kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
(via An Interview With Hiromi Tango | Brisbane | The Thousands)
Japanese-born, now Sydney- (but ex-Brisbane) based artist Hiromi Tango is building something I like to refer to as ‘the womb room’ – but is really an installation representing the female reproduction organs of flowers – pistils. ..
SW: Can you tell us about collaboration in your work?
HT: Collaboration is a really difficult word – I’m often asked if my process in collaborative, but it’s actually more site and situation responsive, or conversational. I just respond to those elements. For example, a Japanese tourist just came to say hello as an audience member, and now he’s heavily involved in the project – he’s actually the Assistant Director of the project. He’s making a catalogue and taking lots of photographs and taking a big direction with the work. He absolutely influences the way the project looks, but it’s really about conversation and dialogue. If someone is willing to give happily, then I respond and we respond to one another.
SW: A pistil is also the reproductive organ of a female flower, how is the work you’re making relating to nature? The installation seems very chaotic, but very organic as well.
HT: I guess the inspiration comes from the human organs, or biology that I was interested in. I was always interested in identity. Pistil responded to a personal experience where I nearly lost a close friend in Japan – she lost her home, her neighbours, her only possessions and many lives in a split second. I had no choice to make work about nature and the human condition. It’s not really a deliberate process, but I continue accumulating, generating and editing. Someone told me my work was about loss and accumulation, so I guess I’m confronting those issues in Pistil. The work is lots of things that have been wrapped, so it’s about wrapping emotions. The pistil is the brain part of the flower for my artistic direction and also about the rich emotions we carry that are incomplete or imperfect. I think emotions are organic, like nature. Reality is really tough and regardless of difficult issues, there’s always a way to recover, and this is the object of Pistil.
Queercore shows became more than just entertainment — they became places to cruise, to network, to take self-defense lessons. (via Queer to the Core )
Queercore artists oral history/interview at OUT mag. Bruce La Bruce, Kaia Wilson, Vaginal Davis, Tribe 8 etc.
Poly Styrene interview 1978 (by chatham43)
i cant believe the interviewer asks her about wearing braces and compares her negatively to Linda Ronstadt. OTOH discusses her approach to style and punk being as derivative as any other genre, which was a big part of her appeal re: not being sidetracked by the more insular ‘uniform anti-conformism’ aspects of punk.
- How do you feel about being interviewed?
I feel like a perfectly good potato put through a masher. Nothing comes out the way I expected, and my skin is off, and the solid, sane things get pulped and the whole thing is served up easy to swallow, but not for me. I am still somewhere at the bottom of the masher shouting “I AM A POTATO GET ME OUT OF HERE”.
- Why do you think what you do matters?
Art and potatoes are pretty similar. Everyone needs slow-release energy and something to stabilise the gut. Art does that – it isn’t fast food, but it isn’t fancy food either. It’s the solid stuff of life. I once had lunch at Heston Blumenthall’s Fat Duck at Bray. I was very depressed because I am not a chocolate risotto kind of person. That night I dug up new potatoes from my garden with my hands, steamed them, covered them in olive oil and mint and chives, and ate nothing else. Then I felt better. The same thing happens to me with a book or a painting. It reminds me that life is good and solid, not about money and not about fad.
- Have you ever found true love?
Yes, but then what do you do?
— Jeanette Winterson, on Questions that authors are never asked
(Source: letsplayasong, via loveandzombies)
(via Border Crossings Magazine | Issue 105)
BORDER CROSSINGS: What emerges in your work is that collage is a natural way of recognizing how you view the world. If the world is a broken place, then is collage a way of demonstrating that brokenness or a way of putting it together again?
WANGECHI MUTU: It’s both. Because in the end, the image has a beauty to it. It’s not something I’m afraid to address and I’m not trying to dissuade conversation. I’m optimistic and I believe we grow and will learn to heal. I guess I’m in this in-between situation, culturally, economically and socially, where I’m not ignorant about how these things relate to one another and the bridges between them.
I love collage because I studied sculpture and I’m fascinated by material. The kinds of things I choose in the collage have a very particular resonance for me. So if I pick up a National Geographic or Motorbike magazine, it’s about what it stands for and who reads it and why. What is its purpose and how are women’s bodies used in there?As a woman of colour, how I’m represented in these publications is of absolute relevance and importance to me because it tells me where I stand in that particular culture. So, in that way, collage tells us not just what cultures have produced but what they’ve fostered.
Q Your art is beautiful, but can also be difficult to look at. Why is it important for you to conjure both?
