I love the word "murkier" an even messier version of nuance - both of which seem far too absent. Even though my hackles go up reading Ayn Rand, and long fingernails, really enjoyed reading this. And despite loving my group of female friends - I am afraid that most of them can't acknowledge the murkiness
Lucy Lippard’s use of “dematerialisation” at the end of the 1960s echoed the fascination conceptual and some minimal artists had, at the time, not with the image but with the medium, the photocopy, the photographic apparatus, electricity, even air (the Art & Language piece, from memory, of Air Con in an empty room). It’s not literal-all those things are objects, they are part of material life, and, most of all, sustained the economy, they structured the “information” society (which was the name of a big exhibition at the MoMA curated by Kynaston McShine in the 1970s).
The “dematerialising artists” played with, amongst other things such as geography and territory, with the combo: photo + diagram + language (or caption), which unveiling the reality they create. The artist Douglas Huebler was great at that, with his Situation pieces for example, or his Turin piece where he deemed to have walked toward a place where he’d never been, taken a photo and found a man who was the most similar person to himself he’d ever seen (or so he claimed in the text that was part of the work, tongue-in-cheek), warning us about the power of seeing what we want to see.
Natalia is capitalizing, on the contrary, on the powerful image of an engagement ring, taken at the top of the powerful symbol and the image of the Empire State Building, promoting a Netflix deal, and multiplying her followers. If anything, she is airbrushing the information devices out of the picture, selling a tale as old as time, an image that has been told by many celebrities: of real or made-up poverty (it doesn’t really matter, who’s gonna check), of real and generic beauty making the poverty even more outrageous, and of a skill which is also connected with trauma because women cannot just be good in mainstream culture, they have to suffer (Frida Khalo, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keffe etc), rendered highly bankable because of the previous characteristics.
I fail to see a connection between this conventionally seductive tale with the fact that it can be possible to be flattered by someone’s attention, i.e., our degree of fuckability, and also scared that healthy and more rewarding boundaries will be broken by allowing an attractive and / or powerful man to break them.
Someone who writes knows that the stories we tell seek either validation or opposition. Perhaps your friend is still waiting for someone to break the spell after the punchline, rather than reinforce the narratives that a beautiful woman’s currency is how much she can push the boundaries of assault / endanger herself, which, and in that we agree, vary wildly from person to person. The length to which those boundaries can be pushed needs its due psychological analysis and a politics of consent.
(By the way, the same thing happened to me, but in a far more tamer version. I personally didn’t feel attacked or scarred in any way, but i still, to this day, regret not having g said anything. Trauma is not the measure of behaviour. I didn’t like what he did, but mostly, I didn’t like that he did it in front of other women. It’s a well-known tactic to contain women in the narrow frame of desirability and taking away power.)
This is something I have yet to definitively codify in my thinking--I know people use this term in lots of different ways, and for some reason its a sticky one for me. My substack uses the term dematerialization simply, in the 1970s conceptual art sense: art is increasingly found not in objects or even images but in events, ideas and relationships--and even humans in and of themselves. Using that term here, I was thinking about Trump and his interest in possessing "things"--real estate, Greenland, pussy etc.--versus Nikolau, who seems more interested in these transcendental, death-defying experiences. The difference between wanting to own a building like the Empire State Building and wanting to scale it (to overcome it and get beyond it, in a sense) seems like two ends of a spectrum. But this is something I am playing with. I am also interested in the idea of dematerialization as a counterpoint to historical materialism, which I think overdetermines the idea of consciousness as an emergent property. I hold different beliefs in that matter.
Ohhhhh. That’s interesting. I’m not an artist, or artistic.
My taste is…unrefined. I took an art history class in college and learned I like representational art, whether abstract or realistic. I think that was the taxonomy. (Abstract can be representational or non-representational, as I remember it, and there were other categories but I don’t remember them.)
This idea about dematerialized art is fascinating. I was convincingly argued out of my claim that football is, or can be, art (in light of the World Cup happening now). My friend said it can’t be art if it’s not intentional, but it can still be beautiful. I disagreed at first, but now I agree. However beautifully Messi plays, each beautiful play is an improvisation, and thus not intentional.
But then that leads me to think that “dematerialized” art can’t be art because there can be no intention. Nikolau, or Honnold, or Messi do what they do, and it can be sublime or beautiful, but neither of them intended to do anything to our emotional states with their feats. They did it for themselves.
But…that’s not exactly what your post is about, so I’m just commenting on the idea of dematerialization.
Your classification of women who relate differently to male desire is fascinating.
I think respect and desire can be commensurate or opposing one another. I’ve met men and women are are attracted to women and also hate, or dislike them. The sexual attraction is an affliction and they resent having to navigate it.
Similarly, I’ve known women and men who are attracted to men but also hate or dislike them.
It seems like a spectrum as complex as the one you identified where how people much or how little people respond to that attraction.
Admittedly I'm a guy, but as someone who all too often convinces myself I can't do anything and didn't grow up poor and starving, this essay really kicked my ass.
I can't help thinking of the Free Solo documentary about Alex Honnold scaling Half Dome (don't know if you've seen it), and the very different gender dynamic there: his partner is basically rendered a helpless onlooker always fearing for his life, who seems to have relatively little say or power in the relationship. Of course the feat is still inspiring, but not the message.
Having been a psychiatric social worker for 30 years probably close to half the women in long term case management had some form of sexual trauma perpetrated on them by men which contributed to their eventual mental health issues. That selfie speaks volumes about the messages women get from society…
“To put it bluntly: I think many women derive the bulk of their self worth from how much men want to sleep with them.”
This is real.
Trying to pretend otherwise is so fake.
I’m so glad I read this article.
Thank you
Thank you for reading it!
