Untitled, 2004, by Emma Bee Bernstein

Hello lovely revolutionaries! Welcome to 2010! ObjectifyThis has recently relocated to New York, delaying posts on this blog in favor of searches for shelter, income, and long-lost friends.

However, I’ll be sure to get back atcha as soon as my schedule allows. I look forward to any semblance of monotony, believe me.

In the meantime, here’s an intense and haunting memorial to Emma Bee Bernstein, a feminist and photographer after Francesca Woodman’s troubled and troubling vision of the female.

Let’s celebrate her insight and her work while recognizing that, as her collaborator and friend Nona Ellis Aronowitz reminds us more than once, suicide is not romantic.

Emma and Nona waitressed and hostessed to afford a heady, two-month road trip across the U.S, speaking to women along the way about feminism and the roles that sex and gender play in their lives. The book of their writing and photography, GirlDrive, is an informed, intergenerational inquiry into the meaning that the women’s movement has or can have, and the obstacles to a unified, positive identity for women as a political group with common needs and communal power.

Nona continues their work together with a hard-hitting blog, in which she argues, amongst other things, that there might be logical reasons that young women were inspired to vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

This week, driving to New York with a car full of worldly goods, I shook my fist at an NPR piece about women and power parroting the same outraged quotations from Geraldine Ferraro (the first female vice-presidential candidate) that Nona decries.

I didn’t feel comfortable voting for Hilary because, while I believe that women can run countries, I didn’t like her politics. Ultimately, she is another politician. Ultimately, she is deeply allied with an administration that strengthened big business’ hold on the senate during its time in power, an administration that whose largest single day of bombing in the Balkan conflict occurred the same day as the Columbine High School shootings and Clinton’s heartfelt condemnation of the “terrible” events in Littleton, Colorado.

And most importantly, wouldn’t it be just as insulting to vote for her because she’s a woman, because her victory would be historic, as it would be to deny her a vote because she’s a woman? In the NPR piece, Anne Kornblut tells Tom Ashbrook that she’s not sure that Americans will elect a woman anytime soon, but fails to recognize that this job is hardly a prize.

As she notes, politics is an ugly place; it is especially ugly for women, because of our culture’s relative tolerance of sexism. But there are women who succeed in politics; it’s not too ugly for women. And there are male politicians who have ugly experiences in poltics; it’s not just ugly for women.

The Onion was right to run the headline Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job when Obama was elected. So far, we have seen him lose popular support as he prioritizes and appears to move away from his broad promises of “change” we “can believe in.” We have seen racist cartoons, we have seen the widespread celebration of the 2009 Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad “That Ain’t My America,”– with its veiled racism, which is reminiscent of the hotly contested veiled racism of their other work. We have seen the president attacked for taking his wife to musical in New York, we have seen insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry thwart a real overhaul of the healthcare system, we have seen him choose to continue a war in Afghanistan in spite of the knowledge that counterinsurgency is unlikely to succeed, at best. (See Nasser Hussein’s forthcoming article in Boston Review, which will be online 1/14/10).

Yet, despite all of this ugliness, despite his compromises, I am glad to have Obama as our president because I believe that he has the right intentions, and that he is doing what he can to bring about some positive social change. If Hillary were in his place, I wouldn’t have that faith; I think she’s been accepting corporate handouts for too long. But in her defense, she would have fired Blackwater. That’s a step in the right direction.

That’s pretty much the spirit of the first poetry movement of the 21st century: semi-dadist riffing with Googleian specifics.

It’s an interesting metaphor for modern consciousness– globalization has brought the information age, and with it zillions of esoteric facts and tabloid-worthy memes of celebrity gossip and pornographic images and pure bullshit. It’s all designed to compete for our attention– so why not poetry?

Poetry has so long been about “mak[ing] it new”, at least according to Ezra Pound. If this is true, the flarf movement is a logical consequence of the reaction between the aftereffects of modernism and the short attention span of the information age.

This is poetry that does not just talk about stalking Walt Whitman’s ghost through a supermarket in California or lusting after the compact and delicious body of an unavailable woman across a restaurant but actually dares to use the raunchy, politically incorrect lingo of the mind at work.

I’m intrigued by the offbeat associations of the flarf movement, which arise from internet searches but often create the feel of the harrassed metropolitan consciousness. Is this postpost-modernism? The rise of a new avant-apathy? A Baudelaire-worthy reinvention of the art form? Or is this just a bunch of people who like to get together and say ‘kike’ and have discovered that people will publish them?

However you classify it, it’s surprisingly formal. Flarf originated on a listserv and initially required an ethnic slur in each poem.  Of course, on first glance, using slurs is objectification — but any complete condemnation of ethnic slurs is as complex and repressive as their reclamation. But Flarf did not necessarily attempt to reclaim slurs (which is fortunate, since identity politics, and especially reclamation, can be so fraught) so much as to dare to pull them out of our cultural closet.

This contemporary excavation of our cultural flotsam and jetsam does not necessarily make Flarf more accessible than traditional modernist poetry– in fact, ethnic slurs are so taboo that even employing them in a lighthearted way in public alienates many audiences as much as any other in-joke.

