Author: dig

Betye Saar at ICA Miami

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The Trickster, 1994 Mixed media tableau

All courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

The Trickster features an anthropomorphic metal sculpture adorned with daggers and chains at its center. Set against a backdrop of camouflage netting and a neon lightning bolt, hands appear to be reaching out of the ground, surrounding the sculpture. The installation is flanked by a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “hoodoo is a blade dat cuts both ways.” In Haitian Vodou as well as the Yoruba and Dahomeyan diaspora, the trickster represents an intermediary, standing at the (spiritual) crossroads between humans and gods. Usually male, Saar’s trickster appears to have female attributes. The figure guards the crossroads for the many hands reaching up from the ground.

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Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight, ICA Miami.

El cuervo, la fosa, y la yegua

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El cuervo, la fosa, y la yegua (The Raven, The Pit, and The Mare), 2021, 16 minutes, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz brings together various forms of non-linear thinking and simultaneous temporalities that challenge traditional ways of reading with El cuervo, la yegua, y la fosa (The Raven, the Pit, and the Mare). Taking as her model a method of Sanskrit poetry that tells two stories in the same text at the same time, Santiago Muñoz explores acts of simultaneous narration to juxtapose images and sounds from seemingly disconnected universes. A madeleine is both a pastry and an idea. Language is historical and abstract. In the “historical now” there is a plastic cup and a robotic arm at the bottom of the ocean. Each day a mare visits a junkyard near an overgrown forest and tries to mate with a Corvette. A traditional Haitian proverb states: the snake can only be measured once it’s dead. Consider things you can’t see but know are real: the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, the Marassa Jumeaux, our attachments to past orders. 

https://mediacityfilmfestival.com/25th-anniversary/beatriz-santiago-munoz/

A related version as an installation (Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021. Two-channel color HD video with sound, 26 minutes.) was featured in Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s video is an interrogation of place, the Caribbean specifically, as well as the medium of film itself.Projecting onto both a traditional screen and a sheer curtain, Santiago Muñoz’s video combines footage from her native Puerto Rico and a 2020 trip to Haiti to visualize links between these places and New Orleans, which is often referred to as “the northernmost Caribbean city.” The film moves swiftly between documentation, interviews, scientific and computer-generated footage, and ethereal imagery, juxtaposing the everyday with the otherworldly while pointing to the ecological and cultural similarities and divergences among these places. Translation emerges as a mode of differentiation: in Puerto Rico, flour and salt suggest bread, but in Haiti they suggest veves—religious symbols used in various Voodoo practices.

The video is at times obscured by a darkness that comes after nightfall in regions that have experienced widespread power outages, like those that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico—familiar to those who experienced Hurricane Ida in 2021 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans. Santiago Muñoz also interrogates the medium of film by the other sense central to film: hearing. What does the taste of salt sound like? Is it possible to translate from one sense to another? Is translation between languages (or places, spaces, perspectives) even truly possible, or is it always merely an approximation?

Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow

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Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Eva Illouz; via themarginalian (2016).

[Eva Illouz] considers how the displacement of religion by secular culture has impacted our ideals and our interior experience of love:

Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.

Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism.

[…] historically, love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.

[…]

To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization.

Review of Eva Illouz’s Work: Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Phillip E. Wegner; jstor (1999).

… it presents such a utopia as alternative to the contemporary world. This opiate does ease suffering but only by providing a compensatory “illusory happiness” that keeps people from engaging in the hard political struggles that would enable them to transform contemporary social conditions, and thereby perhaps begin to realize for the first time “real happiness”, a heaven on this earth.”

Review of Eva Illouz’s The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations; Love for Sale, Anahid Nersessian, nybooks (2022). Nersessian brings tough questions to bear on The End of Love.

“What say you, may I come to your house, about eight—to philosophize?”

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her lover William Godwin

[…] consider the wise words of the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “People are different,”

[…]

While it would be absurd to deny that sex is and has always been indivisible from questions of power, it would be equally absurd to suggest that no one in the ancient world ever had a good time or treated a lover kindly while getting them off. Enlightenment philosophers may have invented the sexual contract, but they did not invent consensual sex.

Why does this matter? For one thing, it points out some difficulties in the study of sexuality. People are different, but difference tends to vanish from the historical record. […] The trouble is that we live at a moment when our basic needs aren’t being met by institutions, and so we are forced to rely on personal relationships to provide us not just with pleasure, excitement, and spiritual growth but with health care and a place to sleep.

[…]

[Illouz] never asks herself if casual sex would be okay (or even awesome) if it happened in another kind of society organized around a different set of values, one in which people truly were free to eat when they needed to eat, rest when they wanted to rest, get medical treatment when they were sick, or fuck when they felt like it. Are dating apps bad in themselves? Or are they bad because the tech companies that profit from them also drive the gentrification that makes Grindr necessary, the bathhouses having long since vanished? To ask a grander question: What would our lives, and not just our sex lives, be like if we thought of pleasure as a social good, to which everyone ought to have access?

Illouz responded to Nersessian : “My modest contribution […] has been to understand how the combined effects of patriarchy, sexual freedom, technology, and the consumer market create a new experience of indeterminateness that has turned heterosexuality into a field rife with struggles.”