Gesture is a Gender project

“gesture is a gender / a shining bracelet which amplifies a slim wrist” presents and unpacks, then complicates performative research around the photograph Alicate, Spain 1933 by Henri Cartier-Breton, an image exhibited in Eye to Eye, Presentation House, 2015. Feeling that I wanted to write about the power dynamic between photographer and subjects, yet wishing to avoid reproducing them with authoritative analysis, I opted to create the photograph as a tableau vivant. I performed this several times with friends and colleagues.

“To-be-looked-at in 1933 was different than to-be-looked-at in 2019. The subjects presently holding the most financial, governmental, social, and sexual power benefit from the relatively new game of peek-a-boo which was photography circa 1933. To emotionally tolerate and withstand the hyper-rationalization of work, family, and the social-spatial arrangement that make up the present, digital network technologies connect us in scopic-affective chains that depend heavily on the image of the human face—”

I stretch my critique from this starting point—how the contemporary ubiquitous reproduction of the human face online repeats the modern’s binaries of ugliness and beauty, blackness and whiteness—beyond frameworks of the agora (our most salient referent for the internet), dependent already on an inside and an outside, a citizen and his opposite. Read the full essay here.

presented at &Now: Points of Convergence, A Festival of Innovative Writing, Seattle, WA
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presented at GESTURES: WRITING THAT MOVES BETWEEN @ the University of Manchester, UK
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Parsons School of Design, NY, NY Fall 2019