A I think the fact that we can’t agree on what is beautiful and ugly is one of the things my work is founded upon. I don’t go out of my way to do either one or the other, and I don’t see massive divisions between them. It is hard when I ask people what they find beautiful and disturbing in my work, because I don’t always agree. I’m like, “You don’t find this beautiful? It’s beautiful to me.” But the discussion of what is beautiful and what is ugly is really deep and visceral. It’s also a point of contention, because we often have beauty standards that only work in one direction. …
Grace Jones interview on singers copying her style (by iconic)
Transcript: “I don’t do internet, so a lot of people are going, “look at this, look at this, look at that!”
And um, I don’t mind, you know Maddonna used to come around and watch me. I know, from the back of the audience cos kids would say, “You know who’s here? Maddonna is here and so and so watching!”
But theyre looking, theyre searching for inspiration. So, theres one thing - searching for inspiration - but sometimes when you begin it might not necessarily be her that’s doing it. It could be teh machine around her that’s doing it.What I would like to say, if I was having a class of you know, upcoming artists, whatever it is you feel to do, DO IT, before you go looking outside yourself, and then from there you can get a true creation.’
Think this is from her Vogue Italia interview.
Interview with JD Samson of MEN re: their tour with CSS.
SFBG: Why name the band MEN?
JD: The idea for the name came out of a feminist confidence boosting philosophy that Johanna was teaching me. If you are in a club and the promoter is being a dick, don’t apologize to them, or feel guilty for existing. what would a man do? at the time she was telling me this, we were asked for a name for the project and we decided to go with MEN.
via Feminist dance pop: Q&A with MEN’s JD Samson | San Francisco Bay Guardian
KillaQueenz - Pull Up A Chair by GrindinHardwax
No idea why these awesome ladies don’t get more attention. Incredible that people don’t even know ‘Into the Streets’ outside Sydney. Interview here.
(via The Femme Monologues: Documenting queer/femme/feminist history | rabble.ca)
The Femme Monologues: A radio book lounge interview with the creators of a new graphic memoir series
by Marusya Bociurkiw, graphics by Terri Roberton (Xtra!, 2011; )
Ellie Gordon-Moershel interviews Marusya Bociurkiw and Terri Roberton about collaborating on their new graphic memoir series, The Femme Monologues. Written by Bociurkiw with graphics by Roberton, the series appears monthly in Xtra! Toronto and in Capital Xtra! (Ottawa).
The Femme Monologues presents short vignettes from a queer/femme/feminist archive, covering such topics as feminist publishing, women’s dances, the new queer cinema and the re-emergence of butch/femme culture in the 1990s. It features a wide-eyed femme discovering lesbianism, vegetarian food, women’s music and butches for the first time.
art together: mia christopher « Brown Paper Bag
Oh did I mention that Brown Paper Bag have this awesome series, where Sarah of BPB engages with artists through interviews based upon her sending them some art she made, which they visually reinterpret and she then bases her questions on?
Well, now you know.
ladyfest ten week: a chat with MEN « wears the trousers magazine
JD Samson, interviewed by Wears the Trousers mag.
You and Ginger have talked about how current queer/feminist dance music can be seen as shifting from “angry” music to politically “optimistic” music. Can you elaborate on that?
That shift I think began a long time ago when Le Tigre was at the helm of the feminist dance music scene. I think now we are kind of working somewhere down the line from optimistic to thought-provoking. We aren’t happy all the time, we are only realistic, practical and hopeful.
This is a mash up of several very serious interviews that Dawn French (who wrote Absolutely Fabulous) did for her show Girls Who Do Comedy.
This focuses on how women have had to change their personalities for men and it’s really very interesting. I do this with my personality because I’m gay, and even though it is somewhat different, it’s actually the same. It gets so tiring.
Lots of the questions Dawn asks the women comics address how other people respond to them as women known for their intelligence and humour more than their looks.
It’s interesting to hear how differently all these famous comics handle the tension between ‘feminine’ popularity and comic ambition; catering to it, jokily dismissing it, taking control of the situation etc.
I was uncomfortable noticing that the comics who’ve been most stigmatized as ugly, bitchy, lesbian [read: unfeminine] aren’t any more judgemental than Dawn about the desire to reconcille their social lives as women with their ambitions in comedy. They’re just the ones who’ve been more ‘plain’ looking on stage, queer in real life or brashly assertive in their performance.
The consoling point [there is one!] is that these are mainly older women, who started out in an even more conservative, macho climate for live comedy than now, and they’ve all had sucessful careers and personal lives anyway.
