Week 10/18 Frida Kahlo

Looking Down and Down and Down

Going too far down

Frida Kahlo Was a Painter, a Brand Builder, a Survivor. And So Much More.


Quote ""Azure-painted walls and a case of Mesoamerican ceramic and stone sculptures and vessels, from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, evoke its spirit. The ancient objects convey the couple’s eclectic taste and deep appreciation for Mexican art and archaeology. “They’d have a colonial portrait next to a pre-Columbian piece next to a gas mask from the 1940s,” said Ms. Small...""


Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany

Quote "Berlin Dada, which is now synonymous with the new medium of photomontage, made emphatic claims regarding the “discovery” of the medium. ... Raoul Hausmann both claimed to have discovered photomontage in 1918 while vacationing on the Baltic Sea. There they had encountered military mementos in the form of lithographs depicting soldiers in uniform with photographed heads pasted on. This discovery, and the desire to rethink the possibilities of picture-making, prompted them to start making photomontages on their return to Berlin. With the boom in mass media publications, photography provided a seemingly endless array of images... ".


Mirzoeff textbook, How to See the World

Quote ""Today, claims queer theorist Jack Halberstam, “the building blocks of human identity imagined and cemented in the last century—what we call gender, sex, race and class—have changed so radically that new life can be glimpsed ahead.” One place where we can catch sight of these glimpses is the selfie. When ordinary people pose themselves in the most flattering way they can, they take over the role of artist-as-hero. Each selfie is a performance of a person as they hope to be seen by others. The selfie adopted the machine-made aesthetic of postmodernism and then adapted it for the worldwide Internet audience. It is both online and in our real-world interactions with technology that we experience today’s new visual culture. Our bodies are now in the network and in the world at the same time.""


Mirzoeff, Nicholas (p. 62). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.