Yet such offense arises because these words have a special magnitude; they threaten the humanity of groups of people en masse, and thus groups of people censure them. But which is more harmful— the power that we assume they possess, or the imposition of censorious restrictions on linguistic agency?  What could be more apt celebration of slurs’ rebirth as tools of agency than the reincarnation of lingusitic arts in a freer form?

Perhaps poetry, which for so long attempted to bring us images (which video technology now does better) and sounds (which audio technology now does better) in pleasing patterns (which are now trite) or realistic representations of the mind at work (which too often require too much of the modern attention span) has finally found its hook: the magic words that will make people stand up and shout, “What!?”

Flarf is nonsensical, at times, but also funny, poignant, and surprisingly affective, as if a pastiche of random, specific cultural icons and slurs were the only way to truly personalize communication all along. Go try it, cracker. You might like it.

For more about Flarf, wiki Flarf, read about Flarf in The Brooklyn Rail or listen to the Poetry Foundation’s “Excuse Me While I Offend You” podcast from their Poetry Off the Shelf series.

Yet the girls depicted in Fafi’s work straddle the line between pornography and anime, calling to mind both the psuedo-demure look of the woman playing the little girl- objectifying herself – and the real woman’s conscious employment of her own sexiness for attention and power. A google image search for  Fafi  reveals more pin-up style cliches than cigarette-smoking discontents, but Fafi’s characters often retain a sex-goddess defiant sneer that reveals that they’re just in this for the money, and they’re ready to go home to their cat and watch 30 Rock.

I may be exaggerating some of the agency here- there are certainly some wardrobe malfunctions going down, which are the classic passive-aggressive expression of an objectified female sexuality. It’s interesting, though, that Fafi dubs her creations “funny, sexy, or aggressive” – all the erect nipples do imply arousal and an intent to titillate the viewer, meaning that both character and audience participate actively in the sexual interaction of viewing and being viewed.

Fafi’s art includes some peieces about racial beauty standards, including this one to the right. But most of her work centers on a sexy white female character who is actively soliciting sexual attention from the viewer. Notable exceptions include ‘Angelina,’ who is paying no attention to the viewer since she’s jacking off on a bearskin rug, and ‘Irina’, who is playing with death heads on sticks – perhaps a postmodern reading of the angel-and-devil advisors that originated in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus?

Or maybe I’m just giving Fafi too much credit here.

“Fafi has completed murals throughout the world in places such as the United States (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco), Japan, Germany, Belgium, Tunsia, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and Hong Kong. In December 2002, Sony released her time-capsule toy set featuring six of her characters and 2005 marks the release of “Irina,” a large scale figure by Necessaries Foundation. In addition to being in numerous magazines, her first book, Girls Rock, was published in 2003 and Love and Fafiness: girlie art by Fafi was recently released as a Japanese exclusive. She also has a clothing line of shirts and handbags and has been featured in MTV Europe’s style show “Mash” and in such style bibles as The Face and Italian Vogue magazines. Continuing her merger with fashion, Fafi is collaborating with LeSportsac in 2007 to produce a full collection of printed bags, as well as a collection from Adidas for Spring 2007.”

In 2006, her work inspired a spinoff from artist Prima Chakrabandhu Na Ayudhya, who created an interactive peice that allows viewers to see what they look like with Fafi’s characters’ signature pout. Fafi’s website is currently down, but you can see collections of  work at this gallery site.

Yesterday was exactly one month short of Frida Kahlo’s 100th birthday. (Maybe if I weren’t nearly nocturnal, you would have found out about this twelve hours ago.) Celebrate by reading up on her, checking out her art, or watching Julia Weiss’ fabulous ficumentary, Frida.

Some interesting trivia from The Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona:

“Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico, on July 6, 1907. In 1925 she was involved in a trolly accident which left her with permanent injuries. Among these were vertebrae fractures, pelvis fractures, fractures in her right foot and a serious abdominal wound caused by a handrail. She was expected to never recover enough to walk again, although she eventually did. The rest of her life was punctuated with treatments and surgeries, including the amputation of her right leg, in order to mitigate the effects of her injuries.

In 1929, she married Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. The two were divorced and then later remarried. Much has been written about their stormy relationship. It is enough to say here that Rivera was clearly a pivotal force in Frida’s life and she in his.

Thoughout her life Frida was a fierce nationalist and a vocal socialist. As a reflection of her beliefs, Frida often wore the indigenous clothing of Mexico. This can be seen both in photographs of her and in her paintings. Frida completed 143 paintings during her lifetime, 55 of which are self-portraits. Many of these self-portaits are among her most famous works. Her works were often classified as surrealist, although she did not like this label. The colors and many of the symbols used in her work are clearly influenced by Mexican tradition. She died in 1954.”

Her husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera, wrote of her that “Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman’s body and of female sexuality.”

Andre Breton, one of the founders of the French Surrealist movement, said of her that “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.”

Frida, herself said of Breton and the European Surrealists that “They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.”

Frida was bisexual and had an affair with fellow artist Georgia O’Keefe, as well as one with the (married) political theorist Leon Trotsky. Plus, in some countries, she has her own line of Converses.