Alison's Response to Readings

Escort
Stranger Than Fiction
Chuck Palahniuk

Several of the assigned readings are narratives that address the challenges of illness or disability. The most unusual of the illness related narratives was Chuck Palahniuk’s Escort. The cult author of bestselling novels such as Fight Club and Choke, this story is from a collection of creative non-fiction penned by Palahniuk called Stranger Than Fiction. Just by reading this short story it’s obvious that Palahniuk has lived a life as quirky as the characters and subplots of his novels.

He describes working the assembly line of a car manufacturer full of recent college graduates unable to land jobs doing much of anything else. As I read this I thought of Ed Check’s remarks related to academics and the working class. It seems that many recent college graduates are faced with minimum wage, unskilled jobs. Palahniuk notes that he was jealous of those, possibly working class, skilled workers who were able to weld and make an extra two dollars an hour. This job also allowed him access to all sorts of different experiences, one of which he outlines in this story.

Palahniuk describes volunteering at a local hospice. One of the AIDS patients Palahniuk forms an interesting bond with makes an unusual request for Palahniuk to clear his apartment of sex toys and pornography before he passes away, sparing his mother from the experience. After cleaning the apartment, Palahniuk is struck at how it could belong to anyone, including himself. After spending a week studying narrative and creating my own stories, I loved the way that Palahniuk wove the story. I was especially struck by the metaphor of family woven afghans reminder of the passed patients hidden away in Palahniuk’s attic. He is unable to throw them away but unwilling to sleep with them. They directly represent the patients he worked with and by writing down his experiences he is able to air his dirty afgans.


My Working- Class Roots in an Academic Ware Zone:
Creating Space to Grieve and Honor
Ed Check

The author of this article describes his experiences being a working class, Polish-Catholic, gay academic. His major methods of academic exploration are art making, interview and personal narrative. He feels that his working class upbringing, his methodologies and belief system make him an outsider in academia. In his introduction, Check builds a strong academic platform for himself by outlining theoretical framework that he subscribes to, name checking feminism, social activism through art and standpoint theory. A standpoint is a place from which a person views the world. Each person carries their own experiences and belief systems and by collecting such viewpoints from oppressed individuals we can construct a more clear account of history.

From this framework, Check describes his own experiences with a focus on ritual, loss and grief. Check describes growing up in a small Wisconsin town, charting his growth through academic achievement and the discovery of his sexual identity. Experiencing the challenge of AIDS, with friends dying and being tested himself, made him angry at how different institutions hadn’t prepared him for being gay. He describes artworks he created at each point of his life, using religious imagery and gay pornography to process his experiences in the gay community, the loss of his mother, his religious and the loss of a church in his hometown community.

Check concludes with his philosophy of art education- if the emotional and physical needs of the student are met the intellectual will take care of itself. He argues for a social justice based curriculum in the classroom, offering children’s books such as Tar Beach as a great starting point.

This article was an enjoyable read and I agree with much of what Check has to say, but I feel that the author may actually set himself up for academic criticism. The article focuses on much of his own experiences and worldview, but I’d like to see how the experiences of his family, community, students and colleagues fit into the larger picture. How do his experiences play into the larger picture? At the article’s conclusion he hints at his teaching methods and his efforts to create a worker’s museum in his hometown. I’d love to hear more about the worker’s museum and how those narratives he collects compare to his own and affect his own worldview.


Revision Number Nine
Idiot
David Hickey

David Hickey’s “Idiot” is fun and scathing account of curating a biennial exhibition. Hickey describes his own experience curating a small biennial exhibition in Santa Fe. He recounts paying out of pocket to tip unpaid staff, while paid staff barely worked. Foreign diplomats offered him glamorous experiences traveling the world to see government-approved art, which he turned down. Hickey is hospitalized and brought back from the dead to put his biennial on.

Hickey is definitely cocky in his narrative, even stating,” Of all the biennials I have ever walked through, I liked walking through mine the best.” His cockiness translates to the self-confidence that maybe he could and should curate the Venice Biennale. After creating a grand daydream, Hickey’s friend Robert Storr is chosen to curate.

