MQR Blog

… or Just Watch “Girls”

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* Zhanna Slor *

Enough already! First they start giving trophies to children who lose basketball games so that they don’t feel bad, now this. Creation is not its own reward, unless you’re really and truly creating for your eyes only. And in that case—by all means, paint away, just please don’t show me. Art, real art, is for other people. If it wasn’t, bookstores would be empty, art galleries would not exist, and you would never hear music at coffee shops, malls, bars, concert halls. Saying that you’ve created something for yourself only and yet posting it on Facebook is just a way of avoiding responsibility for its greatness or lack thereof.

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Psychedelic Revision: An Exhibition on Psychedelia @ Raven Row, London

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* Nicholas Johnson *

It is probably not entirely inaccurate to say that artists have always been interested in methods of altering our perceptions of reality and along similar lines that artists have often sought methods of altering their own in search of new methods of representation. With art work ranging from 1959 to 2013, Reflections From a Damaged Life: An Exhibition on Psychedelia at Raven Row in London, is an attempt by curator Lars Bang Larsen to reframe psychedelia as a mode of art making that is more critical in its approach than the institution shunning, free-love and poster paint aesthetics of a bygone hippie counter-culture.

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Every Halloween

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* A.L. Major *

I’ve come to expect offensive portrayals of blackness during Halloween, but this past year’s trend of impersonating Trayvon Martin seemed unusually cruel. I’ve never understood why certain white people love black face. I can only imagine those who love blackface or find the use of “blackface” funny enjoy dehumanizing blackness. Blackface has been used for racial parody since the early 1800s, and slowly over the years Halloween has become a season for racial parody within a larger social framework that thrives on dehumanizing blackness for its own survival. Blackness as monstrous. I’ve been thinking about this as a concept more and more, especially this Halloween as I perused photos of people who could not have possibly seen and understood Trayvon Martin as a human being.

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Disgusting Animal Things

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* Kristie Kachler *

“Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes, they do.” This is such a weird line. It feels like the turn in a sonnet that isn’t a sonnet, more specifically known as Denise Riley’s “A Misremembered Lyric.” After some very human and fretful missing/not-missing of a thing, this line comes as a complete interruption, a pause and pivot in the work of losing and forgetting and their opposites. I don’t want to work out a reading of the poem here, to worry the line and test what it’s doing. For this post, I just want to point out that a quick Facebook message to a marine biologist who almost wrote a dissertation on shrimp sociality will reveal that “there are thousands(!) of shrimp species, and each have evolved varying degrees of parental care. This can range from laying eggs and moving on with life, to living in a multigenerational colony.” So, now we deduce that if “shrimps” make good mothers then all species must make good mothers insofar as they survive?

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Breaking Bread

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* Zhanna Slor *

Instead of knocking on wood, Russians will spit three times over their left shoulder. If a chicken crows at you three times before noon, the death of a close family member should be expected within the month. Talking about future success: bad luck. Birds that tap on your window: bad luck. Encountering or crossing the path of a funeral procession: bad luck. Bread cut with your hands instead of a knife: bad luck. A woman coming towards you with empty buckets (when would this even happen anymore?): bad luck. There is a very distinct pattern emerging here: nearly everything in the Soviet Union was a cause of bad luck! Though I really think most of it could just be attributed to living in the Soviet Union.

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