ABOUT THE READINGS

We begin with “Subversive Beauty: New Modes of Contestation” by bell hooks from her book Art on My Mind (1995). In this piece, she writes about the work of Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The short text holds close intimacy (of loss and of love) in Gonzalez-Torres' work as well as their shared celebration of beauty as an act of resistance. Note from Eloise: this text was the first text I read that showed me that a historian, critic, or writer of art can reveal and be as vulnerable as the artist.

About “​​Art on My Mind Visual Politics” by bell hooks, 1995

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

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Secondly, we move on to Rituals of Closure in “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” by Byung-Chul Han. Together, we will explore the means by which identity is exploited as a means to extract ourselves into a community of communication without connection, and how the ‘deep-time’ of ritual is a counter-force to these challenges.

About Rituals of Closure in “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” 

 We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behavior has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication - where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning - to today's communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. 

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For the third reading group text, we will read “On How To Swim & On How To Hold It Together” from “On Not Knowing: on how to love and other essays” by Emily Ogden. In these pieces, Ogden write about fear, of distance and depth, and the ever-present leviathan which she explores through the daily life of parenthood, kayaking, and swarms of birds and fish. All of this is to address her not knowing and to find ways of holding it together.

About  “On Not Knowing: on how to love and other essays” 

Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.

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For the fourth group, we will read “The Right To Grieve” by Erik Baker written for the magazine Jewish Currents. Baker writes, "Grief is a threat to the peculiar way capitalism expects workers to relate to their time: as something objective, homogenous, and alienable; a commodity that can be signed over to an employer." In this session, we will explore grief and mourning as a corporeal, physical and embodied reality that cannot be ‘planned’ and utilized in a protestant and capitalist form of productivity.

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Our final texts come from Chroma: A Book of Color by Derek Jarman, we will read “Into The Blue” and ”Iridescence”. We chose to read from this book as Jarman began writing this book as he began to lose his eyesight. We wish to end the reading group with this book to celebrate color and aesthetics that sometimes is dismissed because it is seen as ‘frivolous’. We think that Jarman shows that when it comes down to it, color and our experience of it is much like what bell hooks write about in her piece on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “This art returns us to experience, to memory. What we feel and know with our senses determines what this absence means”.

About Chroma: A Book of Color by Derek Jarman, 1993

Chroma: A Book of Color is a meditation on the color spectrum by Britain's most controversial filmmaker. From the explosions of image and color in Edward II, The Last of England, The Garden, and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Derek Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classic theory, anecdote and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams.