunning comparison though, mmm

addicted to the media much?

Interrupting this broadcast for a couple of newsflash images

so you might have seen them already but! feeling the need for some visual text-tone xx rooooaaaarrrr!!

Rach, Marnie, Clare, you'd all look hot in these. Old/new YUSS

news of the minute: 'out and proud' objects

(This post relies heavily on the images that might potentially form in your cerebral areas)

http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/4289463/Out-and-proud

I feel that the projected reader of this article is intended to be other than glbt - or it is addressed to 'dominant' hegemony or perceptions of sexuality (strongly aligned with gender stereotypes, even if there is an attempt being made to dismantle some of them).

It's not really addressed to the glbt reader (or a reader sensitive to glbt experience). Or if it is, then the glbt reader must ghost as a non-glbt reader for a time, or draw on a time prior to their adoption of glbt circumference, or draw on a communal memory of a time prior to glbt-dom, if they were lucky enough to have not needed to adopt glbt radius, pie or square root, and instead were 'born as'). For example it's not saying anything directly about the different lifestyles, beliefs or attitudes that glbt individuals have or lead. Nor how glbt might see the world in relation to other glbt people - not to mention attitudes to war, nationalism, identity, gender, relationships, etc. which are mono-mobilized and for me remain unsung here.


You can be gay and own a poster signed by ye-olde-Bush - and that liberal-meets-conservative contradiction (a hinted-at contradiction seems to be a recognizable form of normative subjectivity in the context of this article) is then mobilized to absorb the homosexual into an 'open' reality that has strict border controls. It's a doubling of 'contradiction' that acts as a means for absorption and absolution...

It's the petty relocation or shuffling of difference in this kind of article or address, which makes glbt experience appear mono-cultural to me.

AND it brings up the power-ambiguity of subjectivity.

If Hito was trying to think through an alternative to the power-ambiguity of subjectivity, proposing the historically bruised (or contingency-bruised) object, what are we left with as far as tools, thoughts, sensations, to live, work and act as or with:

• a community of objects
• objects which circulate a tangible uninhibited humanity
• objects that can/can't possibly breach everyday humanity
• objects that forage on the outskirts of power-as-humanity
• objects of communities; a cancellation or corroboration of non-mono-subjective humanity
• ...?

(phew...)

And a recap re: Sophie Calle via Yve-Alain Bois (Lecture)

Calle conjures the indefatigable reader

There is an overflow of affect (via anticipation) – there is a countdown and then an encounter

And the encounter is entropic

She pretends to be building a character

She makes manifest contingency

And the tragedies of impersonation

I respond:

She would remove her glasses and begin at the farthest point her sight allowed a figure to be defined. The closer the figure got, the harder it became for her to see in any detail the figure as it persisted into near distance. Sometimes she would resort to her prescription lenses to take in the full force of the figure’s advance.

Lesbian Gaizzzzz

Hey was looking around for some theories that might help with thinking about commercialised images of lesbians in relation to a viewing public, this is all i got to so far though:

"Diana Fuss tackles most directly the mobilisation of a lesbian gaze within this cultural field [fashion photography] which ‘provides a socially sanctioned structure in which women are encouraged to consume, in voyeuristic if not vampiristic fashion, the images of other women’ (Fuss, 1994:211). For Fuss this process by which women come to look as though they were lesbians entails, as she put it, ‘consuming’ images of women whose poses range from the coy to the aggressive. And this spectorial position is triggered by the distinctive codings which are specific to fashion photography many of which rely on, as Rabine points out, the fragment of the body, showing body parts in pieces, cropping the body to show either torso, or legs or in the case of the images Fuss looks at, seemingly disembodied faces ‘detatched from any visible body. These images of body parts .... "

bla bla fetish Kristeva bla bla Oedipalisation Freud bla bla

"… Fuss demonstrates how fashion photographs have to be able to generate homosexual desire so that it can be properly eliminated, but in so doing there is also a production of ‘lesbian desire within the identificatory move itself’. However, as she goes on to say, this lesbian eroticism is so apparent, so visible for all to see, that this obviousness actually also immediately negtes the ‘homoerotic structure of the look’. The illicit desire is ‘harnessed’ in the very process of being invoked as something that exists and that has to be contained and controlled. Thus there is a mobilisation of homosexual desire within an overarching visual economy which at the same time forbids it, producing it in order to say no. Or as if to say ‘better get it over and done with here and by these means’. These photographs therefore flirt with the viewer in a game which both allows the desire expression, and then reminds the viewer of the high cost attached abandoning herself to those desires. Fuss describes this as the ‘strategic deployment of a homospectorial look’(ibid: 227) So precarious is the passage for the woman or girl into required heterosexuality, that, especially in a commercial field given over to expanding the pleasures of feminine consumption, it takes immense efforts to bring this unruly terrain to order, and in a marvelous passage Fuss explains that the work of the fashion image is to provoke this desire so that it can be ‘channeled (or Chaneled)’ (idib:227). And unlike the viewing position supposed by the medium of film, the position ‘mapped by contemporary commercial fashion photography can be read … as feminine, homosexual, and pre-oedipal’ (ibid:228) …"