I love the word "murkier" an even messier version of nuance - both of which seem far too absent. Even though my hackles go up reading Ayn Rand, and long fingernails, really enjoyed reading this. And despite loving my group of female friends - I am afraid that most of them can't acknowledge the murkiness
❤️
Lucy Lippard’s use of “dematerialisation” at the end of the 1960s echoed the fascination conceptual and some minimal artists had, at the time, not with the image but with the medium, the photocopy, the photographic apparatus, electricity, even air (the Art & Language piece, from memory, of Air Con in an empty room). It’s not literal-all those things are objects, they are part of material life, and, most of all, sustained the economy, they structured the “information” society (which was the name of a big exhibition at the MoMA curated by Kynaston McShine in the 1970s).
The “dematerialising artists” played with, amongst other things such as geography and territory, with the combo: photo + diagram + language (or caption), which unveiling the reality they create. The artist Douglas Huebler was great at that, with his Situation pieces for example, or his Turin piece where he deemed to have walked toward a place where he’d never been, taken a photo and found a man who was the most similar person to himself he’d ever seen (or so he claimed in the text that was part of the work, tongue-in-cheek), warning us about the power of seeing what we want to see.
Natalia is capitalizing, on the contrary, on the powerful image of an engagement ring, taken at the top of the powerful symbol and the image of the Empire State Building, promoting a Netflix deal, and multiplying her followers. If anything, she is airbrushing the information devices out of the picture, selling a tale as old as time, an image that has been told by many celebrities: of real or made-up poverty (it doesn’t really matter, who’s gonna check), of real and generic beauty making the poverty even more outrageous, and of a skill which is also connected with trauma because women cannot just be good in mainstream culture, they have to suffer (Frida Khalo, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keffe etc), rendered highly bankable because of the previous characteristics.
I fail to see a connection between this conventionally seductive tale with the fact that it can be possible to be flattered by someone’s attention, i.e., our degree of fuckability, and also scared that healthy and more rewarding boundaries will be broken by allowing an attractive and / or powerful man to break them.
Someone who writes knows that the stories we tell seek either validation or opposition. Perhaps your friend is still waiting for someone to break the spell after the punchline, rather than reinforce the narratives that a beautiful woman’s currency is how much she can push the boundaries of assault / endanger herself, which, and in that we agree, vary wildly from person to person. The length to which those boundaries can be pushed needs its due psychological analysis and a politics of consent.
(By the way, the same thing happened to me, but in a far more tamer version. I personally didn’t feel attacked or scarred in any way, but i still, to this day, regret not having g said anything. Trauma is not the measure of behaviour. I didn’t like what he did, but mostly, I didn’t like that he did it in front of other women. It’s a well-known tactic to contain women in the narrow frame of desirability and taking away power.)
What does “dematerialization” mean in the context of this article? I’ve never seen the word used in this way.
This is something I have yet to definitively codify in my thinking--I know people use this term in lots of different ways, and for some reason its a sticky one for me. My substack uses the term dematerialization simply, in the 1970s conceptual art sense: art is increasingly found not in objects or even images but in events, ideas and relationships--and even humans in and of themselves. Using that term here, I was thinking about Trump and his interest in possessing "things"--real estate, Greenland, pussy etc.--versus Nikolau, who seems more interested in these transcendental, death-defying experiences. The difference between wanting to own a building like the Empire State Building and wanting to scale it (to overcome it and get beyond it, in a sense) seems like two ends of a spectrum. But this is something I am playing with. I am also interested in the idea of dematerialization as a counterpoint to historical materialism, which I think overdetermines the idea of consciousness as an emergent property. I hold different beliefs in that matter.
Ohhhhh. That’s interesting. I’m not an artist, or artistic.
My taste is…unrefined. I took an art history class in college and learned I like representational art, whether abstract or realistic. I think that was the taxonomy. (Abstract can be representational or non-representational, as I remember it, and there were other categories but I don’t remember them.)
This idea about dematerialized art is fascinating. I was convincingly argued out of my claim that football is, or can be, art (in light of the World Cup happening now). My friend said it can’t be art if it’s not intentional, but it can still be beautiful. I disagreed at first, but now I agree. However beautifully Messi plays, each beautiful play is an improvisation, and thus not intentional.
But then that leads me to think that “dematerialized” art can’t be art because there can be no intention. Nikolau, or Honnold, or Messi do what they do, and it can be sublime or beautiful, but neither of them intended to do anything to our emotional states with their feats. They did it for themselves.
But…that’s not exactly what your post is about, so I’m just commenting on the idea of dematerialization.
Great essay.
Your classification of women who relate differently to male desire is fascinating.
I think respect and desire can be commensurate or opposing one another. I’ve met men and women are are attracted to women and also hate, or dislike them. The sexual attraction is an affliction and they resent having to navigate it.
Similarly, I’ve known women and men who are attracted to men but also hate or dislike them.
It seems like a spectrum as complex as the one you identified where how people much or how little people respond to that attraction.
Good read thanks
Good read thanks
Admittedly I'm a guy, but as someone who all too often convinces myself I can't do anything and didn't grow up poor and starving, this essay really kicked my ass.
I can't help thinking of the Free Solo documentary about Alex Honnold scaling Half Dome (don't know if you've seen it), and the very different gender dynamic there: his partner is basically rendered a helpless onlooker always fearing for his life, who seems to have relatively little say or power in the relationship. Of course the feat is still inspiring, but not the message.
I have seen it. That’s a great point.
Thank you. Yes these spectrums fascinate me and I just touched the tip of the iceberg with this one…
Having been a psychiatric social worker for 30 years probably close to half the women in long term case management had some form of sexual trauma perpetrated on them by men which contributed to their eventual mental health issues. That selfie speaks volumes about the messages women get from society…
This is the nicest compliment and I so appreciate it!