This ‘postcard’ came about while I was working on the Brooklyn Art Library’s sketchbook project. I have always been energized by spirit of the Dada period, so I began by constructing a story from words cut from a book (like some dada poetry), then alternating pages with art I am makinig on teabags, featuring artists from the period. I made a conscious effort to represent female and male DADA artists 2:1, respectively in order to reverse the narrative of the male centered culture in art. I am creating these works infused with the artist’s style and then posting tidbits of their history on my Instagram page @mary_art_girl, along with the corresponding image I have created. This art is then sewn into my sketchbook.

A reflection on the nature of fame in the digital age. Source image is a picture of Emma Watson, put through each filter that is available on instagram. Superimposed is a text, which originally read “I’m in love with the real Emma Watson.” The text was then put through various translations through google chrome, ultimately being translated into Japanese then turned into word art using Microsoft Word. A sprite of a car featured on the 1986 Sega Genesis game, Out Run, was also pasted onto the bottom of the picture as a reference to the depictions of artificial love and rampant capitalism that was a staple of that era in Japan. The image file was then put into a hex editor where line 0006960 of the hexcode was edited to include Shakespere’s Sonnet 69. Line 000A420 was also editted to read “The Real Emma Watson.” The result was an entirely corrupted file of the original image. It is worth noting that any reupload of this image would ultimately alter the hexcode of the file itself due to compression.

Lee Brewster was a gay drag queen who successfully fought to have laws against public crossdressing in New York City overturned in the 1970s. He organized popular drag balls, started the Queens Liberation Front, published Drag magazine, and owned and operated the Mardi Gras boutique—one of the few places in the 1970s where gay and straight crossdressers could discreetly shop for women’s fashions sized and styled for them.

– transgenderarchives.ca

Language is kinetic, geometric, recombinant, and open to mutation. Loy understood this. Do we yet understand this? May we not yet split alphabetic characters and take up meaning-making in all of its geometries of possibility? Loy imagined a toy that is a poem—a poem in the hand—that could lead us into language so that we could grasp (hold!) its concrete relation to nature, to the world of force, weight, and dimension. If you are curious (hold your curiosity, love your curiosity) read about “Prototyping Mina Loy’s Alphabet” at Feminist Modernist Studies (Taylor & Francis https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmd20)

Unmapping the Caribbean

What would a map of sanctuary look like? As artists and educators we, Tao Leigh Goffe and Alicia Grullón, began with this question in the contemporary moment of migration crisis as part of New York University’s Sanctuary Coalition. Together we are embarking on a digital artistic collaboration that anchors sanctuary as deeply rooted in the Caribbean as the crucible of the Americas. How can one map the intimacies of four continents, to evoke Lisa Lowe’s reconstellation of the historiography of the Americas, with the Caribbean plantation as focal point? Framed by fugitivity we examine the potential and limitations of mapping African and indigenous presences across the archipelago. This postcard is a love letter of sorts, printed and posted from the diaspora, situating New York as a Caribbean city. Here we are engaged in a practice of unmapping through the body, forming a counter-map of sanctuary through memory and music.

Stills from a collaborative dance + poem composed of, and in response to, quotations from and “exposures” (questions found letter-by-letter inside the sentences) of Isadora Duncan’s “The Dancer of the Future,” and Martha Graham’s Blood Memory, plus excerpts from “Landmarks” by Robert MacFarlane, “An Island Transformed” on govisland.com, and transcripts of conversations between Rebecca Pappas and Katy Didden about Governor’s Island.
Performed on 9/23/2018 on Governors Island, as part of the Works on Water + Underwater New York residency.
Link to poem on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/katy-didden/outside-of-the-air-4

Lately, and rightly, society has been equating turning out from the center with forward movement. Questioning the fundamentals of our social infrastructure is absolutely essential to progress, and so perhaps one of the key differences between the Avant Garde and the En Dehors Garde is the intent: Avant Gardists intend to move themselves ahead of their time, En Dehors Gardists intend to help culture keep up with the times.

But fundamentally, we end up with a rectangle versus a square problem. Forward movement, as conceived by the Avant Garde or the En Dehors Garde, necessitates turning away from the center, but does turning away from the center necessitate forward movement?

A revolution can start and end at any point in the circle. If we think in a political context, which is inextricably linked to this conception of the En Dehors Garde, a turn away from the center can have a very ugly, regressive consequence indeed. We traditionally don’t ascribe any evils to the center of the political spectrum, even if we see value in being left or right of center as well, so long as we are not too far.

I guess what I am asking here is whether the En Dehors Garde is synonymous with progress, or at least progressiveness? If it is, what are our definitions of progressive?