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Thumper bambi seat covers12/17/2023 ![]() It also sets up viewers for something that can be neither possessed nor liberated: Parks lying atop one of the building site’s rocks that is incorporated along the inside/outside edges of the house. 7 The acrobatics of Larson’s body within, on, and eventually out of the chair underscores a nexus of reproductive female sexuality and whiteness. 6 Here, we see a Gaetano Pesce-designed UP 5 chair imagined through metaphors of female fertility (in reference to its biomorphic shape) and dependence (in the form a tethered spherical ottoman that evokes a ball and chain). The scenario in Lautner’s distended man cave is a sexed-up version of more muted scripts for postwar commercial furnishing. When Sean Connery as Bond enters the main living area of the circular home, Bambi emerges from a polyurethane foam seat that pulsates with the racialized heteropatriarchy of modernist chair design. This is to say that if the Elrod House amounts to another flexing of Lautner’s expressionist strand of California modernism – one that swaggered between terrestrial and celestial realms and displayed strong appetites for curvature – I also read it as a space of black flourishing at an oblique angle. 4 By collaborating with other material elements of Lautner’s design and warping a naturalized site of white heteromasculine conquest, Parks’ performance enacts this tending, as does my interpretation of it. For Copeland, tending-toward-blackness characterizes expressive and analytic practices “aimed at establishing an ethical posture towards black subjects and those related forms of being that have been positioned at the margins of thought and perception yet are necessarily co-constitutive of them.” 3 A mode of “leaning into and caring for,” it describes self-consciously black aesthetic production amidst the longue durée of white supremacy while also intervening into new materialist thinking that disregards how black lives are pivotal to understanding nonhuman ontologies and politics in Western culture. 2 This micro-operation is worth considering so that we might know (or know how to know) how certain maneuvers can, paraphrasing Huey Copeland, tend a postwar architecture toward blackness. 1 Playing the role of a bodyguard named “Thumper,” and paired with her white colleague “Bambi” (Lola Larsen), Parks’ performance in the scene is virtuosic black spatial praxis in the sense proposed by Mario Gooden. Two hours into the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) dancer and choreographer Trina Parks navigates the living room of John Lautner’s 1968 Elrod House, a lavish sunburst-shaped retreat “built into the rock and desert” of Palm Springs California and laden with bachelor-pad eccentricity. : : Elrod House as it appeared in Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine, November 3, 1968, p. ![]() – Michael Boyce Gillespie and Lisa Uddin (Editors) Barber on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson on the #inmyfeelings challenge. 13.18) features Lisa Uddin on Thumper’s Descent in Diamonds are Forever, Tavia Nyong’o on Tourmaline’s Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, Tiffany E. Thanks to all the contributors and special thanks to Abram Foley, editor of ASAP/J. We invite you to follow and share as new work is issued every two weeks. will run the course of summertime, when the living is (un)easy. Black visual and expressive culture and all to which it is connected is better for these queries. We circulate them as a new measure of art criticism, one keyed to the channels and frequencies of blackness, pleasure, and critical contemplation. ![]() And it conjures up the necessary intimacy generated between a critic and their object.Īs an assembly of strategies, impulses, and circuits, these pieces conduct an historiographic and aesthetic review of how blackness and the arts demand and distend. It speaks to the ongoing case for black lives and art mattering. It disputes staid frameworks of interpretation that cannot or will not account for the speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable ways of black forms. Using a 1000-word conceit, it references the pressures on scholars and curators to present complex discussions and formulations of blackness for public consumption, political action, and academic relevance. doing the Challenge, 2018.īlack One Shot is a series that stages brevity and precision in response to a single work of black art, contemporary and/or prescient. Details, left to right: Image from Diamonds are Forever, 1971 image from Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, 2017 album cover from D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, 2014 and Odell Beckham Jr.
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