body politic (an ongoing space)

Visual art education revolves around a particular group feedback protocol -- often called the "crit." Lots of ink has been spilled questioning the efficacy and political implications of "crits" as a form of collective evaluation  and analysis (for example, see here ,  here , here , here , here , and  here ). This ink spillage brings us to broader questions about institutionality, authority, education, evaluation, aesthetic judgement, and group process. It brings us towards the question of what constitutes "constructive" criticism and towards various attempts to mitigate the potential relational violence of feedback -- for examples, see Liz Lerman's " critical response process " and the much discussed " feedback sandwich ."   As we move towards showing work and responding to each other's work in class tomorrow, I wanted to take a second to think about how we might approach feedback and response. We are in a graduate department de...

My practice is about Chinese (Tibetan) Buddhism. When I went to Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture as a volunteer teacher, my local teaching partner invited me to Langmu Temple which is one of the most famous Tibetan temples in China. There, I learned that Tibetan temples are colleges for those who believe in Tibetan BUddhism. The believers go to the temples and live there for a whole life until in order to become a master. However, in these colleges, the masters do not teach the believers Buddist texts: they do not have lectures or seminars, and what they do in the “class” is merely reading and transcribing the texts even without understanding the meaning (for most of the texts are linguistically translated). According to their belief, if someone has Pannindriya, he will be able to understand the texts without explanation. So I decided to write a piece of Buddhist texts (though not in Tibetan) everyday during this week with Buddist music. This is the link to one of the songs I list...

Here are parts one and two of videos of me making some art in my backyard in Litchfield. This is part of my venture into mixing painting and sculpture to create images the viewer feels they can "enter." Or to create new miniature worlds. I've been doing a few space paintings like this, combining insulation spray foam, drywall spackle, spray paint, and acrylic paint. I like the dual creation of outer space as the place where creation happens as stars are formed, destroyed, and formed again, and physically creating my own outer space. Both outer space and the space of the canvas hold the same limitless possibility- the ability to add on, to pull from, to give birth, to rub against, to rip and tear, to pull apart, to punch a hole through, to cover up, to go over, to build. I have always loved painting- the technique, the sense of pride of the created image. I hate feelings of not knowing what to paint or which direction to take the painting in. One of my art teachers once sa...

Sorry for the late post. My body really got the better of me these last two weeks.  Sometime this past spring, my therapist and I were talking about (my) internalized ableism and how it is that I came to know disability and what it means to be disabled. “Who have been your examples of disability?,” she asked me, or some question like that. This led me to think about several family members (including my mother and my mother’s brother, my uncle, both of whom have the same autoimmune disease as me). Then a few months later, I came to think about Victor. Victor was my cousin. He had been born with sickle cell anemia. He eventually died of complications in early 2000. He was 32 years old at the time. I was 7, just a month away from my 8th birthday. I felt tremendous guilt when I eventually thought of Victor and realized that it had taken me so long to think of him, that I had forgotten to think of him, that I had forgotten him in relation to this important, emerging part of my life. Tha...

 Here's a little voice recording. Thanks for listening! 

re-reading this feels like it was months ago -  i refuse your orange filigree an opportune refusal of every transient preoccupation  with the tantamount in everything always already foreclosed upon entering for being forthright is not a general expectation for arrival upon the stage of intimate relation i'm not apologizing , this is the way I say goodbye wordless and long standing the drapes settle around what wasn't said to be agreeable, desireable, or even ready for the next approbation, elision, or prevarication don't you see how pertinent the text on the wall is now that the building is destroyed? now that the story of architecture has a proper ending, an apotheothis, a long list of footnotes, beside annotated eulogies-for floors, bannisters, vestibules, counters, and miles of moulding. This is before glass so the shards stay suspended in the speculative cloud, exhausted by the anticipation of epiphany. I didn't sign the lease because i've smelled fraudulence be...