I was in a rare mood just now. You know: blood sugar; all food is unattractive; you can’t find your handful of quarters for the meters; there is a DirecTV van in the parking spot you use in front of your house; you get a losing lottery ticket; you receive an email for an event and you’re, like, personally offended that you are getting spammed. The last one was particularly aggravating since today I received at least seventy five percent bad email.
The power of email has not yet been described accurately by media. Do we even know how to characterize our relationship to email? Unlike the phone, which delivers its messages less frequently and almost always to just you, personally, emails are constantly hitting you with information: general, trivial, unpleasant, funny (usually not). You get news, bills, forwards, spam, spam poetry, gossip (general), gossip (personal). Important stuff, less-important-than-dust stuff. It’s so stressful to sort through it sometimes. Often it feels like it is totally without reward. When you eliminate the spam with a spam folder, and then gradually decide that almost everything not to you personally from a human being should go in the spam folder as well, do you miss it? You still have to check it all the time. I go back and forth: sometimes I check my phone and see that there is a sale on lobster at Legal Seafoods online. I put it in spam. Then months later I look in my spam and I think, oh, how sad. I do like Legal Seafoods.
Since email is often boring, undramatic to portray in art (a person staring into a computer. When will this ever convey the drama that happens here in life? When will I watch a movie and see someone check an email and care? It has not happened yet for me, even though it has for many of my favorite critics), and constantly gettin’ at you, it doesn’t have that punch-to-the-gut as a phone call would. Information over the phone gives you the opportunity to emote right back. There is no time to think! Feelings are in real time. With email, the delay takes the buzz away from your reaction, and the feeling of always having to get back to someone about something from days ago is oppressive. It’s a numb, dreary sensation, getting back to the emails.
At the same time, I hate talking on the phone and it’s great to be able to muse on this or that, when emailing, and think “this person will read this at their leisure. If they have nothing to say right now, they’ll say something later.” It’s nice to send an email, isn’t it? Ahhh. You can take your time with it, too. You can use a complicated metaphor and go back and delete it and nobody will ever know. Best of all, you’ve had a quiet conversation with yourself, essentially. You took a monologue. Even a small email is perfectly encapsulated because it’s an entire thought surrounded by silence. It requires full attention to understand. You can also smoke, or eat a burger, or sit in your underpants as you converse via email — nobody can hear you chew, or interrupt you to say, “Are you in your underpants? I got that feeling. Like you were.”
In a perfect world, people would have no jobs other than to respond promptly and emotionally to their emails. Every single one. Spam would be sent by people who would read these responses and be affected by them. Our movies would change: every relationship would have an email component, and when people sat down at the computer, you would expect a real shitstorm, with crying. Our novels would have big chunks of email exchanges, bam-bam-bam, back and forth, and it wouldn’t be clunky and ruin the book for me, it would be well-executed and make sense and be tense and exciting. Either our whole email system has to change, or our art can never reference emails, ever again. This is the rule I’m making right now.
![Marilyn Minter, Wangechi Gold 3, 2009
via www.contemporaryartdaily.com
“The Female Gaze: Women Look At Women” at Cheim & Reid
Artists: Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramovic, Ghada Amer, Diane Arbus, Vanessa Beecroft, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Kathe Burkhart, Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria Civera, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Anh Duong, Judith Eisler, Tracey Emin, Ellen Gallagher, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Chantal Joffe, Deborah Kass, Maria Lassnig, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Marilyn Minter, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, Collier Schorr, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, Hannah van Bart, Hellen van Meene, Kara Walker, Francesca Woodman, Lisa Yuskavage
Take a look at the lineup of women in this show. It is really impressive….dare I say, canonical? There are a scant few ladies here who seem to be missing (the work of Wangechi Mutu, for example, is not included in the show, however, her mouth is, courtesy of Marilyn Minter [above]), but overall it seems like a fairly comprehensive list. Hyde-do you approve of the title? It’s not so original, but it’s also not Bitch is the New Black. In college my final project for a course on feminism and the visual arts was titled Women Doing Women. It was really nothing at all like this show, but it was influenced by a lot of the women in this show, and, well, the titles are not so dissimilar.](http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/b1174c1e.jpg)
![this is so impressive. reminds me of the work of another ballpoint artist, Il Lee, whose work I think presents a really great contrast to this. (see above) same medium, equally as obsessive, yet completely different.
simko:
Ballpoint Pen Drawing by Juan Francisco Casas…
They may look like pin-sharp photographs - but these amazing pictures are actually drawings created with the humble ballpoint pen. The stunning pictures, measuring up to 10ft high, were drawn by Juan Francisco Casas. Casas, 31, can use up to four 14p ballpoint pens for a canvas. Formerly a traditional painter, Juan began the drawings three years ago based on photographs of nights out with his friends.
[Casas] admires the “simplicity” of the ballpoint pen, invented in 1938 by Hungarian Laszlo Biro. Casas said: “I guess it started off as a joke, to try and make something so realistic that people would think is a photo. I also wanted to create it with something that everyone has - a Biro. I don’t think it has ever been done before. For me it’s not that different from painting. I was trying to show that it doesn’t matter what material you use, it’s what you do with it.” The only drawback is that he can’t erase any errors. He said: “Mistakes are the main problem. It’s better if I make them at the beginning.” (via)](http://26.media.tumblr.com/eEpoSv5pDq9e2h94EwuUhQsLo1_500.jpg)
