Head of a Woman Reading

Last week I took a day trip to Köln (Cologne) where I visited the Ludwig museum and discovered a new-to-me woman artist. Her name? Ursula (Ur­su­la Schultze-Bluhm). Her paintings? Weird. Surreal. Uncanny. Mythological. Bright. Fantastical. Though I am sad to have missed this extensive exhibition from last year , the permanent collection still had several of her paintings on display.  Photo of Ursula in her art studio. Source: NYT Ursula was born in Mittenwalde, Germany in 1921. She moved near Berlin in 1938 and started studying literature and writing. During WWII, she did obligatory war service, and then worked at the Amerika Haus in Berlin after the war. She didn't start painting until 1950 when she also started visiting Paris regularly. Her later work started focusing on creating her own personal mythology. The Ludwig Museum summarizes her artwork this way:  Ur­su­la’s life and work of­fer an un­con­ven­tio­n­al nar­ra­tive of artis­tic in­de­pen­dence. Her art ex­em­pl...

 This quote from Heroines by Kate Zambreno stuck out to me. As she writes about these modernist marriages that keep criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean, she remarks We too desire the transatlantic so desperately. There is always this hope that one of these moves will be back there, to a more voluptuous and glamorous alienation.  As I  pass by the halfway mark of my year living in Germany, this quote really caught me. I've struggled a lot with the ideas and imaginations I had for this year--of being adventurous, embracing the new, traveling across Europe every weekend. The reality has been less on the side of glamorous. But I love Zambreno's description here: "voluptuous and glamorous alienation." There's always something a bit glamorous about living in a different country, but perhaps part of the draw of such an experience is also the alienation. I had been feeling let down by my own alienation: the hesitancy with which I've grasped a new language, the surprise...

 Yesterday, I read some excerpts from Melanie Micir's  The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives for an undisciplining book club with The Space Between Society. We had a lovely conversation about critical archive studies, the current destruction of cultural archives in Gaza, and the various difficulties of doing archival work. I wanted to do more archival work for my dissertation project, but it never quite worked out for various reasons (money, travel, time, covid, archival permissions etc.), but I am planning this course for the summer semester that has students look at some different digital archives. Our discussion got me thinking a bit more about how to have students consider both the ethics and institutional aspects of archives as well as some of the more theoretical discussions of how to approach gaps in the archive and our relationships to the past.  I bring it up here, however, because I was really taken with Micir's explanation ...

 I've been reading Heroines  by Kate Zambreno, and she keeps mentioning the community of women she created on her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister. I've also been listening to Dylan Marron's podcast, The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks , where they dig up websites from the late 90s using the Wayback Machine. So I tried to find Zambreno's site, but was unsuccessful because the permissions seem set to private. And yet in attempting to access her blog I was forced to login to my old blogspot account. Oh the embarrassing earnestness of my college blog. And yet, it's also so endearing.  Prompted by the podcast episodes, I've been thinking a lot about how my relationship to the internet has changed. I think part of Marron's point is that the vitriol and group think that exists now was always there, but I can't stop thinking about the monetization of the landscape. Nobody read that blog. I just liked posting the random things that interested me. The potential for ...