Hickey’s article is well worth reading for his creative descriptions. He calls Storr’s exhibition “astringent and refreshing.” He states that “...the pervasive ambience of clean melancholia was a welcome relief from the thrift-shop fecklessness of most recent biennials.” He also describes Storr’s accompanying essay as “winsome and nonconfrontational as a baby kitten.” Other critics don’t have the same reaction as Hickey and create a flurry of negative press related to the show, which volleys back and forth between Storr and the critics.

Hickey’s narrative depicts the good, the bad and the ugly of the art world. In Hickey’s opinion, the self-important, disconnected from reality, pretentious side of the art world is well worth it for a few sacred moments in the bamboo, referencing one of Hickey’s favorite video works from the exhibition. I got the feeling that although Hickey was criticizing certain aspects of the art world, he really loved those moments in the bamboo as well as the bickering curators. Reading this narrative I realized that I’ll have quite a story to tell when I close the books on my career in the museum world.


The Book of Genesis

The discussion related to R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis illustrations in class made me want to revisit it and probe further. There were many issues that I felt were ignored in the discussion.

The New Yorker refers to Crumb’s process as “a straight illustration job”, which I honestly think is impossible for anyone who translates words into pictures, especially Crumb. Crumb is the creator of counter-culture comics such as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin’. As mentioned in class, his choice of illustrating the Bible seems unusual and out of character and there was even discussion that maybe Crumb has gone soft.

This is not Crumb’s first straight illustration job. Clevelanders are extremely familiar with Crumb’s recently deceased collaborator Harvey Pekar. Pekar, a writer and file clerk at the local VA hospital, took comic books beyond the superficial super hero level when he decided to write up his life in comic book form, which came to be known as American Splendor. Crumb was one of the first to translate Pekar’s writing to illustration form. While not as heavily loaded as the Bible, Harvey’s stories were interpreted in different ways over the years with artists taking artistic liberty in depicting Harvey. Many critics felt that Crumb’s depiction of Harvey was the least flattering of them all.

Now it may be strange to compare illustrating American Splendor to the Book of Genesis, but I think it’s not too far of a stretch for a contemporary illustrator. Looking back to art history textbooks, illuminated manuscript illustrators and copyist often took accidental liberty in their visual and word based translation in a sort of visual version of early auditory telephone game. It’s safe to argue that there’s always some injection of personality in those manuscript illumination illustrations. The illustrator makes personal choices about what to emphasize and what to omit, and in Crumb’s case the most telling decision is how to depict the female figure.

Crumb’s always been fascinated, even obsessed with the female figure, creating huge, curvy, buxom women in an apparent attempt to fulfill his own sexual fantasies. The portion of the Book of Genesis illustrated in this article is the creation and fall of Adam and Eve. I think Crumb’s female character takes on new meaning in these illustrations. In a New York Times review of a gallery exhibition of this work, the critic notes that literary critic Harold Bloom has referred to Crumb’s muscular, full-bodied women as ugly. These are the types of women we rarely see depicted in fashion magazines, on television or the big screen today, therefore we aren’t all culturally encoded to desire them in the manner Crumb does.

Although I’m not very familiar with the Bible, I am extremely familiar with the way artists have depicted this particular scene from the Bible throughout time. There’s always a change in the way Adam and Eve carry themselves post-fruit nosh. In the earlier scenes they are nude, strutting their stuff with confidence from frame to frame. In one scene Crumb depicts Adam and Eve wrestling. In another, Eve stands hands on hips as she confronts the very phallic, lanky serpent character. Although Crumb has been criticized for the way he objectifies his female characters, there’s a sense of pride in this Eve. She’s comfortable with her body in a way that many contemporary full figured women aren’t. After sampling the fruit, Crumb depicts Adam and Eve wide eyed as they realize they are naked. Eve’s body language changes as she takes in her newly loin cloth covered body in shame. Maybe I’m reading to far into it, but I think there’s a commentary hiding there on Crumb’s part.


I Wanna Take Me a Picture
Wendy Ewald

Wendy Ewald’s book I Wanna Take Me a Picture is the only assigned reading that I was familiar with before this course. I don’t remember spending very much time with the introduction of the book when I first acquired it, but I came to it with a new excitement after a week of studying narrative.

