V. C.'s Reading Responses

On Wendy Ewald

The representation of reality is one of those contested aspect of photography, central to numerous theory articles about the medium. Yet Wendy Ewald takes an altogether different approach to the discussion on what reality is represented by photographs. Ewalds essay is an introduction to a book about her experience and her process of teaching photography to children. But what I find captivating is the overarching discussion on representing reality though visual imagery and children’s under-appreciated skills to demonstrate this reality.

In describing her experiences teaching photography to children on an Indian reservation in Labrador she states that her approach to taking pictures was, “selective and cautions. The children, however, took pictures of everything they saw: the chief, drunk, trying to saw a board; young couples fighting; a teapot on the windowsill; a great-aunt in her white Sunday dress sitting on the rocks overlooking the sea. The children’s pictures were more complicated and disturbing than mine—and, I began to realize, much closer to what it felt like to be there.”1 Ewald credits children’s’ ability to take poignant pictures to their graphic understanding and to adults’ inability to appreciate a child’s depth of visual literacy compared to verbal or written literacy skills. Therefore Ewald details how she goes about connecting visual literacy to writing skills in classroom programs. She talks about the poignant results which are often more realistic and forthright than the adults want to acknowledge. I believe it is this contradiction, the mirror that children hold up to the world of adults, that is perhaps most poignant. Photography allows children to show what we adults no longer wish to see or what we coat in too much dialogue and language, thus thwarting empathy and maybe even reality.

I went to Virginia Commonwealth University and Wendy Ewald visited the neighborhood abutting the massive VCU art school building in the early 2000s. I remember the photographs that the children took—portraits blown up to be billboard sized. And I remembered that they looked too clean and acceptable to the status quo. See, the Wendy Ewald was part of a neighborhood program that VCU had begun because it had so brazenly ignored the surrounding neighborhood during the university’s vast expansion and in 2000 it Maybe in this case the reality was looking to compensate for past wrong doings. Many of the programs appeared quite positive and genuine from what I knew of them. Since the art school was in the middle of the neighborhood many of the outreach programs involved the arts. While I was at VCU one project was an oral history project that resulted in a really great play about neighborhood history and another was Ewald’s project.

Honestly I don’t know much about Ewald’s project before the billboard-sized images went up around the city. I know it was declared a success but while reading Ewalds essay I was reminded of my uncertainty at the time if that ‘success’ was too much the adult perspective of success. I’m sure the kids really loved seeing their pictures giant sized and I’m sure there was neighborhood pride around those images. But at the time I felt like VCU, with it’s eye toward public relations and a super slick art and design school, was using the children’s photographs for it’s own purposed more than the initiatives and purposes that the children intended, created, or desired when the took the pictures. wasn’t just in the children’s’ pictures but in how they were appropriated and used within a larger system that had it’s own idea of what photography by children should represent.

1 Ewald, Wendy, I Wanna Take Me a Picture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002)9.


On Jenny Newman

Jenny Newman’s chapter Redrafting and Editing from the Writers Workbook is a short examination of the process and content of taking a good second look at a work of writing. At the very beginning of her essay she lays out the role of the first draft as, “a good place for going out on a limb, for fathoming new feelings, or try out a fresh tone of voice without being monitored.”1 This approach to a first draft is important but, as indicated by Newman’s proceeding section heading, “real writing is rewriting”. Newman continues the discussion on what is involved in this ‘real writing’ by explaining the content of the process. She outlines how meaning is found and emphasized through the revision process as the author begins dealing with developing characters, examining pace and style, and getting into the details of accurate language. Her section headings alone demonstrate the fruit of good reediting because they lay out a clear trajectory that easily lets the viewer absorb the content of Newman’s essay while allowing a reader to reexamine their own process of revision while reading along.

I think often about the process of revision and reediting within my own work. Across the visual arts I don’t think there is always much discussion about this process. Maybe because the reediting process isn’t as straightforward as printing out another draft of a Word doc. Reediting a painting, a drawing, or a ceramic sculpture involves a process of redoing, often with the reedits physically becoming part of the work. The process of editing video or audio maybe hews more closely to reediting words. Yet as I write this I am reminded of the process of sketching and planning a work before that final work is begun. Maybe that’s where some of that precious reediting comes in.