From: Angela McRobbie The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, 2009, Sage Publications, London, pp 106-7

Images worth linking to for article - no really!!! http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/versace-fall-08

24 Years Out

Still enjoying thinking about the specificity of Douglas Crimp's stories via audio to rendering a particular scene, place, time and attitudes in 1970's New York.

So, following up Liz's comment/link from So Gay Right Now, here's a collection of herstories through audio, navigating through New Zealand's 1986 law reform: Radio New Zealand: 20 Years Out! (2006). To play excerpts, see index on the right hand side.

In particular, in thinking of activating a visible private space in public space...

Segment 4: Except 1: This started as a campaign in our interests, but it has become wider – Bill Logan (1′04″). LAGANZ 0502-A. Public meeting to launch the "Coalition to Support the Bill". (11 July 1985) [Public meeting, unknown recorder].

Segment 5: Excerpt 1: A closet is a very dangerous place to be - Alison Laurie (1″09″). LAGANZ 0503-B. Bigot Busters rally at Wellington Town Hall attended by 1400 people. (21 May 1985) [Public meeting, unknown recorder] - her full speech here.

Segment6: Excerpt 3: Lesbian reaction to the loss of Part Two (2′28″). LAGANZ 0507-A. (20 April 1986) [Lesbian Programme – Access Radio Wellington] - later amended in the Human Rights Act of 1993.

Most of the audio is from the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (LAGANZ), based at the ATL in Wellington.

World Contemporaneity

From a recent BBC report about attacks on Ugandans outed as gay.

From Wikipedia: Homosexuality in society

A bit of a crude map above. Whilst local laws signify social attitudes, I guess what the map fails to articulate (as most statistics and graphs do) is the complexity of how various countries deal with 'illegal' or socially unaccepted practices within daily society and culturally.

Douglas Crimp

Nice talking tonight, and facking delicious snacks R!

Some L Day (!) listening:

Douglas Crimp on Gordon Matta-Clark

Lip Service: New BBC Lesbian Drama

A review...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/oct/09/lip-service-bbc3-lesbian-drama

A link to episode 1

http://www.episodeswatch.com/lip-service-season-1-episode-1/

Imaging (in) three times a lady

about time I put a self-generated picture up, much? This is a bit of a precious diary-istic image for moi but in the public version it goes something like this:

The forms are a direct reference to the teachings of the foundation course of the Bauhaus, where artists like Kadinsky believed that it was possible to reduce all form and colour down to a few essential combinations, and so came up with red cube, yellow cone, blue sphere (although there was some controversy about this decision, ha ha, imagine it!). Anyhow, I started working on this for a show called "necessary conditions: free school" and think of them as learning forms, basic, simple, metaphorical etc. How do they relate to this project?? In a contemporary context is homosexuality still a spot the difference game? Which one of these forms is not like the other? Seriously!

so Gay right now

hi! hey! hi!

sooooo contemporary homosexuality huh...

now now now!

as opposed to that ol fashioned kind, where are those old fashioned homos these days?

and what are they wearing? Hi vis gear? or is that us" us the contemps?

Homosexual Law Reform Bill right? is that a signpost? Destiny's Church, are they the past future?

is contemporary homosexuality ubiquitous via the queer spectrum?

will the metro-sexual survive the conservative backlash?

are we seeing ourselves reflected in the mainstream media and liking it?

this is so gay, l it,

can't wait to skype tomorrow w you all,

here's a lite offering towards the pool of ideas/research"": http://effingdykes.blogspot.com/

xxxxxL

Some curatorial thoughts

'Interlocking Girl Circles' could be a great alternative title to this project...?

And just to throw some other general thoughts and questions out there.

As we have entered this project under the loving mantle of homosexuality, should the project address contemporary homosexuality? How might it do that? As text? As subtext? Does that help generate aesthetics/imagery?

The idea of collaboration has come up. Is that realistic? Possible given distance isn't looking our way?

It would be good to know what/how you are all thinking etc. In general how best to progress this project?

Could we all post about this rather than comment? It's annoying the comments stay buried a click behind - I have tried to change the settings but without any luck...