What really excites me is that she jumps right in to discussing visual literacy and our culture’s lack of emphasis on teaching visual literacy skills in a society in which we are regularly inundated by visual images. She begins by describing a frustrating experience evaluating the way in which text and images were used in her son’s kindergarten classroom. Ewald notes that before children can write, they communicate their stories visually in the form of drawings.

Ewald introduces the subject of instructing photography by recounting her experiences teaching on an Indian reservation at the age of eighteen. She notes that she has taught photography all over the world, but one statement holds true with every group of children. They all make a statement along the lines of “I wanna take me a picture”, declaring their need for visual expression. This is the social justice driven form of art education that Ed Check’s article only hints at. Ewald uses the images as prompts, leading the children to face their problems and fears in a constructive way.

Spending more time in traditional school settings Ewald encouraged students to create advanced organizers and write about their subjects before they went out to shoot photographs. She also asked them to document their homes and neighborhoods, giving the culturally diverse students a peek into each other’s lives and even more importantly giving teachers a glimpse into their student’s daily existences. Ewald notes that at times the exhibitions highlighting the student’s works have “an unsettling energy” especially when compared to the cheerful cookie cutter art covering school bulletin boards.

Ewald’s use of personal narrative, incorporating the photographs of her students and their writing, makes for an eloquent introduction to the book. Without the use of narrative, Ewald would be unable to shows the immense impact of her photography program.


Shape Structures Story: Fresh Feisty Stories about Disability
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s article, “Shape Structures Story: Fresh Feisty Stories about Disability” examines the way in which disability influences narrative structure. We generally assume that disability stories are sad and we should feel sorry for their subjects. The author notes that shape impacts narrative. The author provides three examples of positive, or fresh and feisty, disability stories as well as one personal tale.

Garland-Thomas begins the article by referencing medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum. Bynum has published quite a bit about the medieval body and although this article references her personal experience caring for a family member, I think her research related to reliquaries is also relevant. Medieval reliquaries often take on the shape of the bones and body parts that represent. It’s not unusual to find an arm or foot shaped reliquary in the medieval wing of an art museum. Bynum’s research further confirms Garland-Thomson’s thesis- “shape carries story”.

The author clarifies that the phrase “shape carries story” means that the body’s mobility impacts the way a narrative unfolds. We often assume, due to these stereotypical Lifetime movie portrayals of the disabled, that lack of movement means lack of sex, but this is not the case. Two new key themes are pinpointed in the fresh and feisty narratives that Garland-Thomas examines- sexuality and community. The best example of these themes is found in the film Murderball, a documentary about quadriplegic rugby players. The teammates seem to compensate for their disability by adopting a hyper masculine heterosexual identity and homosocial community. A major subtext of the film relates to the team members’ ability to have sex.

The themes of sexuality and community are also apparent in the poetry of Cheryl Marie Wade. “I Am Not One of The...” cleverly uses first person narrative, but is able to represent the disabled community as a whole. The descriptions are amazing, pairing extremely powerful and confrontational actions and terms with words and phrases commonly associated with disability. The result creates something that is contradictory, yet at the same time makes perfect sense, such as “I'm a sock in the eye with gnarled fist” and “I'm pink lace panties teasing a stub of milk white thigh”.

The most effective example of a new type of disability narrative came from the author of the article herself. She explores disability as a celebration, in the form of ethnic celebrations and traditions. Searching for an ethnic style celebration in her own life, she discovers the Society for Disability Studies Conference. The entire conference creates a sense of community in which participants are no longer seen as the “other”. The SDS dance in particular allows participants to flaunt their true selves. The approach to using narrative in a scholarly journal worked extremely well in this article. The author had great descriptions that allowed the reader to really get a feel for the experience from the tongue wagging to the wheelchair lap dancing.

The author makes a great case for disability narrative beyond the sad Lifetime television drama sob story, creating a powerful sense of community and identity. The disabled aren’t simply portrayed as the “other”. Through her fresh and feisty personal narrative, the author also made a case for the use of personal narrative in a scholarly forum.