In my own work I find the reediting process comes down to a redoing of the work more
often than fine tuned adjustments. I know that my redoing process is the meat of good work but after reading Newman’s work it makes me think that I could do a better job reediting my work before I take on the final form.

1 Newman, Jenny, The Writers Workbook (London: Arnold, 2004)


On Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk’s Escort is a short and challenging piece of writing on death and it’s more absurd contrasts to daily life. Palahniuk’s writing highlights the garish high color tones that life takes on when living in proximity to dying. It captures how few things make sense when we are left to cope with trying to fit finality into everyday life. Palahniuk does this so artfully well because his writing keeps the reader permanently teetering by throwing so many poignant lines and so many precise descriptions into the 4 page work that it is difficult as a reader to find one’s bearings. However, this enables the viewer to sit in the space between a profound sense of understanding about life and the mundane and banal work of dying.

Palahniuk’s work reminded me of my own experience with death. At ten when my father died of cancer (a very, very slow death) I don’t think I even really had developed the mental faculty to understand what was happening. I knew it was final, I knew it was a really big deal, I new it was supposed to affect the rest of my life and I knew that death should be dealt with in a healthy way but I had no idea what that meant.

However, I wasn’t naive to the high contrast between my life at home and normal everyday life of those outside my family. I remember going to a sleepover during time when he could die any day and I remember calling him on the telephone from my friend’s kitchen. It was a wall mounted cream phone with one of those very, very long chords. The wallpaper was a blue-stripped patter with small flowers. Essentially I was calling him to say goodbye in case he died in the night.

While he didn’t die that night I remember thinking that this was a really important conversation and it was strange to do it over the phone and that it was ever stranger to go back to a sleepover after hanging up. Looking back it’s hard to understand why I was at that sleepover but my father’s dying stage took about a month and I probably wanted to go to the sleepover and my parents probably didn’t see reason why I shouldn’t. But I think my memory of that sleep over and the phone call to my father is so prominent because it epitomized how death contrasts the small details of everyday life.

We remember the wallpaper. We remember the afghans. We remember the strange normalcy of an apartment that anyone could live in. 1

1 Palahniuk, Chuck, Stranger Than Fiction (New York: Anchor Books, 2004) 198-199.


On Rachel Remen

In the preface to her book Kitchen Table Wisdom Rachel Remen lays out the discomfort and doubts that she encountered while writing the book and prior to knowing the book’s public reception. She describes how the book made her feel vulnerable because she wrote about her personal story, the things she knew. “I did write only about the things I know; what I have learned from being the child of my parents and my grandparents and from the thousands of people I have cared for in the forty-four years I have been a doctor.”1 Her focus in the preface investigates her sense that she was not a writer and therefore could not write about anything other than her own experiences.

I struggle with the well-worn cliché of ‘write about what you know’. It’s such an overused truism to have become near vapid of sincerity. Yet it is sincere, it just needs newer words to do justice to the complexities of what it means. I think some of my skepticism about this statement comes from my skepticism to know about my own experiences. What one knows is often a fogged landscape of bits of clarity and a considerable expanse of opaque connections between events, forgotten anticipations, and overt generalizations. What we know is riddled with the desires of what we want to know in the present and often I feel that when we reach for wisdom from the past we are more accurately clarify our story for today.

Maybe these sentiments of mine are just some existential musings but they occupy me in my work since I often am researching the past and what I know of my own history and experience. We can write or make art about what we know but perhaps really good writing and really good art comes from wanting to understand the scaffolding of what we know. Why is that experience important to clarify on this day, this month? What does writing down things I know from 20 years ago say about my perception of the present? I’m quite interested in that type of curiosity—this a desire to make sense of experience and contradiction in our lives.

1 Remen,Rachel, Kitchen Table Wisdom (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996)9 xx.


On Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s essay Shape Structures Story focuses on how bodies shape literary narratives and how bodies are the central theme in disability literature. In her work she rejects stereotypical narratives of disability that involve ‘overcoming tragedy’ or negative stories of isolation in favor of “two narrative currents which are seldom included in the usual stories we tell about disability: sexuality and community.”1. As examples for these she looks at the documentary Murderball, the poetry of Cheryl Marie Wade, Simi Linton’s memoir My Body Politic, and her own experience of narrating community from within the Society for Disability Studies. As she is examining her own story she suggest that a story of disability has many parallels to stories of celebratory ethnic communities. She argues that the community of disability acts much in the same way as an ethnic community acts in that each demonstrates pride and enthusiasm for the things that make them different from the mainstream.

