anonymous answers to “what makes your nervous” and “when has a part of your body felt outside of your control”?

v = = = ~1

+11 v!!x

- x + 2 ~1-

crushes make me nervous

I don’t like the mole on my back being pulled

spitting blood in the cvs parking lot

my clit during orgasm is out of control

At 3:34pm on February 1st, I was surprised by someone, a person I didn’t want to see. I felt invaded. At one point, we became engaged physically, and rage began to direct my body. I felt unconscious. Out of control. 

Sid Branca, video stills from girls room, a media performance work in progress

from the group show Hysteria! Visualizing Female Anxiety, curated by Carmilla Dirt at Templehead Gallery, Chicago, 2013

What was a time when you felt some aspect of your body was outside of your control?

(this is for a performance piece I’m doing later) 

“On the other hand, a lot of anti-makeup sentiment– particularly anything that starts talking about how “frivolous” and “shallow” makeup is– is also misogynistic and femmephobic. Makeup is a form of visual art. If making your face beautiful is shallow, so is making a canvas beautiful or a block of marble or a hunk of plastic. If you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when they make a gorgeous print, you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when their makeup looks perfect. I do not think it is accidental that the form of visual art almost entirely practiced by women is the one that gets accused of frivolity and where the talent exhibited by many of the artists is ignored or denigrated. - Ozy Frantz”

—

Other People’s Makeup Use: None Of Your Business – Ozy Frantz’s Blog (via brute-reason)

Draw on everything 2k13 has definitely extended to All Cat Eye All The Time.

(via bananafin)

sid’s brain fumes on this:

I also think that there’s something at play here about ephemerality, and how it relates to gendered attitudes about creative output.

A completely not-backed-up-by-anything claim that I have found to be true in my personal observations: The more physically imposing a medium, the more strenuous to work with, it is not only seen as more long-lasting, but often both a) of greater import and b) coming from a more masculine source. What up marble sculpture and steel skyscrapers? I see u there, with your gravitas and your hot, sweaty men wielding dangerous tools. If “women’s media” are textiles, paintings, drawings–things that do not last–pretty, delicate things that must be preserved by men with disposable income, then cosmetic art is an even more palpable example of this.

You paint your face and it lasts mere hours. It is assumed that you do not do this for yourself, to bring yourself pleasure through your personal aesthetics, but for male attention and/as material gain. It is considered shallow, pointless, not art but fashion–as if the distinction between those two things has ever been unproblematic. Just because it is not lasting, that does not mean it cannot be art. Look at theatre, some of which is inextricably caught up in the idea of the ephemeral performance, the moment that is unrepeatable. Only those lucky enough to be in the audience (/in your presence) at the right moment will catch this specific aesthetic experience.

Makeup, like literally every form of aesthetic choice-making, can be a tool. A tool for personal creative expression, for conformity, for rebellion, for political statement, for getting laid, for hiding something, for emphasizing something, for putting up barriers and for taking them down. (The choice of the absence of makeup is, of course, folded into all of this as well.) And sure, it can be shallow.That is totally also okay. But it doesn’t have to be, and categorically writing it off as a shallow and heteronormatively feminine (and it doesn’t have to be) form of aesthetic expression is symptomatic of some super wack nonsense about gender and ephemerality.

Apologies for the incoherence of that rambling, I haven’t finished my coffee yet and may change my mind about all of this by the end of the day.

amandapalmerphotos:

Kickstarter backer art party

This speaks volumes, I think, about Amanda Palmer’s relationship with her fans. Yes, you can say that these images show us that she’s an exhibitionist, a narcissist, that she loves an excuse to get naked in public–all of those things are presumably true to some extent, and I see no problem with any of those things in the way she engages with the media – but the thing I think is important here is trust. She trusts her fans, not only with her music, not only with intimate information about her life via her blog, but with her body in all its vulnerability.

That is huge, especially in an era of bodyguards and guardrails and a Berlin Wall of personal assistants, and a general cultural attitude that treats celebrities as beings that are somehow physically manifest differently from all the rest of us, with our weird corporeal bodies. This kind of relationship to audience is more Marina Abramovic than American Idol, and I think that is what rock n roll is all about.

Wake up. The body next to you is yours. The body you are in is yours. They are both on lease–one from heartache, one from death. Here, let us take solace in the light of morning, in the smell of smoke, in the sound of fabric moving. The shape of your mouth on my face will keep the world at bay, for a moment.

When men sleep, their souls nest in their shoulders, fluttering through collarbone and scapula, wire’s glow and muscle’s sheen. I link my fingers with the tendrils of sleep and this sweet pacing lulls me. I am always on fire, I am always on fire.