I found Thomson’s detailing of Murderball especially captivating. So much so that it sent me to YouTube to find clips of the documentary. As I was watching the clips and thinking of Thomson’s essay I was continually thinking about how the narrative of the story was so deliberately pushing against any assumption that I had about how the story should be. In other words I was able to not only watch portions of the film but also listen to myself trying to reconcile the story with my own stereotyped expectations and pre-established story lines.

I found this especially intriguing because prior to reading Thomson’s essay I was skimming Cusick’s short chapter on myth. What was so challenging about Murderball, and in addition Thomson’s description of the dance party at the SDS conference, is that the story lines fell completely outside of an easily indentified myth. Now, I’m sure those myths are out there but I still struggle to think of ones that don’t repeat the very narratives of isolation and overcoming catastrophe that Thomson is trying to debunk. Which is where I think maybe some of the more profound aspects of the work come in. Perhaps it’s when things start to depart from the narrative of myth or when writers twist them inside out that the stories really stick with us because we can’t anticipate the resolution and we can’t easily grasp for a known moral.

1 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability” Narrative vol.15, No. 1, January, 2007: 114.


On Dave Hickey

I’ve always liked Dave Hickey’s writings but it has been a while since I read them. I think what I’ve always liked is the lack of seriousness in the writings which is unique in art criticism where a lot of things are taken entirely too seriously. For example, in Hickey’s article “9” he describes Rob Storr’s 2007 Biennale whose, “pervasive ambience of clean melancholia was a welcome relief from the thrift-shop fecklessness of most recent biennials.”1 The focus of Hickey’s article is an extension of this critique of biennials, a reflection on his own experience of curating the Santa Fe Biennial ’01-’02, and an overall questioning of the role of the critic/curator. Yet what the reader comes away with is not necessarily an essay of biennial comparisons or summarized assessments, but a reflection on the state of the critic/curator in an art world that often seems like a nonsensical universe. A nonsensical universe that is maybe something like the viewer in the image on page 49 staring hypnotically at two massive projected hypnotic targets.

Hickey comments on this nonsensical art universe are highlighted in his evaluation of several critics’ assessment of the 07 Venice Biennale, “they address the exhibition as NASA bureaucrats might review the latest shuttle launch.”2 And he goes on to give his most poignant critique of the curator/critic of biennials, ‘it means too much to its competitors and too little in the larger scheme of things. The high civility of competition is the first causality. Quality of life is the second. All sense of proportion is third, because biennial curating, trust me, is not a big deal. It’s a skill set.” 3 Hickey’s tone throughout the whole article manages to be a voice of reason amongst a cacophony of jingles and jargon but perhaps most importantly is Hickeys ability to state the ‘the emperor has no clothes’ while also entertaining his readers.

I went to the 2007 biennial and I while I’m thoroughly interested in the contemporary art world I found it difficult to wrap my brain around the entirety of what I was looking at. I think I speak for the vast majority of viewers to say that I wasn’t thinking much about the curating while I was looking at the work, but I did have a pleading desire for the curator to stop putting so much work in front of me.

While I could keep track of the cuarting thematic in the Pavilion area (barely, just barely) the rest of the whole enterprise turns into a novel that unravels into miscomprehension but which the reader really, really, wants to read to the end. In other words it’s a task in endurance with some great sentences to keep you going. In this way I agree with Hickey that the curatoring of biennials is a skill set, a skill set that acknowledges the importance of negotiating multiple works of art in an un-navigable city.

Perhaps my difficulty with Venice was too influenced by the labyrinth setting of the city. Looking at the work in the biennial was compounded by and a sense that I started a book without clear chapter headings. What page am I on? How many more chapters to the end? Is this part one or part two? These things come down to design and organization, definite skill sets crucial to curating. The ‘big deal’ that shows like the Venice Biennial take on, while perhaps intriguing to those in that upper echelon of critic/curator elite, are down right frustrating to this viewer who just wants the curator to take me by the hand and lead me around this slice of what it means to be living in the world today. Give me some user friendliness rather than hubris.

1 Hicky,Dave, “9” Art in America June/July 2009: 50.
2 Hicky, 50.
3 Hicky, 52.